English True Crime

Decades after Richard Ramirez left 13 dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder. Philip Carlo's classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined. The story of Ramirez is a bizarre and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.

In Creekstone, Texas, a small, quiet suburb of Houston, football was king and David Temple was a prince. A former high school and college gridiron-star-turned-coach, he had a fairy-tale marriage to bright, vivacious Belinda Lucas, a teacher at the local high school who was so warm and popular her colleagues called her "The Sunshine Girl". The fairy tale ended savagely on January 11, 1999, when Belinda's lifeless body was discovered in a closet. Her skull had been shattered by a shotgun blast at close range. She was eight months pregnant.

If not for the bodies discovered in the woods behind their new home, Garrick and Olivia Lockwood couldn't have afforded to buy number 25 The Avenue. It's the fresh start they and their two children badly need. Soon, these terrible crimes will be solved, they tell themselves, and once Garrick has remodeled, he's confident they'll sell the house for a profit. But the darkest secrets can reside on quiet, ordinary streets like this - behind the doors of well-kept houses and neighbors' friendly faces....

On a cold December evening in 2016 a terrified young woman turns up at a brothel in Germany with a French passport but doesn’t speak a word of French. The owner is suspicious and alerts the German authorities, igniting a groundbreaking and history-making global investigation where ancient rituals collide with the modern world of crime fighting.

In August 2009, a 39-year-old policewoman went missing in Tamil Nadu. A month later, her heavily decomposed body was discovered in a drain by a graveyard. She had been brutally violated and killed. As the investigation started, the police detected a pattern in more than a dozen unsolved rape-and-murder cases with mutilated bodies of women turning up in graveyards, drains and empty fields along the highways. It didn’t take the police too long to find out that the perpetrator was a trucker named M Jaishankar.

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.

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now. For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined.

Revisiting Dr. Michael Stone's groundbreaking 22-level Gradations of Evil Scale, a hierarchy of evil behavior first introduced in the book The Anatomy of Evil, Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato, a fellow violence and serious psychopathology expert, here provide even more detail, using dozens of cases to exemplify the categories along the continuum. The New Evil also presents compelling evidence that, since a cultural tipping-point in the 1960s, certain types of violent crime have emerged that in earlier decades never or very rarely occurred.

Will Johnnie Veal—convicted of the murder of two police officers in 1970—be granted parole after 50 years in prison? How can he convince the parole board he’s reformed when he insists he’s innocent? What is prison time even supposed to accomplish? These are the questions that propel The Parole Room forward as it builds toward Johnnie’s 20th parole hearing—after 19 rejections.

From the victim or victims, the crime scenes, and the criminal investigations that ensued, we follow 12 true crime stories, some of which are solved and some that are still mysteries. We also take a look at cases where wrongful convictions have occurred and why. These true murder stories will take you on a journey across the globe and even back in time in some cases. Family massacres, individual true crime murder cases, and situations where murder goes unseen in suicide cases, plus many more.

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.

Cold-blooded murders, tragic kidnappings, cruel torture, ruthless abuse, devastating family dramas and a millennium robbery. Real criminal cases. In the third volume of his book series True Crime International, bestselling author Adrian Langenscheid once again reports truthfully, factually and free of any sensationalism about shocking crimes in people' s immediate neighborhood. Crimes that have actually happened - and not so long ago. Three excellent podcasts have contributed 5 cases to the book.

Twelve true crime stories of murder and mayhem. Fifth audiobook of the True Crime Case Histories Series (2020). When researching these stories, I commonly use actual police reports, court documents, and first-hand descriptions. Some of the details can be disconcerting. I do my best to not leave out any of the details in my audiobooks, no matter how depraved they may be. My intent is not to shock, but to show precisely how twisted the mind of a killer can be. The stories in this volume are shocking and disturbing, but they’re also true. These things really do happen in the world.

A rousing tale of espionage and unsung valor, this is the captivating true story of Vera Atkins, Great Britain's spymistress from the age of 25. With her fierce intelligence, blunt manner, personal courage, and exceptional informants, Vera ran countless missions throughout the 1930s. After rising to the leadership echelon in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert intelligence agency formed by Winston Churchill, she became head of a clandestine army in World War II.

The Parable of the Knocker is a nonfiction book about the investigation, prosecution, and trial of a notorious serial killer, Charles Severance. Severance committed his crimes in the City of Alexandria, Virginia, an affluent, historic community just miles south of Washington, DC. Over the course of a decade, Severance ambushed three outstanding Alexandria residents in their middle-class neighborhood by knocking on their front doors in broad daylight and shooting them unexpectedly when they answered the knock.

On July 14th, 1966, Richard Franklin Speck swept through a quiet Chicago townhouse like a summer tornado and stabbed, strangled, and killed eight young nurses in a violent sexual rampage. By morning, only one nurse, Corazon Amurao, had miraculously survived, and her scream of terror was heard around the world. As the eight bodies were carried out of the small building, the coroner, who had seen the carnage up close, told a gathering crowd: "It is the crime of the century!"

A true-crime collection culled from the crime files of the New York Times best-selling series, Notorious USA.

In 1974, Dennis Lynn Rader stalked and murdered a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and then another, until he had 10 victims. He named himself “B.T.K.” (bind, torture, kill) and wrote notes that terrorized the city. He remained on the loose for 30 years.

Millions of people–looking to cheat on their partners–signed up for Ashley Madison in the early 2000s, seeking a private space to share their public desires. The promise of discretion was shattered in the summer of 2015, when anonymous hackers stole the company’s cache of user information and published it worldwide. The result? One of the most shocking data breaches of the internet age. Overnight, millions of unfaithful spouses had their real names, addresses and sexual preferences published online in a searchable database that anyone could browse.

A promising young attorney and a dedicated family man, Michael Fletcher seemed to have it all. But in the summer of 2000, Michael found himself standing trial for the murder of his pregnant wife, Leann. The verdict - guilty of second-degree murder - would leave friends, family, and the public at large scrambling to make sense of a twisted and frightening series of events that ended in the brutal killing of Leann Fletcher. What could possibly have led Michael Fletcher to commit such a gruesome act?