Andrew Murr

Manny Rivas was feeling good as he and his buddy Misha Belyavtsev arrived for work at Loans "R" Us Pawn Shop that Saturday morning. Rivas, 27, had just started business studies at UCLA; the night before, he and his fiancee had spent a cozy evening thumbing through bridal magazines.

The scene was straight out of "Midnight Express." Erik Aude, 21, a budding actor from Los Angeles, strode into the customs line at Islamabad airport on Feb. 15, anxious to board a flight home.

You could always tell it was bonus time at Enron when the shiny new silver Porsches began arriving in the company garage. The $100,000 sports car was the status symbol of choice among the young Masters of the Universe who worked at the global trading company.

Andrea Yates Was The Ultimate Caregiver--Until Depression And The Strains Of Raising Five Children Drove Her To An Unspeakable Crime. Her Descent Into Darkness.

The wait was finally over. Last week Timothy McVeigh at last abandoned his final appeals, dismissed his lawyers and resigned himself to the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind.

In the frantic weeks following the Oklahoma City bombing, federal agents searching for "John Doe 2" fastened onto a reclusive biochemist named Steven Garrett Colbern.

Some remember a deafening roar. Others recall hearing nothing at all. Years later, little Brandon Denny, who barely survived after the bomb blew a large hole in his skull, suddenly turned to his father and asked: "Dad?

Americans can be shrill in their morality and selective about their history. They tend also to be blind to that fact, as I was reminded recently by the trial of Tom Green, a ex-Mormon allegedly married to five women at once.

Kathleen Treanor had been bracing herself for weeks. Six years after Timothy McVeigh's devastating bomb killed her in-laws and 4-year-old daughter, she wanted to watch him draw his last breath.

The video's going to hang us," psychological therapist Connell Watkins told investigators--and in Golden, Colo., last week, it did. Watkins, 54, and associate Julie Ponder, 40, were convicted of reckless child abuse in the suffocation death of 10-year-old Candace Newmaker during a controversial therapy technique called "rebirthing." An adoptee, the girl was being treated for her inability to bond with her adoptive mother, Jeane Newmaker, who was present during the therapy session.

He seemed oddly confident for a convict serving 17 life sentences in the Texas prison system--but then, George Angel Rivas had a plan. "Someday, somehow, by the Grace of our Father, I will see you face to face without these walls," Rivas wrote his father last fall, in a letter made available to NEWSWEEK.

Following a jailbreak in Texas, prison officials usually reassure the public with the Rule of Three: almost all escapees are caught within three days and three miles.

After all the years they echo still, the boom of dynamite and the rain of glass through the autumn leaves--just as some of the leading citizens of Birmingham, Ala., feared when, in the aftermath of the calamitous summer of 1963, they seriously debated changing the name of their city.

Fast-talking, streetwise and cool as ice, Andrew Chambers was utterly convincing when he played the role of a big-time drug dealer. For 16 years, working undercover for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Chambers would fly into a strange city, make contact with local druggies and pass himself off as a gangsta Crip from L.A., a coke dealer from St.

Lori Gonzalez was in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the wheel of her blue Chevrolet Caprice, the 20-year-old college student was leaving the drive-through line at a Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits restaurant in south Los Angeles last week with a young male friend.

Daniel Mauser, Isaiah Shoels and Craig Scott were studying in the Columbine High School library last April 20 when the shooting began. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris burst through the doors and opened fire.

When the Mars Polar Lander disappeared without a trace last Dec. 3, NASA investigators were baffled. Now, four months later, they think they know what happened.

When convicted mobster Sammy (The Bull) Gravano emerged from federal prison five years ago, he was a new man. Placed in the federal witness-protection program, the mob stool pigeon--whose courtroom testimony helped put New York Mafia boss John Gotti away for life--was given a different identity, plastic surgery to alter his face and a fresh start thousands of miles away from his former New York stomping ground.

Kevin Patterson was an unemployed, 42-year-old high-school dropout who lived with his mother. His 48-year-old friend, Charles Kiles, worked odd jobs and liked to take road trips to Nevada, where guns and ammo were easy to come by.

When the folks at the Mars Society asked James Cameron to speak at their annual convention this year, they probably expected him to be polite. Instead, the "Titanic" director stood before them and asked, "Why the hell do you wackos want to go to Mars?" He was just kidding: in truth, Cameron is as evangelical as anyone about Mars, and he figures politicians won't lead the call for funding. "We don't have the same conditions as when John Kennedy declared a race to the moon," he told NEWSWEEK....

When Tucson businessman Paul Moses needed a place to park his retirement money, the issue was what you'd expect it to be--trust. And who better to put your faith in than your own church?

For 30 years, Smithsonian Institution archeologist Dennis Stanford searched in vain for the origins of the first Americans. Every textbook described how mammoth-hunters from Siberia had migrated across the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago and had slowly wandered south and east until they filled the New World.

It wasn't a particularly surprising move for the "People's Republic of Santa Monica." The ultraliberal Los Angeles community recently became the first American city to outlaw the fees that banks charge everyone but their own customers for using ATMs.

The July 1996 raid on a gang-infested apartment building looked like just another skirmish between police and L.A.'s many street gangs. The address was Shatto Place, in a neighborhood of Latino immigrants west of downtown.

Down on his luck and mad at the world, Buford Oneal Furrow Jr., 37, decided to drive to Los Angeles and go hunting for Jews. The way police tell it, on Aug. 7 he bought a used Chevrolet van in Tacoma, Wash., and stocked it with five assault rifles, two pistols, 6,000 rounds of ammunition and a flak jacket.

As church bells pealed and thousands cheered, the backhoe scooped out a dollop of dirt and gravel that had been packed against Maine's Edwards Dam. And suddenly the Kennebec River did something it hasn't done since Andrew Jackson sat in the White House: first in a trickle and then in a torrent, it flowed freely to the Atlantic, through a 60-foot hole that workers had earlier punched underneath the dirt-and-gravel bandage.

At least you can stop rubbing the back of your neck for a while. No doubt it was getting sore after weeks of watching the shares of many Internet stocks roar through the clouds in their first day of trading.

If nothing else, the continuing effort to trace the guns used in the Columbine High School massacre shows how gun control works in the real world--which is to say, it doesn't.

For Hawaiians, it may be the biggest story since statehood, or even Pearl Harbor. After all, it has sex, suicide--and money. Lots and lots of money. It's the scandal over the $10 billion Bishop Estate, the nation's largest charitable trust.

As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple was still healing; deep abscesses in his gums shot bolts of pain into his skull.