American True Crime

October 25, 2023 was just an ordinary night in Lewiston, a small, working class city of 37,000 in central Maine. Friends and families had gathered to do what they loved to do with the people they wanted to be with at a bowling alley called Just-in-Time Recreation Center and Schemengees, a popular sports bar and restaurant. They felt immune from the violent crime that seemed to wrack the rest of the country in a state that the FBI had just named the safest in America.

In The Rising Clamor: The American Press, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Cold War, David P. Hadley explores the relationships that developed between the CIA and the press, its evolution over time, and its practical impact from the creation of the CIA to the first major congressional investigations of its activities in 1975-1976 by the Church and Pike Committees.

On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man - whose real name was James Earl Ray -drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace's racist presidential campaign. With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel.

In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.

America has a long and complicated fascination with serial killers. When we think about the most infamous of these killers, we generally think of men like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or John Wayne Gacy. Those names make headlines while there’s the often-repeated myth that suggests there are no female serial killers. After all, most of us couldn’t name a woman on the same scale of infamy at BTK or the elusive Zodiac Killer, can we? As it so often is, the truth is far more complicated. Women kill.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

The man who would become the Father of Organized Crime in the United States was born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily, but he would quickly make a name for himself after his family moved to New York City when he was still a child. By his teenage years, he was running the streets, organizing his own teenage gang, and moving in circles with the likes of Meyer Lansky, who would become key figures in Lucky's rise to power.

In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the “Big Red” high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take listeners beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture.

From a colonial manse in New England to a small-town home in Iowa to a Beverly Hills mansion, these residences have taken on a life of their own, gaining everything from local lore and gossip to national - and even global - infamy. Here, writer Steve Lehto recounts the stories behind the houses where Lizzie Borden supposedly gave her stepmother "40 whacks", where the real Amityville Horror was first unleashed by gunfire, and where the demented acts of the Manson Family horrified a nation.

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.

According to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: Organized crime. In his classic expos, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America's favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.

Chris Thomas is not yet 30 years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the reputation of her family. Now, 20 years later, Thomas takes listeners behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary on finding Elizabeth Smart.

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas, and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets to automatic weapons and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925.

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

The Girls is a profound exploration of trust, ambition, betrayal, and self-discovery. Award-winning journalist Abigail Pesta unveils this deeply reported narrative at a time when the nation is wrestling with the implications of the MeToo movement. How do the women who grew up with Nassar reconcile the monster in the news with the man they once trusted? In The Girls, we learn that their answers to that wrenching question are as rich, insightful, and varied as the human experience itself.

In the horrifying annals of American crime, the 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 US history.

We all love a mystery - but what about a mystery that has no solution? Delve into the shadowy world of unsolved disappearances and people who have vanished without a trace, never to be seen again. Such strange and chilling tales run the gamut of the terrifying and the bizarre and include crime victims, lost explorers, ships vanished at sea, outdoor disappearances, and supernatural mysteries that defy all explanation.

A gripping work of reportage that, for the first time, tells the story of "Chucky" Taylor, a young American who lost his soul in Liberia, the country where his African father was a ruthless warlord and dictator.