Crime at Bedtime

The murder of Tupac Shakur is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the history of popular culture, and after thirty years, it finally has a verdict. In September 1996, the twenty-five-year-old rapper was shot in a drive-by at a red light just off the Las Vegas Strip, and died six days later. For decades, everyone seemed to know roughly what had happened, a feud, a beating in a hotel lobby, a...

Titu Singh was barely more than a toddler when he began insisting he was not who his family thought he was. He was not a little boy, he said, but a grown man named Suresh Verma, a shopkeeper from the city of Agra, with a wife, two children, and a radio shop, who had been shot dead in his own car. His family dismissed it as a child’s fantasy, until they travelled to Agra and found the shop, the wid...

Herb Baumeister looked like the American dream: a respectable Indianapolis businessman, a married father of three, the owner of a successful chain of thrift stores, and the master of a beautiful eighteen-acre estate called Fox Hollow Farm. He was also one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Beneath the surface, Baumeister was luring young men from the gay bars of Indianapolis...

The murder of Anni Dewani in Cape Town in 2010 became one of the most sensational and bitterly contested cases of the decade. Anni was a bright 28-year-old bride, just two weeks married, when the taxi carrying her and her husband on their honeymoon was hijacked in a South African township. She was driven away and found shot dead the next morning. What began as an apparent random carjacking explode...

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The killing of Ken McElroy remains one of the most extraordinary unsolved cases in American history, and an entire town knows the answer. For more than twenty years, McElroy terrorised the small farming community of Skidmore, Missouri, a thief, an arsonist, and a child abuser who intimidated every witness into silence and walked free from charge after charge. Then, on a July morning in 1981, he wa...

The Securitas depot robbery of 2006 was the largest cash robbery in British history, and it was built on terror. A gang led by a professional cage fighter stole almost £53 million from a cash depot in Tonbridge, Kent, so much money they left another £150 million behind because it wouldn't fit in the lorry. To pull it off, they kidnapped the depot manager, and abducted his wife and nine-year-old so...

The disappearance of Brandon Lawson is one of the most haunting missing-persons cases of the modern age, and it is captured, in part, on a chilling 911 call. In August 2013, the 26-year-old father ran out of petrol on a dark rural road in Texas. He phoned his brother for help, then called 911, breathless and terrified, saying men were chasing him and that he'd run out into a field. He begged the o...

The murder of Julie Ward in Kenya's Maasai Mara in 1988 became one of the most notorious cover-ups in modern criminal history. Julie was a 28-year-old British wildlife photographer, a week from flying home, when she vanished on safari. Her father flew out to find her, and discovered her remains himself, cut and burned, evidence of murder that Kenyan authorities tried to pass off as an animal attac...

The murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of Adnan Syed became a global phenomenon through the Serial podcast. In 1999, the 18-year-old Baltimore student was strangled and buried in Leakin Park; her ex-boyfriend was convicted on the testimony of a witness named Jay Wilds and disputed cell phone evidence. We lay out the full case for his guilt and the full case for his innocence, the vacated and...

The Ilkley Moor alien case is one of Britain's most famous UFO photographs. In December 1987, a retired police officer photographed a small green figure on a Yorkshire moor, then found his compass reversed and an hour of time missing. Experts examined the photo and could not prove it a fake. We lay out the evidence, the sceptics' case, and why, nearly 40 years on, no one can explain it. Settle in,...

The Claremont serial killings are the most infamous murders in Western Australian history. Between 1996 and 1997, three young women, Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer, and Ciara Glennon, vanished after nights out in Perth's Claremont nightlife district. It took the largest investigation in the state's history, and a scrap of DNA under a fingernail, to convict Telstra technician Bradley Edwards two decades...

The murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in December 1996 is one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in Irish history, and one of the strangest legal sagas in modern Europe. Sophie Toscan du Plantier was a 39-year-old French film producer who had bought an isolated holiday cottage in West Cork, near the village of Schull, as a private retreat. Two days before Christmas, she was found beaten to dea...

The disappearance of Steven Koecher in December 2009 is one of the most quietly baffling vanishings of the modern age, and more than sixteen years later, not a single trace of him has ever been found. Steven Koecher was a devout and much-loved 30-year-old journalist from Utah who, in the days before he disappeared, made a series of long and secret road trips that he explained to no one. On a sunny...

The murder of Rachel Nickell in July 1992 is one of the most notorious crimes in British history, and one of the most catastrophic miscarriages of justice British policing has ever produced. Rachel Nickell was a 23-year-old former model and devoted young mother when she was attacked and killed on Wimbledon Common in southwest London, in broad daylight, in front of her two-year-old son, who was the...

The Solway Firth Spaceman is one of the most famous unexplained photographs in British history, and after more than sixty years, people are still arguing about what it shows. On the afternoon of the 23rd of May 1964, a Carlisle firefighter named Jim Templeton took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway Firth in Cumberland, England. It was a...

The great con of Cassie Chadwick is one of the most audacious frauds in American history, and it was built on a single, brilliant lie: that she was the secret illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world. Born a poor railway worker's daughter in rural Canada, Cassie Chadwick reinvented herself a dozen times before arriving in Cleveland as the wife of a respectable doctor....

The disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon in April 2014 is one of the most haunting and hotly debated mysteries of the modern age, and more than a decade later, no one agrees on what really happened. The two young Dutch women, best friends near the end of the trip of a lifetime, set out on a popular jungle trail near Boquete, Panama, on a bright afternoon. They photographed themselves sm...

The murder of Brett Bowyer in February 2002 is one of the most harrowing crimes in Alabama's history, and it produced one of the most extraordinary acts of survival ever recorded. On a cold night in Russell County, two men posing as narcotics officers talked their way into the home of a car dealer named Forrest "Butch" Bowyer, presented a fake search warrant, and handcuffed Butch and his 12-year-o...

The Acid Bath Murders are one of the most infamous cases in British criminal history, and the man behind them, John George Haigh, believed he had discovered the secret of the perfect crime. A charming, softly spoken fraudster who presented himself as a gentleman and an engineer, Haigh murdered at least six people in 1940s England for their money, and then dissolved their bodies in drums of concent...

The mystery of Kaspar Hauser has haunted Europe for nearly 200 years, and it began on a spring afternoon in 1828 when a bewildered teenage boy appeared in the streets of Nuremberg, barely able to speak. He carried two letters and a single strange request: he wanted to be a cavalryman, like his father. He could not use a candle without burning himself. He recoiled from meat and drank only water. An...

The murder of Kim Wall in August 2017 was one of the most shocking crimes in modern Scandinavian history, and it began with an interview. Kim Wall was a brilliant and fearless 30-year-old journalist, a Swedish reporter who had filed award-winning stories from North Korea, Cuba, Haiti, and the nuclear-scarred atolls of the Pacific. On the evening of the 10th of August 2017, she boarded a homemade s...

The case of Brian Mwenda captivated Kenya and much of the world in 2023: the story of a confident young man in a well-cut suit who stood up in the High Court of Kenya, argued cases against trained lawyers, and, according to the viral legend, won every one, despite, the Law Society of Kenya alleges, never having been a lawyer at all. It is a story of two men with almost the same name. One, Brian Mw...

The Zodiac Killer ciphers are among the most famous unsolved codes in the world, and after more than fifty years, two of them have still never been cracked. Between 1969 and 1970, the unidentified serial killer who called himself the Zodiac sent four coded messages to San Francisco newspapers, each a block of strange symbols mixing letters, numbers, and astrological signs. He promised that his cod...

The assassination of Judge John Wood on the 29th of May 1979 was the first killing of a sitting United States federal judge in the 20th century, and the man who pulled the trigger was a Texas contract killer named Charles Harrelson. On that spring morning in San Antonio, Texas, the 63-year-old federal judge known to defence lawyers as "Maximum John", for the harsh sentences he handed drug traffick...