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...