True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

Michael Peterson was driven to succeed. An army brat-turned-marine, he saw combat in Vietnam, and returned a decorated soldier. An avid reader, his dreams of being an acclaimed novelist came true. His desire to find love was fulfilled when he married brilliant executive Kathleen Atwater, the first female student accepted at Duke University’s School of Engineering. The Petersons seemed the ideal ac...

Ambitious, attractive, and full of potential, five young college students prepared for the new semester. They dreamed of beginning careers and starting families. They had a lifetime of experiences in front of them. But death came without warning in the dark of the night. Brutally ending five promising lives, leaving behind three gruesome crime scenes, the Gainesville Ripper terrorized the Universi...

The original comprehensive case files of the East Area Rapist who became known as The Original Night Stalker. A serial rapist turned serial murderer, he held California in a grip of fear for way too long. Larry Crompton tells us of the attacks that began in Northern CA in 1976 that continued on until 1986 that we know of. Prior to Sacramento attacks there was a serial prowler called the Visalia Ra...

When Veterans Hospital patients on the road to recovery suddenly die in increasing numbers, it’s up to VA Special Agent in Charge Bruce Sackman to find out why. His shocking discovery rips open the hidden world of what goes on behind the bedside curtains when a killer doctor or nurse decides a patient must die. Behind the Murder Curtain is the true story of Bruce Sackman, Special Agent in Charge o...

In 1968 young girls went missing in California and New York, massive searches started and soon bodies began to turn up. This is the story of Rodney Alcala, the charming, good looking photographer that was in NYU studying under Roman Polanski and even once had won on the popular TV game show " Dating Game" but now wanted for rape, torture and murder of several young girls. He would make the girls s...

At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull. In time, their apple orchard gave up its secrets - a burial ground for their mutilated victims, each stripped of their possessions. The devilish enterprise on "Hell's Half-Acre" would earn the Bloody...

During the mid-1980s, a brutal killing spree began in Los Angeles as several women were murdered, having been sexually assaulted and shot in the chest with the same .25 calibre gun. The man responsible was Lonnie David Franklin Jr. However, his identity wouldn't be revealed for more than 20 years, by which time he had become one of America's most prolific serial killers. At the time, Los Angeles w...

Amanda Howard is a bestselling true crime author, fiction writer and violent crimes consultant who has written 19 books over the past 14 years including ten books on a wide range of true crime cases. She has also interviewed some of the world's most heinous serial killers over two decades and has collected a vast pool of information on various types of killers, their motives and rituals. In Killer...

One question remains unanswered: Who is the Zodiac? There have been many hypotheses about the killer’s identity, some sober and evidence-based, some wildly speculative, all touching upon any one or more of the 2,500 suspects in the Zodiac serial killer case. But until now, the truth has not been known.  In HUNTED, Dr. Mark Hewitt presented the facts of the case: the attacks, the letters, the phone...

When Elizabeth Andes was found bound, stabbed, and strangled in her Ohio apartment in 1978, police and prosecutors decided within hours it was an open-and-shut case. Within days, Bob Young, a 23-year-old football player who’d found his college sweetheart’s lifeless body on their bedroom floor, was charged with her murder. To this day, police and prosecutors still say they had the right guy--even t...

In March 2009, pretty, vivacious Rhonda Casto plunged to her death from a 300-foot cliff in the Oregon woods. The only witness, Stephen Nichols, the father of her nine-month-old baby, Annie, told police investigators she slipped and fell. Yet, Nichols’ story didn’t quite mesh with the facts. And some of his other actions raised suspicions as well, including just days after her death trying to coll...

THE newest installment in the New York Times bestselling series of tales of America’s most notorious criminals and the crimes that shaped the places we call home.  This time you’ll have no better guide through the darkest side of Iowa than Katherine Ramsland, one of America’s most legendary true crime authors and researchers. Dr. Ramsland is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and one of my p...

On September 14, 1991,in Anchorage, Alaska,  a very pregnant Peggy Barnett along with her 9-year old daughter drove to the post office to deliver a package to an associate, George Kerr in Chugiak, fifteen miles outside of Anchorage. George's father David Kerr picked up the package three days later and brought it home. He and his wife Michelle were in the kitchen when David opened the package. The...

From 1910 to 1919, New Orleans suffered at the hands of its very own Jack the Ripper–style killer. The story has been the subject of websites, short stories, novels, a graphic novel, and most recently the FX television series American Horror Story. But the full story of gruesome murders, sympathetic victims, accused innocents, public panic, the New Orleans Mafia, and a mysterious killer has never...

J. Reuben Appelman cracks open one of America’s most notorious murder sprees while simultaneously banging the gavel on his own history with violence. A deftly-crafted true crime story with grit, set amid the decaying sprawl of Detroit and its outliers. With a foreword by Catherine Broad, sister of victim Timothy King. Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters o...

From the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters comes an in-depth examination of sexual serial killers throughout human history, how they evolved, and why we are drawn to their horrifying crimes. Before the term was coined in 1981, there were no "serial killers." There were only "monsters"--killers society first understood as werewolves, vampires, ghouls and witches or, later...

The gripping story of one of the the most fascinating cold cases of the 20th century - Was eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr serial killer Ted Bundy's first victim? She disappeared from their Tacoma, Washington neighborhood early on a summer morning in 1961. Her body was never found, there were no clues, no ransom demand and no arrest. Was Bundy telling the truth when he told a hypothetical story abou...

Baptist deacon, family man, pillar of his Florida community . . . and serial killer of prostitutes: chilling true crime from the author ofLobster Boy. By day, Sam Smithers was the deacon of his Baptist church in Plant City, Florida, a respected neighbor to many, and a devoted husband and father. But after the sun set, he became something else: a violent attacker—and killer—of prostitutes. Smithers...

In the late summer of 1969, the nation was transfixed by a series of gruesome murders in the hills of Los Angeles. Newspapers and television programs detailed the brutal slayings of a beautiful actress--twenty six years old and eight months pregnant with her first child--as well as a hair stylist, an heiress, a businessman, and other victims. The City of Angels was plunged into a nightmare of fear...

The Calabrian Mafia—known as the ’Ndrangheta—is one of the richest and most ruthless crime syndicates in the world, with branches stretching from America to Australia. It controls seventy percent of the cocaine and heroin supply in Europe, manages billion-dollar extortion rackets, brokers illegal arms deals—supplying weapons to criminals and terrorists—and plunders the treasuries of both Italy and...

"You want to know what happened? Ask Anne."—serial killer William Devin Howell A monster was on a killing spree. In just nine months, seven people went missing; all of their bodies eventually discovered in a wooded lot behind a suburban strip mall. But the investigation that led law enforcement to their suspect, William Devin Howell, is only part of the story behind HIS GARDEN: Conversations With...

On a fall evening in Corvallis, Oregon in 1967, 17-year-old Dick Kitchel, a senior at the high school, disappeared after attending a party. Ten days later, his body was spotted by two children as it floated down the Willamette River. He had been beaten and strangled. The investigation into his murder played out during one of the most dramatic years in America. Life in Corvallis, a college town, ha...

For years Lori Orr believed her Los Angeles firefighter dad was a selfless hero. When Lori’s dad was arrested and charged with four murders and countless arson fires, it was her testimony that helped keep him from being sent to Death Row. Eventually, Lori’s search for the truth lead her to the dark secrets lurking in her family’s past and to an inescapable conclusion about the remorseless killer a...

In 1901 Evelyn Nesbit, a chorus girl in the musical Florodora, dined alone with the architect Stanford White in his townhouse on 24th Street in New York. Nesbit, just sixteen years old, had recently moved to the city. White was forty-seven and a principal in the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. As the foremost architect of his day, he was a celebrity, responsible for designing...

Forgotten Sacramento Murders 1940-1976 explores the crimes by Sacramento's Greatest Generation. The murders that shocked Sacramento two generations ago are now only remembered by a handful of people, but during its time they startled Sacramento to its very core. Including... The original Boogie Man who in 1956 murdered a young boy in a downtown movie theater's men's room. The Mad Basher of 1941 wh...