People PEOPLE True Crime Stories: From Real-Life to TV

True Crimes Serial killers, homicidal relatives, twisted kidnappers, dogged sleuths, courageous victims: True crimes can reveal humanity at its worst as well as its best. The stories involve acts of ghastly violence and depravity but also of justice served, of ingenuity and heroism. This special edition features the best of People’s crime reporting and the latest on today’s top stories—cases that prove that reality can be more riveting than fiction. THE REAL-LIFE GOOD NURSE WHEN HER HOSPITAL COLLEAGUE WAS KILLING ICU PATIENTS, AMY LOUGHREN’S HEROISM LED TO HIS CONVICTION—AND INSPIRED A MOVIE By MIA MCNIECE WORKING AT NEW JERSEY’S Somerset Medical Center, Amy Loughren thought the world of close friend and fellow ICU nurse Charles Cullen. “He took care of everyone,” she says. In a matter of speaking. Detectives investigating mysterious deaths at the hospital would—with…

JUST MEET ME AT MOSELLE. On June 7, 2021, Alex Murdaugh knew that his wife, Maggie, by then living on her own at the family beach house, was quietly interviewing divorce attorneys. Alex, the wealthy and powerful son of a family that has dominated the legal system of South Carolina’s Low Country for a century, also knew that Maggie had a soft spot for his ailing father, Randolph. So on that summer evening, when Alex told Maggie his father was dying, he knew she would hasten to his bedside. But Alex wouldn’t say which hospital, instead persuading Maggie to meet first at Moselle, their hunting estate, and then to follow him from there. En route, Maggie texted a friend. “It’s fishy,” she wrote. “He’s up to something, but I don’t…

MICHAEL SHAVER BEAMED whenever he talked about his 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. “After Michael had kids, that’s all he talked about,” says Shaver’s former coworker and friend Michele Rippy. “They were his biggest priority.” Shaver loved playing horseshoes with them and tending to the rabbit hutches he built for them in the backyard. He gave up his career as a commercial pilot because it took him away from home too much and took a job as a mechanic fixing the monorail at Disney World. And, friends say, it was for his kids’ sake that Shaver stayed in a marriage to their mom (and his high school sweetheart), Laurie, that had long been rocky. “He was desperately trying to make Laurie happy,” recalls Wilma Nicholas, the Shavers’ next-door neighbor in…

THE WEALTHY AMERICAN COUPLE visiting Africa were no strangers to guns and big-game hunting. Over their 34-year marriage Larry and Bianca Rudolph, separately and together stalked pumas in Canada, ibex in Spain and bushbucks—a type of wild antelope—in Zimbabwe. But in 2016 at a remote safari camp in Kafue National Park in Zambia—where Bianca was hoping to bag a leopard—her 12-gauge shotgun went off in the early-morning hours of Oct. 11. The blast hit the 56-year-old mother of two in the heart, killing her. Larry said he was in the bathroom while his wife was packing her weapon into a travel case when the gun fired. Responding Zambian police quickly ruled it an accidental death. American officials, however, were not so certain. Within days of Bianca’s death, Larry, a successful dentist, filed…

IN NEWS FOOTAGE NOW MORE THAN THREE DECADES OLD, a little girl is staring at the living room floor in her ramshackle West Virginia home, the very spot where just hours earlier, on Feb. 24, 1987, she had fatally shot her stepfather, Wayne Wyers. Asked by a local reporter on-camera why she did it, 11-year-old Mary Elizabeth Bailey, her flame-red hair tucked behind her ears, nods toward an easy chair out of view. “Wayne, he beat up my mom. He got drunk, and he passed out there in the chair. And …” She pauses, shifting uneasily. “… I shot him.” In that uncomfortable pause Mary Bailey held a secret. “I did exactly what my mother asked me to do,” she says now. “But she did not take the blame. I thought…

IT WAS GETTING TOWARD THE END OF THEIR SHIFT, less than an hour before midnight on Monday, July 22, 1991, when two cops on routine patrol in what they called District 3, then a notorious high-crime area near Milwaukee’s downtown, were flagged down by a man with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one of his wrists. Tracy Edwards, then 32, pointed toward the nearby Oxford Apartments, at 924 N. 25th St. “This freak, this crazy guy” had held him captive and threatened him with a hunting knife, Edwards later testified. He had barely escaped with his life by hitting his captor in the head and running from the apartment. When officers Rolf Mueller and Robert Rauth went to investigate, their knock on the door of apartment 213 was answered…