What the record actually shows

Some cases enter public memory in a shape the facts do not support. A detail gets repeated until it hardens into common knowledge; a moral panic supplies a villain; a sensational headline outlives its own correction.

Kitty Genovese's 1964 murder became shorthand for urban indifference on the strength of a newspaper account of 38 unresponsive witnesses — though the same case file records a neighbour who shouted and drove the attacker off, and another who reached her as she was dying. Three teenagers in West Memphis were convicted amid a Satanic-ritual narrative the physical evidence never bore out. The Dyatlov Pass deaths drew decades of theories before Russian prosecutors settled on an avalanche.

The point of gathering them is not to debunk for its own sake, but to keep the file honest: to record what was established, and to mark where the popular story parted from it.