True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America isn’t your typical road trip companion. This darkly fascinating guide is quirky and unconventional and takes readers on a dark journey through the United States, exploring notorious locations linked to infamous and not-so infamous serial killers. From the shadowy forests of the Pacific Northwest to the sun-bleached basements of suburbia, each stop offe...

A Crime That Shattered Paradise... A Chase That Became Legend. Crystal Beach, Florida—1949. A peaceful seaside haven where crime was unheard of. Until one early morning, a brutal act of violence changed everything. John Calvin "Rastus" Russell, a drifter, thug, and small-time car thief, committed an unthinkable crime—the torture and murder of Norman Y. Browne and the near-fatal assault on his wife...

In the quiet town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, the idyllic calm of 1978 was shattered by a series of brutal murders. Karol Beavers, a vivacious high school junior, and her mother, Clementine, became the unsuspecting victims of a heinous act of violence that left the community reeling. For six months, the case went cold, fear gripping a town unaccustomed to locking its doors. Then, another shocking mur...

How one father, determined to reclaim his daughter's memory, brought down Alex Jones. On December 14, 2012, Robbie Parker's daughter Emilie was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, a tragedy that changed Robbie's life and the country forever. By the next day, Alex Jones was on air claiming the shooting was a hoax. So begins Parker's David and Goliath story, a tale of hope and resilience amid hatred an...

Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA’s most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos f...

For Yves Trudeau, the blood was all business. An assassin for the Hells Angels in the ’70s and ’80s, Trudeau was known as Apache, the Mad Bumper, and the Mad Bomber. As a contract killer, he did his job so well that the bikers sometimes lent him out to other organized-crime empires in Montreal, including the east-end French gangs led by the deadly Dubois brothers and the upstart Irish Mafia in the...

Something Big tells the story of the infamous Brown’s Chicken massacre, a brutal case that captivated Chicagoland after remaining unsolved for nearly a decade. Customers know Brown's Chicken for its crispy buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits. The Illinois-based franchise has a reputation for delicious but simple comfort food. But through no fault of its own, the words "Brown's Chicken" are...

The latest collection from true crime master Michael Benson looks at some of the ghastliest murders in Rochester, N.Y., history. One of them takes place in Genesee County, but it's a good one. Stories include: The Davis Street Fiend: The Murder of Tessie Keating; Shallow Grave at Holy Sepulchre: The Murder of Anna Schumacher; The Linden Lunatic: The Murders of "Ruth", Frances Kimball, George and H...

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarish...

A twisting, deeply engrossing investigation into the many lingering questions surrounding the sudden disappearance of the McStays, a family of four who vanished from their suburban San Diego home without a trace—until their skeletal remains were found in the Mojave Desert nearly four years later—from New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother. On February 15, 2010, Joseph McStay, his wife Su...

FOLLOW-UP TO THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER 22 MURDERS The truth about the deadliest criminal incident in Canadian history has remained untold—until now. Investigative journalist Paul Palango’s 22 Murders examined the April 2020 shooting spree committed by Gabriel Wortman that began in Portapique, Nova Scotia, and ended thirteen and a half hours later when Wortman was shot dead by RCMP officers. The e...

The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous―even deadly―experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory de...

On September 6, 1982, convicted murderer Leroy James Chasson made a daring break for freedom from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute-Walpole—one of the most infamous, escape-proof prisons in the country. But this wasn't just any prison break. It was a meticulously planned, five-year effort, made possible by an unlikely accomplice—Kathleen MacDonald, Chasson's former pen-pal turned wife. True...

In 1971, Montgomery County Deputy Sheriff James Tappen Hall was gunned down outside a Maryland country club. The case went cold—no suspect, no answers, no closure. But his daughter never gave up trying to find her father's killer. Fifty years later, cold case detectives finally reopened the investigation and identified a suspect whose shocking confession revealed a detail never released to the pub...

"It was the most horrific crime ever to come before this Court,” said the Judge. A renowned forensic pathologist shouted from the witness stand, “Torture!” when describing the beating three-year-old Kyson Rice took at the hands of a 6-foot 3-inch, 240-pound monster. Read the account of an ambulance team desperately trying to keep a badly beaten boy alive and a high-risk arrest by a well-equipped p...

Anne JaegerFrom her small-town Michigan roots to becoming a  New York Times  bestselling author, Ann Rule’s life journey is as fascinating as the cases she covered. Discover how she revolutionized crime writing, influenced FBI profiling, and Rule's fateful encounter with a murderer at just nine years old. Go behind the scenes of Rule’s most infamous cases—including Ted Bundy ( The Stranger Beside...

London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wro...

 What drove the inconspicuous sociopath to become a ruthless killer? During his nearly fifteen-year reign of terror, Ronald Lloyd Bailey’s depraved obsession with sexual sadism held communities across southeast Michigan in a shroud of fear. From the early 1970’s to the mid-1980’s, the former patient at one of Michigan’s foremost psychiatric hospitals, abducted as many as fifteen teens and over tim...

L.A. Coroner is a gripping true crime biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the controversial “Coroner to the Stars,” who performed the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Natalie Wood, and hundreds of other notable personalities. Choi, an award-winning historian and professor, deftly blends Los Angeles history, death investigation and forensic science, and Asian American histo...

Irma Grese “The Hyena of Auschwitz” entered Adolph Hitler’s concentration camps at the age of 18 as one of the most feared females in Nazi Germany. Before she was 20 years old, Grese became legendary for her insatiable cruelty and salacious liaisons, an alleged predator and sadist. Even Nazi supervisors were forced to curtail her brutal behavior. Irma Grese hailed from a small farming village. Her...

For all Tom Marquardt knew, Capital Gazette just had an unhappy reader. What he didn’t know was that the unhappy reader was about to become a mass murderer. Marquardt, the former editor of Capital Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, MD, was a target of a 38-year-old loner who sought to avenge a 2011 article that reported the reader’s conviction of sexually harassing a former high school classmate. Fo...

The true story of how one dedicated forensic scientist restored the long-lost identities of the teenaged victims of the “Candy Man,” one of America’s most prolific serial killers. Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long...

Acclaimed journalist, author, and creator of the True Crime This Week podcast, and former Boy Scout James Renner, explores the dark side of an American institution, its pervasive culture of sexual abuse, and the traumatic—even deadly—repercussions of its long-buried secrets. In the summer of 1995, at the largest Boy Scout camp in Ohio, a night of sexual violence ended with one counselor dead and a...

THE CRACK CITY STRANGLER: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins offers a chilling, in-depth account of the horrifying crimes committed by one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Award-winning journalist B.R. Bates delves into the twisted life of Benjamin “Tony” Atkins, whose reign of terror in Detroit spanned less than a year in the early 1990s. Known for targeting vulnerable wome...

Smitty: My Marriage to Serial Killer Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson unveils an unforgettable tale of love, betrayal, and survival. Diane Schmid thought she had found her Prince Charming when she met Charles Schmid, a charismatic and mysterious man who swept her off her feet as a teenager in the mid-1960s. But her fairytale quickly unraveled when her husband was arrested for multiple shoc...