Early one morning in May, 1997, a young couple in the mountains of Colorado spotted a man dragging a body up a secluded trail. The man fled, leaving behind a bloody, dying woman. The investigation into the death of young street-walker Anita Paley would lead from that idyllic spot to the seamy underbelly of Denver and a world of prostitution, drug dealers, and violent criminals. And it would expose the lives of suspect Robert Riggan and Anita's friend Joanne Cordova, a former cop-turned-crack-addict and hooker.

In the early morning of October 18, 1986, Cherie Wier’s life collapses when her teenage son takes the life of her beloved husband. For years, Cherie grapples with events preceding and following the crime, struggling to overcome the consuming grief she suffers from her loss and the difficulty she faces as she attempts to forgive her son. The courtroom accounts of gruesome details and the shocking testimonies from experts only add to Cherie’s yearning to make sense of the crime. She is tormented, wanting to know why the tragedy happened, and if there was anything she could have done.

Terrifying things are happening to Kay Weden, a 40-something single mom and high school teacher in Salisbury, North Carolina. Despite having no known enemies, Kay's home, car, and peace of mind are under attack throughout 1993. Most chilling of all are the senseless attacks on her only son and the shot fired in the night through a wall of her house, which narrowly misses his head as he sleeps.

The four-year-old Brandon Sims had not been seen since July 3, 1992, when he attended a birthday party with his 20-year-old mother, Michelle Jones. For years, Jones lied to her friends about Brandon, telling some that he was living with his father and others that he was staying with his grandmother in another state. When Brandon’s father, who had been in jail, came looking for Brandon, Michelle’s shocked friends confronted her. She confessed that Brandon was dead. She repeated her story of how Brandon died to a detective. The detective didn’t believe her story. 

Brian Stidham fell in love with Tucson, Arizona, the minute he came to town. A young and talented eye surgeon, he accepted a job with an established eye surgeon to take over his pediatric patients. Brad Schwartz, the doctor who hired Brian, was ambitious and possessed surgical skills few others had. But he was a troubled man. Within a year of Stidham’s arrival in Tucson, the medical relationship would be severed by Schwartz’s personal troubles.

Mike DeBardeleben was known as the Mall Passer for the way he passed off fake money at local shopping centers. But when US Secret Service agents finally arrested him, they were met with more than just phony bills. They found that their counterfeiter led a shocking double life.... DeBardeleben's home was littered with drugs, bondage gear, and a collection of audio tapes in which he recorded the abuse of his countless victims. 

It was a dreary winter afternoon in Ayer, Massachusetts, a quintessential New England town, the type that is romanticized in Robert Frost’s poems. But on January 30, 1979, a woman’s scream was heard piercing the northeast tempest wind. In an unassuming apartment building on Washington Street, Elaine Tyree, a mother, wife, and US Army soldier, had her life brutally ripped from her. Her husband, William Tyree, a Special Forces soldier, was convicted of this heinous murder, which he has always vehemently denied.

On a cold Southern night in 2013 under a full moon, 20-year-old Heather Elvis parked her car at a boat ramp along the Intracoastal Waterway and was never seen again. A series of sensational trials involving a handsome restaurant coworker and his Disneyland-obsessed wife resulted in shocking verdicts - but no body - as her family desperately sought closure and fought for justice, and a resort town struggled to regain calm.

Ben Novack, Jr., was born into a hotel empire, Miami's lavish Fontainbleau. But his luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would ironically end in another hotel room - where the police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death. Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation - when his ex-stripper wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for 24 hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce.  

Tells of the seductress, the student, and a murder in New England. The perfect life of newlyweds, Pam and Gregg Smart, was shattered in 1990 when Gregg was shot dead. In the trial, it emerged that Pam had seduced 15-year-old Bill Flynn to do the killing.

For twenty years, Ken and Kristine Fitzhugh and their two sons had lived lives of comfortable middle-class normality. Then came the shocking news that Kristine Fitzhugh was dead, the victim of a terrible accident.... By the time the Palo Alto Police Department looked closer at the death of Kristine Fitzhugh, there could be only one conclusion. Someone had murdered Kristine in her own home, inflicting a series of horrific blows to the back of her head, and then cleaned up the mess to make it look like an accident.

On March 15th, 1987 police in Anchorage, Alaska arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.

"Millionaire" had just entered the American lexicon and Cassie Chadwick was front page news, becoming a media sensation before mass media, even eclipsing President Roosevelt’s inauguration. Using these newspaper articles, Hazelgrove tells the story of one of the greatest cons in American history. 

Monique, the daughter of San Diego Chargers football great Earl Faison, married her high school sweetheart soon after she discovered she was pregnant with his child. Her relationship with Chris was shaky from the start, but turned tumultuous as he became verbally and physically abusive. When she could no longer put up with the abuse, she left him with their children. That was when the stalking and genuine threats began. Nothing stopped him - not protection injunctions, police warnings, or even arrests. One fateful Monday morning, Chris kidnapped Monique....

On an unseasonably warm April evening in 2001, the headless body of a tiny girl was found discarded in a makeshift dump site in the woods on the southeast side of Kansas City, Missouri.