Police who arrived at the home of a Illinois man to investigate claims of battery and attempted indecent solicitation of a child ended up tacking on an additional charge: Sexual abuse of a pet peacock.

Vivian Schronce, an 80-year-old grandmother and great-grandmother, had just returned to her home in Gaston County, North Carolina from Sunday morning church service when she was shot and killed, allegedly by her 88-year-old roommate, Charles Edwin Venn

A tribunal in Guatemala has found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. It's the first time a former Latin American leader has been convicted of such a charge.

Oakland is a world-class city with world-class terrible crime and a forever scandalized police force that often does more harm than good. Meet new OPD Chief Anthony Toribio and then say good-bye, because he's out after two days on the job.

Florida resident Bryan Zuniga had just successfully fled from a sheriff's deputy when the 20-year-old encountered a foe he couldn't outrun: an alligator.

A member of Colombia's dreaded "Los Topos" gang who escaped prison after being incarcerated last year was caught by police this week despite having undergone a very "convincing sex change."

Joe Muto, the former producer for Bill O'Reilly who did a short-lived star turn as "the Fox Mole" here on Gawker about a year ago, will plead guilty today in a Manhattan criminal courtroom to misdemeanor attempted theft and attempted computer tampering charges.

Police in Texas say the mother of a teenage boy who was shot in the leg by a friend turned to WebMD for help instead of driving her son to the hospital.

A housekeeper in Tempe, Arizona, was cleaning the room of 18-year-old high school senior Joshua Prater when she stumbled upon an improvised explosive device.

A Phoenix jury just found Jodi Arias guilty of first-degree murder in the death of her ex-boyfriend, bringing to a close a case that's fascinated America, particularly Nancy Grace.

A woman believed to be in her late teens or early twenties is being sought by police in York (England) in connection with an "unprovoked assault" on a 17-year-old girl inside a local McDonald's.

On Tuesday, Tim Lambesis, the singer for Christian heavy metal band As I Lay Dying, was arrested for allegedly attempting to hire a hitman to murder his estranged wife.

A Pentagon survey estimates 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010. The survey was released two days after the head of the Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program was arrested for sexual assault.

You may remember the sad case of Thomas Grant, a Pennsylvania man who last Halloween accidentally shot his 9-year-old cousin with a shotgun after confusing her skunk costume for a real skunk. On Monday, Grant pleaded no contest to charges of reckless endangerment and misdemeanor simple assault and avoided jail time.

As police sift through the ramshackle Cleveland home where three women who'd been missing for almost a decade were recovered yesterday afternoon, neighbors of the three brothers arrested for the kidnappings are coming forward with terrifying tales of brutality that went overlooked by police for years.

A New York couple reported that they were the victims of a hate crime Sunday afternoon, when they were assaulted in Madison Square Garden by a group of attackers dressed in Knicks gear. Nick Porto and his partner Kevin Atkins were reportedly walking arm-in-arm on Eighth Avenue by 34th Street around 5 P.M. when they were allegedly surrounded by four men and physically and verbally assaulted.

Speaking at a forum on human trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, kidnapping and rape survivor Elizabeth Smart offered personal insight into why someone in an ordeal similar to the one she endured would have a hard time running away from their captor.

Joe Francis, founder of the now-bankrupt Girls Gone Wild franchise, was convicted yesterday of falsely imprisoning three women and severely assaulting at least one of them back in 2011.

Three women were rescued Monday afternoon from a home in Cleveland. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight all went missing roughly 10 years ago, when Berry was 16, DeJesus 14 and Knight was 20. All three are alive, talking, and apparently in good health, according to police.

For several years, someone calling himself "Fat Longpig" haunted a variety of online forums, discussing with anyone who shared it his unique interest in "abducting, raping, murdering, and eating children," trading child pornography, and, in at least one case, attempting to arrange a kidnapping.