A good month for murder: the inside story of a homicide squad
(Media Player)

Twelve homicides, three police-involved shootings, and the furious hunt for an especially brutal killer--February 2013 was a good month for murder in suburban Washington, DC. After gaining unparalleled access to the homicide unit in Prince George's County, Maryland, which borders the nation's capital, Del Quentin Wilber begins shadowing the talented, often quirky detectives who get the call when a body falls. He rides with a hard-charging investigator who pops diet pills while devouring cheeseburgers; he stands over a corpse with a hulking detective who moonlights as a security guard at a cemetery; he spends hours in the interrogation room, aka the box, with a hypercompetitive, chain-smoking vegan. After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting or stabbing after another. The body of a young man carrying nothing but a bus ticket in his pockets is found in a deserted park; an ailing seventy-one-year-old woman is killed in her home during an apparent robbery; a high school freshman is gunned down by thieves hoping to snatch the shoes he'd just purchased for his girlfriend. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold "red ball," a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honors student named Amber Stanley, whose killer kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed.