On a Thursday in March,2019, University of South Carolina student, Sami Josephson went out to the Five Points district to celebrate her acceptance to Drexel’s Graduate School of Law. She called an Uber to take her back to the dorms, but the Uber never dropped Sami off on the campus. Sami vanished, her body turning up sixty miles away in the underbrush of a turkey hunting farm. As the case unfolded, it became clear that someone had posed as an Uber driver, and Sami had gotten into a car with an illicit killer. While her murder was tragic, her legacy lives on through new national rideshare policies and procedures under “Sami’s Law.”

University of Utah track and field star Lauren McCluskey had everything going for her. Until she met Melvin Shawn Rowland at a club, and started dating him. Melvin told Lauren he was just 28, and a college student like her. But he was really 37, had a child – and had done ten years in prison for a sex crime. When Lauren broke up with Melvin, she started receiving bizarre and then concerning texts, and then the sextortion started. Lauren went to the campus police for help repeatedly, but her cries for help went unheard. On October 22nd, as she was on the phone with her parents, Melvin grabbed Lauren outside her dorm and shot her 7 times. The school had ignored all the warning signs – and Lauren McCluskey paid the ultimate price.

In 1966, Riverside City College student Cheri Jo Bates was viciously stabbed 42 times and nearly decapitated in an alley after leaving the school library. Police discovered that her car had been deliberately disabled, and concluded that her attacker had deliberately sabotaged it in order to get to her. The case was thoroughly investigated, but had started to cool when an anonymous confession letter arrived – claiming responsibility for the murder in great detail. Additional letters added to the mystery. And then, another killer dominated the headlines in California – a killer who also sent anonymous letters that bore marked similarities to the confession letter. Was Cheri Jo Bates the first victim of the serial killer who terrorized California in the late 1960s, who has never been identified – the Zodiac?