The Story Behind the Crimes

For decades, American True Crime books have held an irresistible allure for readers. They plunge us headfirst into the heart of real-life mysteries, taking us on journeys through heinous crimes and the relentless pursuit of justice. Whether it's the infamous cases that have dominated news headlines or the lesser-known incidents that unveil the grim underbelly of society, these 17 True Crime books provide a rare glimpse into the human psyche and the intricate web of the criminal justice system.

The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History's Most Astonishing Murder Ring

by Patti McCracken

The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other--a 1920s midwife who may have been the century's most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men.

The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in modern-day Hungary. To look at the unlikely lineup of murderesses--village wives, mothers, and daughters--was to come to the shocking realization that this could have happened anywhere, and to anyone. At the center of it all was a sharp-minded village midwife, a "smiling Buddha" known as Auntie Suzy, who distilled arsenic from flypaper and distributed it to the women of Nagyrév. "Why are you bothering with him?" Auntie Suzy would ask, as she produced an arsenic-filled vial from her apron pocket. In the beginning, a great many used the deadly solution to finally be free of cruel and abusive spouses.

Behold the Monster: Confronting America's Most Prolific Serial Killer

by Jillian Lauren - Michael Connelly

Jillian Lauren had no idea what she was getting into when she wrote her first letter to prolific serial killer Samuel Little. All she knew was her research had led her to believe he was good for far more murders than the three for which he had been convicted. While the two exchanged dozens of letters and embarked on hundreds of hours of interviews, Lauren gained the trust of a monster. After maintaining his innocence for decades, Little confessed to the murders of ninety-three women, often drawing his victims in haunting detail as he spoke. How could one man evade justice, manipulating the system for over four decades?

Coal Country Killing: A Culture, a Union, and the Murders That Changed It All

by Robert K Tanenbaum - Steve Jackson

A triumphant, uplifting true justice story led by jury trial expert, Richard A. Sprague--the indomitable, nationally renowned prosecutor who engaged in the most intense manhunt investigation in police history.

Coal Country Killing: A Culture, A Union, And The Murders That Changed It All, revolves around the cold-blooded 1969 assassination of United Mineworkers of America "reform candidate" Jock Yablonski, and murder of his wife and daughter in their Pennsylvania farmhouse. But driving the story are the extraordinary efforts of a tenacious special prosecutor and his "army" of investigators to bring the gunmen, the union boss who ordered the murders, and his henchmen who saw them carried out, to justice.

The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius

by Scott C Johnson

The spellbinding tale of an epic international manhunt for a psychopathic con artist who exploited the dreams of creators to steal dozens of identities and millions of dollars.

Blending years of deep reporting with distinctive, powerful prose, Scott C. Johnson's unique true crime narrative recounts the tale of the brilliantly cunning imposter who carved a path of financial and emotional destruction across the world. Gifted with a diabolical flair for impersonation, manipulation, and deception, the Con Queen used their skill with accents and deft psychological insight to sweep through the entertainment industry. Johnson traces the origins of this mastermind and follows the years-long investigation of a singularly determined private detective who helped deliver them to the FBI. Described by one victim as a "crazy, evil genius," the Con Queen enacted one of the most elaborate scams ever to hit Hollywood--the perfect criminal, committing the perfect crime for our time.

Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious Onecoin Cryptoqueen

by Jennifer McAdam

The OneCoin global cryptocurrency fraud stole tens of billions of dollars from ordinary people around the world. Unlike Madoff or Enron, who relieved the world's wealthiest investors of their cash, the exploiting genius of the OneCoin scam was targeting the poorest people in the world, the "unbanked"--those who struggled to live or get mainstream banking support. The arrogant assumption was that the downtrodden wouldn't have the means or will to fight back. They didn't reckon on Jen McAdam--a teenage mother, young grandmother, and modern-day Erin Brockovich.

Jen's father left her £15,000 when he died: his savings from living a careful life in a small Scottish mining town. Jen wanted a safe investment for this money to fund a better life for her family. She was digitally savvy, and she had heard of people making fortunes with Bitcoin. When she saw the promotional material for OneCoin--the founder Dr. Ruja Ignatova featured in major reputable media outlets; videos of celebrity events; gushing video testimonials of people, just like Jen, who had changed their lives--she was entranced.

Fire on the Levee: The Murder of Henry Glover and the Search for Justice After Hurricane Katrina (Original)

by Jared Fishman - Joseph Hooper

In 2009, Jared Fishman was a young prosecutor working on low-level civil rights cases in the Justice Department when a file landed on his desk. That folder contained two items: a story from The Nation magazine examining a mysterious death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an autopsy report for a man named Henry Glover, whose charred remains were found in a burned-out car two weeks after the storm. The autopsy report, bafflingly, listed no cause of death. But according to The Nation story, a gravely wounded Glover had last been seen in a car driven by a New Orleans police officer.

Intrigued despite the lack of evidence, Fishman set out to learn what happened to Glover. He flew to New Orleans and teamed up with a rookie FBI agent, and together they started to track down anyone with information about what had happened to Glover on that day.

Genealogy of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night

by Lisa Belkin

Independence Day weekend, 1960: a young cop is murdered, shocking his close-knit community in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, his identity still unknown. But on a beach not far away, a young Army doctor, on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison, faces a chilling realization. He knows who the shooter is. In fact, the man--a prisoner out on parole--had called him only days before. By helping his former charge and trainee, the doctor, a believer in second chances, may have inadvertently helped set the murder into motion. And with that one phone call, may have sealed a policeman's fate.

Alvin Tarlov, David Troy, and Joseph DeSalvo were all born of the Great Depression, all with grandparents who'd left different homelands for the same American Dream. How did one become a doctor, one a cop, and one a convict? In Genealogy of a Murder, journalist Lisa Belkin traces the paths of each of these three men--one of them her stepfather. Her canvas is large, spanning the first half of the 20th century: immigration, the struggles of the working class, prison reform, medical experiments, politics and war, the nature/nurture debate, epigenetics, the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, and the history of motorcycle racing. It is also intimate: a look into the workings of the mind and heart.

Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice

by Christine Kenneally

The shocking secret history of twentieth-century orphanages--which for decades hid violence, abuse, and deaths within their walls

For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events--abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths--took places inside orphanages. The survivors have been trying to tell their astonishing stories for a long time, but disbelief, secrecy, and trauma have kept them from breaking through. For ten years, Christine Kenneally has been on a quest to uncover the harrowing truth.

Centering her story on St. Joseph's, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice. Ghosts of the Orphanage is an incredible true crime story and a reckoning with a past that has stayed buried for too long, with tragic consequences.

I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever

by Barbara Rae-Venter

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer--and how she became the nation's leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

Rae-Venter leads readers on a vivid journey through the many cases she tackled, often starting with little more than a DNA sample. From the first criminal case she ever solved--uncovering the long-lost identity of a child abductee--to the heartbreaking story of the Billboard Boy, whose skeletal remains were discovered along a highway, to the search for the Golden State Killer, Rae-Venter shares haunting, often thrilling accounts of how she helped solve some of America's most chilling cold cases in the span of just three years.

Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore's Deadliest Gang Leader

by Mark Bowden

Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world;
it earned Baltimore its nickname Bodymore, Murderland, and was made notorious
by David Simon's classic HBO series "The Wire." Drug deals dominate street
corners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds.

Montana Barronette grew up in the center of it all. He was
the leader of the gang "Trained to Go," or TTG, and when he was finally
arrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been nicknamed "Baltimore's
Number One Trigger Puller." Under Tana's reign, TTG dominated Sandtown. After a
string of murders are linked to TTG, each with dozens of witnesses too
intimidated to testify, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison for
life. For them, this was never about drugs: It was about serial murder.

Little, Crazy Children: A True Crime Tragedy of Lost Innocence

by James Renner

For readers of Ann Rule and Gregg Olsen, a riveting new true crime book from the acclaimed author of True Crime Addict and creator/host of the podcasts True Crime This Week and The Philosophy of Crime, as he explores the unsolved murder of 16-year-old Lisa Pruett in the real life town of the bestselling novel Little Fires Everywhere for a painstakingly researched account of a senseless and heartbreaking tragedy and the people who were pulled into its aftermath.

In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett, a poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend, when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy's home.

Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy

by Alex Mar

On a spring afternoon in 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a fifteen-year-old girl kills an elderly woman in a violent home invasion. In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in.

When Paula is sentenced to death, no one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader. But the tide begins to shift when the victim's grandson Bill forgives the girl, against the wishes of his family, and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world--reaching as far away as the Vatican--as newspapers cover the story on their front pages and millions sign petitions in support of Paula.

Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders

by John Glatt

Among the lush, tree-lined waterways of South Carolina low country, the Murdaugh name means power. A century-old, multimillion-dollar law practice has catapulted the family into incredible wealth and local celebrity--but it was an unimaginable tragedy that would thrust them into the national spotlight. On June 7th, 2021, prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh discovered the bodies of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, on the grounds of their thousand-acre hunting lodge. The mystery deepened only months later when Alex himself was discovered shot in the head on a local roadside.

But as authorities scrambled for clues and the community reeled from the loss and media attention, dark secrets about this Southern legal dynasty came to light. The Murdaughs, it turned out, were feared as much as they were loved. And they wouldn't hesitate to wield their influence to protect one of their own; two years before he was killed, a highly intoxicated Paul Murdaugh was at the helm of a boat when it crashed and killed a teenage girl, and his light treatment by police led to speculation that privilege had come into play. As bombshells of financial fraud were revealed and more suspicious deaths were linked to the Murdaughs, a new portrait of Alex Murdaugh emerged: a desperate man on the brink of ruin who would do anything, even plan his own death, to save his family's reputation.

We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

by Roxanna Asgarian

On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children.

Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children's birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts' adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian's reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

What the Dead Know: Learning about Life as a New York City Death Investigator

by Barbara Butcher

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner's Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous--and she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that's her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in a cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation's largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members' descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

The Delphi Murders: The Quest To Find 'The Man On The Bridge'

by Brian Whitney - Nic Edwards

On February 13, 2017, two Indiana teenagers, Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, went for a walk in the woods near the abandoned Monon High Bridge.

They never returned home. Their bodies were discovered on Valentine's Day morning, sparking a torrent of news coverage and social media speculation that engrossed the attention of people around the world.

A grainy photo of the suspected killer walking across the bridge and a chilling cellphone recording of his voice saying "down the hill" captured the public's attention. Numerous possible suspects were brought to the attention of the authorities but dismissed, leaving everyone wondering who could have committed such a heinous crime.

Smash, Smash, Smash: The True Story of Kai the Hitchhiker

by Philip Fairbanks - Alissa Fleck - Wendy S Painting

"That woman was in danger, so I ran up behind him with a hatchet... Smash, smash, SUH-MASH!!!"

Millions of people heard these words and shared the viral video with their friends. This mysterious surfing hitchhiker then vanished as quickly as he appeared, only to reappear on many late night talk shows and fan videos. But 3 months later, he was arrested and charged with killing a prominent New Jersey lawyer... in self defense against a sex assault.

Who is this mysterious hitchhiker? What was with that lawyer who drugged and assaulted him? Why would the investigators destroy evidence, tamper with witnesses, and shut the public out of the trial?

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