October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond recognition. Two days later, he dies in the hospital. His name is John Gilbert Hartman and he's just turned 15 years old. The police quickly arrest four suspects, all under the age of 21 and of Alaska Native and American Indian descent. Police lineup witnesses, trials follow, and all four men receive lengthy prison terms. Case closed. But journalist Brian Patrick O'Donoghue can't put the story out of his mind.

When it first came to the public’s attention in the fall of 1986, the story of the Billionaire Boys Club and its leader, Joe Hunt, a young man labeled a “yuppie Charles Manson” by the prosecutor, was splashed across headlines and TV screens throughout the nation. The story of rich kids, flagrant excess, and multiple murders fascinated the American public, but deeper truths lay buried beneath. The saga was so complex that neither its scope nor its implications could be clearly discerned—that is, until The Price of Experience was published in 1996.

After Jack the Ripper and before Son of Sam there was only one name their equal in terror: the deadly, elusive, and mysterious Zodiac. Beginning in 1968 the hooded mass murderer terrified the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area with a string of brutal killings. A sexual sadist, his pleasure was torture and murder.

Beautiful, accomplished, and beloved, Ellen Greenberg was a vivacious and affectionate teacher of young children she adored. Always upbeat, she deeply loved her family and friends, and especially her fiancée, Sam Goldberg, with whom she was planning a wedding. In fact, they’d just sent out the save-the-date announcements when, on January 26, 2011, Ellen was found in the kitchen of the luxury apartment she shared with Sam, a knife still plunged in her chest.

When Nathan Carman, a young man with a complicated past, is miraculously rescued from a lifeboat bobbing in the unforgiving North Atlantic, questions swirl about the fate of his mother, who is presumed to have drowned when their fishing boat sank. Nathan is in remarkably good shape for being lost at sea for a week, and his account of what exactly happened out there on the waves raises questions from family members and law enforcement.

In this chilling true crime series, we tell the stories of pillars of the community who betrayed the trust of those around them and challenged what we all think about the people we’ve come to rely on. Police officers, teachers, doctors and nurses, we believe these people are here to protect us from harm, not cause it. This series looks at some of the most heinous crimes perpetrated by people in positions of trust and examines the ripples their actions left on their community.

Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Anne Luera, Guiselda Hernandez, and Janelle Ortiz were four marginalized women striving to make ends meet as sex workers. They looked out for one another. But they would soon share a connection that none of them could have imagined. When Melissa was found dead, the other three women were on edge but assumed they were safe. Twelve days later, they too were dead and police had detained an unlikely suspect—Juan David Ortiz, a ten-year veteran of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net.

In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially mixed, and he was a leader in the early civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California, where he got involved in electoral politics and became a prominent Bay Area leader. But underneath the surface lurked a terrible darkness.

Although happily ensconced in a loving second marriage and a new family of quadruplets, Sheila Blackthorne Bellush never truly escaped the enslavement of her ex-husband, multimillionaire Allen Blackthorne, a handsome charmer - and a violent, controlling sociopath who terrorized her for a decade after their divorce. When Sheila was slain in her home, in the presence of her four toddlers, authorities raced to link the crime to Blackthorne, the man who vowed to monitor Sheila's every move in his obsessive quest for power and revenge.