True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

In March 2009, Michael Jackson stood before the world press and announced that he would be doing a series of live concerts at London's Grand Concourse stadium, beginning in July. The shows would be called "This Is It," and he referred to them as his "final curtain call.". But Michael would never make any of the dates. In June "The King of Pop" died at his Los Angeles home. In 2004, a San Diego jur...

Descended from a notorious carny family, Grady Stiles Jr. traded on the deformity that gave his hands and feet the look of lobster claws, to achieve fame as the "Lobster Boy". In November 1992, neighbor Christopher Wyant, in a conspiracy with Stiles's wife and stepson, shot Stiles in the head, leading to one of the most bizarre trials in criminal history. LOBSTER BOY-The Bizarre life and Brutal De...

When Jerry Heimann's son arrived at his father's home in Everett, Washington, he found his grandmother, an Alzheimer's patient, alone in the house, starving and dehydrated. His father was missing. The furniture was gone. Within hours, police realised that Jerry's live-in housekeeper, Barbara Opel, had robbed him and fled. But where was Jerry? The next morning, Opel's 11-year-old son led police to...

Sexecutioner On November 30, 1989, in a lonely place off Florida's Interstate 95, 51-year-old Richard Mallory shuddered under the impact of four .22-caliber slugs being pumped into him by a naked, hard-faced blonde hooker. While he suffered a slow, agonizing death, she stripped him of his valuables and drove his Cadillac back to the motel where her lesbian lover was waiting. In 1990, her killing s...

Growing up, Susan Berman's childhood was idyllic. She was Las Vegas Mob royalty, the daughter of a Mob boss who ran the Flamingo and furnished his only child with anything money could buy. But halfway through her childhood, dream exploded. Susan's father died without warning during a routine surgery. Next, Susie Berman's mother died by her own hand the next year when she overdosing on drugs. Susie...

When filming his TV series Race Relations, John Safran spent an uneasy couple of days with one of Mississippi's most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he heard that the man had been murdered – and what was more, the killer was black. At first the murder seemed a twist on the old Deep South race crimes. But then more news rolled in. Maybe it was a dispute over money, or most intriguingly,...

 American Sniper is the astonishing autobiography of SEAL Chief Chris Kyle, who is the record-holder for most kills for a sniper in U.S. military history. Kyle has more than 150 officially confirmed kills (the previous American record was 109), though his remarkable career total has not been made official by the Pentagon. In this New York Times bestselling memoir, Kyle shares the true story of his...

In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. The suitcases contained all manner of paraphernalia: medals, gems, two cigar cutters, silk underwear, a hot water bottle, and the equivalent of $1 million in cash. Hidden in a coffee can, a set of brass...

Final Exams features four fascinating true crime cases from the files of Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., one of America’s most respected forensic pathologists.  Coauthored by crime writer Dawna Kaufmann, Final Exams explores both the technical and the human side of murder.  From the heartbreaking case of abducted child, Jessica Lunsford, held captive within shouting distance of her loved ones, to the...

On January 10, 2013, Kendrick Johnson's parents reported their 17 year-old son missing. The next day at Kendrick's school, Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia, in the gym students saw what they thought was a pair of socks sticking out of a gym mat, but when they approached they told investigators they realized it was a body. According to Lowndes County Sheriff Chris Prine, Kendrick Johnson di...

An African American soldier returns home to New York City from the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. It is a time of turbulence and change and racism is very much alive in America. Times are tough for a young black man in America, especially one who has fought for his country in an unpopular war. Rick Talley takes what he believes the only economic road open to him: drug dealing. Prisoner of Dreams p...

In 1992, Lois Duncan, acclaimed author of fictional suspense novels, wrote a horror story she could never have imagined writing—a true account of the murder of her own daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette. Kait, 18, was shot to death as she drove home from a friend’s house on a Sunday evening in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Police closed the unsolved case as a “random shooting,” refusing to accept information t...

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. It remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life.  However, Illinois governor...

In 1958, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather went on a murder spree that paralyzed Nebraska, shocked the nation, and left 11 people dead. With him when he was captured was his 14-year-old ex-girlfriend Caril Fugate. The question soon arose, was Caril a kidnapped victim, or a heartless accomplice? Appointed to her case, Attorney John McArthur initially accepted the assignment out of a sense of constit...

Award-winning journalists investigate the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the unsolved lynching of Claude Neal; an identity thief finds herself confronted by one of her victims; a triple homicide rattles a high school swim team; a young adventurer supports her travels by smuggling Peruvian pre-Columbian artifacts; a woman struggles to live free of the ex-boyfriend who kidnapped a...

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life, went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist prostitute who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County Police, too, seemed to have paid...

In february 1975 a case began to unfold like nothing the quaint Detroit suburban area of Orchard Lake had ever seen. In the hours following a near head-on collision between a mysterious sedan and an on-duty patrolman, the frightening truth behind the speeding car's driver would be discovered. The vehicle was littered with weapons, drugs, and cash, yet these items weren't even the beginning. The mo...

Joyce Wishart was living out her life's dream, running her own art gallery in sunny Sarasota, Florida. But that dream ended in nightmare when a deranged drifter named Elton Brutus Murphy walked through the door with a knife in his hand and a voice in his head commanding him to rape and kill. In the space of half an hour, Joyce was dead - brutally mutilated - and the tony arts enclave plunged into...

The true crime story of sex killer Westley Allan Dodd--his victims were too small to fight...and too young to die! Includes eyewitness execution report. By all appearances, twenty-nine-year-old Westley Allan Dodd was the perfect all-American boy—model high school student, camp counselor and U.S. Navy enlistee. But behind his mask of normalcy lurked a predatory sex fiend with a seventeen-year histo...

This is the remarkable story of Frank Matthews, a charismatic drug kingpin from the late 1960s and 1970s, who organized a huge criminal enterprise before jumping bail in 1973 with $15-20 million and a beautiful woman. Nicknamed Black Caesar, Matthews has never been seen again in what has become one of organized crime’s most intriguing mysteries. Lewis Rice spent twenty six years as a Special Agent...

No crime is as horrific, as mesmerizingly perplexing, as a child's murder at the hands of a parent. In most cases, the perpetrator is the father. A veteran journalist explores five examples of "family annihilators" in this troubling snapshot of American crime twisted by the dark trajectory of machismo in economically stressful times. Her research includes some fifty in-depth interviews of victims'...

A vain man of good looks, small means, and no family links to the mob, Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano steadily worked his way up to acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, becoming its leader when official boss Joseph Massino went to the clink in 2003. But at a time when the Mob was crawling with secret operatives and informants caving to government pressure to flip, Basciano obeyed the code o...

The crimes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and other high-profile killers are so breathtakingly awful that most people would label them "evil." Renowned psychiatrist Michael H. Stone—host of Discovery Channel’s former series Most Evil—uses this as his starting point to explore the concept and reality of evil from a new perspective.  Basing his analysis on the detailed...

This book is the first comprehensive account of three centuries of thug life in the city where America began. In chilling new detail, veteran Boston journalist George Hassett reveals the legendary crime stories of Boston - from Prohibition to the Mafia, the Irish Gang War to Whitey Bulger. The forgotten chapters of Boston gang history are also covered - from the role of street gangs in the America...

On January 28, 2011, the Tampa Police Department received a phone call from a woman who was worried about her daughter, Julie Schenecker. A devoted Army wife and mother of two, Julie had sent her mother an email that could be described as “suicidal.” When authorities arrived at the Schenecker home, they encountered a horrific scene…  Sixteen-year-old Calyx and thirteen-year-old Beau Schenecker wer...