Curated playlist

People convicted of murder by the United States federal government

Cary StaynerCary Stayner is an American serial killer whose crimes began to surface in March 1999, when police near Yosemite National Park received an anonymous note. It held a hand-drawn map, and across the top someone had written, "We had fun with…
Derek ChauvinDerek Michael Chauvin joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 2001, and on the 25th of May 2020 he became one of the most scrutinized defendants in the world. That day he was among four officers who arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old…
Dzhokhar TsarnaevDzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan planted two pressure cooker bombs at the 117th Boston Marathon. The bombs exploded at 2:49 in the afternoon on the 15th of April 2013, Patriots' Day. One had been placed at the finish line,…
Carmine PersicoCarmine Persico, known as Junior and as Immortal, had a projected prison release date of the 20th of March 2050. By then he would have been 117 years old. The sentence behind that date began in 1987, and he served 32 years of it. Yet the…
Timothy McVeighTimothy McVeigh was driving on Interstate 35 in Noble County, Oklahoma, when state trooper Charles J. Hanger noticed his yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis had no license plate. Hanger also noticed a bulge under the driver's jacket. McVeigh…
Jared Lee LoughnerAt 2:05 on the morning of the 8th of January 2011, Jared Lee Loughner left a voicemail for a friend. "Hey man, it's Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later." The message was short and casual. Within hours, a shooting in the…
Ted KaczynskiTed Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times in 1995 and attached a promise to it. If the Times or The Washington Post printed his essay in full, he would "desist from terrorism." The essay ran to roughly 35,000 words and carried the…
Dylann RoofDylann Storm Roof, born on the 3rd of April 1994, is an American white supremacist and neo-Nazi who carried out the Charleston church shooting. On the evening of the 17th of June 2015, a routine Bible study was under way at Emanuel African…
Gary HiltonGary Michael Hilton, born in 1946, earned the nickname The National Forest Serial Killer because every one of his four known murders took place inside a national forest. Those killings came between 2007 and 2008 and stretched across three…
Joseph Paul FranklinJoseph Paul Franklin chose his own name, and it was not the one he was born with. By his own admission or by court verdict, he shot 22 people across ten American states. Sixteen of them died. He was a white supremacist, and he picked…
Eric RudolphEric Robert Rudolph was picking through a dumpster behind a Save-A-Lot store in Murphy, North Carolina, at about four in the morning on the 31st of May 2003. A rookie officer named Jeffrey Scott Postell, on routine patrol, assumed he was…
David HeadleyJudge Harry Leinenweber of the federal court in Chicago told David Headley that he deserved to be executed. Then he sentenced him to 35 years in prison. Headley, born Dawood Sayed Gilani, was a Pakistani-American who gathered the…
Carl PanzramCarl Panzram told investigators that he had murdered twenty-one boys and men, yet only five of those killings could ever be confirmed. Authorities suspect the real toll in the United States alone passes one hundred, with more victims in…
Jeffrey R. MacDonaldAt 3:42 in the morning on the 17th of February 1970, a dispatcher at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, picked up a call from Jeffrey R. MacDonald, an Army physician with the Special Forces. His voice was faint. "Help! Five forty-four Castle…