On the last afternoon of her life, a 16-year-old Nevada cowgirl posted a smiling photo from the passenger seat of a friend's truck. For days, searchers hunted the man he said she left with, a tall cowboy in an old green Ford F-150. The last photo of her alive had already captured the real killer.
Open the file →A long-haul trucker carried two hunting knives, a choke wire, and a DVD about a killer who stalks his victims through three states in seventeen days, murdering women in their own homes. Then he picked a house where a 15-year-old had left the back door unlocked for her brother, and found her parents instead.
In 1978, a charming photographer won a televised dating show and a date with a bachelorette who took one look at him and refused to go. He was already, by then, in the middle of a murder spree that stretched from Los Angeles to Manhattan to rural Wyoming. Investigators would eventually link him to eight killings, recover more than a thousand photographs of women and children whose identities remain unknown to this day, and need three trials over three decades to make a death sentence stick.
An unemployed community theater actor needed money for his wedding and honeymoon. His neighbor, an Afghanistan veteran, had $62,000 in saved combat pay. So he shot him in a theater attic, went onstage that same night to perform in a musical, then used the dead man's phone to lure a second victim to her death to frame him for it.
For more than a year, someone kept breaking into the Pleskovic house. Anna's fiancé, who had moved in and fathered her child, called the police about it more than once himself. Nine days before the wedding, a declined credit card threatened to expose him, and the family's 49-year-old matriarch was shot and stabbed to death in her own kitchen. Three days before his arrest, he carried her casket.
A bodybuilder on federal probation for trafficking steroids married a woman with a seven-year-old son, then beat and choked the boy so badly a school counselor had to retrieve him from the cold. The night before his own child-abuse hearing, he learned his wife would not testify for him. By morning she was dead in their bed, and he was on the interstate, driving toward her parents' house instead of his own.
A 7-year-old in a Flint Township hoarder house weighed more than three times what is healthy for his height when his heart gave out. Seven months later, the county prosecutor charged both parents with murder — and said the family's dog had seen a veterinarian more recently than the boy had seen a doctor.
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