True Crime Evil

Prostitutes and animals could no longer satisfy Peter Kürten’s sexual deviancy. During a burglary of a local tavern, he stumbled upon a nine-year-old girl asleep in her bed. He strangled her, slashed her throat with a pocket knife, and orgasmed upon hearing her blood drip to the floor. His crimes were halted by World War I and an eight-year prison sentence but he unleashed his urges with a spate of brutal murders in 1929 earning him the nickname "The Düsseldorf Monster."

In the 1970s and early '80s, southern California was shocked when dead boys began turning up with disturbing regularity alongside some of the state's most heavily traveled freeways. Victims of sadistic torture, the dead boys and young men had been raped and strangled, and their untimely deaths were eventually attributed to the Freeway Killer, an elusive psychopath whose trail of death would go down in California history as one of the worst true crime stories in the country.

In the heart of Indianapolis in the mid-1960s, through a twist of fate and fortune, a pretty young girl came to live with a 37-year-old mother and her seven children. What began as a temporary childcare arrangement between Sylvia Likens's parents and Gertrude Baniszewski turned into a crime that would haunt cops, prosecutors, and a community for decades to come. When police found Sylvia's emaciated body, with a chilling message carved into her flesh, they knew that she had suffered tremendously before her death.

In the summer of 1998, FBI agent Bob Hilland reluctantly picked up the phone to call the famous psychic John Edward. Bob didn’t expect much from the call, but he was working on an unsolvable cold case and had nowhere else to turn. What Bob never imagined was that the call would lead to a shattering of all his preconceived notions, a huge break in the cold case, and an unlikely crime-solving partnership that spanned twenty-five years.

Jeffrey Dahmer committing his first murder with a fear of being left alone, then went on luring young boys and keeping souvenirs of their skulls. Ted Bundy who appeared to be a generous and charming young man with a brilliant future started with a petty crime and worked his way up to the murder of young women. John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of the community, organizing themed block parties and entertaining as Pogo the Clown, but his early transgressions began to take on more and more sinister forms.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

Profiler Roy Hazelwood is one of the world's leading experts on the strangest and most dangerous of all aberrant offenders - the sexual criminal. In Dark Dreams he reveals the twisted motive and thinking that go into the most reprehensible crimes. He also catalogs the innovative and remarkably effective techniques that allow law enforcement agents to construct psychological profiles of the offenders who commit these crimes.

Shane Hanson was set up for a double homicide when he was only 13-years-old. His relative did it because she blames him for the death of her one true love. After spending five years in juvie, he’s released on parole and determined to reveal the truth about his relative. In the meantime, he meets a girl he develops feelings for. Shane's relative is a psychopath so good at manipulating people that she has managed to get everyone to believe Shane killed two people that she’s killed.

There's the world wide web - the internet we all know that connects us via news, email, forums, shopping, and social media. Then there's the dark web - the parallel internet accessed by only a select few. Eileen Ormsby has spent the past five years exploring every corner of the dark web. She has shopped on darknet markets, contributed to forums, waited in red rooms, and been threatened by hitmen on murder-for-hire sites.

Of all the many psychopaths and sociopaths that have hunted for human victims throughout history, few have been more disturbing or mysterious than Christopher Bernard Wilder - the Beauty Queen Killer. From the middle of the 1960s until 1984, Wilder sexually assaulted countless women and murdered at least nine in Australia and the United States. The Beauty Queen Killer was not only a true psychopath, but also a hunter, as he carefully chose attractive girls and young women to victimize.

The Calabrian Mafia in Australia is alive and well. This is the first time its real story in this country has ever been told. The Calabrian mafia is Australia's oldest, largest and most ruthless crime syndicate, trafficking drugs worth billions of dollars and laundering the proceeds through sophisticated international networks. Enforcing discipline with age-old tools of violence and intimidation, the Calabrians have been responsible for nearly 40 murders in Australia since the mid-1970s and many more before that.

Richmond, Virginia. On the morning of October 19, 1979, parolee James Briley stood before a judge and vowed to quit the criminal life. That same day James met with his brothers, Linwood and Anthony, and 16-year-old neighbor Duncan Meekins. What they planned - and carried out - would make them American serial killer legends and reveal to police investigators a seven-month rampage of rape, robbery, and murder exceeding in brutality already documented cases of psychopaths, sociopaths, and sex criminals.

John Christie was a man with many secrets, and his flat at 10 Rillington Place in London would become known as one of the original houses of horror. Former soldier, special constable, and husband, John was to become regarded as one of the worst British serial killers to date, and one that left a lot more questions than answers following his execution.

Among the annals of American serial killers, few were as complex and prolific as Joseph Paul Franklin. At a gangly 5'11, Franklin hardly looked imposing, but once he put a rifle in his hands and an interracial couple in his cross hairs, Joseph Paul Franklin was as deadly as any serial killer. In this true crime story, you will learn about how one man turned his hatred into a vocation of murder, which eventually left over 20 people dead across America.

In 1999, Emmon Bodfish was murdered in his home in the wealthy enclave of Orinda, California, just east of San Francisco. For the young crime-scene analyst Paul Holes, it quickly became the most bizarre and surprising case of his storied career. It was immediately clear how Emmon had died: by being hit over the head with a heavy object. What wasn’t clear was who did it and why.

Real Life Evil is the first book in a compelling series of true-crime short stories for listeners who don't have time for a full-length novel.

In April 2014, the world awoke to the shocking news that the terrorist group Boko Haram had kidnapped nearly 300 school-aged girls and taken them deep into the forests of Nigeria. When veteran journalist Mellissa Fung travelled to Nigeria, she discovered that the scope of the kidnappings had been vastly under-reported. Hundreds—possibly thousands—more girls had been taken against their will and forced to become child brides to soldiers and leaders of Boko Haram. Some of the captives escaped and returned to their villages, many with children in tow.

Most Evil II is Steve Hodel's follow-up investigation (2009-2015) into his father's potential murders and introduces new evidence and additional linkage obtained by him over the past six years. Included in that evidence is the solving of the Zodiac's 45-year-cryptic cipher, which gives us the answer to the question asked in Most Evil: Were Black Dahlia Avenger and Zodiac the same serial killer?

Some would say, we, the people of now, are living in the future. And as we take the time to look around at the infinite inventions and creative scientific solutions humanity has gifted us with to date, it's easy to understand their sentiment. But what about the often overlooked, but gravely authentic past of the depravities humankind has stooped down to under the guise of “science?”

John Wayne Gacy raped, tortured, and murdered 33 boys and young men, burying most of them in the crawlspace under his Chicago home. Karen Conti was in high school at the time watching the bodies being removed on the television news. Fourteen years pass. Through a twist of fate, Conti, now a young and inexperienced attorney, is called upon to handle Gacy’s final death row appeals. The serial killer soon becomes her most famous, difficult, and haunting client.