serial killers
The Time a Bachelorette Picked a Serial Killer on TV
Before The Bachelorette pitted 30 men against each other to win one woman’s heart, Americans watched a different show about random strangers competing for a mate: The Dating Game. Starting in 1965, the reality show featured a woman asking three men questions without seeing their ...read more
Life as a 14-Year-Old Manson Girl: Orgies, Dumpster Diving and Singalongs
What was it like to be barely a teenager amid the soon-to-be notorious Manson family, living as part of the cult leader’s harem? 1967 was the Summer of Love, but in sunny southern California something sinister was brewing. There, in the desert foothills of the Santa Susana ...read more
How Charles Manson Got Under America’s Skin—For Nearly 50 Years
To understand why Charles Manson has remained such a riveting figure in American popular culture for five decades, it helps to go back to mid-April 1969, when Manson, then 34, called his three dozen or so followers together on the isolated Spahn Ranch outside Los Angeles. It was ...read more
Charles Manson Was Sentenced to Death. Why Wasn’t He Executed?
In 1971, cult leader Charles Manson was sentenced to death for murdering two people and orchestrating the killings of seven others in August of 1969. But why, if he received the death penalty all those years ago, did he spend his life in jail, dying of natural causes in 2017? It ...read more
The Zodiac Ciphers: What We Know
Killers usually go to great lengths to avoid the police and media attention, but the self-proclaimed Zodiac, who terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was an exception. He called the police on two occasions to report murders he had committed and sent dozens ...read more
The Zodiac Killer: A Timeline
“I like killing people because it’s so much fun.” In July of 1969, a letter arrived at The San Francisco Examiner newspaper containing those chilling words in a coded message. The sender: the soon-to-be-notorious Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the ...read more
Could Any of These Men Have Been the Zodiac Killer?
For nearly five decades, police and amateur sleuths have sought the identity of the Zodiac—and never come close to making an arrest. The serial killer who murdered at least five people, taunted police and terrorized Bay Area residents in the 1960s and 1970s apparently vanished ...read more