Two black boys were found murdered at the end of July 1979, officially starting one of the most highly publicized murder series in history. A couple of years later, 29 black youths would be dead and a black man, Wayne Williams, who many people believe was railroaded by the government, would be imprisoned for life. Recent efforts to vindicate Williams have stalled.

The bloodiness of the acts is startling. Along with the gruesome nature of the crimes is the unexpected character of the accused, not a hatchet-wielding maniac, but a church-going, Sunday-school-teaching, respectable, spinster-daughter, charged with parricide, the murder of parents, a crime worthy of Classical Greek tragedy. Many people believed she killed her father and stepmother, but recent forensic research suggests that she didn't.

"A Dingo Took My Baby!"

They were the words that Lindy Chamberlain had screamed out into the blackness of the cold night in a camping ground close to Ayers Rock, Central Australia, on the night of August 17, when the minister's wife discovered that her nearly ten-week-old baby, Azaria had been taken by a dingo.

There were dingo tracks going in and out of the tent and fellow campers were eye witnesses to the events, but somehow the media got ahold of the story and twisted it beyond recognition. Despite the all the forensic evidence to the contrary, Lindy was convicted of murder and spent years in prison until this horrible miscarriage of justice was exposed. This is the real story behind Meryl Streep's classic movie "A Cry in the Dark."

The twists and turns, surprise witnesses and tabloid events of her two trials almost defy belief. Not surprisingly, this extraordinary case has been the subject of books, movies and plays.

Twenty-six days later, five defendants had been sentenced to death. To most people, it mattered little that four of the suspects did not even know a murder was committed during the robbery at the Griffin house. They had a trial, were found guilty and now had to suffer the penalty. Case closed. Was this rush to justice legal? Yes, but was it just?

A smeared, bloody handprint was found by police. Within hours, police had a description of the killer and a single suspect T. Cullen Davis, one of the richest men in America and the model for the villainous J.R. Ewing on the nighttime soap opera "Dallas." In a series of events that emulate soap opera fiction, the billionaire oil man was charged in the most expensive investigation and trial in Texas history for the murder of his daughter and wife's boyfriend, shooting a witness, assaulting his wife and paying to have a judge murdered.

Many called it the best "justice money can buy."

A little less than two months later, the crowd got its wish. A number of upstanding citizens hung Leo Frank. They lynched him from a large oak tree, in a quiet grove, outside Marietta, Georgia.

But the story did not end with his death. It is a case of injustice that continues to echo through the twentieth century and beyond. It generated the formation of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and produced the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that exist to this day. It is a sad tale of anti-Semitism, the clash of cultures, and an egregious miscarriage of justice.

To understand how the blue film actor wound up at the center of the "Wonderland Murders," a quadruple murder investigation, you must first trace Holmes' meteoric rise to stardom, and his equally impressive fall from it.

The Jennifer Levin murder case captivated New York City and mesmerized the public with its sordid tale of "rough sex" and a freewheeling lifestyle among the city's spoiled youth. Fueled by the tabloids, which featured such titillating headlines as SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, JEN'S SEX DIARY and the now notorious, HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH, the case dominated front-page news for two years.

The media turned Chambers into the victim, blaming a very young woman for her rape and murder. Jennifer Levin, 5 foot 3 inches and 120 pounds, roughed him up a little too much during sexual play behind Manhattan's Museum of Art. He said that he was forced to act in self-defense when he accidentally choked her to death.

Now "preppie" killer Robert Chambers is charged on multiple felony drug counts.

Robert Kissel, a high-flying investment banker, was a prominent member of the American expatriate community in Hong Kong. Police arrested his wife, Nancy, who stated that her husband had assaulted her over the previous weekend after she refused to have sex with him.

Does poisoning one's husband with a pink arsenic-laced milkshake constitute premeditated murder?

Suppose you could live like royalty behind bars, in almost total control, with guests free to come and go as they pleased, cellphones, TV, gourmet food and fine wine to eat and drink. Would that make the deal worth 20 years of your life?

Sobraj is a con man, jewel thief, drug dealer and murderer, but one who lived a life of adventure and intrigue that made him a media celebrity.

In a bizarre way, it was perhaps almost a comforting thought that Father Leo died an innocent victim, a man who could never, it was assumed, have taken any steps to provoke his killer, or to have hastened his own demise. In the belief structure of coal-country Catholicism, it is far more soothing to believe that the world is predatory and black, and that people must succumb to its pernicious dangers so that they can ultimately reach salvation.

What eventually became clear was that Father Leo was succumbing to dangers of his own: a chronic struggle with alcohol and his vows of celibacy. And so, while the parish was firmly entrenched in a heroic view of Father Leo, in reality a drunken priest was carrying on a relationship with a married woman. A priest who was killed by the woman's elderly husband. The community was in an upheaval as it sorted through the key cause for the priests death: self-defense? Involuntary manslaughter? Murder?