Having a house guest can be stressful, especially when said guest is one resident's ex-boyfriend.

WKRN-TV in Nashville reports that police arrested 37-year-old Henry Baxter for the murder of his adoptive father last Friday, but that's not the weird part.

Earlier this year, I wrote to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution in the near future. I asked them about their personal history, their lives in prison, and their thoughts on America and its justice system. Today we hear from Abdul Awkal—a man who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio last week, before receiving a last-minute reprieve.

Remember the hoopla that arose when it was revealed that Casey Anthony allegedly Googled the term "chloroform" either once or eighty-four times?

Pedro Hernandez, the man who confessed to the 1979 murder of Etan Patz, may have taken credit for the crime long before now.

It looks like there is yet another lead in the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz: New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced today that NYPD detectives had obtained an incriminating statement from a new suspect.

Sometimes when you wake up in your nice comfortable (or at least reasonably comfortable) bed in your nice (or at least moderately serviceable) house or apartment here in the United States of America, it is useful to take a moment to reflect upon how fortunate we all are, by comparing ourselves to those in countries that may be our geographic neighbors, but whose state of life is quite different. One good way to do this is simply by taking in this, the very first paragraph from a Washington Post story by William Booth today:

Oh tra la, fiddle dee dee, dance 'round all of the Maypoles, for Verlyn Klinkenborg hath taken pen in hand to scratch out yet another dispatch from the mild climes of rural America, which is mightily preferable to the indignities of the city, where all of Verlyn Klinkenborg's readers live. This week's fascinating topic: lawns. We got our hands on the rough draft, before the cityfied editors ruined Verlyn's vision.

Leslie Sandoval doesn't remember much about the night his friend Seth Foster ended up dead and dismembered. He does, however, remember the location of Foster's severed foot, which authorities have not been able to locate — and he might use that as a bargaining chip.

On Friday, Jennifer Hudson's ex-brother-in-law William Balfour was convicted in the 2008 murders of Hudson's mother, brother, and seven-year-old nephew. It was the culmination of an emotional trial, during which Balfour was shown to be a jealous husband, acting out against Jennifer's sister Julia Hudson, his then wife.

It's a brutal and unsettling story, made all the more so by the fact that the perpetrator was a 22-year-old man with no connection to the victims. Bryan Clay was arrested Friday for the April 15 rapes and bludgeoning murders of a Ignacia Martinez and her 10-year-old daughter Karla.

Last year, 24 year-old Michael Ikoli was shot and killed in the Bronx. Wednesday night, his friends held a candlelight vigil in remembrance of him outside his old apartment. At that vigil, Jonathan Lewis, 22, was shot and killed.

Grammy and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson was called as the first witness today in the murder trial of William Balfour, the man accused of shooting her mother Darnell Donerson (57), brother Jason Hudson (29), and nephew Julian King (7) in 2008.

"He was trying to kill me," 52-year-old Inwood resident Marta Hevia said of her cat Aqua after the 2-year-old feline went so crazy attacking her that she called the cops. For some reason, The New York Daily News was on hand to photograph the harrowing event. Aqua shattered a window pane while trying to evade arrest.

Weird, right? He looks so normal-eyed and harmless! But 65-year-old trucker Robert Ben Rhoades, currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a 14-year-old Illinois girl, is believed to have killed "an average of three women a month by the early 1990s."

Last night, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would investigate the death of Trayvon Martin, after watching outrage build as Florida authorities appeared to do nothing for 23 days. The 17-year-old Martin was walking through a residential development in Sanford, Fla. and was chased down and shot by a 28-year-old man named George Zimmerman. If this sounds painfully familiar, it should.

If you want to kill someone and get away with it, do it before the NBA All-Star game.

Within an hour of the announcement of relentlessly partisan internet provocateur Andrew Breitbart's death, his most vociferous fans memorialized him in the most appropriate way possible: They launched conspiracy theories about his assassination on Twitter.

As part of our ongoing project to catalog the 2012 presidential election from a metal point of view, we've been soliciting presidential endorsements from noteworthy American metal musicians. Today: GWAR.

As the murder trial of Decatur, Georgia's Hemy Neuman wraps up, we discover that Neuman admits he shot Russell Sneiderman outside the man's 2-year-old son's preschool. His lawyers say he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity because "he was visited by a demon who sounded like Barry White and an angel who looked like Olivia Newton-John before he shot and killed a toddler's father outside a preschool." Prosecutors says Hemy's motive was jealousy. [AP]