Category: Crime

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Women at a memorial outside the Gold Spa in Atlanta, where three Korean women were shot and killed on Tuesday. Credit: Chang W. Lee - "The New York Times"

The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shooting

Among the first things I did upon learning about the shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area was to check in with a former massage parlor worker I met in 2019. At the time, I was reporting an article about a prostitution raid at a Florida massage parlor.

Dying Inside

Teenage murderer James Morgan didn’t go the electric chair. But is his life worth living? In 1987, when I first interviewed James Morgan, he was on death row in Florida, sentenced to die in the electric chair for murdering a widow in a small town

Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison

WHEN she was 15 years old, Paula Cooper and three high school classmates in Gary, Ind., decided to cut school and steal some money to play games at a local arcade. They drank some cheap wine, smoked some pot and walked to the nearby home

Reproductive Rights and the Criminal Justice System

This Mom Checked Her Newborn Out of the Hospital Early. The Next Day Her Baby Was Taken Away.

Tiffany Langwell was thrilled to find out she was pregnant again at the age of 38. She had two children from her first marriage —

Corporate Fishing

What’s it take to buy a share of the ocean in America? For Lion Capital, the British private equity firm, the price is somewhere south of $980 million. That’s the sum the London-based firm paid three years ago when it bought Bumble Bee Foods, the

Treating Humans Inhumanely in America’s Justice System

“While waiting for an officer to handcuff and escort me back to the cell that awaited me after showering, I sat on the floor holding a razor used for shaving,” W writes to me. “Today was the day I decided to end my life.” I

America’s Young Detainees

Three boys stumble out of the back of a border patrol van. Their sweatshirts, jeans, and boots are filthy, and their lips are flaky. One boy has red cheeks, chapped by the cold desert wind. The boys each clutch a small bag. They are silent

Lives in Looting

How professional grave-robbers are destroying the past “Once you start doing this, you never want to stop. The huaca keeps calling you back,” said Robin. At 23, Robin is a huaquero, a professional grave-robber who has been digging up pre-Hispanic burial mounds known as huacas

Stopping the Pillage

In Peru, villagers mobilize against the looters who ransack ancient sites A lean man in his 50s with skin burnished from a lifetime working in sugar cane fields, Gregorio Becerra remembers the days when his father used to bring home ancient ceramic pots to their

Convicting the Wrong Man: Part One of Two

Maybe a detective lied on the witness stand. Or a prosecutor played games with the evidence. A snitch could have testified falsely after getting a sweet deal on his own case. Maybe a defense lawyer was incompetent. He even could have been napping in court,

Anatomy Of A Gay Murder

Jon Christopher Buice doesn’t look the part of a gay-bashing killer. Sitting behind a blue steel mesh in bleached white prison garb and T-shirt, the brown-eyed, baby-faced convict, even at 26, could pass still for the ordinary white suburban teenager he once was. Jon Christopher

Convicting the Wrong Man: Part Two of Two

The Christmas holidays were over and so was his last big murder trial. Veteran homicide prosecutor Mark Curry was cleaning up the clutter in his small office near the county courthouse when the phone rang. It would have been easier to let his answering machine

Cracking An Unsolved Rape Case Makes History

For years after she was raped, Laurie Williams (not her real name) had occasional nightmares that took her back to that night in August 1994 when a man broke into her apartment and threatened to kill her unless he got what he demanded. If she

Homophobic Killings in Texas

As soon as Manuel Zuniga heard the news, the fate of his younger brother, Pablo, flashed before his eyes. A television station in Austin, Texas, was reporting that a young Hispanic man had been stabbed to death in the middle of the night on a

Jose Santos (left) and Salvador Valdez (right) in a Hidalgo jail this spring. These traveling stamp salesmen were falsely accused of kidnaping in rural Mexico. Photo by Jorge Muedano

Lynching in Huejutla

Looking back, people say they didn’t much notice the two men – one fat and one thin – lurching along the unpaved roads in their gray 1980 Chevrolet pickup early on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 24. Like most days in Huejutla, Hidalgo that time