You probably don’t have time to read every investigation, every breakdown, every file we’ve opened this week. We get that. So, here’s our weekly recap of our deep dives. We are Front Page Detectives, and this is where the story actually is.
Nidal Hasan was supposed to treat soldiers scarred by war. Instead, the Army psychiatrist became the gunman behind one of the deadliest attacks ever carried out on a U.S. military base.
On November 5, 2009, Hasan entered a readiness center at Fort Hood and opened fire on soldiers and civilian staff. Thirteen people were killed and dozens more were wounded before officers Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd confronted him. Hasan survived after being shot and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
The massacre exposed years of missed warning signs. Hasan’s supervisors had questioned his professional conduct, while the FBI had intercepted messages between him and extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Investigators later concluded information had been mishandled across agencies as Hasan moved toward violence while remaining inside the Army.
At his 2013 court-martial, Hasan represented himself, admitted carrying out the shooting and described himself as having switched sides in a war. He was convicted of 13 murders and 32 attempted murders and sentenced to death.
Now, 17 years after the massacre, his looming execution has reopened the story. But the bigger question has never changed: how did a military doctor entrusted with protecting soldiers become the man who murdered them?
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Greenpeace expected confrontation when it reached the French nuclear testing grounds. It did not expect the French government to send agents into New Zealand and blow up its ship first.
On July 10, 1985, DGSE divers attached explosives to the Rainbow Warrior while it was docked in Auckland. Two blasts sank the vessel and killed photographer Fernando Pereira, who had gone below deck to retrieve his equipment.
New Zealand police unraveled the covert operation through rental vehicles, false Swiss passports, diving equipment and travel records. French agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur were arrested, while other members of the team escaped.
Paris initially denied responsibility before the story collapsed under mounting evidence. Defense Minister Charles Hernu resigned, France admitted its intelligence service carried out the bombing and the two captured agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
France wanted to stop a protest against nuclear testing. Instead, it killed a photographer, violated the sovereignty of a friendly country and created one of the most notorious state-sponsored attacks on an environmental organization in modern history.
Full file
Some people walked into Roy DeMeo’s Brooklyn hangout expecting a meeting. Their families never saw them again.
The Gambino crime family soldier built a crew around loansharking, stolen cars, drugs and murder, with men including Joseph Testa, Anthony Senter and Chris Rosenberg helping enforce an operation whose violence became almost industrial.
Victims were lured to meetings, killed and dismembered before their remains were dumped where investigators were unlikely to recover them. The method gave detectives the worst possible starting point: a missing person, no body and criminals determined to say nothing.
DeMeo’s own paranoia eventually became as dangerous as his enemies. He murdered 18-year-old vacuum-cleaner salesman Dominick Ragucci after mistaking him for a threat, while disputes inside the crew produced more killings as associates became liabilities.
By 1983, Mafia bosses feared DeMeo himself might cooperate with investigators. He disappeared and was later found shot dead in the trunk of his Cadillac. The organization he built eventually collapsed through informants and federal prosecutions, but many of its victims never received even the certainty of a grave.
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Jean Spangler was finally beginning to make progress in Hollywood when she walked out of her Los Angeles home in October 1949 and disappeared forever.
The 26-year-old actress and dancer had worked alongside stars including Betty Grable and Kirk Douglas and had recently filmed Young Man with a Horn. Two days after she vanished, police found her purse in Griffith Park with a strange unfinished note addressed to “Kirk” and mentioning a mysterious “Dr. Scott.”
Douglas contacted police after reading reports about the note and said he remembered talking and joking with Spangler on set but had never seen her socially. Investigators ruled him out and continued searching for the unidentified Kirk, while separate theories emerged involving an illegal abortion, a secret lover and Los Angeles gangland figures.
Police chased reported sightings from Hollywood to Mexico, examined possible links to missing Mickey Cohen associates and investigated a former boyfriend known as “Scotty.” Nothing produced Jean.
Her connection to Kirk Douglas remains one of the most famous details in the case, but it was only one thread in a disappearance crowded with them. Seventy-seven years later, Spangler still has no known grave and no established explanation for what happened after she left home.
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Sirkka-Liisa Valjus’ killer left fingerprints, a palm print, a bloody footprint and traces believed to be his own blood. Police still never identified him.
The 34-year-old was found strangled inside her Turku apartment in July 1963 after leaving a dance restaurant with a mysterious foreign man witnesses believed was German or Dutch. Neighbors later recalled hearing a woman in distress during the night.
Inside the apartment, investigators found evidence of a violent struggle and signs the killer had tried to clean up. Cigarette butts were gone, bloody water remained around the bathtub and a section had been cut from a bedsheet. Yet fingerprints, blood and a bare footprint survived.
Notorious German-born suspect Hans Assmann was questioned, but police checked his movements and footprints and found nothing sufficient to connect him to the murder. Other suspects came and went without producing an arrest.
For more than 60 years, Sirkka-Liisa’s private life has been scrutinized while the man who killed her escaped every consequence. Her son Hannu has spent decades trying to make sure the victim, rather than the rumors surrounding her, is what Finland remembers.
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