#true-crime

#true-crime

In 2023, siblings Ty and Brynlee Larson, then aged 15 and 12, made national headlines when they barricaded themselves in Ty's bedroom for 54 days, refusing to follow a judge's order that they return to their father's home "despite state child welfare investigators determining that he had sexually abused the children," ProPublica reported at the time. The pair livestreamed their defiance of the order on TikTok, garnering millions of views and "igniting a viral national reckoning," according to a press release from ABC News Studios.

Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions and life sentence for the deaths of his wife and son were overturned Wednesday by the South Carolina Supreme Court because the court clerk at his trial suggested he was guilty. But the disgraced lawyer won't be leaving prison anytime soon. Prosecutors say they plan to retry Murdaugh, which likely means there will be another lengthy trial for the case that because of the combination of money, power, Southern accents and treachery has become a true crime sensation with several streaming miniseries, best selling books and dozens of true crime podcasts.

Betty Broderick, who became infamous for the 1989 killings of her former husband and his new wife in a case that shocked the country and inspired movies and books, has died at the age of 78 while still serving a life sentence. Representatives from the California department of corrections and rehabilitation confirmed to NBC News that Elizabeth A Broderick was moved from the California prison where she had been transferred to a medical center on 18 April. She died on the following Friday.

In 2023, Alex was convicted of the 2021 murder of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, a crime committed in a stupendously doomed attempt to fend off disgrace and financial ruin.

Mind of a Serial Killer's mission is to dissect the mindsets of what drives murder for a better global understanding, while creating a place to honor slain victims.

DTF St. Louis ultimately tells its own sordid saga about a marriage and a friendship torn apart by secrets, sex, and dissatisfaction at the mundane lives they lead in the midwestern suburbs.

These films that I'm making, says Dretzin, that other documentarians are making, are often more effective than the legal system at affecting change; psychological change and also sometimes systemic and criminal change.

Catherine Nevin claimed that a hooded man had threatened her with a weapon, tied her up, and ransacked the pub, leading to her husband's murder.

Didion describes San Bernadino County as 'the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers' school.'

The myth is that the murdered woman was 'a sex worker, a gangster's moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner.' In fact, Elizabeth Short was a young woman who wanted to see more of the world than her hometown offered. She had suffered abuse from her father and dreamed of making a new life for herself in Los Angeles.

Billy Preston was a genre-bending singer-songwriter whose work climbed the charts, won Grammys, and saw him collaborating with fellow legends like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin & The Beatles (even earning him the nickname "The Fifth Beatle). Yet he was battling a number of demons on-stage & off, including struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, which he'd repressed thanks to a lifetime in the church.

"True crime can just be about one particular incident in isolation," he explains, "but what interests us is the way it sort of radiates out... It was almost like watching a ghost story happen in real life. Every kind of murder isn't just an isolated tragedy... it involves the entire community."

Even in an era of CGI and AI, nothing is more vivid than the intimacy and imagination of radio or more direct than the connection radio has with listeners. I remember when the legendary Stan Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate, a 700-foot mountain of whipped cream, and a 10-ton maraschino cherry. We didn't have to see it. We heard it on the radio. It was Freberg's demonstration of what radio can do better than television.

You're probably (unfortunately) at least vaguely familiar with some pretty infamous serial killers in the U.S., like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. However, you may never have heard of Stephen Morin, even though his suspected crimes rival both Bundy's and Dahmer's in number. And although none of these pieces of sh*t deserve to be immortalized, what makes Fear Not unique is that it tells Morin's story through the lens of a survivor's lived experience.

On February 8, 1977, Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritzis (Bill Skarsgard) kidnapped Richard Hall, a mortgage company president (Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery), claiming that Hall's company had sabotaged his real estate investment. Kiritzis rigged a 12-gauge shotgun with a hair-trigger "dead man's wire" around Hall's neck, ensuring that Hall would die if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. He held Hall for three days as police, family members, a charismatic local radio DJ (Colman Domingo) and TV reporters were drawn into the standoff.

It begins with a murder, and then another. A woman is killed, a man grievously injured, and a letter is sent to the news media. The killer gives himself a name this is the Zodiac speaking and provides a message written in code. So we start with three mysteries: the man, his motives and his message. The third is quickly cracked; the first hypothesized, but never definitively proven.

We are always aware, I think, of man's inhumanity to man. The latest true-crime documentary from Netflix is here to remind you that this is an umbrella term. It is undoubtedly rarer, though precisely why is unclear, but women can inflict the most awful suffering too and here, a pair of them do so on children. Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story is the latest offering from Skye Borgman, who is the undisputed queen of the genre, specialising in high-end takes on the most extreme,

KENREX is a one man show, co-written by its star performer, Jack Holden, alongside the show's director, Ed Stambollouian. Holden, fresh from writing The Line of Beauty, which recently enjoyed a sell-out run at The Almeida, now bounces back onto stage himself, in a role portraying the entire town of Skidmore and resident bully, Ken Rex McElroy. Skidmore is a Missouri town too small and far away from anywhere to have a sheriff.

In a chaotic and distressing year, books provided a respite, a chance to commune with works of coherent voice and vision. Some people find it harder to read during days overflowing with one-minute distractions and incessant notifications, but when I took the time, I was rewarded with a slightly bigger foothold in a world of decency, humanity, patience, and compassion. Here are 10 good reasons to give that a try.

The kayaker who went missing-and stayed missing for so long that rescue teams were at a loss. The seemingly perfect man who conned women-and was brought to justice by his own victims. The following stories pack a double punch, starting with a mysterious circumstance and tracing the story to places unknown and unexpected. Today, sit back and explore five gripping reads that aren't what they seem.

Such begins the story of The Carman Family Deaths, Netflix's latest true crime documentary, based on a 2021 WIRED feature by Evan Lubofsky. Carman was, according to his father, the "first-born grandson of a Greek dynasty," and when questions began to emerge following his rescue, suspicions arose that what happened at sea wasn't what he claimed.

Now, a new book details the campaign of coercive control waged against the late Tina Satchwell, and the deep extent of his manipulation. 'Beneath the Stairs' written by Paul Byrne and Ralph Riegel details the sheer cruelty of convicted killer Richard Satchwell and features extensive interviews conducted with Satchwell after his wife went missing in 2017, as he tried to portray himself as a victim and claimed she had run off with €26,000 of their life savings.