During a terrifying three-day period in late August 1990, five college students were found brutally murdered in Gainesville, Fla.; panic filled the usually sunny city as investigators searched to find the serial killer before he struck again.

For nine months in 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was the most famous missing child in America; kidnapped by Brian David Mitchell, she was forced up into a hiding spot in the mountains behind her home, assaulted and forced to be his second wife.