72 Hours: True Crime

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.