Criminal (2014)

In 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead in a pool of her own blood. Her husband Michael Peterson was convicted of her murder. A curious neighbor, a lawyer named Larry Pollard, had a different theory... one that brings new meaning to man vs. beast. Explore a theory you won’t find in the Netflix documentary The Staircase.

For nearly a century we've been trying to read someone's truthfulness by the way they act. Be it through machines, or our own intuition. The police have tried. The FBI has tried. The CIA has tried. But the fact is… most of their efforts just don't work. Are we doomed to ignorance? Maybe not. We talked to forensic psychologist Andy Morgan about the difficult truth regarding the industry around lying.

With the advent of the Inkjet printer, counterfeiting money became as simple as a trip to Staples. By the year 2000, there were 72 million of these homemade dollars in circulation. The real question is… who was behind them all? Today, we talk to a woman who “made” her own money.

There are plenty of things we don't share with our mothers. Dark, sad things. Unless of course, you both speak the same dark language. Kathleen Vernon is a coroner in Albany County, Wyoming, the youngest ever, in fact. But she didn’t come to this preternatural curiosity just on her own; the business of death runs in the family.

Every year for the past few years, tens of thousand of flytraps have gone missing – from the wild, from gardens, from nurseries. And, really, nobody knows where they go. What’s cropped up in rural North Carolina is essentially a Venus Flytrap crime ring — with lackies, middle men, and a mysterious end buyer who’s perpetuating the market.

On April 13, 2014, former KKK member Frazier Glenn Cross pulled into a Jewish Community Center and ambushed William Corporon and his grandson Reat Griffin Underwood, killing both. He then killed another woman named Terri LaManno a short distance away. What does the family left behind do when they are thrust into a national spotlight? How do they figure out what to disclose and what should be private?

Crime victims are often put under the same scrutiny as the accused. Not only for their version of events, but sometimes for how they look and talk, too. We meet a man whose trial hurt worse than his assault.

In March 1964, a 35-year-old African-American woman named Johnnie Mae Chappell was walking along the side of the road in Jacksonville, Florida. Four white men were driving around listening to the local race riots on the radio. They had a gun on the dashboard. As they passed Chappell, one of the men leaned out the car window and shot her to death. As the police investigated, evidence began to mysteriously disappear, making it impossible to punish the men who admitted to committing the crime.

What does it mean when a woman commits a crime and attributes her actions to PMS? We revisit the first use of the "PMS defense" in this country, back in 1981. What have we learned about the science of PMS since then? Last year, the American Psychiatric Association classified a form of PMS (Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD) as a mental disorder in the DSM-V. How can the scientific community study severe premenstrual symptoms without perpetuating the utterly unscientific idea that menstruating women aren’t mentally competent or liable for crimes they commit? We talk to lawyer Stephanie Benson who used PMS as a defense for her client Shirley Santos after Santos was charged with assault and endangering her children.

Working as a reporter for a TV station in New Hampshire, Kevin Flynn was covering the capture and arrest of a female serial killer named Sheila LaBarre. As he grew more and more obsessed with LaBarre’s story, Flynn decided to write her a letter. She wrote back. Their correspondence became flirtatious, and eventually he went to visit her in person. We talk with Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie.

In 1977, a mild-mannered aeronautical engineer sideswiped a parked car in Compton, CA. When he stopped his car to survey the damage, a man named Leon Moore opened the driver-side door, shoved him over, and started driving. He said, "I'm about to save your life." We talk to lawyer Stephanie Nally about a con that spanned decades.

In 1999, most of America's tech hysteria centered around Y2K. But at that same time, a teenager in Canada named Mike Calce was messing around in chat rooms, meeting hackers, and learning tricks. At 15, he decided to put his knowledge to the test. To push up against the Internet's limits, and in some places, break them. In the end, he managed to pull off something no one had ever seen before. Today, we talk to the self-proclaimed “MafiaBoy.”

Raymond Chandler is often called the greatest American crime novelist, famous for murder mysteries like The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. He's the subject of several biographies, and his correspondence and manuscripts are archived at Oxford. But something very, very important to Chandler had gotten lost. No one noticed until a pair of Chandler's biggest fans, newlyweds in their seventies, Loren Latker and Annie Thiel, got on the case.