Dateline

For months, Chris Smith's family believed he was taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world, until discovering the heartbreaking truth.

Novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy played the part of a grieving widow when her husband Dan Brophy was gunned down, but surveillance video, her online search history and financial motives implied otherwise.  

Bob and Jane Bashara had a seemingly idyllic life in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, until Jane was found dead and her husband's secret life and dark fantasies were exposed. 

Newlyweds Scott Pierce and Katherine Bailey's new home put them on a collision course with a dangerous serial killer hired to target someone else.     

Nick Hacheney was viewed as a charismatic and devout man of God, but parishioners would say he used his faith to manipulate others in dangerous ways.

After LaNell Barsock was found dead in her Palmdale home's garage with a plastic bag over her head, detectives eventually realized their investigation was "heading in the wrong direction."

Joseph Sonnier, a man with seemingly no enemies, was gunned down in his Lubbock, Texas home in 2012.

Investigators initially thought the tragic deaths of Nichole Payne and her son Taylor could be the result of a murder-suicide, but chilling clues at the scene told a different story.    

When two women were killed in the same Arlington, Texas apartment complex in the same year, panic spread through the city. “He said, ‘Don’t scream and I won’t kill you,'" one survivor recalled.

Casino magnate Ted Binion was found dead in his home in 1998 surrounded by heroin and drug paraphernalia, but investigators began to suspect that his death may have had more sinister origins.