10 cases · Violent Crime
Convicted: Jodi Ann Arias
When Travis Alexander's friends broke into his Mesa, Arizona home on June 9, 2008, the smell told them everything before their eyes could. He had been missing for five days. Inside the master bathroom, they found him crumpled in the shower: twenty-seven stab wounds, a throat slashed nearly to the spine, and a single .25-caliber bullet in his forehead. He was thirty years old. Within days, investigators had a name: Jodi Ann Arias, his ex-girlfriend, an aspiring photographer with a smile that charmed everyone she met. She would eventually confess to the killing, but not before telling two other stories first. What followed was one of the most-watched murder trials in American history, a 64-day courtroom spectacle broadcast live to millions, fueled by explicit text messages, recovered photographs of the victim alive in his shower just hours before his death, and a defendant who took the stand for 18 consecutive days and insisted she acted in self-defense. The jury didn't believe her. Neither did much of the country. She is serving life without parole. From a Nevada convention hall where two ambitious young people first locked eyes, to a prison cell in Goodyear, Arizona where Arias now sells artwork and writes a Substack blog, this is the full story of a killing that America could not look away from.
Convicted: Susan Lucille Wright
On the night of January 13, 2003, a young Houston mother tied her husband to their bed with neckties and a bathrobe sash, then stabbed him 193 times. Forty-one wounds landed on his face. Forty-six on his chest. Seven in the groin. The force was so relentless that a knife tip snapped off inside his skull. Then she dragged his body to the backyard and buried it in a hole he had dug for a garden fountain. She was 26. He was 34, a six-foot-two flooring salesman who weighed 220 pounds. Their children, ages four and eighteen months, were somewhere in the house. Susan Wright's case became one of the most watched murder trials in Texas history: broadcast live on Court TV, dissected on Snapped and 48 Hours, and eventually turned into a Lifetime movie. A prosecutor climbed onto the blood-soaked mattress in open court to reenact the killing. A former fiancée came forward years later with new allegations of Jeff Wright's violence. And through it all, the central question never fully resolved: was Susan Wright a cold-blooded killer who seduced her husband into restraints to collect $200,000 in life insurance, or a battered woman who reached her limit on a January night and could not stop? The answer, locked somewhere in the details of that bedroom, has haunted the case ever since.
Convicted: Kimberly Michelle Hricko
On Valentine's Day 1998, guests at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore laughed through a murder mystery dinner called 'The Bride Who Cried,' a campy audience-participation whodunit where everyone got to play detective. Somewhere in that dining room sat Kimberly Hricko and her husband Steven. By morning, one of them would be dead. Kimberly was a surgical technologist with direct access to succinylcholine, a muscle paralytic that stops breathing and metabolizes so quickly it leaves almost no trace in the body. She had spent months telling friends and coworkers, in precise and specific detail, exactly how she planned to kill her husband: inject him with the drug, set a fire, make it look like a drunken accident. She had even bought the cigars she intended to plant at the scene. When Steven's body was found burned in their hotel bed that night, Kimberly told investigators he must have fallen asleep drunk while smoking. But the autopsy refused to cooperate: no carbon monoxide in his blood, no soot in his airways, no alcohol in his system. Steven Hricko had already stopped breathing before the first flame was lit.
Convicted: Jacqueline Sauvage
At 7:27 PM on September 10, 2012, Jacqueline Sauvage called emergency services in rural central France to report that her husband was on the terrace of their home, shot three times in the back. He was dead. The night before, their only son Pascal had hanged himself. Jacqueline was 64 years old, married for 47 years, and had allegedly spent nearly five decades absorbing the fists, boots, and violations of the man now cooling on the terrace flagstones. She would later say she fired the shots with her eyes closed. The case that followed split France down the middle, drew nearly 436,000 petition signatures, forced a sitting president to act twice, and dragged into the open a question French law had never been designed to answer: what does self-defense mean for a woman who has been taught by decades of violence that by the time the threat feels immediate, it is already too late? This is the story of Jacqueline Sauvage, a woman the courts convicted of murder, the public embraced as a martyr, and history will not easily categorize.
Convicted: Katherine Mary Knight
The dinner plates were already set when police broke down the back door of 84 St Andrews Street in Aberdeen, New South Wales, on the morning of 1 March 2000. Two place settings, two handwritten notes, two names: the children of John Price, a local miner who had not shown up for his shift. The food was still warm. So was what was in the pot on the stove, which turned out to be John Price's head, simmered with vegetables and seasoned with care. In the hallway, Price's skin hung from a meat hook his killer had recently installed in the living room ceiling. He had been stabbed at least 37 times. Katherine Mary Knight, a former abattoir worker with a decades-long history of escalating violence against the men in her life, was found unconscious at the scene from a drug overdose. She was 44 years old. On 8 November 2001, she became the first woman in Australian history sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. She remains at Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre today, aged 69, banned from access to knives and assessed as too dangerous to share a cell. This is her story.
Convicted: Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)
On Easter Sunday morning, April 7, 1996, an East Rutherford police officer spotted a man dropping garbage bags into the Passaic River behind a small New Jersey electronics company. When Officer Richard Freeman approached, he found blood on the man's hands and clothing. Inside those bags were sixty-five pieces of what had once been Yakov Gluzman, a prominent cancer researcher, dismembered through the night with hacksaws and a scalpel after his wife and her cousin attacked him with axes in his own apartment. The woman who orchestrated it had once moved George H.W. Bush, UN Secretary-General U Thant, and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to action on her behalf. She had survived rape at age ten, near-starvation at eleven, and the entire machinery of Soviet bureaucracy. She had gone on an 18-day hunger strike to free her husband from the USSR. And then, more than two decades later, she waited in his darkened apartment holding an axe. Rita Gluzman became the first woman ever charged and convicted under the Violence Against Women Act, a law built to protect women from men like the one prosecutors said she had become. Tabloids called her the Jewish Lizzie Borden. She still calls herself innocent.
Convicted: Elena Kiejliches
Three days after her husband was shot to death inside their Staten Island home, Elena Kiejliches packed her two young children into the car and drove to Disney World. When she returned, she told authorities that Borys Kiejliches might have simply walked out on the marriage. What investigators eventually uncovered was something far darker: a calculated killing rooted in an eighteen-month affair with an aspiring rapper she had met at a Manhattan traffic light, a man she had showered with more than $85,000 in cash, jewelry, and gifts. The body of Borys Kiejliches, a jet-fuel magnate worth an estimated $3 million, turned up a month later in a marsh near the Belt Parkway, wrapped in carpet and stuffed in a cardboard barrel. Elena has maintained her innocence ever since, and her defense attorney still believes her. But a Staten Island jury did not. In 2002, she was sentenced to 22 years to life. This is the story of a marriage, a murder, and a cover-up that stretched from a quiet hilltop neighborhood all the way to a Florida theme park.
Convicted: Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen
At 5:25 on a March morning in 1986, Joyce Cohen called 911 from her Coconut Grove mansion and told dispatchers that burglars had shot her millionaire husband four times in the head while he slept. Then she kept police waiting outside the house for more than eight hours. It was the first of many decisions that would define the rest of her life. The story of Joyce Cohen is a portrait of poverty survived and luxury squandered, of a woman who clawed her way from foster homes in Illinois to the highest rungs of Miami society, only to watch it all collapse in a single pre-dawn hour. What followed was a nearly three-year investigation, a sensational trial, a jailhouse informant who failed three polygraphs, and a lead detective who privately believed the whole prosecution theory was wrong. Joyce Cohen has maintained her innocence for nearly four decades. She is in her late seventies now, housed at Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida, with a parole board having pushed her release date to 2048. The mansion is gone. The Jaguars are gone. Stanley Cohen has been in the ground since 1986. And the full truth of what happened that night may never be known.
Convicted: Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)
She was blonde, pretty, and worked part-time at an animal hospital. She cried on cue for investigators. She told them she was a victim — a battered woman trapped in a monster's web. Canada believed her. Prosecutors believed her. They gave her a deal. Then the videotapes surfaced, and everything changed. The footage showed Karla Homolka not cowering in fear, but actively participating in acts so savage that seasoned law enforcement officers required counseling after viewing them. Among the victims captured on those tapes was her own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy — drugged, assaulted, and dead by Christmas. The plea bargain had already been signed. Double jeopardy protections made it untouchable. The deal that spared Karla Homolka from a murder conviction — struck before prosecutors had seen a single frame of evidence — would become the most reviled legal arrangement in Canadian history, immortalized forever as 'the Deal with the Devil.' She served twelve years. Then she walked free, changed her name, married, had three children, and disappeared into ordinary life. She is out there still. This is how it happened.
Convicted: Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)
She survived the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. She held her fiancé's arm together with her bare hands while his blood soaked her white dress from collar to hem. She stayed until dawn with a screaming, inconsolable Mary Todd Lincoln, absorbing the widow's grief alongside her own. Clara Harris endured all of that — and still, eighteen years later, she never saw her death coming. On the night of December 23, 1883, in a consular residence in Hanover, Germany, her husband Henry Rathbone shot and stabbed her to death in their bedroom while their three children slept nearby. He then turned the knife on himself five or six times. He survived. She did not. A German court found Henry guilty but criminally insane. He was committed to an asylum, where he lived another twenty-seven years, apparently never fully comprehending what he had done. The children were shipped back across the Atlantic. Clara was buried in a foreign city cemetery and eventually disinterred when no family came to tend her grave. This is the story of a woman who sat two feet from history's most famous assassination, and lived to describe it — only to become the victim of a quieter, more intimate one. It is also the story of what trauma does to the people left alive in its wake: how it metastasizes, quietly, over years, until it destroys everything it touches.
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