I wrote the following words three days ago. With twenty-one days left in the year, here’s my list of the top crime stories in the U.S. in 2012. They are in no particular order. Here’s hoping that we have a peaceful ending to the year.

Unfortunately, the year would not end peacefully. Today, 20 year-old Adam Lanza opened fire inside an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut killing 26 people, including 20 children, making it the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, second only to Virginia Tech, which claimed 33 lives. Lanza also killed his mother and then committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 28.

Dressed in full assault gear, James Holmes opens fire in a crowded movie house in Aurora, Colorado last July, killing 12 and wounding dozens. Holmes faces 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and other charges related to the shooting.

Former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky is convicted of molesting 10 boys over 15 years in a scandal that destroys the reputation of legendary coach Joe Paterno, who fails to notify the police when told Sandusky is seen molesting a boy in the campus showers. Sandusky is sentenced to 30-60 years in prison.

George Zimmerman stalks and kills a young unarmed Trayvon Martin in February and then claims “self-defense” invoking Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law.

Seventeen-year-old Austin Sigg is charged with murdering ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway and dismembering her body near Denver, Colorado.

Michael Page opens fire at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in a Milwaukee suburb, killing six people and wounding four others. He then commits suicide.

Pablo Hernandez confesses that he murdered six-year old Etan Patz in May of 1979. Hernandez tells the New York Police Department that he used a can of soda to lure the child inside a bodega, strangled him to death and later disposed of the body in the store’s garbage. The crime mesmerized the country 33 years ago.

Former police officer Drew Peterson is convicted of murdering his third wife Kathleen Savio in March of 2004 in a case that was originally ruled an accidental drowning. Peterson is charged after his fourth wife Stacey Peterson vanishes in October 2007. Savio’s body is exhumed and declared a homicide “staged to look like an accident.”

Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher guns down his girlfriend, and then commits suicide by shooting himself in the head at Arrowhead Stadium in front of Coach Romeo Crennel and General Manager Scott Piloi.

Babysitter John Burbine of Massachusetts is indicted on 100 counts of charges related to the rape and sexual abuse of more than a dozen young children in their homes. Burbine videotaped himself as he raped and sexually abused 13 small children through a child care service operated by his wife.

Serial killer Israel Keyes commits suicide in an Anchorage, Alaska jail after confessing that he murdered eight people across the U.S.––though he’s suspected of killing as many as twelve. He was facing a March trial and federal murder charges in the kidnapping and death of eighteen-year old Samantha Koenig, who was abducted from an Anchorage coffee-stand in February.