
Following the path from victim to verdict and exploring how, when it comes to murder, it is rare for there to be no prior connection between the killer and the deceased.

When a well-respected psychiatrist and his adult son are killed as they sleep, police are baffled by the apparent randomness until an arrest in an unrelated crime leads them to the least likely of suspects.

The night begins with a birthday celebration for Susan Sutton; it ends with a nightmare when a man breaks in and opens fire, killing Susan and blinding her husband; when police track down the shooter, they can't believe who he said put him up to it.

After leaving a work party late at night, Ramona Krotinea's body was discovered in the trunk of her own car the next day, and police need to reconstruct who and what happened in the intervening hours.

Terri Gilbert said she didn't know who was coming down the basement steps; she shot and killed him; turned out to be her husband whom she was divorcing; twenty years earlier, she told a similar story, about her first husband.