American True Crime

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

I Did It is the story of Gina Champion-Cain, the mastermind behind the largest woman-led Ponzi scheme in US history—$400 million. This real-life story includes a multitude of participants, banks, hedge funds, egomaniacs, and small-time crooks, all fueled by greed, stupidity, and a keen desire to look the other way. And even when they were looking in the right direction, all of these people and entities saw nothing.

George Washington Gayle is not a name known to history. But it soon will be. Forget what you thought you knew about why Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. No, it was not mere sectional hatred, Booth’s desire to become famous, Lincoln’s advocacy of black suffrage, or a plot masterminded by Jefferson Davis to win the war by crippling the Federal government.

Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America recounts the story of three innocent victims, all of whom suffered violent deaths through no fault of their own: Vaudine Maddox in 1933 in Tuscaloosa, Sergeant Gene Ballard in 1979 in Birmingham, and Michael Donald in 1981 in Mobile. The death of Vaudine Maddox - and the lynchings that followed - serves as a cautionary tale about the violence that occurred in the same region nearly 50 years later.

When John Wilkes Booth fired his Derringer point-blank into President Abraham Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of dramatic consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Washingtonians and Americans alike. In a split second, the story of a nation was changed. During the hours that followed, America's future would hinge on what happened in a cramped back bedroom at Petersen's Boardinghouse, directly across the street from Ford's Theatre.

Using court transcripts, personal interviews, and police records to retrace the key events of the case, this journey to uncover the truth about what happened to Richard Davis provides a disturbing, eye-opening look into the problems of today's military. After surviving tours in Bosnia and Iraq, Davis was mercilessly tortured and ultimately murdered before his remains were set on fire in the woods of Georgia.

Part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and part landmark legal case, The Third Degree is the true story of a young man’s abuse by the Washington police and an arduous seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis, and J. Edgar Hoover. The ordeal culminated in a sweeping Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for the Miranda warning many years later.

An ancient shaman and his granddaughter travel to Harvard to pick up 2,047 skeletons stolen from the ruins of their family pueblo. She wants their time together to heal their broken hearts. He hopes the road trip will make her appreciate family. He fashions a dreamcatcher which sometimes hurls Hollow-Woman into the past to experience her ancestors.

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.

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England - for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly didn't commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before she was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison. In her opinion, a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name.

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within 24 hours of the discovery of the murder, would be inextricably linked in the nation's imagination to an exceptionally brutal, modern-day lynching. In this superbly written examination of the murder and its aftermath, award-winning journalist Joyce King brings us on a journey that begins at the crime scene.

The hood is an addiction. An addiction that pulls as seductively and fiercely as the drugs hustled on its streets. And living in it is a daily exercise in survival. Raised impoverished in the streets of Miami, David Lee Windecher was only 11 years old when he was arrested for shoplifting. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, deciding to take what he believed he deserved. But that was the beginning for David.

This is the riveting account of one of the first Americans to spy for Joseph Stalin. A brilliant Columbia University graduate, Isaiah Oggins went to Berlin to establish a safe house and spy for his country - but he turned coat. Working for the Soviets, he was nevertheless poisoned in 1947 on Stalin's orders. Classified for decades, Oggins' story is a cloak-and-dagger tale to rival the best novels.

He is a street star from the Southside of Jamaica Queens and a towering icon from the underworld of New York. At the dawn of the crack era he was the Don Dada of Baisley Projects and set the tone and styles for the would-be rappers and future CEO's of the music industry. They catered to and emulated him and his crew. He was the original hip-hop hustler and an American Gangster of epic proportions. Listen to his story today.

In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.

American Animals is a coming-of-age crime memoir centered around three childhood friends: Warren, Spencer, and Eric. Disillusioned with freshman year of college, and determined to escape from their mundane Middle-American existences, the three hatch a plan to steal millions of dollars' worth of artwork and rare manuscripts from a university museum. The story that unfolds is a gripping adventure of teenage rebellion, from meetings with black-market art dealers in Amsterdam, to the opulent galleries of Christie's auction house in Rockefeller Center.

Il resoconto autobiografico (da parte di uno che di mestiere faceva il ladro e non lo scrittore) di una sensazionale rapina all'American Express nei primi anni del Novecento, nonché della vita all'Île du Diable, dove Guerin fu deportato dai francesi quando lo pizzicarono e lo condannarono all'ergastolo, e della successiva, ancor più clamorosa fuga dal carcere.

There was no shortage of well-known public enemies like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, but none fascinated the American public as much as Bonnie and Clyde. While the duo and their Barrow Gang were no more murderous than other outlaws of the era, the duo's romantic relationship, and the discovery of photographs at one of their hideouts, added a more human dimension to Bonnie and Clyde, even as they were gunning down civilians and cops alike.

The '90s were a time when big changes were happening across the world. Unfortunately, with big changes also comes instability and crime, resulting in many heinous individuals that got a chance to commit them and cases that many are terrified to just hear about. In this audiobook, find 12 such cases from all over the world.

Revised and updated with new information, this Jane Addams Award-winner is an in-depth examination of the Emmett Till murder case, a catalyst of the civil rights movement.