True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

No body means no crime, which makes this the perfect murder. Doug Stewart even has an ironclad alibi. He's been seen hundreds of miles away when his lovely wife, Venus, vanishes. What better plan could any murderer hope for? But Doug's forgotten one thing: the power of a mother's love. Venus' mother believes her daughter's husband lured her outside. They fought. He won. Venus' mom wants her daught...

On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Rocked as imaginable evil converged on them, a pall would be cast over the region and its inhabitants for years to follow. Tha...

The incredible story of a 1958 murder that ended with the last woman to ever be executed in California—a murder so twisted it seems ripped from a Greek tragedy. Deborah Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The myster...

Murder is the most vile crime known to man. It can be triggered by love or money or sex. Those are the three big ticket items for homicide. But people are strange. They will kill for the most obscure and ridiculous of reasons. In 30 years covering murder, Brad Hunter has discovered each one has its own flavour. Cops and friends can be stunned by the evil lurking within a seemingly ordinary man or...

The western suburbs of Chicago were being terrorized by a serial rapist and murderer in the 1970s and 1980s. Bruce Lindahl was a psychotic rapist and killer who preyed on girls and young women for almost a decade. He managed to escape detection because he did not leave his rape victims alive. But in 1980, he kidnapped and raped Debra Colliander in Aurora, Illinois. She escaped before he could murd...

From the award-winning author of Two Crows Sorrow comes another historical true crime story about secret identities, deception, and murder. At the turn of the century, an ex-convict from Ireland arrives in the back country of rural Nova Scotia, whereupon he is accused of murdering a man and burying him in the victim’s own cellar under a pile of potatoes. Rooted in Deception follows the life of Joh...

For more than three and a half decades, the disappearance of 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews was a mystery – a riddle neither authorities nor her family members could solve. The residents of her cloistered Colorado hometown had scoured every inch of prairie. Jonelle’s face had been on milk cartons nationwide. Even the President of the United States had appealed to the public for help. Still, every le...

On a cold, windy December night in 1926, hell was unleashed on a tenant farm near Farwell, the last Texas town before the New Mexico border. Prone to the bottle and fits of rage, the burly man with the smiling blue eyes was in no mood to quarrel with his third wife over his bootleg whisky and sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. He went from room to room in the house, killing his wife and each child...

In 1979, Brenda Spencer, a seemingly average teenage girl living in a nice suburban neighborhood, made and executed plans that would place her in infamy and set a violent and terrifying national precedent. She received a rifle for Christmas and a month later set her sights and opened fire on the elementary school across the street. The event is forever glorified by the song ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’...

Mike Rothmiller and Douglas Thompson draw on previously secret LAPD intelligence files, a cache of FBI documents released to the authors in 2021, and extensive interviews with prime sources, including many who worked with Frank Sinatra and many more who tracked his long and fatal association with the American Mafia, notably his ongoing connection, after his original godfather was assassinated: Sam...

A relentless detective and an amateur genealogist solve a haunting cold case—and launch a crime-fighting revolution that tests the fragile line between justice and privacy. In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and i...

Much is known about American and European serial killers, but did you know that more than 150 homicidal maniacs have plagued the former Soviet Union during the last 100 years? Nicknamed “The Night Creature”, “The Urals Strangler” or “The Balashikha Ripper” in their native motherland, these sex fiends have committed some of the most heinous series of murders in the history of modern criminology. Th...

Brad Hunter has spent over thirty years writing about some of America's most horrific crimes. In this new book he enters the mind of John Wayne Gacy, the real-life 'Killer Clown', often said to be the inspiration for Stephen King's evil Pennywise in It. Gacy lured victims to his home with the promise of work or a warm bed and then duped them into putting on handcuffs, claiming he wanted to show th...

Although featured nationally on 48 Hours, Dateline, and the Oxygen Network, the detailed, complete, and totally unbelievable story of the case of DAVID CAMM has never been fully revealed as police, prosecutors, forensic scientists, and judges either sought or facilitated the convictions of an innocent man while ignoring a mountain of exculpatory evidence. While David was being pursued, persecuted,...

“SARGE!” is a fascinating memoir by the late Chicago Police Detective Sergeant John A. DiMaggio, one of the most decorated officers on the force during a career that spanned the years 1957 to 1991. Among his awards are two Superintendent’s Awards of Valor, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Praiseworthy Acknowledgment Plaque for Exceptional Act of Bravery Involving Risk of Life, a Presidential Citation of A...

January 14, 1927 — A.J. Mathis, a wealthy, elderly chicken rancher, is missing. One of the last of the cowboy sheriffs, Jim McDonald, is convinced A.J. is dead. Murdered. And McDonald says he knows who did it and vows to “prove it on her.” McDonald’s leading and only suspect is a former saloon singer and prostitute, Eva Dugan. Short, stocky, and plain, Eva takes off with a younger man in A.J.’s Do...

In the early hours of March 22, 1989, two friends – career criminals with violent felony convictions - drove around the eastern Kansas City area in a stolen car committing a series of crimes. The weather was mild for late March in Kansas City; the sky was clear, and there was the pale remnant of a Full Moon that bore the dubious name of Death Moon, the last full moon of winter. A little before 7 a...

Sheree Warren left her job in Salt Lake City on a mild October evening in 1985. She told a coworker she was headed to meet her estranged husband, Charles Warren, at a car dealership. But she never made it, Sheree vanished. When her car mysteriously surfaced weeks later, hundreds of miles away in Las Vegas, no one could say how it got there. When a young mother disappears under unexplained circumst...

A devoted father. One of the most accomplished criminal law scholars in the country. Someone wanted him dead. But why? On the morning of July 18, 2014, 41-year-old Florida State law professor Dan Markel dropped his boys off at preschool, hit the gym, and headed home to his quiet, tree-canopied neighborhood. Within seconds of pulling into his garage, two .38-caliber bullets fired from point-blank r...

Deborah Sue Williamson was a newly married young woman living in Lubbock Texas on Aug. 24, 1975. One night while her husband was away at work, she was brutally stabbed 17 times in the carport of their home. Many suspects were investigated, but no one was charged. The case went cold until the mid-1980s when Henry Lee Lucas, a man notorious for admitting to murders he didn't commit confessed to her...

The solution to the Zodiac serial killer case is as clear as it is controversial. One man, a letter writer, bomb maker, and code creator, was living in the area at the time of the Zodiac murders, had easy access to all the crime scenes, and had had a psychotic break at the time the Zodiac began his heinous murder campaign. A genius-level mathematician, he was clever enough to disguise his handwrit...

Unsolved crimes, unanswered questions. Crimes are meant to be solved. But what happens when they’re not? For the individuals involved—from the victims and their families to police investigators—this is the most frustrating part of all. For them there’s no resolution, no justice, no tidy boxes in which to pack away all the bits and pieces of a puzzle that finally links together. Instead, they are o...

Acclaimed crime historian, podcaster, and author of American Sherlock Kate Winkler Dawson tells the thrilling story of Edward Rulloff—a serial murderer who was called “too intelligent to be killed”—and the array of 19th century investigators who were convinced his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind. Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have cal...

The Generation Why Podcast released its first episode in 2012 and pioneered the true crime genre in the podcasting world. Two friends, Aaron & Justin, break down theories and give their opinions on unsolved murders, controversies, mysteries and conspiracies. One of the longest running true crime podcasts out there, Generation Why has a little something for every true crime listener. Follow The...

Nearly a hundred years ago, two wealthy and privileged teenagers―Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb―were charged and convicted in a gruesome crime that would lead to the original “Trial of the Century”. Even in Jazz Age Chicago, the murder was uniquely shocking for the motive of the killers: well-to-do Jewish scions, full of promise, had killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it. The...