true crime

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