The most captivating crime narratives of 2025 delved beyond mere tales of perpetrators and victims, exploring themes of free expression, terrorism, trust in justice, and safety in once-secure places.

The year’s most attention-grabbing crimes exposed significant societal rifts in the United States, yet they kept millions of Americans glued to their news feeds and social media platforms.

From politically charged assassinations to high-stakes trials with relentless true crime coverage, these incidents dominated national discussions over the past year.

Charlie Kirk’s final publication stands as a “manifesto against the machine of modern life,” urging his audience to “pause in the name of God” and uphold the sanctity of the Sabbath. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

SILENCED VOICE: The assassination of Charlie Kirk

During a campus speaking tour aimed at championing free speech and engaging in debates on contentious issues, Turning Point USA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, stopped at Utah Valley University in Orem on September 10.

However, just 20 minutes into his talk, a sniper’s bullet tragically ended his life, striking him in the neck.

“It’s just one of those moments that is so shocking to your system and yet it’s going to change everything and this is going to be a moment that we’re going to think back upon and talk about for years and years to come,” said Joshua Ritter, a Los Angeles defense attorney and Fox News contributor. “How shocking it was that it took place in public, and the video of his assassination lives on the internet forever now, in such stark violence. And then to realize that it was entirely motivated because of what this man stood for and how people disagree with that really brings a level of disturbing awareness of how divided we still are as a country.”

Suspected assassin Tyler Robinson was arrested days later in his hometown in southern Utah, hundreds of miles away.

Kirk made a career out of engaging people who disagreed with him. According to prosecutors, Robinson sent text messages to his lover allegedly admitting he “had enough of his hatred” and left a note declaring, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it.”

IMPORTED HATE: The ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans

An ISIS-inspired attack on New Year’s revelers in New Orleans killed 14 people and underscored the ongoing threat of Islamist extremism.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar is pictured in an undated photograph released by the FBI after he attacked New Orleans’ Bourbon Street with a pickup truck and died in a shootout with responding officers. (FBI)

Authorities said the suspect was motivated by radical propaganda.

Video shows he flew a black ISIS flag from the back of his rented pickup truck as he sped down Bourbon Street, slamming into pedestrians in the early morning hours of Jan. 1 — reviving fears that global terror networks continue to inspire lone actors to carry out violence on American soil.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texan blamed for the attack, died in a shootout with police. Months later, authorities in Iraq revealed they had arrested an ISIS member accused of inciting Jabbar to commit the murders.

COWARD’S WAY OUT: Bryan Kohberger pleads guilty

By pleading guilty, Bryan Kohberger avoided the potential death penalty and a public trial that could have exposed new details about the home invasion murders of four University of Idaho students, three of whom were asleep when he attacked them with a knife on Nov. 13, 2022.

Bryan Kohberger appears at the Ada County Courthouse for his sentencing hearing, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Boise, Idaho, for brutally stabbing four University of Idaho students to death. (AP Photo/Kyle Green, Pool)

The move brought closure for some of the victims’ families, but others were outraged that prosecutors didn’t take him to trial and seek capital punishment.

The deal spared his life but secured the highest possible punishment aside from the death penalty — four consecutive sentences of life without parole, plus another 10 years.

However, he was not required to explain himself under the terms of the deal, leaving questions about a motive unanswered.

“The Bryan Kohberger case stands out because it’s literally the embodiment of every parent’s nightmare,” said Ritter, who is a father himself. “You send your children off to college hoping they’re gonna be safe, and even when you do everything to put them in a safe environment, some absolute maniac can sneak into their home in the middle of the night and kill them in an apparently random attack.”

PART DEUX: Karen Read’s second murder trial

Karen Read’s second murder trial reopened one of the most divisive and closely watched legal battles in recent memory. She had fervent supporters, who believed her defense’s theory that she had been framed, as well as outspoken critics, who noted that no one but her has been accused by any law enforcement agency of killing John O’Keefe.

Karen Read exits Norfolk County Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. Read was found to be not guilty of the murder of her boyfriend, John O’Keefe. (Richard Beetham for Fox News Digital)

“The Karen Read case was about far more than a tragic death outside a Boston-area home,” said Royal Oakes, a Los Angeles-based attorney who played a key role in a judge’s decision to allow cameras in the courtroom during OJ Simpson’s murder trial in the 1990s. “It became a referendum on police credibility, investigative integrity and whether a defendant can get a fair trial when law enforcement itself is accused of circling the wagons.”

With new jurors, renewed scrutiny and sloppy police work, the retrial appeared to put the investigation itself on trial alongside Read.

“The case exploded nationally because it blended true crime with institutional distrust,” Oakes said. “The defense didn’t just argue reasonable doubt — they argued a cover-up. That turns a homicide trial into a broader test of public faith in the justice system.”

Her first trial, which ended with a hung jury, led to disciplinary action against Massachusetts State Police homicide investigators, an independent review of the local police department and the firing of the lead detective.

The second time around, Read was acquitted of all homicide-related charges in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, O’Keefe, and sentenced to a year of probation for drunken driving.

“Karen Read’s trial mattered because it illustrated a growing trend: juries are increasingly skeptical of law enforcement narratives,” Oakes said. “This case will be cited for years as an example of institutional doubt in criminal prosecutions.”

Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Supreme Court during a hearing in the murder case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York on Dec. 8, 2025. (Sarah Yenesel/pool via Reuters)

ONGOING SAGA: Luigi Mangione and Jeffrey Epstein

While Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019 and Luigi Mangione is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, both names continued to dominate headlines in 2025.

Each case fueled broader debates about power, privilege and accountability — for different reasons.

Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking and victimizing hundreds of women and girls for himself and his rich and powerful friends, has only one convicted accomplice, his former lover Ghislaine Maxwell. She is still fighting her conviction from inside a Texas prison camp.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were both indicted on federal sex trafficking charges stemming from Epstein’s years of abuse of underage girls. (Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Mangione, on the other hand, is accused of killing Thompson to send a message about what his supporters see as corruption in the U.S. health insurance industry.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty to a slew of charges in New York, Pennsylvania and at the federal level. None of his cases have gone to trial yet.

EVIL AT THE IVIES: The New England university shootings

A split image shows Claudio Neves-Valente, identified as the Brown University gunman, wearing the same jacket as a man identified earlier as a person of interest in the case. (Providence Police Department)

Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national with a green card, killed two Brown University students and injured nine more during a finals week study session, according to police in Providence, Rhode Island.

Then he drove 50 miles away to the home of a leading nuclear physicist who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and gunned him down inside two days later, federal prosecutors said.

Neves-Valente had briefly attended Brown in the early 2000s and went to the same Portuguese college as Nuno Loureiro before that, but a motive remains unclear. Police found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Dec. 18.

The violence reignited debate over security, surveillance and whether open campuses are prepared for modern threats.