In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was raped and stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens in New York City, New York, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid.
The murder of Megan Nicole Kanka occurred in Hamilton Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. Seven-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and murdered by her neighbor, Jesse Timmendequas, after he lured her into his house; Timmendequas had previously been convicted of child molestation. The murder attracted national attention and subsequently led to the introduction of "Megan's Law", which requires law enforcement to disclose details relating to the location of registered sex offenders.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as the Confession Killer, was an American convicted serial killer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
Jeremy Strohmeyer is an American convicted murderer, serving four consecutive life terms for the sexual assault and murder of 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson at Primadonna Resort and Casino in Primm, Nevada, on May 25, 1997.
A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime which the individual did not commit. Although such confessions seem counterintuitive, they can be made voluntarily, perhaps to protect a third party, or induced through coercive interrogation techniques. When some degree of coercion is involved, studies have found that subjects with highly sophisticated intelligence or manipulated by their so called "friends" are more likely to make such confessions. Young people are particularly vulnerable to confessing, especially when stressed, tired, or traumatized, and have a significantly higher rate of false confessions than adults. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death after confessing to crimes they did not commit—but years later, have been exonerated. It was not until several shocking false confession cases were publicized in the late 1980s, combined with the introduction of DNA evidence, that the extent of wrongful convictions began to emerge—and how often false confessions played a role in these.
Efren Saldivar is an American serial killer who murdered patients while working as a respiratory therapist at Adventist Health Glendale, named at that time Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Glendale, California.
Levi Bellfield is an English serial killer, sex offender, rapist, kidnapper, and burglar. He was found guilty on 25 February 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 June 2011, Bellfield was further found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler. On both occasions, the judge imposed a whole life order, meaning that Bellfield will serve the sentence without the possibility of parole. Bellfield was the first prisoner in history to have received two whole life orders.
Richard Francis Cottingham is an American serial killer and rapist who murdered at least eighteen young women and girls in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed the New York Ripper, the Torso Killer and the Times Square Killer, since he was convicted of three murders that occurred there that included mutilation.
Mack Ray Edwards was an American child sex abuser and serial killer who molested and murdered at least six children in Los Angeles County, California, between 1953 and 1970. Sentenced to death, he died by suicide by hanging in his prison cell.
Shanda Renée Sharer was an American girl who was tortured and burned to death in Madison, Indiana by four teenage girls. She was 12 years old at the time of her death. The incident attracted international attention due to both the brutality of the murder and the young age of the perpetrators, who were aged between 15 and 17 years old. The case was covered on national news and talk shows and has inspired a number of episodes on fictional crime shows.
The Wineville Chicken Coop murders, also known as the Wineville Chicken murders, were a series of abductions and murders of young boys that occurred in the city of Los Angeles and in Riverside County, California between 1926 and 1928. The murders were carried out by Gordon Stewart Northcott, a 19-year-old farmer who had moved to California from Canada two years prior, as well as his mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, and his nephew, Sanford Clark.
Moderation Management (MM) is a secular non-profit organization providing peer-run support groups for anyone who would like to reduce their alcohol consumption. MM was founded in 1994 to create an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous and similar addiction recovery groups for non-dependent problem drinkers who do not necessarily want to stop drinking, but moderate their amount of alcohol consumed to reduce its detrimental consequences.
Anthony Allen Shore was an American serial killer and child molester who was responsible for the murders of one woman and three girls. He was active from 1986 to 2000, and became known as the "Tourniquet Killer" because of his use of a ligature with either a toothbrush or bamboo stick to tighten or loosen the ligature. The instrument was similar to a garotte or a twitch, a tool used by farmers to control horses. Shore was sentenced to death in 2004, and executed by lethal injection on January 18, 2018.
John Albert Gardner III is an American convicted double murderer, rapist, and child molester. He confessed to the February 2009 rape and murder of 14-year-old Amber Dubois from Escondido, California, and the February 2010 rape and murder of 17-year-old Chelsea King from Poway, California after he entered a plea agreement that spared him from execution. Additionally, Gardner attempted to rape 22-year-old Candice Moncayo of San Diego County, and had been previously incarcerated for the molestation of a 13-year-old girl.
Rajvinder Kaur Gill was a Canadian banker who disappeared in late August 2012, while on a trip to Pakistan. According to the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, Gill possessed over $5 million USD at the time of her disappearance.
April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her killer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.
On January 26, 2019, a gunman shot and killed five people in Ascension and Livingston parishes, Louisiana, before being taken into custody in Virginia.
Aundria Michelle Bowman was an American teenager who vanished under mysterious circumstances from her family's property in Hamilton, Michigan. Adopted as an infant, Aundria Bowman was raised by her adoptive father, Dennis Bowman. At age 14, she accused him of molesting her. A short time after this incident, she vanished from her family's rural property. Dennis Bowman claimed that she had stolen money from her adopters before running away.
Larry Dean Bright, also known as The Bonecrusher, is an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least eight women between the ages of 30 and 41 in central Illinois. The murders occurred between July 2003 and October 2004, in Peoria and Tazewell County, Illinois. His nickname derives from his purported propensity for burning his victims' bodies before crushing their bone fragments with a hammer. After confessing to his crimes in May 2005, Bright was convicted of eight counts of murder and sentenced to eight life sentences without the possibility of parole.
James B. Grinder (1945–2010) was an American serial killer and rapist who murdered three teenage girls in Arkansas and a woman in Missouri between 1976 and 1984. Grinder wasn't apprehended until his confession in March 1998. However, authorities still had little evidence tying Grinder to the murders, so they used a technique known as brain fingerprinting to help prove his guilt. In 1999, Grinder was convicted of the four murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He remained imprisoned until his death in 2010.
