Murder: True Crime Stories

In 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery logged onto an online gaming site, pretended to be an 18-year-old Marine, and fell into an intense romance with a young woman who called herself Jessi. What started as a fantasy quickly curdled into obsession. When Jessi began talking to one of Thomas's younger coworkers, jealousy consumed him, and in September 2006, that obsession turned d...

By 2010, Jennifer Pan's carefully constructed lies were collapsing around her. Her parents had discovered the truth about her fabricated life, pulled her out of her relationship, and tightened their control over her every move. Desperate to regain command of a situation spinning out of her hands, Jennifer didn't beg for forgiveness. She arranged for three men to enter her family...

From the outside, Jennifer Pan was the perfect daughter. She brought home straight A's, won swimming trophies and piano awards, and seemed destined for a career in medicine, exactly the future her strict immigrant parents had demanded. But almost none of it was real. Over years, Jennifer built an elaborate web of lies to hide failing grades, a secret boyfriend, and a life that l...

In rural Missouri, Ray and Faye Copeland looked like any other elderly farming couple, churchgoing, weathered, and unremarkable to the neighbors who waved at them from the road. But behind that ordinary facade was one of the most disturbing operations in American criminal history. The Copelands hired drifters and transient men to help on their farm, used them to write bad checks...

By the spring of 1934, the small colony of European settlers on the Galapagos island of Floreana was tearing itself apart. A relentless drought had withered the crops, the self-proclaimed Baroness was abusing her companions, and the tiny island had become a pressure cooker of resentment, jealousy, and fear. Then people started to vanish. The Baroness and one of her lovers disapp...