True Child Crime

What makes someone become a serial killer? What goes through the mind of these coldblooded killers while they pretend to be normal like the rest of the world? We can't say for sure for every single one of them - but for those who were caught and told their stories, we can. Plunge yourself into the dark and chilling abyss, and peek inside the minds of the world's most dangerous monsters - the infamous and cold-blooded serial killers.

In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was 13 years old, her father robbed 11 banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the "Mario Brothers Bandit" by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars. In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father.

Criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee goes behind bars to get the last word from some of the worst criminals in the world. They speak of their violence and shocking deeds in their own words, from within some of the hardest prisons on earth. These interviews have been collated into this disturbing and unflinching analysis of the criminal mind. Here is what happens when you meet the people most of us know only from our nightmares and newspaper headlines.

The crime of sextortion has reached epidemic proportions, fuelled by both sex offenders and organised scammers targeting our most vulnerable online. Children are some of the internet's most prolific and most naive users, and increasing numbers are finding themselves caught in an evil web of networked manipulators. Saving Our Kids highlights the dangers lurking in every child's smartphone, web browser and computer game.

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

At three years old, Jodie watched her father murder a woman in a seedy hotel room. He, a true-born sociopath, strolled undetected, using religion as his disguise. A life suffocating the truth wouldn't work for Jodie. The murdered woman's spirit seemed to ignite a search for answers in Jodie's adulthood. A budding darkness around the reality of her past was coming sharply into focus.

Based on years of investigative reporting and unprecedented fieldwork, Walking the Bowl immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities.

As the recent tragedies in Oregon, Arkansas, and Colorado Have shown, children as young as eight years old are capable of murder and violence. No community is safe from this tragic phenomenon, and experts ranging from law enforcement officials to guidance counselors are confused and conflicted about how to approach it.

On Australia day, 26 January 1966, Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont were abducted from Colley Reserve, Glenelg, South Australia, and never seen again, leading to one of Australia's most extensive police investigations and manhunts. Five decades later, no trace of the children has ever been found.

On an unseasonably warm winter evening in Pennsylvania, 15-year-old Patty Desmond sneaked out through the basement of her house. She had a history of running away, and that, combined with an argument with her mother, gave police reason to suspect she’d come home in a week or two.

There have been monsters among us lurking in the darkest corners of America, preying on children since the first settlers arrived on our shores. They have always been with us, stalking the innocent, from the days of the original colonies, to the Gilded Age, the Depression, and beyond. These monsters are not the stuff of fiction. They are bloodcurdlingly real, and they still walk among us, always looking for their next victim.

In 1988 a troubled young man and his flamboyant mother were arrested for murdering a wealthy widow in her New York City mansion. Suddenly America was transfixed by a pair of real-life film noir characters. The media couldn't get enough of the twisted relationship between Sante Kimes and her 23-year-old son Kenny. But the most chilling story of all was never told - until now. Kent Walker, Sante's elder son, reveals how he survived 40 years of "the Dragon Lady's" very special brand of motherly love and still managed to get away.

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

Ted Bundy killed at least 35 girls and women, and possibly hundreds. Was his first victim eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr who disappeared from their Tacoma, Washington neighborhood in 1961? Her body was never found and there were no clues, just two tenacious detectives who spent the rest of their lives trying to solve the case.

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend. Taylor had always struggled to make friends - she felt 'different'. Taylor never knew her father, and her mother wasn't around much. She just didn't understand people and was alone and scared most of the time. That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her - a protector. But when he moved away a few months later, she was easy prey.

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.

Filicide is the intended act of parents killing their children. The act is also regarded as an offense since it amounts to murder. It appears to very unnatural for a parent to end the life of his child. As much as this appears to be inhumane and unimaginable, there are some parents who kill their offspring. We consider mothers to hold the highest status in our lives. For a son, there is no greater being on this planet than his mother. She gives birth to the child, cares for him when he is at his most vulnerable stage, unable to eat or drink, and she feeds him her own milk.

The winter child lived and breathed amongst us for several years. He was brilliant as he moved around society, exercising his charm and wit as he observed seemingly normal people going about their lives...After all is said and done, what do we understand about the fragile nature of mankind, and the reasons behind a life like the winter's child? This is an inward look at the development and sum total of the life of Edmund Kemper, one of the most notrious serial killers in recent history.

Given up for adoption by his mother at only a few weeks old, Robert Black is placed with physically abusive foster parents, setting the tone for who, and what, he'd become - a pedophile and serial killer. Starting at the age of five, he recalls being sexually curious and began placing items in his anus at the age of eight. He'd sexually assault hundreds of little girls before committing his first murder.

Reports indicate that one in twenty children in the UK are being sexually abused at any one time. One in six boys will be sexually abused by the time he is sixteen. One in three children will never tell of their abuse due to ninety percent of child sex abusers being known to the child.