True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that nineteen-year-old Jon Bowie’s body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school’s baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned...

It was a bleak November in 2012 when Cari Lea Farver vanished from Omaha, Nebraska. Cari, thirty-seven, was a devoted mother, reliable employee, and loyal friend—not the type to shirk responsibilities, abandon her son, and run off on an adventure while her dying father took his last breaths. Yet, the many texts from her phone indicated she had done just that. It appeared that Cari had dumped her n...

Terrifying things are happening to Kay Weden, a forty-something single mom and high school teacher in Salisbury, North Carolina. Despite having no known enemies, Kay’s home, car, and peace of mind are under attack throughout 1993. Most chilling of all are the senseless attacks on her only son and the shot fired in the night through a wall of her house, which narrowly misses his head as he sleeps....

At a high school dance in 1964, 17 year-old Sondra London met a bright, handsome, well mannered Catholic boy, 18 year-old Gerard John Schaefer. They hung out all the time and soon fell in love. But after a year, as young lovers will, they went their separate ways. She thought she'd never see him again. Then in 1972 came the screaming headlines: “6 Dead, 28 May Be,” and the ghoulish stories about t...

The story raced across the news wires in 1966. Residents jumped in their cars and drove to Lake Summit to see the gruesome crime scene. On a late, hot July summer night in 1966, in a small North Carolina mountain town, the days-old bodies of two local men were found on a hillside overlooking a lake south of town. Nearby was a woman's body, a tire jack shoved into her genitals. Author Terrance Ryer...

Stephen Singular is the author of 25 non-fiction books, many of them about high-profile criminal cases. His first book in 1987 was Talked to Death: The Life & Murder of Alan Berg, which became the basis for the 1989 Oliver Stone film, “Talk Radio", and set the tone for his journalistic career. Since 1991, Denver native Joyce Jacques Singular has partnered with Stephen on eight of the true-crim...

Elliot Rodger considered himself to be intelligent, refined, handsome, fashionable and charming. He spent years trying to be cool so women would like him. He thought if he just wore expensive and fashionable clothing, had a better car, or if he were rich, then women would throw themselves at him. In fact, he thought himself to be “The Supreme Gentleman.” Yet, women paid no attention to him. His on...

As seen on ID Discovery’s The Devil You Know, Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?, and Tabloid The shocking true story of how Barbra’s picket fence turned to prison bars, trapped in her twisted husband’s dangerous web of addiction, abuse, and world-infamous crime. Barbra Reifel, former wife of notorious Body Snatcher Michael Mastromarino, has appeared on Oprah, Nancy Grace, ID Discovery, and Lifetime. Ne...

"'No witnesses, no problems.' Thompson’s mantra was supposed to be reassuring to the smaller man, but Percy felt the shadow of his own death coming. There was one witness. Him. And he cowered, wondering when his neck would be broken, when his body would be ripped apart with bullets." Maybe the youngest son of a violent criminal named Hoggy Thompson was born a beast. Maybe rage was beaten into him....

In April, 1893, John Marshall, an immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found dead lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse. The farmer's face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked neighbour who discovered the body rushed to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroner's inquest a...

Jim Jones convinced his 1000 followers they would all have to commit suicide since he was going to die. Shoko Asahara convinced his followers to release a weapon of mass destruction, the deadly sarin gas, on a Tokyo subway. The Order of the Solar Temple lured the rich and famous, including Princess Grace of Monaco, and convinced them to die a fiery death now on Earth to be reborn on a better plane...

21 year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel—a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a...

Ron Crisp invites the reader to follow him through his investigation of the Leslie Barry murder; the trial of Art Anzures for the murder; the evidence that led him to his 3 suspects; how his investigation of the Barry murder led him to the defense of Angelo Buono in the Hillside Strangler case; and what happened in his personal life as a result of his attempts to expose the systematic cover-up in...

Michael Benson is one of today's most popular true-crime writers. His books--including Betrayal In Blood, Murder In Connecticut, Killer Twins, The Burn Farm, Mommy Deadliest, A Killer's Touch, Evil Season, Watch Mommy Die, A Knife in the Heart, Escape From Dannemora, Nightmare In Rochester, Haunting Homicides and The Devil at Genesee Junction--tell vividly of today's most heinous criminals, and th...

Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities–beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books–sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-year career. Known as the “American Sherlock Holmes,” Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America’s greatest–and first–forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, e...

Sexual predators exist in our society and their evil desire leads them to commit heinous, brutal crimes with little concern for their victims or the toll it takes on the community. Violent sociopaths have no interest in the needs or safety of anyone else and see ordinary people as either targets or competitors. They have no hesitation taking what they want from their victims. Whether they are rapi...

Diane Fanning is the author of fourteen true crime books published by St. Martin's Press and Berkley Books including the Edgar Award nominated Written in Blood, about Michael Peterson of Netflix's The Staircase and the best-selling Mommy's Little Girl, about the infamous Casey Anthony case. For the work she began with Through The Window about serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells, she received the "Defen...

A young pregnant mother is killed, and a small town demands justice, a conviction, someone to blame. When an unlikely suspect is convicted, it raises a question: Is this the culprit, a scapegoat, or a martyr? This question prompted a mother and daughter to go beyond the official version to search for the truth. As they delved deeper into the story of this murder and conviction, they found themselv...

The story of a woman whose ambition and accomplishments far exceeded the expectations of her time, 18 Tiny Deaths follows the transformation of a young, wealthy socialite into the mother of modern forensics... Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she devel...

In “The Garden State Parkway Murders,” true crime writer and attorney Christian Barth dives into the harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the parkway in the early hours of May 30, 1969. Among the numerous suspects Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and G...

The Gwinnett County, Georgia, Police Department was formed by tough, honorable men who were brought in to clean up the county after the sheriff made moonshining his personal business. With a low budget—officers had to buy their own uniforms, guns, even bullets—the police had to take anyone with a pulse who could stand upright. Even with the odds against them, the police department grew into a forc...

When Piper Streyle failed to show up for work, a coworker called her home. Piper’s three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Shaina, answered and said, “A mean man carried Mommy away.” Then the line went dead. In the tranquil region of southeast South Dakota, word of the young mother who was brazenly abducted from her home in broad daylight shocked residents. Piper was the second woman to vanish, follow...

Fred Rosen is a former columnist for the Arts and Leisure Section of The New York Times. He is also one of the most important and successful figures in true crime writing, and the author of several true crime classics. He got off to an incredible start with Lobster Boy in 1995, Blood Crimes in 1996, and Gang Mom and The Mad Chopper both published in 1998. Deacon of Death was published in 2000, Nee...

Burl Barer definitely is a legendary figure in true crime writing and broadcasting, co-hosting the very first true crime podcast, True Crime Uncensored. He is an Edgar Award winning author and two-time Anthony Award nominee. Burl Barer is the author of 9 truly important true crime books. In 2000, Murder in the Family was published, In 2004, Broken Doll, In 2008, Mom Said Kill. In 2011, Fatal Beaut...

On September 12, 2001, Michele Harris went missing from a small town in upstate New York. She has never been found, and the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains. Four years after she went missing, her wealthy husband, Cal Harris, was arrested and charged with her murder. With neither a body nor a murder weapon, Cal was shockingly tried and convicted of her murder. Then new evidence surfac...