Stories from Canóvanas, Porto Rico, Estados Unidos

Chupacabra: how Puerto Rico’s monster was born and transformed

In 1995, animal deaths, a witness in Canóvanas and a mayor’s search launched a legend across the Americas. Necropsies and DNA tests explained specific cases, but the original bipedal creature was never verified.

115 km · Guánica

The Guánica Gargoyle: the hunt, the composite photo and the unidentified animal

In 2010, accounts of enormous wings and dead animals brought a search party to an old sugar mill in Guánica, Puerto Rico. The hunt produced testimony, stones thrown by pranksters and a photograph later called a composite. What can the sources actually establish?

1,352 km · Jonestown

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple: the promise, Jonestown, and 918 deaths

From an interracial Indianapolis church to a Guyanese agricultural settlement, this dossier traces Peoples Temple’s social appeal, relatives’ warnings, Leo Ryan’s visit, and deaths in Jonestown, Port Kaituma, and Georgetown. Records and testimony show why calling all of it “mass suicide” erases children, coercion, and dissent.

1,683 km · Miami

Roberto Wagner Fernandes: three women, two decades, and an identification after death

Florida investigators linked Roberto Wagner Fernandes by DNA to the killings of Kimberly Dietz-Livesey, Sia Demas and Jessica Good in 2000-2001. The trail runs through the Brazilian trial over Danyelle Bouças Fernandes’s death, an exhumation, and suspicions about other crimes that remain unproven.