California True Crime

Gruesome California is a collection of true-life stories, most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts that were published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book have ever made it into print, except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, many of them are lucky to rate a paragraph. Listen to them now, if you dare!

Young, beautiful, popular, intelligent: You can have all these things going for you and still find yourself in situations you cannot get out of. In Gone Too Soon, author Don Lasseter explores three cases of young lives cut short.

In this group of stories from the Notorious USA archives, we find three ladies who will do anything, just about anything, for money. This journey has no limit to the amount of twists and turns it will take, and things are not always how they appear. Miki McDermott, June Gravlee, and Olga Thomas all had selfish desires to take what did not belong to them. Enlisting friends and family in their devious plots could be a stroke of genius or just may be their undoing.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Charles Manson è l'uomo che ha annegato in un mare di sangue il sogno del flower power: insieme alla sua "Family" è stato il protagonista di alcuni dei crimini più efferati della storia americana, come il massacro di Cielo Drive, in cui l'attrice Sharon Tate (all'epoca incinta) venne trucidata con più di 160 coltellate, o gli omicidi LaBianca.

This suspenseful true story of a drug cartel hitman who got away with murder after murder in California's Central Valley over three decades reveals how the criminal justice system fails our most vulnerable immigrant communities. On the surface, 58-year-old Jose Martinez didn't seem evil or even that remarkable - just a regular neighbor, good with cars and devoted to his family. But in between taking his children to Disneyland and visiting his mom, Martinez was also one of the most skilled professional killers police had ever seen.

I'm often asked why I still do criminal defense. My response is because the stories are the best. Richard Stanley has proven adage to be true ten times over. This is a fascinating story told in masterful fashion that is riveting and entertaining.

Most familiar with the Wild West know Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp for the famous shootout on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But few know the later years of the close-knit Earp family, which revolved around patriarch Nicholas Earp, and their last push at a major monetary coup in Los Angeles.