True Crime Archive

A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald - For decades, the scariest sentence in the English language was “Mike Wallace is here to see you.” No more. Now it’s “Errol Morris is fact-checking you.”   Errol Morris, who makes Academy Award-winning documentary

Compulsion - Let's say that someone wants to kill four people, all in the same house, so quickly that no one can confront him --- and then disappear into the night, never

Little Caesars: How Wall Street & Big Business Conspired to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Dictator — and the Patriot Who Stopped Them - Rachel Maddow has a new book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, and a podcast that dissects historical efforts to bring Fascism to America. Along the way, she synopsizes the

Shot in the Heart - So here we are in Utah. If I hadn't thought of Gary Gilmore earlier, I can't avoid him now; he's in the news. Utah's lawmakers are having the same trouble

The Annals of Unsolved Crime - I met Edward Jay Epstein a lifetime ago, in Cambridge in 1965. He was researching a book about the Kennedy assassination. I wondered why. Wasn’t JFK killed by Lee Harvey

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Imposter - People can be so stupid. And I don’t mean politicians who don’t know enough to use throwaway cell phones when communicating with women who aren’t married to them.   I mean the citizens

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial - WARNING: What follows is a strong recommendation for a story of death in Australia. Three deaths, actually, all children, all young, all drowned when a car driven by their father

Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber: The True Story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge, One of the FBI’s Most Elusive Criminals - When I opened this book, a five-dollar bill fell out --- a "gift" from the author. That seemed just about right.   “Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber” carries a subtitle so long it almost announces