TRUE CRIME

For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15 Barclay Avenue, in Flushing, Queens. Her flat was modest, but it was home. Living alone on a fixed income from Social Security and a telephone company pension, her monthly earnings totalled less than $500. Her rent, which remained under $200, allowed her to remain independent. That all ... View more

When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they found instead was a window into something far more unsettling, a collection of 54 photographs, each one a portrait of a different woman, many never seen or heard from again. Bradford, a self-proclaimed photographer with a taste for deception, would go on to be convicted of two brutal ... View more

In the summer of 1968, as children ran barefoot through the derelict streets of Scotswood, a working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, two boys would never return home. Their deaths would not only shock a community but also shake a nation’s belief in childhood innocence. At the centre of this disturbing case stood Mary Bell – just 11 years old when she was convicted of manslaughter – a child herself, yet capable of ... View more

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. Slave. There’s no way around it.” — Leonard Lake It started, as so many grim tales do, with something as mundane as shoplifting. On 2 June 1985, a man named Charles Ng tried to steal a $75 metal vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco. His friend, a quiet and seemingly unremarkable man named Leonard Lake, stepped in to pay. But when police arrived, they noticed that ... View more

The Dubrovka Theatre, located in a working-class district of southeast Moscow, was hosting its 129th performance of Nord-Ost, a musical adaptation of Veniamin Kaverin’s Soviet-era adventure novel The Two Captains. The production was a deliberate cultural choice—a modern celebration of patriotism and Russian resilience, supported by government funding and championed by state media. The performance had become a popular draw for ... View more