Sword and Scale

On a cold April afternoon in Milwaukee, two men walking along the Lake Michigan shoreline make a gruesome discovery: a human leg tangled in the weeds below a bluff. Within days, more body parts start surfacing across the city, and even across state lines. The remains belong to 19-year-old college student Sade Robinson, a young woman with a promising future - cut short. Piece by piece, investigators put together the puzzle of Sade’s grisly demise and learn that not everyone is redeemable.

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In 2008, University of Wisconsin–Madison student Brittany Zimmermann was murdered in her apartment in the middle of the day, and then the trail went cold. An unlikely informant leads the police to search for two mystery men, a theory that would steer the investigation for years. As time passed and leads fell apart, the case slowly faded from view. Twelve years later, detectives discovered the truth wasn’t buried; it had been right in front of them all along.

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When Virgil and Shirley Best were found dead in their home, investigators expected a familiar explanation. What followed instead was an investigation defined by uncertainty and a motive that challenged the idea that violence always comes from clear intent.

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In 2022, when 57-year-old Harold Allen was found dead in his Indiana home, the case was ruled natural. Nearly a year later, a brazen burglary and a string of buried messages bring detectives back to the same address and to Marsha Allen, the woman who said she loved him. What starts as a property crime becomes a chilling reexamination of Harold’s final days, as small-town routines, late-night deliveries, and a quiet house of secrets point to something far darker. No one is ready for where the evidence leads or what it costs.

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Beloved father and prominent attorney, Gary Farris, should have been safe on his own land. But in July 2018, he vanished from his family’s rural dream property, and a smoldering burn pile would unravel everything they thought they knew about their home, their marriage, and each other.

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