Browse cases currently getting the most attention
Convicted: Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini
On Thanksgiving morning 2016, a motorist on a desolate stretch of California interstate spotted a small, trembling figure bound by restraints — a young mother, barely 87 pounds, branded with a burn mark and shorn of her hair. The nation wept. Then it seethed. Sherri Papini's story of abduction by two armed Hispanic women became a media sensation, a missing-person case that swallowed millions in investigative resources and detonated fear across Latino communities nationwide. FBI sketch artists disseminated her descriptions of the alleged kidnappers around the world. The California Victim Compensation Board cut her 35 separate checks. Her husband stood beside her, steadfast. But from the beginning, detectives noticed the details didn't quite fit — and a strand of male DNA clinging to her clothing would, years later, unravel everything. What investigators eventually uncovered wasn't a kidnapping. It was a 22-day escape to an ex-boyfriend's apartment in Costa Mesa, complete with self-inflicted wounds, a wood-burning brand from Hobby Lobby, and a web of prepaid-phone deception that had been spinning since at least December 2015. This is the story of how a California mother staged one of the most elaborate hoaxes in modern American law enforcement history — and why, even after conviction, she refuses to stop rewriting it.
Convicted: Ghislaine Maxwell
Ghislaine Maxwell, once a high-profile British socialite, became globally notorious following her association and subsequent legal trial with financier Jeffrey Epstein. Her life transformed dramatically from attending elite social gatherings to facing charges in a New York trial for sex trafficking and child abuse. Maxwell's case captured international attention due to its depth of criminal activities intertwined with the lifestyles of the influential. Convicted in 2021, Maxwell was handed a 20-year prison sentence, underscoring her pivotal role in facilitating Epstein's network of sexual exploitation. This outcome not only secured a measure of justice for the victims but also highlighted the severe implications of power misuse in elite circles. Currently, Maxwell remains incarcerated, her previous affluent lifestyle starkly contrasted by her life behind bars, continually making headlines and prompting discussions about accountability and the social elite.
Convicted: Anna Vadimovna Sorokin
When Rachel DeLoache Williams returned from a luxury week at the Surf Club in Marrakech in the spring of 2017, she was $62,000 poorer. Her friend had promised the wire transfer was coming. It never came. The friend was Anna Sorokin, the 26-year-old daughter of a Russian truck driver who had spent four years convincing Manhattan's elite that she controlled a 60-million-euro European trust fund. Operating under the alias Anna Delvey, she defrauded banks, luxury hotels, and private individuals of approximately $275,000, forged financial documents, bounced checks, and nearly secured a $22 million bank loan using fabricated paperwork. When she was arrested, tried, and convicted in 2019, she hired a courtroom stylist and showed up in Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham, making international headlines for her courtroom looks as much as her crimes. Netflix paid $320,000 for her story. The state took most of it under the Son of Sam law. She was released from prison, immediately detained by ICE, held for nineteen months, then released to house arrest in a 470-square-foot East Village apartment. She started selling art and made $340,000. She appeared on Dancing With the Stars wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor. Her deportation case remains unresolved. Anna Delvey, it turns out, is very hard to get rid of.
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: Myra Hindley
On the morning of October 7, 1965, eighteen-year-old David Smith walked to a public telephone box in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, hands shaking, and dialed 999. The night before, he had watched his brother-in-law bludgeon a seventeen-year-old to death with an axe. The brother-in-law was Ian Brady. The woman who had invited him to witness it was Myra Hindley. What that phone call exposed would redefine evil in the British imagination for generations. Between 1963 and 1965, Brady and Hindley abducted five children and teenagers from the streets of Greater Manchester, sexually assaulted them, and buried four in shallow graves on the desolate expanse of Saddleworth Moor. The fifth was killed in Hindley's living room. The evidence police found inside that house was staggering in its horror: photographs of a ten-year-old girl bound and gagged in Hindley's bedroom, and sixteen minutes of audio tape capturing that same child's final, agonized moments. A luggage ticket for the suitcase containing these materials was found hidden inside the spine of Hindley's Catholic prayer book. Myra Hindley would spend thirty-six years in prison, applying repeatedly for parole, insisting she had changed. The British public never believed her. One of her victims, Keith Bennett, has never been found. His mother died in 2012, still waiting. This is the story of how an ordinary girl from Gorton became the most reviled woman in British criminal history.
Convicted: Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)
At 12:30 in the morning on March 4, 2005, Martha Stewart walked out of the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia. She was 63 years old. America's most famous homemaker, a woman who had watched her personal fortune touch $1.2 billion, had just served five months in federal prison for crimes that traced back to a single phone call and a stock sale that saved her exactly $45,673 in avoided losses. The story of how the most recognizable domestic brand in American history came undone involves ImClone Systems stock, a Merrill Lynch broker named Peter Bacanovic, a frightened assistant named Douglas Faneuil who became the government's star witness, and a prosecutor named James Comey who would one day lead the FBI. It involves a woman who grew up in working-class Nutley, New Jersey, modeled for Chanel at 15, navigated Wall Street in the 1960s, and built a media empire from scratch, only to lie to federal investigators over a transaction that, compared to her net worth, was pocket change. The crime was almost comically small. The cover-up was not. And the consequences reshaped one of the most iconic careers in American business history.
Subject: Karen A. Read
"Karen Read is innocent." The jury foreman said it plainly, on national television, the morning after a Massachusetts jury acquitted Read of second-degree murder in the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. She had faced the possibility of life in prison. Instead, she walked out of a Dedham courthouse on June 18, 2025, into a crowd of more than a thousand supporters dressed in pink, their cheers rising over Norfolk County like a verdict of their own. O'Keefe was found unconscious in a snowbank at 6:03 a.m. on January 29, 2022, on the front lawn of a fellow officer's Canton home. He died that morning. For three and a half years, the question of how he ended up there consumed two trials, a hung jury, a state police corruption scandal, a Netflix documentary, and a movement that circled the globe. The prosecution said Read hit him with her SUV and left him to freeze. The defense said he was killed inside that house, and that Read was framed by the very institution meant to find justice for him. The jury, in the end, believed neither side completely. That complicated, unresolved truth is what makes this case impossible to put down.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/sherri-papinie-050125-6fed48fca2f5411e9f00a9c8037c330d.jpg)
