72 Hours: True Crime

19-year-old Greg Parsons is convicted of brutally murdering his mother with evidence of the audio tape of a song he'd written, "Kill your Parents". After three years in prison, Parsons is released when DNA exonerates him and it's proven that a friend of his had given police the tape and, in a double betrayal, also murdered his mother.

Whistler, B.C. is a winter wonderland for the rich and trendy. Three people meet - the son of a wealthy Frenchman, a Vancouver businessman looking for investors and a real estate agent trying to sell a mountainside estate. Unbeknownst to them, they are the latest victims of a notorious international con man.

A string of bank robberies in Winnipeg confound local police. Most bank-robbers are thin strung out addicts. This new man doesn't fit that profile as he is fat. When he strikes next he confuses police further by changing locales and hitting up a bank in Vancouver. One can only fool detectives for so long, however - sooner or later a thief's pattern will give him up. After setting up a dragnet and nabbing their man, police are shocked to discover who they've caught. The real mystery, it seems, is just beginning.

A woman is told by a friend that she was a passenger in a car where she was confronted with a guy's head in a bucket. The woman gets in touch with police. But the story keeps changing and the woman retracts. As police dig deeper, they discover a sordid tale of power and intrigue.

The bizarre murder of a world-renowned anthropologist over the Christmas holidays shocks staff and students at the university where she teaches. Police get a clue that a stranger described as a female Hulk was seen shortly before the murder. In a case stranger than fiction, the murderer turns out to be not whom she appears to be.

A 19-year-old man comes home one night to discover that his father, mother and autistic sister have all been savagely murdered. Could it be the $500,000 insurance money and the movie The Great Despisers that motivated the killers to perpetrate such violence?

A beloved small town public school teacher fails to arrive for work for the first time in 30 years, leaving an empty house and a baffled community. Vanished, she seems to have disappeared without a trace. The few clues that are found - a missing chair, a small trace of blood on the floor - fail to shed much light on the mystery, until police turn their attention to a neighbour with a peculiar interest in the case. A neighbour who just happens to work at a landfill.

When the curiosity of an insurance claims investigator is piqued by the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of a young Sikh man, a trail of bigamy, deceit and murder is soon uncovered. Police detectives follow that trail and discover it leads all the way to India - and that the secrets of a massive killing spree can be traced back to one small, bitter pill.

A trucker stopping at a roadside rest station discovers the fully clothed body of a dead East Indian woman in the woods. An autopsy reveals that she has been strangled, she has an unusually high level of sedatives in her bloodstream and, mysteriously, there are several pairs of burn marks on her skin. Police eventually discover she is the beloved wife of a revered East Indian faith healer and the circumstances of her death are bizarre.

Surgically clean body parts start turning up on a highway. Stranger still, they have been drained of every drop of blood. Using a unique forensic technique that takes footprint impressions from the inside of shoes, police are able to connect the body parts to a missing 22-year-old violinist. Suspicion for the slaying falls on her ex-boyfriend and her new paramour, a college professor.

The wife of a successful jeweler is found in their home, stripped naked and beaten to death. The jeweler immediately falls under suspicion, but he's not alone. The couple had been overseeing expensive renovations to their home for the past year - meaning literally hundreds of people had access to the house before the murder. This was a horrible crime with a multitude of suspects. But the jeweler's wife was no sitting duck - she had fought back. And under her fingernails is the DNA that will lead detectives to her killer.

When a senior citizen is killed on a city street, authorities at first treat it as a typical hit-and-run accident. But as they investigate further, they begin to realize that the culprit is a thrill-seeking psychopath who intends to kill people.

Firemen are called to put out a blaze and discover two sisters, one dead and the other on death's door. Detectives learn that a man snuck into the house late at night and brutally sexually assaulted the sisters before setting fire to the house. The attacker's face was covered with a balaclava and he had a chain around his waist that could have been part of prison shackles. So begins one of the most gruesome and sadistic murder sprees in Canadian history.