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Before, during and after the horrific murders, the Capital Gazette shooter left behind a series of clues about his motivation and his mental state, the prosecution’s psychiatric expert testified Friday.
The man who killed Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters harbored a grudge against the news organization for years before planning the attack and choosing a time, Dr. Gregory Saathoff said.
OLATHE, Kan. — Decades later the family of a murdered Johnson County teen has hope her case may soon be solved.
On Tuesday, Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden, announced they cracked a nearly 40-year-old cold case. Now, Tawnya Knight’s family is hoping hers is next.
“I love her and miss her. We’re not giving up,” her mother Lori Knight said.
Her daughter, 15-year-old Tawnya Knight was killed after leaving a friend’s house in 1996. The Spring Hill girl’s remains were found in a field next to a graveyard six months later. A metro major case squad was activated, and they ran down more than 100 leads, with no arrests.
“It was like the case just went and sat on a shelf,” Lori Knight said. “Sometimes it seems like I’m ready to give up hope. But then I remind myself, I can’t do that. You know, Tawnya needs justice. And, and this family needs closure, and it’s been a long, hard road.”
In Southern Italy, a herculean effort is underway to bring down a crime syndicate that’s less famous, but more powerful than the Cosa Nostra. Seth Doane reports for 60 Minutes+, now streaming on Paramount+.
It may not look like “The Godfather” or “Goodfellas,” but Southern Italy is in the grips of a crime syndicate much bigger than the Cosa Nostra, the inspiration for those movies. It’s called the ‘Ndrangheta and its members keep a much lower profile while controlling an estimated 50% to 80% of Europe’s cocaine trade.
That more modest lifestyle was on display when 60 Minutes+ went with law enforcement into the forest in Calabria, a region the ‘Ndrangheta has in a stranglehold. Members of an elite hybrid military-police force called the Cacciatori – which in Italian translates to, “the hunters”- showed Seth Doane a small hideout covered in earth that blended into the side of a mountain. An ‘Ndrangheta member on the run had been captured there while making his morning coffee.
Considering how many involve law enforcement corruption, true crime stories suggest that without accountability cops can’t be trusted to behave properly in obtaining confessions, charging individuals, or admitting to their mistakes regarding unjust convictions. The Night Caller is both a sprawling serial-killer mystery and a saga about legal exoneration. Yet by its conclusion, it primarily proves to be another infuriating non-fiction portrait of police malfeasance and—worse still—unwillingness to own up to, and correct, their own wrongdoing.
Writer/director Thomas Meadmore’s four-part Sundance Now docuseries (premiering Jan. 19) takes place in the Western Suburbs of Perth, Australia, an affluent enclave that, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, offered residents a comfortable, carefree and safe life in which they were free to leave their doors and windows unlocked and to sleep on their verandas during the hot summer months. Those good times came to a crashing halt, however, in 1959, with the brutal murder of single mother Pnina Berkman in her bedroom. When her boyfriend Fotis Fountas promptly fled the country for his native Greece, authorities assumed he was the culprit. Nine months later, though, another similar slaying took place in Perth: that of 22-year-old chocolate empire heiress Jillian Brewer, who was savagely slain in her bed with a tomahawk and a pair of scissors.
Police agencies have long known that Mexican drug cartels help supply Europe’s nearly US$10 billion annual cocaine habit, but acknowledge they have little idea about the workings of these highly organized and well-financed operations.
But now, a recent Italian police investigation, code-named Operation Halcon, has provided the most in-depth look yet into how Mexico’s leading drug traffickers, the Sinaloa Cartel, do business in Europe. IrpiMedia, OCCRP’s Italian partner, obtained access to police files and surveillance reports that show the cartel’s methods in unprecedented detail.About This ReportThis article was produced in collaboration with “The Cartel Project,” an investigation coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories. It involves 60 journalists from 25 organizations in 18 countries and involves various aspects of Mexican cartel violence, including the murders of journalists in Veracruz state. Forbidden Stories is a nonprofit group dedicated to continuing the work of journalists silenced by homicide.Read more
Operation Halcon started in early 2019, at a time when Europe was being flooded with cocaine from Latin America. The Sinaloa Cartel, a global leader in cocaine sales with operations in at least 50 countries, was looking for new routes into Italy as a way to
