Vesna Vulovic: The Woman Who Fell From The Sky

Nearly five decades ago, Vesna Vulovic fell thousands of feet after the plane she was on exploded midair. Miraculously, Ms. Vulovic, a flight attendant from the former Yugoslavia, survived. When I met her at her home in Belgrade in 2008, she told me she had no memory of the fall. But she vividly recalled its aftermath, when she was celebrated as a national hero. She earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest recorded fall without a parachute. She died in 2016 at age 66.

​Ratko Mladic: The Butcher of Bosnia

When I arrived in the poor, remote Bosnian village where Ratko Mladic grew up, it was covered with blacks crows. It was somehow fitting for the hometown of the Bosnian-Serb general held responsible for the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. In 2010, I and another Times reporter, Doreen Carvajal, investigated his whereabouts. He was captured one year later, in a Serbian farming village. His conviction in November 2017 for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes marked the end of one of Europe’s bloodiest chapters since the end of World War II.

Seemona Sumasar: A Revenge Plot So Intricate, The Prosecutors Were Pawns

In 2011, when I was a Metropolitan reporter in New York, I stumbled on a crime story right out of an episode of C.S.I. The case focused on Seemona Sumasar, a petite former Wall Street analyst who had been raped by a former boyfriend. When she refused to drop the charges against him, he framed her for a series of brazen armed robberies that never took place. As a result, the rapist and his victim switched places: Ms. Sumasar spent seven months in prison. “In the collective memory, no one has ever seen anything like this before,” the Queens district attorney told me at the time.

Pashe Keqi: A Sworn Virgin of Albania

For centuries in a rural northern part of Albania, people lived under an ancient warrior code called the Kanun, dating to Ottoman times. Under the Kanun, murder must be avenged with blood. Consequently, thousands of men were killed in so-called blood feuds, leaving women alone in a culture where men ruled. Some women adapted by taking an oath of virginity and thereby becoming the men of the house. In 2008, I set out for the mountains of Albania and met Pashe Keqi, 78, a sworn virgin, to learn what had motivated her to swap genders. The resulting story is not one I will soon forget.