. They are angry as they want just to shoot.

They get his rifle in the bed and start shooting at us when we are under the bed. He put his rifle and started shooting to me and Nour.

Maybe a lot of this is imagination. None of this was near as bad as it seemed. I'm talking about what actually happened to the civilians. They did not get the pictures. Those pictures today are still not been seen. Where are they? Frankly, I believe I gave the Marines the benefit of the doubt, every opportunity that I could. Yeah. I mean, did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. The first investigation into what happened on November 19th, 2005 in Haditha, the one conducted by Colonel Watt, was brief and friendly and not too detailed. But for all of Watt's inclination to give the Marines the benefit of the doubt, he did recommend another investigation, a criminal one. And This investigation was conducted by investigators who were not so friendly, not so willing to give the Marines the benefit of the doubt. This investigation was conducted by NCIS, the investigative arm of the Navy. The NCIS investigation was massive. It went on for months. It involved dozens of agents working in Iraq and the United States.

We very much had a responsibility to the Iraqi people and to the US military We talked to one of those investigators.

Her name is Kelly Garbo.

Everybody involved deserved to understand exactly what happened. Should the military attorneys find that prosecution instructions were warranted, we wanted to be able to have provided all of the possible information so that the families of the victims could feel like we had served justice.

Ncis agents went inside the houses, the killing sites, and took measurements of the rooms. They pried bullets out of walls. They picked shell casings off the ground. They talked to hundreds of people. It was one of the largest war crimes investigations since the one into the killings at Myli during the Vietnam War. The full records of the NCIS investigation, as far as I can tell, had never been released to the public until we received them by suing the US military. That's how I found out that perhaps these investigators's greatest accomplishment was what they were able to find out from the shooters themselves. There were six people involved in the shootings that day, at the white car and inside the houses. There was the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Woodrich, who the Marines we spoke with described as quiet and reserved. He was quiet, but a good dude. There was Corporal Sonic Dela Cruz. That dude loved it. He fucking loved the Marine Corps. And four other men, Corporal Dr. Salinas. He was experienced and definitely would probably have not taken any shit over there. Private First Class Humberto Mendoza. Never gave us a hard time. He did what I was told.

Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt.

He was just a cool guy. He Who's that cool guy that you wanted to hang out with?

And Lance Corporal Steven Tatum, a lanky Marine from Oklahoma who no one could remember much about. Ncis investigators interviewed most of these men for hours, over months, often in multiple sessions. They would come back to the shooters, tell them what they'd heard from other people, challenge their accounts. And the statements that NCIS got out of all this told a very different story than the one the Marines had told to Colonel Watt. This is Season 3 of In the Dark, an investigative podcast from The New Yorker. This season is about the killing of 24 men, women, and children by US Marines in Haditha, Iraq. It's a story not just about the killings themselves, but also about the failure of the US military to bring the men responsible for them to justice. This is episode 6, The Full Picture. The accounts the Marines gave over hours and hours of interrogation by NCIS were full of revelations. Like take what one Marine, Sonic Delacruz, admitted to NCIS about what happened to the very first people shot by Marines that day, the five men who'd been traveling in a white car on the same road as the Marines convoy.

Dela Cruz told NCIS that he shot at the men. He said he only did it because his squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wutterrich, shot them first. As for why the men were shot, Dela Cruz had told the first investigative team, the one led by Colonel Watt, that the men were shot because they were running away, the thing that might be suspicious. But Dela Cruz told NCIS that was actually a lie. The men were just standing there, some of them with their hands up. He said he'd lied about it after Wutterrich told him to. After the shooting by the white car, the Marines moved to the houses, and the NCIS statements from the shooter investigators about what happened inside those houses were full of startling admissions. How when the Marines arrived at 11-year-old Safa's house, they apparently rang the doorbell, and then Safa's dad, Eunice, came to the door to answer it. One of the Marines, Humberto Mendoza, told NCIS that he then shot Eunice right in the doorway, shot a man for answering his own door. And Mendoza also told investigators that he'd shot another man in the house nearby because he thought he was reaching for something, even though he never saw a gun.

I read statement after statement from Marines describing firing quickly inside the houses without identifying who they were shooting at, even though the rules of engagement said you had to identify people, had to determine that they were the enemy before shooting at them. One Marine, Hector Salinas, describes shooting a figure in the hallway of 6-year-old Abdul Rahman's house. That figure turned out to be a grandmother. Another Marine, Lance Corporal Justin Sheret, told investigators that he stood near the doorway of Abdul Rahman's living room and fired blindly until he ran out of ammo. All right, it is Friday, and I am on page 10,000-One day in my apartment, I was sitting down for my daily reading of the investigative file, making my way through the thousands of pages we'd received. So I'm diving in. It's 9:44 in the morning. And I've made a lot of coffee to get me through this because this is a particularly dense batch of documents I know I have in front of me today. And then I came across something buried in all these documents. A statement. Actually, a series of statements that I'd never seen before. This is a Tatum thing.

These statements were from a Marine who had seemed to be relatively unremarkable. When we talked to other Marines, almost no one could remember anything about him. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum. Tatum had flown under the radar during the initial investigation by Colonel Watt. His statement to Watt was vague and unmemorable. He'd admitted to being in the first two houses that morning, the house where 6-year-old Abdul Rahman lived with his family, and the next house where 11-year-old Saafa lived with her family. But Tatum didn't mention shooting at anyone inside the houses. It was all incredibly vague. But right away, when Tateum started talking to NCIS investigators, he admitted that he'd been one of the shooters. He said he'd actually shot at people in both those houses. He'd shot in the living room of Abdul Rahman's house and inside Saafa's house, in the bedroom, where Saafa and her mother and siblings and aunt were, many of them lying close to each other on a bed. But that wasn't all Tateum told NCIS. Tateam talked to NCIS several times, and at first, he claimed he didn't know who he was firing at. He said it was dusty and smoky.

They could only make out shapes. He was just shooting at targets. Targets he assumed to be hostile. Then one day, NCIS investigators were interrogating Tatum again, and this time, he broke down. He started crying. In this interview and in other interviews to NCIS, Tatum revealed that he knew that he was shooting women and children. He was looking right at them, but he shot them anyway. Tatum told investigators that in the first house, Abdul Rahman's house, inside the living room, he personally had shot four people, all on the right side of the room. He said he knew he was shooting women and children in that room. He said he hadn't seen any weapons on any of them, and that none of the people were even standing up when he shot them. Tatum told NCIS that he only stopped shooting after everything in the room stopped moving. He recalled how later that day, he saw two children being led out of the house to get medical treatment. Those two children, Abdul Rahman and his sister Iman. Tatum said he wondered, How did they survive? In the next house, Safa's house, the house where Safa hid in the back bedroom while her entire family was killed around her.

Tateum's statements were even more detailed. Tateum said he saw his squad leader, Sergeant Woodrich, firing in that back bedroom, and he followed Woodrich inside. He said he recognized that women and children were together in that back bedroom before he shot them. He said some of the children were kneeling. I don't remember the exact number, Tatum said, but only that it was a lot. And then Tatum described one child in particular. He said he wasn't sure if this child was a boy or a girl, but that they were wearing a white shirt and had short hair and were standing on the bed. Tatum told investigators that he looked at the child and then fired. He said, Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him. Knowing it was a kid, I still shot him. Tatum had admitted to knowingly shooting a child, actually several children, in two houses. It was about as clear cut of an admission of guilt that you could get. At the risk of stating the obvious, it's illegal to knowingly kill children who don't pose a threat. It's a war crime. And yet Tateum had never been convicted of a crime, never served a day in prison.

Tateum appeared to place at least some of the blame on his squad leader, Sergeant Wutterrich. Tateum said the only reason he shot the children in the bedroom was because he saw Wutterrich shooting at them first. As for what happened in the house nearby, Abdul Rahman's house, Tateum told investigators that he shot the women and children in that house because, quote, women and kids can hurt you, too. Tatum told investigators, I regret that innocent children were killed that day, but I also know I did what I had to do.

These statements by Tatum ended up being used by military prosecutors to file charges against him. After the charges were filed, Tatum's defense was that he actually hadn't made any of those statements about knowingly killing women and children. The implication being that the statements had been fabricated by NCIS. The investigators hadn't recorded audio of the interviews with Tatum or with any of the Marines, but they had taken detailed notes, notes from all the interviews they'd had with Tatum where he'd admitted to knowing who he was shooting. I have those notes. And they match the typed-up statements. These notes and statements were written by multiple investigators over the course of several interviews, conducted weeks apart. As for Sergeant Wutterrich, the squad leader, the one who Tatum said had shot first in Abdul Rahman's living room and in the back bedroom of Safa's house, and who Delacruse said shot first at the people by the white car. Wutterrich never talked to NCIS. He refused to. Wutterrich had admitted to the first investigator, Colonel Watt, that he shot at people by the white car. But a statement to Watt about what happened inside the houses was vague. He would later forcefully deny that he ever fired his weapon inside either of those houses.

I wanted to talk to all six of the men who were involved in the killings that day. Hi, I'm trying to reach Mr. Mendoza. My name is Madelyne. I called. I sent letters. I want to get the story right. I got no response. Hi. I went to Dela Cruz's house in Texas. We were stopping by to talk to Mr. Dela Cruz. He wasn't home. He was not in town, weren't he? Oh, okay. I knocked on Salina's door, also in Texas, with our producer, Natalie. He was not happy to see us. He declined to talk.

Maybe we can leave our contact info, at Absolutely not.

We later sent Salina's a letter with our findings about what he did that day, some of which were pulled from his own statements to investigators. Salina's responded in a brief email, calling it all false. I tried to go to Mendoza to his house and to Wutterrich's. Both of them, it turns out, live in the same city in California in separate gated communities. There's a lot of signs, private property, no trespassing, violators will be prosecuted. It wasn't possible to get inside. Shit. Well, Well, there goes our plan to door knock. And we tried to talk to Steven Tatum, the Marine who NCIS said admitted to knowingly killing women and children in two houses. Our reporter, Parker, and our producer, Natalie, went to try to find him. Well, we're at the 711 outside of Oklahoma City.

And we're about to drive to Steven Tatum's house.

They drove into the subdivision in Oklahoma City, where Tatum lives, out in the flat, windy plains. It was November. The trees were bare, the grass was dead. They passed one red brick house after another.

We need to get a handle on some house numbers.

Until they found his. Oh, I think that's his house right there. Yeah, are you ready? Mm-hmm. Tatum opened the door. He was tall and clean-shaven, with the same side parted hair we'd seen in photos of him back in Iraq. His hair was now graying. He was wearing a blue hoodie and jeans.

Hey, hello. Hello. My name's Parker. This is Natalie. We're radio reporters. We're working on a project about the Iraq war, and we're researching the day in Haditha when then Corporal Tarazis was killed. It sounds like it was quite an intense day. I have no comment. We just wanted to come- If you have any questions, you need to talk to my lawyer. How would we get in touch with- Zimmerman and Zimmerman. They're out of Houston. We've read some of your statements to investigators, and it sounds like you really regret the way things turned out that day.

Who wouldn't?

But like I said, I have no comment. You can talk to my lawyer. You can give him the questions, and he'll decide whether I answer them or not. You said you do regret what happened that day. What about that day? Again, you I can contact my lawyer, and he will forward the questions on to me, and I'll decide what I want to answer. Okay. There's just one thing we need to make sure we ask you while we're here. I've already told you everything you're going to get. Which is that we've read your statements to investigators where you said that you saw women and children in those rooms, and you shot them anyway?

Tatum went inside. The interview was over. A couple of Two weeks later, I called the law firm that represented Tatum to try to see if Tatum would reconsider our interview request. I ended up talking to one of Tatum's lawyers, a woman named Terry Zimmerman. I explained that I wanted to talk to Tatum. I said I wondered what his life was like now. She told me that she thought my questions were valuable, but that she thought it probably wouldn't be a good idea for Tatum to talk to us. She said, There's no statute of limitations for murder. So as a lawyer, I'm hesitant to advise a client to make any statements about a case when his case isn't resolved. Zimmerman said she'd check in with Tatum and get back to me. We spoke a few weeks later, and she told me she had a statement for me from Tatum.

So he's authorized me to tell you that he's doing really really well today. He's grown up a lot, and he authorized me to tell you that he feels terrible about the loss of life. I mean, obviously, nobody wants to be responsible for killing another human being. But he was just doing his job the way he was trained to do. And as his lawyers, we've analyzed the facts and the law that applied at the time, and we don't feel like he violated any rule, any authority or law in any way. He never intended to break the law. He never intended to do anything wrong. We, as his lawyers, don't think he did anything wrong.

Got it. One of the statements that really does stand out to me is something that Tatum told investigators that in one of the houses, he shot at a child knowing it was a child. I just wonder how you can reconcile that statement with the idea that he didn't do anything wrong.

That's a totally fair question. I'll have to go through my file and find the statement that you're talking about.

I told Zimmerman I could send her a copy of Tateum's statements.

Yeah, if you'll email that to me, I will take a look at it.

Sounds good.

Okay, thank Thank you.

Yeah, take care. Bye. Bye. I emailed her Tatum's statements. A few weeks later, she emailed me back. She said she was going to stick with what she told me on the phone. She wrote, Lance Corporal Tatum was doing what he was trained to do on the orders of people senior to him and was just as upset to learn of a loss of life as anyone else. He obviously wishes that had not happened, but he never meant to, nor, in my opinion, did he break the law. As I do with all of my clients, I have advised him not not to make any statements to anyone about this situation, but he thinks about this situation every day. He's done his best to get his education and a job and to be successful in life. We'll be back after the break. Hey, Hey, it's Madelyne. If you're a fan of In the Dark, and you love long-form storytelling, and you've listened to all the serialized investigative podcasts, and you've already watched Everything Good on Netflix, there is a wealth of stories you're going to love waiting for you at The New Yorker. This story, published just this year by Patrick Radden Keef, about a teen who got mixed up in the London underworld and then mysteriously fell into the Thames.

In the four years since Zack's death, the family has had to confront the extent to which the boy they thought they knew had been living a double existence. None of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zack might be moving about London, pretending to be someone else altogether. This season of In the Dark took us four years to report. You're hearing it now because The New Yorker believes in what we do. So go to newyorker. Com/dark and become a subscriber today. That's newyorker. Com/dark. By this point, there was so much that I'd learned about what had happened that day in Haditha, but there was still something missing. Those pictures today has still not been seen. People are proud of that. Where are they? The pictures. The photos of the bodies taken by Marines just hours after the killings. The photos that the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Michael Hagey, had bragged about keeping secret. The photos that we'd sued the US military to get with the help of the survivors, the two colleagues, who went house to house collecting signatures from family members of the dead, saying they wanted us to have these images. Photos that the public has never seen.

These photos could show us what statements and memories could not. They could take us to the killing sites to see these sites as they looked that day to show us the bodies of the dead. I'd wanted these photos for one reason. They were evidence that could help me better understand what really happened that day. That's why all the family members had signed those forms, saying they wanted us to have them. And then one day.

Holy shit. I am vibrating right now. I just woke up to an email that says, well, it Actually, it says something really boring, but I know how to decipher it. It says, NCIS, Freedom of Information Act Request, Release of Information-Photographs. Wow. Okay, I am not going to tell Madelyne. Hello. Hello. What's up? I... We have the photos. We have all the photos.

Oh my gosh. Okay. This is a very big deal. Okay, let me open this. All right, I'm opening. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. After four years of foya requests and lawsuits and help from the survivors, the military had finally agreed to turn over the photos to us. My God, there's so many photos. There were more than 100 photos. They included many taken by Marines on the day of the killings, and they included photos taken months later by the criminal investigators from NCIS. The photos go through the entire chronology of the killings. So this is all photos of the people from the car?

Yeah.

There are images of every single person the Marines killed that day. I'm going to open the next file. In the photos, you can see the numbers that the Marines scrawled on the bodies of the dead with a red Sharpie. I'm looking at a photo of someone who looks like they have maybe a 20 drawn on their head. It's a little unclear. There are wide shots of rooms, bullet holes, and blood covering the walls. Maybe shrapnel or bullet holes, shattered window, bullet hole in the window. And there are close-ups of faces.

These are horrible.

Yeah, I see why you wouldn't want these photos released to the public. We kept going through them, one horrible photo after another. Oh, there's one photo. It's so devastating. There's a mom on her back, lying dead on the bed, and then all of her dead children around her. And there's a little boy who's curled up next to his mom. You can see how he's like, has his arm on his mom's stomach.

Yeah, and he's just burying into the blanket. Yeah.

It was terrible. Yeah. Now that we had the photos, we needed to make sense of them to see what exactly these photos could tell us. I needed to look at these photos with someone who knows what to look for. So we got in touch with a forensics expert named Kevin Parmily. Do you go by Mr. Parmily or Kevin, or how shall I address you?

If it's informal, we could just do Kevin. That's fine.

Okay. All right. Well, I'm Madelyne Baron. It's great to meet you. Parmily is a former detective with more than 20 years experience in law enforcement. His specialties include forensic reconstruction. He helped create national standards for how to investigate crime scenes. When I first called up Parmily to ask if he'd be willing to review the materials I had, he agreed to take a look. But he cautioned me not to expect him to get too worked up over the photos. He said he'd spent his career looking at photos that most people would consider terribly gruesome. Photos like that, he said, can look really bad, but not actually prove anything. He added that his brother was a Marine who'd fought in Iraq. He said he knew that in war zones, decisions about what to do can get really complicated.

Over there, it's a different environment and your threats can come from anywhere. It's a much more hostile environment because it's a war zone. I mean, you can't let your guard down at all.

With all those caveats out of the way, we sent Parmily what we had. He emailed back saying he'd stayed up until 2:00 in the morning, the first night he got the materials, and he continued meticulously reviewing everything we'd sent. A few weeks later, I gave him a call. Overall, how valuable would you say these photos are?

Oh, exceptionally valuable. They are very powerful. These photos are beautiful.

It might sound like an odd thing to say. These photos are beautiful. But Parmely is a forensics expert. He was looking at these photos in a very particular way to see what they could tell us. It turned out they could tell us a lot.

Especially with the bullet defects and the blood and the positioning of the bodies, that actually lends a lot of information towards towards reconstructing the sequence of events. So this is how we piece it all together.

Let's start with the first people the Marines killed that day, five men who were killed after getting out of a white car near the site of the IED explosion. Some of the Marines had claimed those men were running when they were shot. But then one of those Marines changed the story. Sonic Dela Cruz told NCIS that actually, the men were just standing by the car, some of them with their hands up when they were killed. The photos clearly showed that the men were right next to the car, not where you'd expect to see them if they'd been running away. And there was something else that was a little less obvious, something that Parmely noticed that indicated that maybe what happened to these men was even more chilling than what Dela Cruz had said. It was the way the body of one of the men was positioned. It looked like his legs were tucked underneath him. He was lying on his back.

So he has his knees up against that mound. He's the one that have his legs underneath him.

It made Parmily wonder something about what the man was doing when he was killed. Given the man's position on the ground, Parmily ventured a guess.

He could have been kneeling.

Kneeling kneeling. Parmily was careful to say that he couldn't say that for sure. It was just a possibility that the way this man's body was, a logical explanation for how it got that way, was that he'd been kneeling when he was shot. This possibility that some of the men were kneeling was actually corroborated by the statements of two soldiers from the Iraqi army who were in the convoy with the Marines that day. They have their statements to NCIS, and they both said that the men were kneeling. One of them even said the men had their hands on top of their heads when they were shot. So the truth of what happened to the men by the white car was now becoming clear. They almost certainly were not running. At least some of the men may have even been kneeling. We moved on to the next set of photos. These were taken inside 6-year-old Abdul Rahman's house, the first house that Marines entered that morning. Tatum had admitted to NCIS that he'd shot people inside the living room of this house. According to NCIS records, Tatum said that he shot four people, all on the right side of the room, and that he knew that the people he shot included women and children, and that the people hadn't even been standing when he shot them.

Tatum didn't provide many details beyond that. The only person we talked to who'd seen what happened inside this room was Abdul Rahman, and he really couldn't remember much. It was hard for me to picture this scene. I had the memories of a man who was just six years old when the killings happened, and the statements of Marines under investigation for murder. All I knew for sure was that four people had been killed in that room. Three adults, Abdul Rahman's mother, his uncle, and his grandfather. And one child, Abdul Rahman's four-year-old brother, Abdallah. The photos show that the grandfather's body was very badly damaged, and the uncle had been shot in the head. But it was what the photos showed about what happened to Abdul Rahman's mom, Asma, and her four-year-old son, Abdallah, that really stood out to Parmely.

This one broke everything open.

The first photo of the living room that we looked at was a wide shot. You can see white walls, a patterned red rug on the floor, and pillows scattered around. There's a couch along the back wall and what looks like a space heater, a typical living room in a rock.

Could you zoom in? Yeah. Especially to the position of them.

And there, in the far corner of the room, next to the couch, I saw two bodies huddled together. I realized I was looking at Asma and her four-year-old son, Abdulla. They were on the right side of the room, the side of the room where Tatum said he shot four people. Asma and Abdulla were kneeling in the corner of the room, heads down, their foreheads touching the ground, in a position like you would be in if you ever had to do a tornado drill at school. Basically, the least threatening position the human body can be in.

They're kneeling facing... Oh, they're facing the floor, but they're kneeling with the bottom of their head facing towards the doorway, so they're next to each other.

Asma looked like she'd been wounded on her neck. It's not clear how exactly she was killed. But looking at these photos, you could imagine this moment of a mom trying to protect her son. Four-year-old Abdulla was pressed up between his mom and the wall, and his mom had put her arm around him in what would be their final moments.

The photo has her left arm over him.

Almost like she's getting as close to the wall as she can. Who knows? But it seems like she might have put him in the safest possible place she could try to put him.

Oh, absolutely.

This was all awful. But what Parmily was about to tell me was even worse. It had to do with what the photos could tell us about how exactly Asma's son was killed. In the photos the military sent us, There's a closeup photo of four-year-old Abdallah. It looks like someone had taken him out of the position he was in next to his mom and propped him up. He was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon helicopter on it. The first thing the photo clearly showed was that Abdallah had shot in the head.

The wound goes from his back right neck, and it goes forward to his left temple.

So what does that tell you?

Oh, that lines up the trajectory.

The trajectory. Where Parmerly was going now was right to the question of where the shot came from. Where the shooter would have had to have been when he fired at Abdulla's head. Parmely saw this question as a math problem. Geometry, actually. It's something that forensics experts do all the time. Determine where a shooter would have been shooting from, their position. If you shoot a bullet from a gun, you can pretty much determine what the bullet trajectory would have been. You're basically drawing a straight line from where the shooter's gun was through the entry wound and the exit wound.

Now we have that line segment. Then what you do is you go from the exit wound, which is blown out in the left side, you go to the entry wound, which is his right neck, and you're going to bring that back towards where the shooter was located.

There was furniture in the room that would have limited the places a shooter could have stood. And of course, there were also walls. We also had the measurements of the room. They'd been taken by military investigators. Parmely took all that into account, too. And then he gave me his analysis.

Overwhelmingly, the information from that child, his wounds and the trajectory are very, very clear.

The person who shot Abdulla couldn't have been doing something like firing blindly from the entryway.

That's total opposite trajectory.

That angle just didn't line up. Not at all. Like, not in the doorway.

Oh, absolutely not.

Parmely pointed to a small object, the space heater. Right next to Abdallah's mom, Asma, just a few feet from Abdallah. That spot, right next to that space heater, Parmely said, was where the person who shot Abdallah would have been standing.

So he was standing right next to her in front of that object. He's pointing his rifle down at the boy, pointing it down towards the boy's head. That would be the angle that he was shooting him from.

Parmely was saying the shooter was incredibly close to this little boy, just a few feet away, basically standing over the mom Asma and shooting down into Abdulla's head.

This is an up-close and personal shot where you're putting a bullet into a little boy.

Like he was shot from one side of his head to the other.

He was executed from the back right to the front left temple while his face was down in a kneeling position.

And you're saying executed. Talk about that. Why are you saying executed?

There's no misconstruing the size of this child and the position that they're in, that they're not a threat to them.

As Parmily was telling me this, it was obvious that he was getting upset. At one point, it almost looked like he was about to cry. I wondered how he was feeling. He paused for a long time?

I've seen a lot of kids killed throughout my career. It's not easy, but it just takes me back to all those experiences as well. It's disgusting. It really is. I I wasn't in a war zone. I give a lot of latitude and tolerance to understanding what people were going through in those times. And we're all human, and we make decisions. I in a fast pace and split seconds. This wasn't split second. This is really It really pulls at my emotions a lot.

Looking at the photos of Abdulla, he's so small. He's clearly just a little kid huddled in a corner with his mom maybe trying to calm him or protect him by putting her arm around him. And someone stood over this mother, aimed their gun at this little boy, and shot him in the head.

There's no doubt that that's an execution. Once they decide to stand a foot next to a four-year-old child and put a bullet in his head, there's no way that you cannot see that that's a child. There's no way that you can't process that information. That's why I firmly believe that that was an execution.

Parmily and I moved on to the photos of the next house, the house where 11-year-old Safa had hidden next to the bed while her mom and siblings were shot to death. The Marines killed eight people inside this house. They killed Safa's father, Eunice, when he answered the door. Then the Marines killed seven people all in the back bedroom. Tatum had told NCIS that he'd seen Wutterrich shooting in this back bedroom, and so he'd followed Wutterrich inside. According to NCIS records, Tatum said he'd seen children in the room on the bed, including a child who was actually standing on the bed. Tatum said this child was wearing a white shirt. Tatum told NCIS he looked at this child and then opened fire. There are several photos of this bedroom. In the photos, you can see the spot where Safa had said she was hiding with her sister, Noor, next to the bed. Noor's body is right there, exactly where Safa said it was, cratching down in the small space between the bed and the wall. On the other side of the bed, near the doorway, was Safa's aunt lying dead on the floor. The aunt that Saafa said was shot after she peaked out into the hallway to see what was going on.

Then there was the bed where Saafa had said her siblings had huddled with their mom, terrified. The photos of this bed are devastating. Saafa's mom is lying on her back, her head on a pillow. Lying next to her are four of her children. There's little Ayesha, just three years old, wearing a shirt with a flower on it, her head covered in blood. There's her older sister, 10-year-old Seba, lying next to her. There's her brother, 8-year-old Mohamed, the one who Saafa had told us had initially survived the shooting but was injured and screaming. He's curled up next his mom, his elbow touching her stomach. Then there was five-year-old Zanib. Zanib's injuries were particularly gruesome. Her head was so badly damaged, I couldn't even see it in the photos. I had to ask Parmily to show it to me.

Her head is to the right. It's just under... It's next to the child that's in green.

Okay.

You see it down the bottom. It's a little bit dark. It's a bottom center.

Without getting too detailed here, I'll just say that there wasn't much left of her head. It was mostly gone. Parmely pointed out a yellow blanket on the bed in front of Zanib. He said that if Zanib had been shot lying down, you'd expect to see a lot of blood in other parts of her head on the blanket. But the blanket didn't appear to have much blood on it at all.

Because right now, if you look at the yellow blanket or that yellow cloth right there, It's not consistent with being shot in that location.

Instead, there was a lot of blood on the wall next to the bed, which to Parmily suggested that at the time that Zanib was shot, she was actually sitting up on the bed or maybe even standing on it.

I would think that the head was higher. If the child's head is up and I shoot, it's going to go towards that wall that has all of that.

A five-year-old shot standing on a bed, just as Tatum had ascribed. This bedroom was small. We have the measurements. It was just 13 by 17 feet. The bed took up a lot of that space, and there was furniture along some of the walls, making the space seem even smaller. No matter where the Marines were in the room, they would have been close to the people they were shooting. In general, looking at the photos of SAFA's house, what is your assessment of whether the shooters would have been able to see that they were shooting women and children?

They go in, they went into the room, and they were just taking shots at the people in the bed. How did they not perceive that these were children as they have to identify that they're in the bed. Don't expect me to rationalize that one.

According to NCIS's forensic examiner, who analyzed the bullet trajectries, one the shooters would have had to have been standing near the foot of the bed. The space was so small that the tip of the Marine's rifle likely reached over the bed when it was being fired. After the break, one last set of photos.

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The final house the Marines went into that day was a house where the Marines killed the four brothers. When we spoke with their surviving family members, Ehab, Najla and Najla's son, Khaled Jamal. They all said they wanted more than anything to know exactly what happened inside that house.. She just wants to know who've been murdered first. The last thing the family said they saw was the four brothers being marched into the house by two Marines, and then a short while later, they'd heard gunshots. He wants to know the little details after they couldn't see them anymore. Khaled Jamal had told us that he's always going over and over that day in his mind, wondering exactly what happened inside that house. Who was killed first? Did his father have to watch as his younger brothers were killed? He told us he'd even dreamt about it. That's why he signed the form saying he wanted us to have the photos and why he helped the other Khaled, Khaled Salman Rezif, take those forms door to door in Haditha. To collect signatures from other surviving family members of those killed. To know. The photos of the inside of this house, the photos of Khalid Jamal's father and his three younger brothers, were the last set of photos we looked at.

Khalaj Amal and his mom, Najla, and aunt Ehab, had described each one of the four brothers in loving detail, what they were like as fathers, husbands, uncles. Now I was looking at photos of all four men lying dead on the floor. The Marines who were involved in this shooting had told investigators that when they entered the house, there were four men inside, two of them holding AK-47s. A Marine fired first, and all four men were shot dead. The photos show the men lying dead, shot in the head. And there were other photos, photos that didn't have any bodies in them that turned out to be more revealing. These were photos of bullet holes and blood stains on the furniture and walls of the room. They'd been taken by forensic investigators from NCIS who'd entered this house four months after the killings to try to collect evidence from this room. They have the tiniest bit of audio of these investigators, recording themselves entering this house back in 2006.

Time is 12:00 33. We've been clearance to enter House 4, marking in the hall hallway, marking what appears to be redish-brown. This will be B1, his potential bloody fingerprints.

We're going to be here longer than we thought. When the NCIS investigators entered the room, they looked for any evidence of the shootings. By then, months after the killings, the blood on the floor had been cleaned up, and most of the room, by this point, looked pretty normal. But something caught the investigator's eyes. There was a big piece of furniture in the room, a free-standing wooden wardrobe. The family said they'd found the body of one of the brothers, Marwan, inside this wardrobe. On the door of that wardrobe, the investigators noticed something, a small hole, the size of a bullet. They opened the door and inside they found blood stains and another hole leading out the back. Then they moved the wardrobe away from the wall, and that's when they noticed something metallic in the wall, a bullet. They pulled it out. It was a 5:56 round, the type of bullet used in an M16. There were two Marines who admitted to being in that house, Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt and Sergeant Frank Wutterrich. Sherritt didn't have an M16, but his squad leader, Sergeant Wutterrich, did. Ncis concluded that most likely Wutterrich shot Marwan, as Marwan hid in the wardrobe with the door closed.

Then there was the question of how College Mall's father, Jamal, had died. Investigators found another set of bullet holes and blood stains that lined up with where Khalha Jamal's father's body had been found. They concluded that Khalha Jamal's father had been sitting or crashing down against the wall next to the wardrobe. Investigators found a 9-millimetre bullet in the wall behind where his body had been. The only Marine who had a 9-millimetre in that house was Sheret. Then there were the two other men in the room, Chasev and Khatan. Both of them had been shot in the face right by the doorway while they were standing. What the NCIS investigators had found and what these photos showed contradicted the Marine's accounts, especially Sherritt's, which was particularly detailed. Sherritt claimed that after he shot the first two men near the doorway, the other two men started moving toward them. Or as Sherritt put it in a statement to investigators, he, saw others in the corner moving to their fallen comrades, so I was not taking any chances of them picking up the AKs. I fired at them and took them out. But according to the photos and the NCIS forensic analysis, these two men were definitely not moving toward their fallen comrades.

One of them, Marwan, had jumped into a wardrobe. The other, Khalaj Amal's father, was crouched down or sitting in a far corner. This hardly sounded like the behavior of insurgents who had lured the Marines to a house to kill them. It sounded a lot more like what terrified unarmed men would do when they realized they were trapped in a room with Marines intent on killing them. Marines who were standing in the doorway, blocking their escape. This stood out to Parmily, too.

You have people in the room moving away from the doorway. They're not coming together. Yeah, you couldn't be more isolated trying to get into a closet as opposed to going towards your camarades. So that definitely refutes that statement right off the bat. And then that also reduces the credibility of the people that are giving those statements.

Taken together, all this evidence allowed NCIS to reconstruct what most likely happened inside this room. Ncis concluded that most likely the first person killed was Khatan because his body was closest to the doorway. Then Chasib, who was right behind his brother Khatan. Ncis thought it most likely that Jamal, Khalha Jamal's father, was shot next as he sat or crouched on the floor across the room. Marwan was probably the last brother to be killed. Ncis thought it most likely that the Marines saw Marwan go into the wardrobe and that then Wutterrich stood in front of the wardrobe and opened fire with a single shot at the closed door, a shot that hit Marwan in the head. After looking at all the photos and reading the NCIS reports, I got in touch with Khaled Jamal and told him that if he wanted, I could tell him what the photos and the other forensic evidence indicated about what most likely happened in the final moments of the lives of his father and uncles. Khalha Jamal told me, yes, he wanted to know. And so we set up a call with an interpreter, and I told Khalha Jamal what we'd learned.

Khaled Jamal had wanted to know, but knowing brought its own pain. Khaled Jamal told me that he'd hoped to hear that his father and uncles had fought back, had resisted the Marines somehow. And now, knowing that his father had been crashing down behind a door and one of his uncles had been inside a wardrobe, the idea that his father and uncles had died fighting had been replaced by something that was somehow even sadder. Khalaj Amal asked me a question. Could I send him the photos of his dead father and uncles? I told him yes, but I cautioned him that the photos were very graphic. He said he understood. And so I sent him copies of the photos, the photos of his own family that the military had kept for all these years. The photos that Khalaj Amal had worked so hard to get by gathering all of those signatures. They were now his. I'd looked at all the evidence. I'd looked at the photos, at the Marine statements, at all the thousands of pages of documents in the investigative files. I'd watched the video that Khaled Salman Rezif had helped to make. We'd interviewed the Marines who'd responded to the killings, and we'd interviewed the survivors, including people who'd actually witnessed the killings.

What happened on the morning of November 19th, 2005 was no longer a mystery. Dela Cruz and Wutterrich had shot at the five men by the white car. Some of the men, Dela Cruz said, had their hands up. The photos showed at least one of the men was maybe even kneeling. Some of the Marines had then gone into Abdul Rahman's house. A Marine named Hector Salinas had killed a grandmother in the hallway. A Marine named Umberto Mendoza had killed the father. The Marines went into the living room. Sheret and Tatum both admit to shooting in this room. Sheret told investigators that he stood near the doorway and fired blindly until he ran out of ammo. Tatum says Wutter which was shooting, too. Tatum said he shot four people all along the right side of the room. The photo showed that the people on the right side included four-year-old Abdulla and his mom, Asma. One man escaped from the house but was later shot by Marines outside. The Marines went to a house close by. They apparently rang the doorbell. Saafa's dad, Eunice, answered. Mendoza shot and killed him. The Marines entered the house. Tatum made his way to the back bedroom.

He said he saw Wuttererich already inside the bedroom, shooting at people. Tatum went inside the bedroom, too. According to NCIS records, Tatum said he saw women and children. He saw a child, maybe five-year-old Zanib, standing on the bed, and Tatum opened fire. The Marines went into one last house. According to the survivors, the Marines separated the men from the women, children, and elderly, and ordered the men, four of them, all brothers, into one of the houses. Wutterrich and Sheret went into the house and killed them. Sherritt did most of the killing. He shot three of the brothers in the head. The fourth brother, Marwan, appeared to have jumped into a wardrobe. But according to NCIS, Wutterrich shot through the wardrobe door and the bullet hit Marwan in the head. This was a case full of evidence. Photos, forensics, statements from Iraqi eyewitness, statements where Marines implicated themselves and each other. There were even the confessions from Tatum. 24 killings. And yet there wasn't a single criminal conviction for any of How did that happen? How did the military go from having all this evidence to having the cases completely fall apart? The answer to that question Coming up on In the Dark.

One last thing about the photos. Once we got them, we talked for a long time as a team about what to do with them. We We talked with our editors and with other colleagues at the New Yorker, and we talked to some of the survivors as well. We decided to publish a selection of photos that we thought were especially important to understanding what happened that day. All these photos were published with the permission of the surviving family members of the people depicted. You can find them at newyorker. Com/season3. In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madelyne Baron, managing producer, Samara Freemark, producers, Natalie Jablonsky and Raymond Tungakar, and reporter, Parker Jesko. In the Dark is edited by Katherine Winter and Willing Davidson. Interpreting in a Rock by Aya Muthena. Additional interpreting and translation by Aya Al-Shikarchi. This episode was fact-checked by Linnea Feldman-Emerson. Original music by Allison Leighton-Brown. Additional music by Chris Julen. Sound design and mix by John Delors. Our theme is by Gary Meister. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art Direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. Foyal legal representation from the Foyal team at Lovy & Lovy. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni.

In the Dark was created by American Public Media and is produced by The New Yorker. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of global audio for CondeNast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, you can send them to us at inthedark@newyorker. Com. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Lalee Aaricoglu, host of Women Who Travel. This summer, we visit a remote Danish Island with strong Viking roots.

I think it was also part of the history you told yourself, We're strong women here. We're strong women. This is the culture of this island.

We've crossed the country with a baseball stadium chaser.

Some games could be a day game, and then you drive to your next location and take it a night game, and then you turn around and try to get to a day game.

And well, how can it be summer without at least one mouthwatering moment in France?

I'm in a country where there's all these wonderful cheeses and fruits, and I tasted a white nectarine, and it was small and ugly, but it just had a sweetness and a juice that shocked me.

Join me, Lalea Rocoglu, every week for more adventures on Women Who Travel, wherever you listen. From PRX.