In 1992 Levon Brooks was arrested for murdering a three-year-old girl and sentenced to life in prison. Only a few months later Kennedy Brewer was arrested for a nearly identical murder and was sentenced to death. Both cases were based almost entirely on faulty bite mark evidence and both men spent almost two decades in prison for crimes they did not commit. However in 2000, Kennedy Brewer wrote a letter to the Innocence Project asking for their help with his case which was when the fight for the truth began and the real story came to light. 

Donna Cooper, her daughter Gina, and Jenny Leung took a drive into Death Valley for a day of exploring. After deciding to take a detour they realized too late that their GPS was leading them further into the desert with no real direction. Two hundred miles later they were out of gas and almost out of hope that they would get out of there alive.

Let's talk about some terrifying Reddit Let's Not Meet stories!

The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California along the Oregon Trail in a wagon train from the Midwest. After taking a new and dangerous shortcut, the party became trapped by an exceptionally heavy snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. When their food supply ran out the group resorted to cannibalism of those already dead.

On November 14, 1974, Barbara Mabee Abel returned home from work with her 6-year-old son to find the Casanova Killer, Paul John Knowles, waiting in her kitchen with a double barrel sawed-off shotgun. To protect her son and sister, she convinced Knowles to take only her, begging him to kidnap her instead of harming her family. During her captivity, she employed a survival strategy of charming him and attempting to make him fall in love with her to keep him from killing her. By this time, Paul John Knowles, had already been on a 4 month killing spree and claimed to kill more than 35 people.

On July 22nd 2010, Dave Akers and Gary Nall decided to take a sight seeing trip in Gary’s small plane. What should have been a short flight before sunset turned into a fight for their lives after the plane got caught in a powerful down draft that caused them to crash almost 4,000 feet up a remote mountain side in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite their injuries, the men quickly discovered their only option was to attempt to hike off the mountain.

The night before Thanksgiving 2021, Leslie Reeves and Chris Smith went on their first date after hitting it off online. The next day, friends and family became increasingly anxious when they couldn’t reach either one of the pair. Leslie’s best friend Nanette Stuiber was so worried she showed up to Chris Smith’s home, which was when she and one of Chris’s concerned loved ones discovered something was very wrong inside the house. When authorities arrived they found the glass on the back door had been shattered, there had been a struggle, and both Chris and Leslie had been shot. Leslie had been murdered and Chris was clinging to life. Investigators needed to piece together what could have happened in the hours leading up to the discovery of this grizzly crime scene.

In 1949, 13-year-old 'Roland Doe' became the victim of alleged demonic possession which lead to a harrowing series of exorcisms by a team of catholic priests. Roland's exorcism became the chilling real-life inspiration for famous horror film, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.

In December 1968, 20-year-old Barbara Jane Mackle was kidnapped from her motel room and buried underground in a ventilated box that was designed to keep alive for a full week while she was held for ransom. Her kidnappers, Gary Steven Krist and Ruth Eisman Schier, demanded $500,000 from Barbra’s father Robert Mackle, who was a very famous and wealthy Florida businessman. Over the course of 83 hours Robert, along with the help of Richard Nixon, Jay Edgar Hoover, and the FBI, did exactly what the kidnappers demanded to get Barbra out of the box alive.

On Halloween night in 2004, three roommates spent the evening handing out candy to trick-or-treaters before going to bed. A few hours later, Lauren Meanza was awoken to the sounds of the screams of her roommates, Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara, above her. As she opened her bedroom door, she heard whoever had been attacking her friends coming down the staircase toward her, so she bolted out the backdoor. Leslie and Adriane would be found brutally murdered in an upstairs bedroom, and Lauren would live tormented by the survivors' guilt from that night. The investigation would bring to light that their killer was a lot closer to the girls than anyone could have imagined. 

In April of 2009 four Somali pirates boarded the Maersk Alabama, a US/Danish cargo ship off the coast of Africa, a notorious piracy hotspot. The crew aboard the Alabama did everything they could to keep the pirates from gaining control of the ship, however the pirates still held multiple crew members hostage, including Captain Richard Phillips. After chief engineer, Mike Perry, managed to capture one of the pirates, the crew attempted to negotiate an exchange of hostages. However the failed attempt led to Captain Phillips being held on a lifeboat with the pirates, who demanded a $2 million ransom for his release. The captain's capture resulted in a standoff between the pirates and the US Navy, including Navy SEAL Team Six.