Top Crime Stories of 2008

Not since a pregnant Laci Peterson disappeared in California has a missing person case so captivated the public's interest. The case of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, who disappeared in June but was not reported missing until mid July, touched off hundreds of comments on blogs and thousands of posts in our Crime and Punishment forum. The case continues to attract interest as her mother, Casey Anthony, faces a first-degree murder trial in 2009.

Justice finally caught up with the former star NFL running back. O.J. Simpson and co-defendant C.J. Stewart were found guilty of holding up two sports memorabilia dealers in a Las Vegas casino hotel room. Simpson, who was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in 1995, will spend at least nine years in prison.

On October 24, 2008, the bodies of Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother were found in the family's home on Chicago's South Side. Shot to death were Hudson's mother, Darnell Donerson, and her brother, Jason Hudson. Three days later the body of 7-year-old Julian King, Hudson's nephew, was found in a SUV parked on the West Side. He also had been shot.

The community was stunned at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when Eve Carson, the popular president of the student body, was found shot to death in the street at an intersection near the college campus. They became outraged when they discovered the two suspects in the crime should have been in jail for probation violations.

In a case that sent legislators scrambling to change the Georgia death penalty laws, Atlanta Courthouse Killer Brian Nichols was found guilty of 54 counts, including four murders. But the same jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of the death penalty when three jurors refused to negotiate during four days of deliberations.

On October 20, Anne Pressly, a popular morning anchorwoman at KATV television, was found badly beaten and raped in the bedroom of her home in the Pulaski Heights section of Little Rock. A suspect was arrested after DNA evidence linked him to the Pressly crime scene and the earlier rape of a school teacher.

The decapitated child who was known only as "Precious Doe" for more than four years, finally got a measure of justice seven years later. A Kansas City jury deliberated for about three hours before returning a guilty verdict against Harrell Johnson in the first-degree murder trial of Erica Green, the daughter of his then girlfriend who he married a year later.

Joseph Edward Duncan III was out on a $15,000 bond in Minnesota for molesting a 7-year-old boy, when he killed three people in an Idaho home in order to kidnap, torture and sexually assaulted their two children. A federal jury in Boise, Idaho deliberated only three hours before voting to sentence this monster to death.

For 10 months, the University of Nevada Reno community was terrorized by a suspected serial rapist and killer after 19-year-old Brianna Denison disappeared while sleeping on a friend's sofa in January. Her body was found almost a month later in a field in a Reno business park. DNA found at the scene was linked to several sexual assaults.

For the third time, Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis received a last-minute reprieve from execution as his attorneys appealed to the highest courts for a new trial. The convicted cop killer's case has been championed by death penalty opponents because witnesses in his original trial have recanted.