Family Murders True Crime

Beneath a veneer of respectability and religion, Mary Winkler's soul festered as she struggled to be obedient and loving to her husband and her God. Her suppressed anguish exploded in a shotgun blast that took the life of her husband, preacher Matthew Winkler. Mary packed up her three young daughters and fled to the beach, leaving an endless trail of questions in her wake. Would anyone ever make sense of the tragedy in Selmer, Tennessee?

For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline.

Blood was found at his home in Franklin County, PA. All evidence pointed to one suspect: Scott North, a former employee of Carl’s, a regular attendee of Franklin County courts, and the son of a Chambersburg, PA cop. After burglarizing a tavern, a judge granted him work release, and then another dismissed a recent gun charge. Days later, he ran from his unsupervised worksite and began a crime spree that may have ended with the murder of Carl Wade Ryder.

The affluent suburb of Cheshire, Connecticut, seemed like the perfect place for Dr. William Petit and his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to raise their two lovely daughters.... Until July 23, 2007, when, according to police, two ex-cons invaded the Petit home hoping to embark on a routine robbery - one that would ultimately prove deadly.

Liz Catalano is shocked when a DNA ancestry test reveals she’s adopted. But she could never have imagined trying to connect with her unknown family would plunge her into an FBI investigation of a notorious serial killer. The Tri-State Killer has been abducting pairs of women for 40 years, evading all police efforts and leaving barely a trace behind. Can Liz figure out who in her new family is the cold-blooded killer? And can she save his newest victims before it’s too late?

On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers—the ship’s captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog—along with the ship’s crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea. When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore—on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans.

In this remarkable memoir, a harrowing true story of family, violence, guilt, and atonement, a journalist reflects on his own journey to come to terms with his brother’s terrible crimes - and to find justice for the young girl he killed.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds.

On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of 24-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub - dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind. But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. And Ocey's own mother and two aunts were far from the sorrowful caretakers they appeared to be.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

A psychopathic criminal on the run from prison. A family of five held hostage in their home. A frantic police manhunt across the snowbound Derbyshire moors. Just one survivor. The definitive account of the terrifying 1977 Pottery Cottage murders that shocked Britain. For three days, escaped prisoner Billy Hughes played macabre psychological games with Gill Moran and her family, keeping them in separate rooms of their home while secretly murdering them one by one.

RELENTLESS PURSUIT follows the personal mission of a Washington, D.C., federal homicide prosecutor who dedicated himself to bringing justice and closure to the family of a brutally murdered mother and daughter, a case during which the author's own father passed away.

In his account of the sensational life and murder of Grady Stiles Jr., also known as the legendary carnival freak Lobster Boy, author Fred Rosen explains how Stiles' death was engineered by his wife, Mary Teresa, the carny known as the Electrified Girl. Rosen describes how Mary Teresa arranged for her husband's murder after years of physical and emotional abuse. During Mary Teresa's dramatic trial, Rosen becomes a character in his own book.

In 1991 Nancy Dillard Lyon, daughter of a powerful Dallas real estate tycoon, was murdered, poisoned with arsenic. Nancy’s brother became convinced her adulterous husband, Richard, was responsible. And so Richard was arrested, tried, and convicted - and sentenced to life in prison. But did the evidence support this conviction?

Janet March had it all: a corporate lawyer husband, two beautiful children, a promising career as an artist, and a dream house she designed herself. But behind closed doors, her husband led a destructive double life. On August 16, 1996, Janet had an appointment to finally file for divorce. But she never arrived. On the night of August 15, she vanished. Janet's disappearance incited a massive search and media frenzy that revealed her husband Perry's seedy dealings.

One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met. When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Richard's seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah, was sitting on the living room couch with a high-powered rifle - just in case her brother missed.

For twenty years, Ken and Kristine Fitzhugh and their two sons had lived lives of comfortable middle-class normality. Then came the shocking news that Kristine Fitzhugh was dead, the victim of a terrible accident.... By the time the Palo Alto Police Department looked closer at the death of Kristine Fitzhugh, there could be only one conclusion. Someone had murdered Kristine in her own home, inflicting a series of horrific blows to the back of her head, and then cleaned up the mess to make it look like an accident.

On October 8th, 2009, Bobby Jamison, his wife Sherilynn, and their six-year-old daughter Madyson, set off for a drive from their home in Eufaula, Oklahoma, to the nearby Sans Bois Mountains. They didn't return that day, or the next. A week later, their truck was found abandoned on a mountain road. Inside was their dog, malnourished but alive, the family's cell phones, wallets, and $32,000 in cash.

As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.” This observation seems especially true in matters of family, when the fury between generations is often never resolved and instead secretly carried, a wound that cannot heal. For David Berg, this is truer than for most, and once you listen to the story of his family, you will understand why he held it privately for so long and why the betrayals between parent and child can be the most wrenching of all.

In Backseat Tragedies: Hot Car Deaths, best-selling true crime authors RJ Parker and JJ Slate explore the circumstances that led to the deaths of over 20 children who died of hyperthermia, or heatstroke, in a car. They explore the science of how quickly a car can heat to deadly temperatures and why the human brain can so easily be tricked into forgetting something as important as a child. They also highlight important steps we can take as a community to prevent future casualties.