True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

DEATHBEDSIDE MANNER-A doctor stabbed his 2 small children 46 times to punish his cheating wife.  At trial he was found Not Criminally Responsible because he was depressed and suicidal. After 6 months in hospital he was released. The murdered children’s mother was outraged. But how far would she go to avenge her children’s deaths? DEATHBEDSIDE MANNER-Psychiatrists Poison Canadian Court Room-Dan Zup...

An investigation into the man Scotland Yard thought (but couldn't prove) was Jack the Ripper. Dozens of theories have attempted to resolve the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper, the world's most famous serial killer. Ripperologist Robert House contends that we may have known the answer all along. The head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department at the time of the murders thou...

Multimillionaire Steven Beard, Jr. fell hard for Celeste Martinez, a shapely, blonde waitress who served him his nightly cocktail at the local country club…as well as sexual favors. In 1995, the 70-year-old widow Beard married the 32-year-old mother of twin teenagers and gave her homes, cars, and more jewelry and designer clothes than she could ever wear. But it wasn’t enough for Celeste.  Claimin...

In February 2014, Aspen socialite Nancy Pfister was murdered in her own home—brutally bludgeoned, wrapped in a sheet, and stuffed inside a locked closet.  Fewer than twelve hours after her body was found and without any evidence, police decided a married couple from Denver had killed her. Within a few days, they arrested and charged Nancy Styler, a friend of Pfister’s who’d had a falling out with...

She thought she had married her soulmate. But when Carol Kennedy could no longer tolerate her husband's reckless womanizing and out-of-control spending, the artist, therapist and mother of two had to let him go. Just weeks after their divorce, Carol was found in her Arizona ranch home--bludgeoned to death with a golf club. Her ex, Steven DeMocker, was the prime suspect. Yet it took the authorities...

Today you’d call Ballantyne suburban, but back then, at the start of the summer of 1966, it was country — just a cluster of houses, some of them shacks, on or near Ballantyne Road, in the Town of Chili, NY. And while June 25 started like any other day it would end in a nightmare. In The Devil at Genesee Junction, veteran crime writer, Michael Benson, returns to his formerly rural hometown to take...

Rampage: a state of anger or agitation resulting in violent, reckless, and destructive behaviour. In 1989, Marc Lépine mercilessly executed 14 female students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique to become Canada’s most notorious mass murderer. The following year spree killer Peter John Peters roamed from London, Ontario, to Thunder Bay, leaving a trail of bloodied bodies, broken dreams, and stolen v...

In June of 1985, while her teenage sons held their half-sister down, Theresa Cross beat her nineteen-year-old daughter Sheila unconscious and then stuffed her into a 2´ x 2´ storage locker. After three days, the knocking, kicking, and cries stopped. Theresa and her sons dumped the girl’s body in the desolate High Sierras. The summer before, Theresa had dug a bullet out of her daughter Suesan’s che...

One day, Andrea Yates was a loving mother. The next, the nation was shocked by the death of her five innocent children... The 911 call that shocked the country. "I just killed my children." Why were they killed? On June 20, 2001, in a middle-class Houston suburb, Andrea Yates and her husband Russell, a NASA engineer, prepared for the routine week-day ahead. But before the morning was over, tragedy...

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln’s. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr. P. H. Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of i...

From the bestselling author of The Vampire Next Door: The True Story of The Vampire Rapist, John Crutchley. J.T. Hunter tells the story of a friendly, baby-faced, Canadian boy next door. He came from a loving, caring, and well-respected family. Blessed with good looks and back-woods country charm, he was popular with his peers, and although an accident at birth left permanent nerve damage in one o...

A day celebrating the beauty of God's handiwork turns into a father's worst nightmare as the sun sets on his only son, Jaryd Atadero, lost in the Colorado Mountains. A highly publicized search breaks into a national story as reports surfaced concerning Jaryd's whereabouts. Did Jaryd fall prey to a territorial mountain lion? Was he a victim of the elements? Did someone take Jaryd off the mountain?...

Tim McLean left Edmonton at 12 a.m. on July 30, 2008, on board a Greyhound Bus, destined for Winnipeg. At 7 p.m. the bus left one of the scheduled stops with a new passenger, Vincent Weiguang Li. Li, a tall man, with shaved head and sunglasses, sat near the front of the bus but moved next to McLean following a scheduled rest stop. McLean proceeded to fall asleep with his headphones on. Suddenly th...

Invisible Darkness is the story of one of the more bizarre cases in recent memory--killings so sensational that they prompted the Canadian government, in the interests of justice, to silence its national press and to lock foreign journalists out of the courts. To all appearances, Paul and Karla Bernardo had a fairytale marriage--beautiful working-class girl weds bright upper-middle-class guy and t...

The author of the true crime classic Lobster Boy now turns his investigative skills to the chilling true story of Kendall Francois, one of the most bizarre serial sex-killers of modern times. In October, 1996, young, pretty, and petite women began vanishing off the streets of Poughkeepsie, New York. Most were prostitutes and some were addicts. By August, 1998, the toll had reached eight, when a pr...

With details about grim and grisly fatalities, this history of California's arcane deaths encompasses the murders and accidents that at one time shocked the West Coast. The stories of hangings, gun accidents, suicides, crashes, and overdoses of both the famous and obscure offer a bizarre, if sometimes perverse, glimpse into the Golden State's strange past. Including frightening murder tales like t...

Karla picks up where Williams's first book on the case, Invisible Darkness, left her, painting her nails in her cell in solitary confinement in the gothic tower of Kingston's Prison for Women. After testifying against her ex-husband in 1995, Karla's life in prison was soon going to take a very different, dramatic turn. With a thriller's pace, Karla: A Pact with the Devil charts the inner life of t...

Introducing the victims and perpetrators responsible for California's most notorious shootouts, lynchings, and assassinations, this account shows how homemade justice is never black-and-white. In relating these histories, this discussion also analyzes how and why Hollywood storylines almost always follow the same skewed and unrealistic arc in which the bad guys abuse the good guys, the good guy ta...

On a cool, spring day in 1897, Alfred Haney left his Williamston, Michigan home to earn a day's wage. He knew his wife's peculiar behavior had become more frequent, and he had planned on her seeing the town doctor, but she assured him she was feeling much better. They would go the following day instead. When he returned home later that day, he discovered a macabre murder so bizarre that it shook t...

The gray ranch along Third Avenue in the sleepy Midwestern town of less than 400 people was the recurring site of screaming, mad chaos and horrific domestic violence.  Then one day, abusive husband Scott Shanahan was gone. Some thought he packed his bags and left town. Weeks passed. Months went by. Still no sign of the volatile wife beater. But what really happened to him was so shocking and so un...

To his neighbors, Anthony Sowell was a friendly and helpful former Marine. But they didn't know about his dark side -- or the gruesome secret inside his house.  Sowell's secret life was revealed to the nation on Oct. 29, 2009 when a Cleveland Police SWAT team entered his house to arrest him for an alleged rape. They didn't find Sowell, but they encountered a nightmarish scene -- two decomposed bod...

Lance Herndon was at the top of his game in 1996. At age forty-one he was a self-made millionaire, the owner of Access, Inc., a successful information-systems consulting company. As a prominent member of Atlanta's young, wealthy, and powerful set, he was surrounded by black Atlanta's "beautiful people." But when he failed to show up for work one day, friends and family started to worry. Their worr...

 From the author of VAMPIRE: The Richard Chase Murders  and The Bundy Murders comes an excursion into the truly weird and the bizarre: from a medieval-esque murder in a small town museum to the jilted boyfriend who decided that his former girlfriend needed to die on her twenty-first birthday.  And then there’s the demented son who returns home to live with his mother and stepfather, and one night...

Hitchhiking from Eugene, Ore., through northern California in 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan thumbed a ride into hell. Her kidnappers a sadistic lumber mill worker, Cameron Hooker, and his battered wife Janice subjected her to seven years of torture and sensory deprivation. She was made a sex slave, kept locked in a wooden box and brainwashed into believing that an underground network of sadists w...

A survivor's firsthand account of attempted murder in St. Francisville, Louisiana. A former warden of Angola Prison shoots his wife five times with a pistol, then sits down to watch her die on her plantation home porch. The victim, author Anne Butler, survives to tell this true crime story, detailing the unraveling of her seven-year marriage and how it led to her near-murder. Interspersed with sim...