Crime Story Editor

Katherine Mader spent two decades as a judge in Los Angeles Criminal Court, before retiring early in 2020. Before that she was the LAPD's first Inspector General, prosecuted two murder-for-hire trials and served as a defense attorney who convinced a jury to spare the life of the Hillside Strangler. In August of this year, Judge Mader published Inside the Robe: A Judge's Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America, which best selling author Michael Connelly called: "a perfect book: engrossing and telling at the same time." The Judge has granted Crime Story permission to excerpt the entirety of her...

Katherine Mader spent two decades as a judge in Los Angeles Criminal Court, before retiring early in 2020. Before that she was the LAPD's first Inspector General, prosecuted two murder-for-hire trials and served as a defense attorney who convinced a jury to spare the life of the Hillside Strangler. In August of this year, Judge Mader published Inside the Robe: A Judge's Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America, which best selling author Michael Connelly called: "a perfect book: engrossing and telling at the same time." The Judge has granted Crime Story permission to excerpt the entirety of her...

This is the third in a series of articles on the case of The People vs. Daniel Masterson in which Masterson is charged with sexual assaulting three women in 2001 and 2003. You can find links to all of Crime Story's coverage of this case here. Bombshell, the 2019 film, dramatizes the fall of Roger Ailes — the media mogul accused of sexually assaulting women at the FOX News media empire that he governed. Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie lent their stardom to amplify these stories of workplace harassment and explore how FOX News shielded and enabled perpetrators,...

Today we update and reprise two stories that we published about the legal troubles faced by Los Angeles Rapper Drakeo the Ruler, who was born Darrell Caldwell, and who spent over 3 years in an L.A. Jail through one trial and pending a second trial.  In those articles, we explored both the political and cultural dimensions to Drakeo’s case. Since that time Drakeo released a critically acclaimed album recorded over a jail-house phone, and he accepted a plea bargain on a remaining Gang Conspiracy charge. That deal, according to journalist Jeff Weiss, set him free on parole, the conditions of...

The Rafay Murders: An Interview with Jason Flom (Part One) Back in Capanne prison, I was lucky to receive daily correspondence from family, friends, and strangers alike. Not all of it was good; I got used to throwing out the death threats, marriage proposals, and images of my face photoshopped onto pornography. I received a number of letters from other inmates, too, almost always male, and they began in the (what I learned to be) typical way: “My name is ___. I’m 5’11’, 185 lbs, athletic build, brown hair, brown eyes.” In Italy, inter-prison courtship was as popular a pastime...

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR  To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the International Military Tribunal, Crime Story presents a new series, NUREMBERG. Sean Smith examines the many dimensions of the historic judicial proceedings. Drawing on official transcripts of the trial, as well as a vast bibliography of first- and second-hand accounts, NUREMBERG tells the stories behind the legal, political and personal struggles which complicated this revolutionary exercise in international jurisprudence.  NUREMBERG Today marks the 75th anniversary of the opening of the International Military Tribunal held in Nuremberg, Germany. For ten months beginning in the Fall of 1945, amid the rubble of that once...