Author: Darren Rowse

Six weeks before my sister’s wedding, she told me she didn’t want me there. Not in those exact words, but close enough that there was no graceful misunderstanding available to either of us. I had signed the contract for her venue. I had paid the deposit. And I was, apparently, not on the guest list. The call came on a Tuesday evening in late February. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of wine and a stack of project timelines I was supposed to be reviewing, and my phone lit up with Claire’s name. We hadn’t talked…

When Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network on September 19, 2007, its central character was a girl who had everything. Blair Waldorf lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She wore headbands that cost more than most people’s rent. She attended the kind of prep school that generated its own mythology. She had a mother who was a famous fashion designer and a best friend who was effortlessly beautiful and a social position that was, by any measure available to a teenager in the zip code of 10021, impeccable. Blair was wealthy, poised, immaculately groomed,…

On the afternoon of December 1, 2007, a man walked into a police station in London and told the officer behind the desk that he thought he might be a missing person. He gave his name as John Darwin. He said he couldn’t remember much—not where he’d been, not how he’d gotten to London, not what had happened to him since some point around the year 2000. He was fifty-seven years old, relatively healthy in appearance, and calm. The officers took down his details and began making inquiries. Those inquiries produced an immediate and startling result. A man named John…

On the morning of April 24, 2018, Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies arrested a seventy-two-year-old retired truck mechanic in the side yard of his Citrus Heights home. He had lived in that three-bedroom house for at least two decades. His neighbors knew him as a quiet, sometimes cantankerous presence — someone who complained about noise, who kept to himself, who had spent years in the kind of unremarkable suburban retirement that invites no particular scrutiny. His name was Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. He was also, investigators had concluded, the serial offender known over forty years of reporting as the Visalia Ransacker,…

In 1971, a photographer named Michael Rougier arrived at a family’s California home with his camera equipment and spent several days documenting what he found there. The assignment was not a news emergency. The scene Rougier was sent to photograph was, on its surface, domestic: a kitchen, a living room, a backyard swimming pool, a set of bedrooms. But what he found in those spaces, alongside the family’s furniture and houseplants and ordinary possessions, was a full-grown male lion. The lion’s name was Neil. He weighed approximately four hundred pounds. He had access to every room in the house. He…

Sometime in the year 2000, a copy of Action Comics No. 1—the June 1938 comic that introduced Superman to the world, and one of the most valuable pieces of printed paper in existence—disappeared from Nicolas Cage’s home in Los Angeles. He filed a theft report with the LAPD on January 21, 2000. The theft was logged, the case was opened, and Detective Donald Hrycyk of the LAPD’s Art Theft Detail began what would become one of the longer assignments of his career. Over the next eleven years, the comic was not found. False leads emerged and faded. In 2002, there…

She said it during lunch. We were at the kitchen table, Patricia and Daniel and I, eating the chicken soup Patricia had made that morning without asking whether either of us wanted chicken soup. It was good soup. That is not the point, but it is true, and I have tried to stay accurate about which things were good and which things were problems, because the two categories overlapped in ways that took me months to sort out. She had rearranged the cabinet above the stove. This was the third time in six weeks that she’d reorganized something in our…

On the morning of September 12, 2001, Steve Buscemi put on his old firefighting gear and drove to the smoldering crater where the World Trade Center had stood the day before. He had not been a working firefighter for seventeen years. He was, by the fall of 2001, one of the most recognizable character actors in American cinema — the guy from Fargo, from Reservoir Dogs, from Con Air and Armageddon, the actor whose face launched a thousand casting directors’ “strange” and “menacing” calls. None of that was the point. The point was that he had worked at Engine Company…

On the night of April 8, 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the nominees for Best Actress at the 35th Academy Awards were announced to the assembled audience: Anne Bancroft for *The Miracle Worker*, Bette Davis for *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, Katharine Hepburn for *Long Day’s Journey into Night*, Geraldine Page for *Sweet Bird of Youth*, and Lee Remick for *Days of Wine and Roses*. Four of those women were in the room. One was not. Anne Bancroft, the eventual winner, was three thousand miles away in New York City, appearing nightly on the stage of the…

The meeting was in my father’s office, which he called “the conference room” in a way that had always seemed optimistic for a room with one window, a whiteboard with a stuck marker cap, and a mini-fridge that hadn’t worked since 2019. I had been in that room for dozens of hard conversations over eighteen years. I thought I knew what hard looked like in there. Victor closed the door. Luke was already seated, which told me the geometry had been decided before I arrived. “We’ve been thinking about the leadership structure,” my father said. He used the formal voice,…