William Dale Archerd married seven times in 15 years, a rare feat by any standards. He kept up a steady supply of wives because of their habit of dying – helped, it should be said, by his habit of killing them. From an early age he wanted to be a doctor. It was an appropriate career choice, because everywhere he went he carried a hypodermic needle and a bottle of insulin. For Archerd, though, these were not intended as agents of healing, but of agonising death. He first came in contact with his killing tools while working as an attendant in a state mental hospital. In the 1940s insulin injecti ..read more

Michele MacNeill lay face down in her bath. She was wearing a black T-shirt, bandages swathed her head, and her skin looked greenish in the cold brown water. Bursting into the bathroom, her little daughter shouted: “Mommy! We’re home! Are you feeling better? Can we have burgers for lunch?” She was still screaming when her father pounded upstairs to see what was happening. As soon as he saw his wife, he shouted at the terrified child: “Go and get the neighbours! Tell them to call for help!” When paramedics arrived, they found him pacing round the room scolding his dead wife for having the cosme ..read more

Glenn van Norstrand would take his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks for a walk each morning on a popular track on Metropolitan Avenue in Forest Hills, New York. It’s in an upmarket part of the borough of Queens, and the morning of April 16th, 2022, was perfect for Glenn and his pooches. He set out at 8 a.m. to take advantage of a lovely spring morning. As they passed around the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and Jackie Robinson Parkway, the dogs started getting agitated about a bag that had been dumped on the street. Glenn tried to pull them away from the Bauer-branded hockey bag, but they were insiste ..read more

Like Joni Mitchell in her song “Big Yellow Taxi,” Tara Pakanich was woken late one night when the screen door slammed. She got up to investigate. Downstairs she went to the basement where her son, Shad Thyrion, shared his bedroom with his girlfriend, Taylor Schabusiness. But when Tara investigated, she couldn’t see anyone. The light was on, but there was no one in. What she could see, however, was blood. An awful lot of blood. So Tara woke up her boyfriend, Steve Hendricks, to see if he could help solve the mystery. And between them, they discovered the most horrific sights they would ever see ..read more

With the bunker door open, the officers entered a room. It was stocked with survival-type food; water, candles and a number of weapons with boxes of ammunition, including an AR-15 .223-calibre rifle that had been altered to make it into an automatic. A trap-door led to a room below the main floor of the building. As a deputy entered it he exclaimed: “Holy Moses!” One of the walls was lined with enlarged photos of young women posing naked or in various articles of flimsy lingerie. The photos hadn’t come from girlie magazines, and each portrayed a different young woman. On another wall a placard ..read more

While others celebrated Christmas 2011 with their nearest and dearest, the atmosphere was less than festive in the Springfield, Missouri, home of church organist Diane Staudte, 51, who had other things on her mind. The time had come, she decided, to downsize her dysfunctional family. She hated her 61-year-old husband Mark, whose strong political opinions prompted him to write regularly to the press. He’d never had a steady job, and he’d recently given up any attempt to work, spending his time instead playing for a band – Messing with Destiny, best known for their track “Female Judas.” Diane’s ..read more

When an impoverished tribe of American Indians struck it rich, predators swept in from far and wide, setting the stage for thieving, fraud...and mass-murder The racism was not confined to Oklahomans. The US Congress enacted a law that required the indigenous Osage to produce a “certificate of competency” before picking up their royalties. The biggest blunder made by Congress was to allow the headrights to be inherited by someone who was non-Osage if they had married an “incompetent” Osage. This was a law that opened the floodgates for unscrupulous fortune-seekers to marry Osage Indians purely ..read more

The murder of his fifth and probably his last victim saw Jack the Ripper exceed his previous parameters of bestiality. What he left of Mary Jane Kelly was found by the police naked in the middle of a bed in a Whitechapel doss-house, and it was an appalling sight. Mary Jane, a sex-worker, had probably died quickly. She had been picked up by the Ripper in a dark Whitechapel street. She undressed and placed her neatly folded clothes beside the bed. While she lay on the bed facing the Ripper, he severed her right carotid artery with a long-bladed knife, which would have caused almost immediate dea ..read more

For 16 months Jane Andrews, 33, had been living with Thomas Cressman, a wealthy 39-year-old businessman. Then on September 18th, 2000, Mr. Cressman was found stabbed to death at the home they shared in Fulham, south-west London. Jane had not been seen since the previous day, Sunday. On the Monday she hadn’t turned up at the London jewellers where she now worked. The story broke two days later. “Fergie’s Aide Wanted for Murder,” screamed a headline. “On the run as millionaire lover is found stabbed.” Suddenly, the former royal aide and jeweller’s sales assistant ceased to be someone of whom the ..read more

Eleven-year-old Gannon Stauch was reported missing from his home in El Paso, Colorado, by his stepmother Letecia Stauch on January 27th, 2020. For weeks, nothing was heard about the young boy, even though a whole ream of law organisations, not to mention hundreds of local volunteers, were turning the country upside-down to find him. In fact, it soon became the biggest search in the history of El Paso County. But it would be nearly two months before young Gannon was found, 1,400 miles away in Florida. Tragically, he wasn’t alive. His body had been discovered by construction workers carrying out ..read more