k0710 Dorothea Puente, the Sacramento boarding house landlady who buried seven people beneath a carefully tended flower garden while cashing their government benefit checks, died Sunday morning inside a prison medical unit at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. She was 82 years old and had spent nearly 18 years behind bars for murders that … Read more
The clock on the wall inside the Nebraska State Penitentiary had become the most feared object in the building, its hands crawling toward a moment that no appeal, no motion, and no last-minute plea could stop. Charles Starkweather, the 20-year-old whose name had terrorized the nation and whose face had stared out from every newspaper … Read more
The body of Susan Sternfield was found in a trash bin at a Riverside factory complex in December 1991, her clothes arranged with deliberate precision, her body positioned as if she were a piece of refuse left for collection. The 27-year-old prostitute had been strangled, but it was the staging of the corpse that chilled … Read more
The FBI has asked a television crime program to help hunt for potential victims of a Las Vegas woman they describe as a “predator without comparison,” accused of drugging elderly men with lethal doses of sedatives, stealing their life savings, and in some cases, allegedly leaving them dead. Federal authorities say 43-year-old Aurora Phelps ran … Read more
SALT LAKE CITY — In a cramped 10-by-6-foot death watch cell, just steps from the execution chamber, Ronnie Lee Gardner finally drifted into an uneasy sleep as guards monitored every breath beneath the constant glare of surveillance cameras. It was the last night of a 49-year life that had careened from violent crime to death … Read more
The walls of Sing Sing’s death house have witnessed countless final moments, but nothing prepared even the most hardened guards for what transpired between June 18th and June 19th, 1953. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, condemned as the architects of Soviet atomic espionage, spent their last hours on Earth separated by a wall of concrete and … Read more
PLANTATION, Fla. — A 5-year-old boy held a pair of scissors in his tiny hands, smoke filling the room around him, his adoptive mother still bound at the wrists and ankles beside him. Hours earlier, he had watched a masked intruder press a gun to his father’s head. Now, as flames consumed the family home, … Read more
The case that turned a pregnant woman’s disappearance into a national obsession is exploding back into the headlines, as the Los Angeles Innocence Project and a new A&E documentary present evidence that could upend the conviction of Scott Peterson. For 23 years, the question has haunted true crime lovers and legal minds alike: Did Scott … Read more
The execution chamber at Oklahoma State Penitentiary was supposed to deliver a clean, clinical end to Clayton Lockett’s life—a final checkbox in a decades-long legal process. Instead, what unfolded inside that room on April 29, 2014, became one of the most harrowing and consequential botched executions in modern American history, leaving witnesses horrified, legal experts … Read more
OSSINING, New York — The woman the tabloids christened “Ruthless Ruth” spent her final hours on earth playing cards, eating a full chicken dinner, and murmuring prayers she had only learned behind prison walls. Ruth Snyder, 32, convicted with her lover of bludgeoning her husband to death with a sash weight and strangling him with … Read more