Murder | featured news

A university instructor on Friday confessed to killing two women in an apartment where a message demanding freedom for jailed members of the Pussy Riot band was scrawled on the wall, news reports said. The killing in the city of Kazan of a 76-year-old woman and her 38-year-old daughter attracted nationwide attention because of the Pussy Riot connection. Three members of the feminist punk band were sentenced two weeks ago to two years in prison in a politically charged case.

New search warrants unsealed in the murder case of a Marine wife reveal that, according to detectives, Brittany Killgore was an unwilling participant in sadomasochistic sexual activity involving the three suspects accused of killing her.

Prosecutors have opened a murder inquiry into the 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a judicial official tells the Sipa news agency.

A man charged with shooting his wife of 45 years in a hospital intensive care unit in what may have been a mercy killing was charged Wednesday with aggravated murder, and his attorney said the man always acted out of love.

A coroner’s office scheduled an autopsy Monday for a northeast Ohio woman who was shot in her bed at a hospital’s intensive care unit, allegedly by her husband in what police believe was a mercy killing. Capt. Dan Zampelli said an initial court appearance for John Wise likely wouldn’t come until at least Tuesday or even Wednesday. He said police needed results of the autopsy to decide what charge would be appropriate.

China will open the murder trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of ousted Communist Party Politburo member Bo Xilai, on August 9, two sources said on Friday, a case at the center of a scandal that has rocked the government and could bring Gu the death penalty.

A man convicted of stealing a gun used in a murder was given 125 years in prison — about a century longer than the actual killers received after taking plea deals. Christopher G. Nichols, 27, was sentenced Tuesday for gun theft, trafficking in stolen property, being a felon in possession of firearms and other crimes, The Spokesman-Review reported ( http://is.gd/BOKh1e ) .

Prosecutors are expected to formally charge James Eagan Holmes with multiple counts of first degree murder on Monday in the shooting deaths of 12 people at a movie theater.

A man who had recently separated from his wife shot his two children, killing his 7-year-old daughter, before committing suicide, prosecutors said....

Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced political leader Bo Xilai, has been indicted for intentional homicide, in a crime that has triggered China’s most serious political crisis in decades. The official Xinhua news agency on Thursday evening published a brief dispatch announcing that Ms. Gu and an aide employed by the family had been formally charged in the poisoning death of the Briton, Neil Heywood, 41, whose body was found last November in a hotel in Chongqing, the sprawling municipality Mr. Bo led until his downfall.