True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

Jerry Langton is a veteran investigative journalist and bestselling author, writing primarily about outlaw motorcycle gangs and organized crime. Former Harris County Sheriff's Department Deputy Joseph Kent McGowen was sentenced in 2002, to 20 years, his second conviction—for murdering Susan Diane White, in her home, August 25, 1992. In 2021, after almost 20 years—Kent McGowen was released. A bests...

Texas Deputy Kent McGowen shot and killed Susan White after she pulled a gun on him. It seemed like an open-and-shut case of an officer acting in self-defense. But before his first court date, the Houston region was inundated with rumor, innuendo and speculation about the case. Many believed those fabrications and half-truths to be fact. And an unsubstantiated-but-persistent story of how McGowen a...

The District Attorney began his opening statement with, "If you don't know what hell is like, you're about to find out." In 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris went on a rape and killing rampage. The pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, sledgehammers, and ice picks they used on their victims became their calling card and moniker: The Toolbox Killers. They were soon apprehended and convicted for their...

Truth is supposed to be a journalist’s north star. But during the 2010s, the fourth estate lost its way, abandoning reporting for straight-up activism. In Crimes of Omission, seasoned investigative journalist Rob Rosen will reveal the full story of the high-profile cases of law enforcement violence that rocked the world. Through dozens of exclusive interviews, this book transports readers inside t...

Why do certain women become icons of evil? This book offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka, and Karla Faye Tucker.  It examines their lives, crimes, and cultural reception in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, asking how violence committed by w...

A True Crime Mystery Four Decades in the Making. On the cold night of January 27, 1976, twenty-two-year-old college student Kyle Clinkscales vanished after leaving his bartending shift at the Moose Club in LaGrange, Georgia. His disappearance baffled investigators and devastated his parents, John and Louise, who spent decades chasing rumors, suspects, and false leads in one of the South’s most hau...

One Man. One Mission. Justice. In the Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer. Rodney K. Harrison’s life could have gone the way of the drug dealers he grew up with in South Jamaica, Queens. Instead, a twist of fate and relentless drive led him to become the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer and, later, Police Commissioner of Suffolk County on Long Island—where he engineered the arrest of th...

They hunted together. They killed together. And for years, no one stopped them. For years, Gerald and Charlene Gallego traveled the highways of California and Nevada, searching for their next victims. They didn’t look like killers. He was quiet, calculating, and obsessed with control. She was young, vulnerable—and willing to do whatever it took to survive. Together, they abducted, tortured, and mu...

The infamy of Miami's cocaine wars of the 1970's and 80's is forever etched into the darkest chapters of U.S. history, and Lt. Raul Diaz was on the frontlines for all of it. The decorated and controversial law enforcement figure identified the shifting tide in the Magic City when law enforcement lost their grip on crime as a new breed of criminal flooded South Florida to ply their billion-dollar t...

An immersive account of a seemingly loving father's transformation into a "family annihilator." In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. By then, the story had become headline news across the country, with its revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspic...

Was there more than one killer? Had the crime scene been cleaned and sanitized before the police arrived? Was furniture staged to throw off detectives? In one of the most extraordinary true crime stories ever published, Broken Plea questions what really happened in the house on King Road—and the results of that investigation will astound you. In the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, four l...

In 1990, Monroe County’s daytime television viewing habits were disrupted by a TV first: the live broadcast of The People v. Arthur J. Shawcross. Never before had home viewers anywhere been given access to gavel-to-gavel coverage of a sordid murder trial. The show lasted eleven weeks, September to December. Viewers that normally followed daytime dramas or game shows were instead focused on the tri...

In this dramatic true account about the power of sensationalized crime, one woman’s case is exposed for its sexism, flagrant disregard for the truth, and, ultimately, the dangers posed by an unbridled prosecution.  Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse―offering her too many options of all the wrong kin...

The gripping inside story of Nathan Carman’s crimes from the maritime lawyer who solved his multimillionaire mother’s disappearance at sea and his even wealthier grandfather’s shooting death in bed. When Nathan and Linda Carman were a week overdue on a fishing trip out of Point Judith, Rhode Island, few thought they would still be alive. Even the Coast Guard had called off its search. So it seemed...

“They finally got me… Emprise…the Mafia…John Adamson. Find him. ” Investigative reporter Don Bolles used his final words to name the people he believed had set the car bomb that had left him dying in a hotel parking lot in midtown Phoenix. In his fourteen years as one of Arizona's top reporters, Bolles took on the Mafia, land fraud kingpins, and corrupt politicians. And someone wanted him silenced...

MODEL DETECTIVE takes readers where true crime has never gone before—inside the heart, mind, and soul of a Chicago homicide detective whose grit and instincts prove that a woman’s place is in the homicide division. Sergeant Michele Wood, a 25-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, has spent nearly two decades in the Detective Division. With hundreds of arrests, and an extraordinary record...

This story seems impossible. But every word is true. Convergence is the account of a vicious double homicide in 1970s Chicago and a trial that almost didn't happen. This is a different kind of true crime book. It isn't a mystery, because the killer was arrested right away. It's not a police story, although Convergence is there at every step of their investigation. It's not a defense lawyer's story...

From the author of the national bestseller The Dark Queens, an incandescent work of true crime and feminist history about Elizabeth Bathory, the woman alleged to be the world's most prolific female serial killer. There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. S...

Chicago, 1982. Seven people swallowed Tylenol capsules meant to heal, then they died within minutes. America changed overnight, then the killer vanished into darkness, and that darkness lived in my home. I was eleven, and my father was The Tylenol Killer that terrorized a nation. He created chaos, and confessed with his last breath. I uncovered the truth, and the rot behind his badge. He built lie...

Homicide historian David Kulczyk releases 1926—Murder in America—New and Expanded Edition for the 100th anniversary of the deadliest year in American history. While researching his seven true crime books, Kulczyk noticed that there was an extraordinary number of oddball murders during the year 1926. The 1920's was a time of massive cultural and technological changes. The death and destruction of W...

A meticulously researched page-turner about one of the Philadelphia suburbs’ most shocking 20th-century crimes. A gunman broke into Jack and Peggy Abt’s house moments after the last family member left for the day. He took a seat next to the upright piano in the living room and waited silently for 11 hours. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t watch television. People expect things to go bump...

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Deat...

September 1990. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, teenage honors student Lisa Lee Pruett vanishes into the night. A boy calls 911 when she does not arrive for a secret late-night meet-up. Police soon find her nearby, stabbed to death and left exposed. Lisa had just passed an important test and earned her driver’s license. She was a Girl Scout, athlete, musician, and lover of poetry. Then her life was cut s...

The latter part of the Victorian era bore witness to a series of unexplained female dismemberment cases that plagued London for a period of thirty years. All the cases remain unsolved and only two women were ever identified. Today, the circumstances surrounding these deaths have largely become a footnote in history, dwarfed in attention by their much larger cousin, Jack the Ripper. In this, Suzann...

The murder of a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher in 2004  never made the evening news, yet within hours arrests were made, charges filed, and a speedy conviction sent to prison Jimmy Kitlas, an incredibly shy, special needs teenager with no criminal history whatsoever. 20 years after the murder , a woman named Kelley Leigh asked Burl Barer and Frank C. Girardot to investigate. She believed that t...