serial killers

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

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

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

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

“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

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