True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

Gary Michael Hilton once sold his movie idea to Hollywood. The straight-to-video Deadly Run was about a man who captures women only to set them free on his very private and secluded Georgia land so that he can hunt and kill them. In 2007 (at least, that's the earliest investigators have been able to prove), he brought Hollywood to life when he began using state parks as his own personal hunting gr...

Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute, shot, killed, and robbed seven men in remote Florida locations. Arrested in 1991, Wuornos insisted she had acted in self-defense, but the jury condemned her to death and she was executed in 2002. An abused runaway who turned to prostitution to survive, Wuornos has become iconic of vengeful women who lash out at the nearest target. She has also become a tou...

  In the horrifying annals of American crime, infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and Berkowitz are writ large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and hypnotized by their monstrous, murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who’s gotten ink for spilling blood, there’s a bevy of all-but-forgotten homicidal fiends studding the bloody margins of U.S. hist...

  In late October 2009, Cleveland Police detectives arrived at the home of Anthony Sowell, an ex-Marine and registered sex offender—to arrest him on week-old rape charges. But this was no ordinary house, nor would it be a routine arrest. For even though Sowell was not at home, officers knew immediately something was horribly wrong. After initially finding two rotting corpses inside the home, their...

  There are more than 60 serial murderers in Canadian history. For too long awareness of serial murder in Canada has been confined to West Coast child killer Clifford Olson and the "Schoolgirl Murderers" Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, along with one of the most prolific serial kllers in history Robert Pickton. Unlike America, Canada has been viewed as a nation untouched by the shadow of serial m...

  J. Tony Serra is the epitome of counter-cultural hero. He has spent his life defending society's marginalized citizens in the courtroom. His role in the Chol Soo Lee case was depicted in the film True Believer and he has gained national prominence for his closing argument techniques. He is a life-long tax resister who has spent time in federal prison in protest of what he percieves to be an unju...

Murder in the Mountains: The Muriel Baldridge Story revisits the slaying of Muriel Baldridge, the 17-year old high school cheerleader who was found beaten to death on the morning of June 28, 1949 in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. After a decades-long investigation that featured an amazing array of twists and turns, including a sensational trial and a controversial verdict, the case remains unsolved. To t...

  Raynella Dossett Leath said she came home one morning in 2003 and found her husband’s body in bed—covered in blood, a Colt .38 by his side. But authorities were suspicious of Raynella’s story. Why would her husband of ten years suddenly commit suicide? And if he had taken his own life, why did it appear that three shots were fired?   David Leath was not the first of Raynella’s husbands to turn u...

  To his parishioners, minister Matt Baker seemed a pious and good man. To his wife, Kari, he was a devoted husband and caring father. Always sunny and vivacious, Kari never questioned their frequent relocations from one small Texas Baptist church to another. Even when tragedy struck, Kari remained strong—until one day, inexplicably, she took her own life. To friends and family, Kari's suicide mad...

Chelsea King was a popular high school senior, an outstanding achiever determined to make a difference. Amber Dubois loved books and poured her heart into the animals she cared for. Treasured by their families and friends, both girls disappeared in San Diego County, just eight miles and one year apart. The community's desperate search led authorities to John Albert Gardner III, a brutal predator h...

  In February 1975, 9 year-old Marcia Trimble left her house in Nashville to deliver Girl Scout cookies in the neighborhood. She never returned. After a massive but fruitless search, her body was discovered on Easter Sunday. Outrage and horror gripped the community of Nashville, but the murder investigation was frustrated at every turn. The case went cold for three decades until it was finally sol...

By the time Richard Trenton Chase graduated high school, everyone knew he was strange. But no one had any idea how bizarre he'd become, or what dark impulses were flowing through his troubled brain. The transformation from the outwardly strange young man to the diabolical killer he ultimately became, was gradual and would not become known until it was too late. First it was the killing of small an...

David Mahler, a 43-year-old east coast lawyer, came to Hollywood for the celebrity lifestyle, the movie industry, and the women. At his seven-level home in the Hollywood Hills, Mahler rubbed elbows with the seedy elements of the entertainment world: wannabe rock stars, drug kingpins, and adult film stars—one of whom introduced him to Kristin Baldwin, a pretty, upbeat blonde. One night, during a vi...

Laurie Show was as compassionate as she was hard-working. The outgoing high-school junior worked part-time to pay for the home she and her divorced mother shared. Yet she always had time to tutor friends struggling in school. And she befriended a dejected classmate after his traumatic breakup with his pregnant long-time girlfriend Michelle Lambert. But soon things spiraled into jealous obsession,...

  On the morning of April 8, 2006, residents of the hamlet of Shedden, Ontario, woke up to the news that the bloodied bodies of eight bikers from the Bandidos gang had been found dead on a local farm. The massacre made headlines around the world, and the shocking news brought a grim light to an otherwise quiet corner of the province. Six Bandidos would eventually be convicted of the first-degree m...

    In 1980 in Toledo, Ohio—on one of the holiest days of the church calendar—the body of a nun was discovered in the sacristy of a hospital chapel. Seventy-one-year-old Sister Margaret Ann had been strangled and stabbed, her corpse arranged in a shameful and stomach-churning pose. But the police's most likely suspect was inexplicably released and the investigation was quietly buried. Despite damn...

When the infamous gangster Whitey Bulger went on the lam in 1995, the streets of Boston became a war zone between the Mafia and the renegades, with the Winter Hill Gang looking on. Rogue Mobster: The Untold Story of Mark Silverman and the New England Mafia chronicles the inside story of the Boston mob wars of the 1990’s when over two dozen gangsters were killed in a vicious war for control of the...

The greatest counter-culture lawyer of his time. His trials have garnered him acclaim as one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers of the century. He's the white tornado in court, a semantic samurai, a shaman, a bard, a hero to some, a trickster to others, and always a force to be reckoned with, respected by all. This is a no-holds barred examination of the man, his renegade lifestyle, his reso...

When prison inmate Robert Reldan's aunt died and left him an $8.9 million trust fund, Arthur and Barbara Reeve, parents of murder victim Susan Reeve, acted to deprive Reldan of the funds that could gain him freedom on parole. The Reeves ultimately got an unheard of $10 million judgment against their daughter's killer, effectively stripping the man known as America's richest inmate. Soon after Susa...

  In the early 1970's, Frank Matthews became America's biggest drug kingpin. His organization, headquartered in Brooklyn, stretched across more than 20 states, and he became the only Black gangster to establish direct ties to the French Connection heroin pipeline. After being indicted in 1973, he disappeared with 15-20 million dollars in drug profits, equivalent to roughly 100 million in today's c...

In the mid-to-late 1980's, a quiet neighborhood near Tacoma, Washington was terrorized by the violence of three men: Paul St. Pierre, an alcoholic psychopath; his younger brother, Chris, who had committed unspeakable acts to be one of the boys; and Paul's childhood friend, druggie Andrew Webb. The three beat up one man before cutting his throat on a deserted beach. They decapitated another victim,...

In June 1983, Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter and a 11-year-old house guest were brutally murdered in Chino Hills, California. Two days before, Kevin Cooper had escaped from a nearby prison and hid in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family's hilltop house. After the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department established that he had ben there, it focused on him as the lone ass...

Sarah Ludemann was new to love. The Pinellas, Florida, 17-year old was a late bloomer. When she fell for a boy she was blind to the world of sex, drugs and drama swirling around her. Soon, Sarah had a bitter enemy in 18-year-old waitress Rachel Wade. Both girls were head-over-heels with a cocky two-timer named Joshua Camacho. On a warm spring night, their passions erupted into violence. A knife fl...

  The beloved son of Holocaust survivors, forty-nine-year-old George Kogan grew up in Puerto Rico before making his way to New York City, where he enjoyed great success as an antiques and art dealer. Until one morning in 1990, when George was approached on the street by an unidentified gunman—and was killed in cold blood. Before the shooting, George had been on the way to his girlfriends’s apartme...

On January 23, 2000, already battered by an ice storm, the rural Alabama resort town of Mentone was about to be struck by an even more terrfying freak catastrophe. Hurtling down the highway in a Lincoln Town Car was Hayward Bissell, a 400-pound madman on a murder rampage. Ramming the pickup truck of Don and Rhea Pirch, Bissell lured Don Pirch on to the road, running him down with his car. Bissell...