Major Crimes and True Crime

Is $5.5 million enough? On the early morning of May 8, 1981, while Alice Sebold was walking home during her freshman year at Syracuse University in New York, she was violently attacked and r-aped. She reported the incident to the authorities, but investigators had no positive leads for months. Five months after the attack, Sebold came across Anthony Broadwater, and somehow she became convinced that he was her attacker. With her testimony, Broadwater was tried, and sentenced to to prison. After 16 years he was released in 1998. Once he was out of prison, he was compelled to register as a s-ex offender, and for the next 23 years, he lived a life of shame and worked odd jobs because few people wanted to employ him. In November 2021, Broadwater was exonerated after a combined effort of the FBI and the Innocence Project proved beyond every doubt that he was innocent. In February 2023, the state of New York paid him $5.5 million as compensation for all the t...

Stephanie Spurgeon ran a daycare facility from her home in Pinellas, Florida, for 15 years. On August 21, 2008, a 1-year-old baby, Maria Harris, fell ill after staying in her care. Maria was taken to the hospital, where she died after 10 days. An autopsy showed that the baby had bleeding inside her brain, which means she must have been abused physically. However, there was no sign of physical abuse like skull fractures or anything else. The case was taken to court, where the prosecution argued the defendant had thrown the baby onto a soft surface, such as a mattress. And with that, Spurgeon was sentenced to 15 years in 2012. After serving nine years, a new team of pathologists discovered the brain bleed had happened about 10 days before the baby was admitted to the hospital. Not only that, they also discovered the baby had an unusual level of blood glucose in her system. The baby had died of complications from undiagnosed diabetes. A Florida woman, Steph...

On August 1, 2009, Dalia Dippolito of Boynton Beach, Florida got into the passenger seat of a red sedan for a clandestine meeting and told the driver she wanted him to kill her husband. She offered him $7,000 and he responded that he'd already bought the gun. They agreed on a date and time when she would be at the gym to establish an alibi.⁠ ⁠ When Dalia arrived home from her workout on the day of the murder, her house was a crime scene. Police told her that her husband was dead and she broke down in tears right there on the street. Officers consoled her and escorted her to the station for a debriefing and explanation. There, she continued to sob in horror and disbelief — until the man she believed to be dead came out from behind a doorway.⁠ ⁠ The whole operation had been a setup. The hitman was an undercover cop and her husband himself was in on the sting — with the entire saga had even been recorded for an episode of "COPS Dalia Mohammed was...

Candace Hiltz had been a truly amazing girl. She was a brilliant child, and by the time she was 16, Candace had already completed 3 years of college! She had intended to become a supreme Court Justice some day, and there's very little doubt that she would have succeeded had she been given the chance. At the time of her murder Candace had been taking some time off from college to focus solely on her baby, Paige, who suffered from Hydrocephaly. Nobody knew how long the child would be on this Earth, and Candace wanted to spend every waking moment with her daughter. The teen is remembered as being strong willed, spunky, anything but a pushover; that is probably what got her killed: young Candace stood up to the wrong person. When Dolores Hiltz walked in her front door at approximately 3pm on August 15th of 2006, she immediately knew something was wrong. 11 month old Paige was screaming from her crib, but the baby's young mother was nowhere to be found. Upon entering her 16 year old...

15-year-old Will Cornick sought the help of friends to carry out the m̃urdḛr of their Spanish teacher, he promised to pay them for the service. When they refused, he finally carried out the act himself, and bought whisky to celebrate. On April 28, 2014, midway through the Spanish class, Cornick came behind Anne Maguire and mercilessly stabbed her seven times in the back and neck, cutting through her left jugular vein. She ᶁieᶁ a sad and painful dḛậth. 61-year-old Anne had taught Spanish at the Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds, England, for 40 years and was just five months shy of her retirement. Connick hated that she made him take up Spanish in school. After being convicted by Leeds Crown Court, he was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison. Despite his conviction, he has never expressed remorse for his actions. When asked about his crime, he callously stated that he knew it would upset the victim's family but felt that everything was “fi...

Kristine Bunch lived in Decatur County, Indiana, with her three-year-old son, Anthony. Her life changed drastically on June 30, 1995, after she woke up to discover her trailer home was on fire. She managed to escape the fire, but her three-year-old son was trapped. An investigator quickly concluded the pattern the fire left on the floor could only be caused by a liquid accelerant; they suggested she purposely set her trailer on fire. With the little evidence they had, Kristine, then 22 and pregnant, was charged in court and sentenced to 60 years for the m*urder of his son and 50 years for arson. Image: Kristine can be seen reading a book in prison While in prison, she spent time in the prison library reading law books and cross-examining the legal rulings that sent her to prison. When she was convinced she had seen the loopholes, she got the attention of the Center for Wrongful Conviction, which agreed to take up her case. She got a retrial, and expert arson i...