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.
Two girls went for a walk on a mild February afternoon. What happened next consumed Delphi, Indiana, for nearly eight years.
Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, disappeared after visiting the Monon High Bridge Trail in February 2017. Libby’s phone captured the image and voice of a man approaching the girls shortly before they were killed, creating one of the most recognizable pieces of evidence in modern American true crime.
Police spent years chasing leads, releasing competing sketches and investigating men ranging from the owner of the property where the bodies were found to a convicted online predator. All the while, one crucial name had been sitting inside their own files.
Richard Allen had told authorities in 2017 that he was on the trails that afternoon. His lead was misfiled and effectively lost for more than five years. When investigators rediscovered it in 2022, they built a case around his own statements, an unfired cartridge allegedly linked to his gun and dozens of confessions made after his arrest.
A jury convicted Allen in November 2024 and he received 130 years in prison. His appeal now challenges the evidence, his treatment in custody and the restrictions placed on his defense. Nearly a decade after Abby and Libby walked onto the bridge, the case has a convicted killer — but the fight over how Indiana got there is far from finished.
Full file
New York’s Mafia built its hierarchy to protect the men at the top. Federal prosecutors eventually turned that structure into evidence against them.
For decades, bosses rarely needed to touch the crimes making them rich. Soldiers collected money, capos passed orders and underbosses kept layers of distance between street violence and the men running the Five Families.
Then investigators began bugging cars, homes and social clubs. They recorded Mafia leaders discussing construction rackets, union power, money disputes and the Commission — the governing body used by New York’s crime families to settle business between them.
Using RICO, prosecutors attacked the organization rather than another collection of individual crimes. Eight defendants went before a federal jury in 1986, including Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine Persico and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo. Every one was convicted. Seven received 100-year sentences.
The Five Families survived. Their old protection did not. From then on, becoming a Mafia boss meant inheriting something earlier generations had largely avoided: criminal exposure created by the very authority that made the job worth having.
Full file
Mimi Boomhower had a Bel Air mansion, expensive jewelry, a packed social calendar and plans extending months into the future. Then she vanished.
The 48-year-old widow was last heard from on August 18, 1949, while preparing to meet an unidentified “gentleman.” When police eventually entered her home, every light was burning, her car remained locked in the garage, food filled the refrigerator and a dress lay ready on her bed.
Then her purse appeared four miles away inside a phone booth. Someone had written a message claiming it had been found at the beach, yet police found no sand or saltwater on it.
Investigators explored gambling debts, robbery, suicide, voluntary disappearance and a mysterious prospective buyer. They even reopened the unsolved murder of real-estate agent Gladys Kern because Mimi was trying to sell her house and may have been expecting a man interested in buying it.
Mimi was declared dead, then legally alive again, then finally dead for good seven years later. Seventy-seven years after she disappeared, nobody knows whether the “Merry Widow” ran away, was murdered or walked into a trap arranged by somebody whose name never entered the case.
Full file
Camilla Steinaa once lived at the center of Copenhagen’s punk scene. By the time she vanished, she seemed determined to reject almost everything about the life she had known.
The fiercely independent 25-year-old had dated musicians and celebrated Danish poet Michael Strunge, partied hard and earned a reputation as one of Copenhagen’s memorable alternative-scene figures.
Then her worldview changed. Camilla embraced veganism, austerity and an obscure spiritual text called The Gospel of Peace. She talked about abandoning technology, living from the land, sleeping under hay and leaving material society behind.
By the winter of 1986, she was gone. Her last known plans pointed toward Jutland and an organic farm, while later witnesses claimed to have seen her at the Thylejren hippie community. Photographs and footage appear to show a woman resembling Camilla there, but no identification has ever been confirmed.
There is no body, no known crime scene and no evidence proving Camilla was murdered. There is also no verified proof she survived the 1980s. Nearly four decades later, her disappearance leaves one extraordinary possibility alongside all the darker ones: perhaps Camilla Steinaa really did manage to walk away from the modern world.
Full file
