American Crime

One of the 20th-century's most darkly beautiful works of crime fiction - a story of carny life, spiritualism, and a con man of merciless resolve.

Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his siblings idolized their dad. Tall, strong, smart, and brave, the self-taught Cherokee regaled his family with stories of his World War II feats. But as time passed, David discovered the other side of Thurston Crow, the ex-con with his own code of ethics that justified cruelty, violence, lies - even murder. A shrewd con artist with a genius IQ, Thurston intimidated David with beatings to coerce him into doing his criminal bidding. David's mom, too mentally ill to care for her children, couldn't protect him.

In the early morning hours of August 13, 2018, Shanann Watts was dropped off at her Frederick, Colorado, home by a colleague after returning from a business trip. It was the last time anyone would see her alive. By the next day, Shanann and her two young daughters, Bella and Celeste, had been reported missing, and her husband, Chris Watts, was appearing on the local news, pleading for his family's safe return. But Chris Watts already knew that he would never see his family again. Less than 24 hours after his desperate plea, Watts made a shocking confession to police.

The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most people have never heard of Israel Keyes, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in modern history American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.

Mike DeBardeleben was known as the Mall Passer for the way he passed off fake money at local shopping centers. But when US Secret Service agents finally arrested him, they were met with more than just phony bills. They found that their counterfeiter led a shocking double life.... DeBardeleben's home was littered with drugs, bondage gear, and a collection of audio tapes in which he recorded the abuse of his countless victims.

At 5:02 p.m. on June 5, 1986, an emergency call came into the local sheriff’s office in the small town of Auburn, Washington State. A distressed housewife, Stella Nickell, said her husband, Bruce, was having a seizure. Officers rushed to the Nickells' mobile home to find Stella standing frozen at the door…. Bruce was on the floor fighting for his life.

Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

The romance of the West is built on an endless armature of shootouts and train robberies, cowboys versus Indians, white hat versus black, and everybody versus the wilderness. From John Colter's harrowing escape from the Blackfeet to Hugh Glass' six-week crawl to civilization after a grizzly attack, from Custer's final moments to John Wesley Powell's treacherous run through the rapids of the Grand Canyon, Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears takes the top 50 wildest episodes in the region's history and presents them to the listener in one convenient, narrative-driven package.

Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live - northern Minnesota along the Red River. Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms. She's tough as nails, five feet two inches, blue jeans, blue jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano takes you inside John Gotti's inner circle to reveal the dark hearts and violent deeds of the most remorseless and cold-blooded characters in organized crime. Men so vicious even the other mafia families were terrified of them. Meet Gotti's Boys....

Emery Thompson hates Calvin Chamberlain. From the way he acts like he’s better than everyone to the way he moves through the world thinking his podcast is the cream of the crop, every little thing about the man gets to him. Even that dashing, oh-so-confident smile. He’d rather be caught dead than be around the man any longer than necessary—or admit that last part out loud.

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.

Her name is Renee Blackbear, but what most people call the 19-year-old Ojibwe woman is Cash. She lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota’s Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. She has one friend, the Sheriff Wheaton. He pulled her from her mother’s wrecked car when she was three. Since then, Cash navigated through foster homes and at 13 was working farms, driving trucks.

A mother and her three young children are found hacked to death in their beds. The apparent weapons, an ax and butcher knife, are found nearby. A month later, the husband and father, who was away on a business trip when the bodies were found, is accused of the killings. A successful businessman and devoted member of a fundamentalist religious group, David Hendricks has the total support of his extended family. Police paint a darker picture, and prosecutors face the daunting task of convicting him on a case based on completely circumstantial evidence.

Vegas Duncan's release from prison is right on time for his older brother Junior's engagement to the voluptuous Sonya Brown. Unfortunately Junior's attempt at happiness comes to a screeching halt when Sonya's husband, the mysterious Brother X, and his army of Muslim hit men declare war on the Duncan clan. Duncan family patriarch LC Duncan has gone up against many foes in his time.

In the jungles of Southeast Asia, American sniper Mack Bolan honed his skills. After 12 years, with 95 confirmed hits, he returns home to Massachusetts. But it's not to reunite with his family, it's to bury them - victims in a mass murder/suicide. Even though Bolan's own father pulled the trigger, he knows the old man was no killer. He was driven to madness by Mafia thugs who have turned his idyllic hometown into a new kind of war zone.

Las Vegas: a city built on obscene wealth and corrupt deals, cunning entrepreneurs, and the ruthless mob. The Cartel's plan to open a casino will rake in cash, but it comes with great sacrifice. The stakes have never been this high, and the rules of the game have never been this hard to manipulate. And when one dead girl, one scorned wife, and one hole in the desert launch a chain of catastrophic events, the Cartel is sent on a downward spiral as they battle the Arabian mob and fight traitors within their circle.

American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis. The narrative, which swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, is populated by a diverse cast of characters.

In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him - only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal Midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son's death.