True Crime Girls

The picture didn't fit. On the surface, Alyssa Bustamante was a pretty 15-year-old girl who excelled in school. Behind closed doors, however, Alyssa was a deeply disturbed teenager with fantasies about killing someone. Her social media pages and diaries all painted the portrait of someone with an insatiable to desire to inflict pain onto the world. Her murderous impulses increasing by the day, Alyssa dug two graves in the woods outside her home and waited...waited for the perfect victim.

In 1992, 12-year-old Shanda Sharer was tortured and killed by four teenage girls, led by Melinda Loveless. Caught in a lesbian love triangle, the four girls would torture the young Shanda and burn her alive. The case would shock the picture-sque town in southern Indiana and make national headlines, making an entire nation ask, "why"?

A miracle, a vision, a premonition, and an unsolved death in Las Vegas, have hung in my memory like a broken antique for the last twenty four years of my life. I've had that long to think about the reason it all happened in the first place and why I was drawn to, and ultimately placed in the old apartment building on Riverview Avenue in Pittsburgh. If you believe that nothing happens by accident, or if you have lost your faith, this true story of fate and divine intervention will shed a bright light on all the possibilities.

On a cold night in December 1956, two young girls mysteriously vanished after a night at the movies on the Southwest Side of Chicago, beginning one of the greatest searches to ever take place in the history of the city. Three weeks later, the bodies of the two lost girls, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, were found on the side of a secluded, snow-covered road, miles from where they disappeared. The discovery of their battered corpses created one of the greatest unsolved mysteries to ever baffle post-war America. Where had the girls been for the past three weeks?

Writer Karen Walker knows more than most about murderers. Her first love went on to become The Bagman, a notorious serial killer now locked away for life in a maximum-security prison. Karen has spent her life running from the weight of having loved him, defended him and, ultimately, leading the police to his door. But now, ten years later, just as she’s about to publish her account of his crimes, a young woman is abducted in horribly familiar circumstances. It can’t be The Bagman…can it? He’s safely behind bars, thanks to her. But she has to know for sure.

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

As Australia sank into the darkest days of the Great Depression, a succession of bloody mysteries grabbed headlines and gripped the country. The Hammer Horror, The Bungendore Bones, The Park Demon, The Human Glove and The Pyjama Girl—these were just some of the grisly cases that had to be solved by the Sydney detectives of The Murder Squad. The Murder Squad reopens the files on Australia's most chilling forgotten crimes to ask who was guilty, who was innocent, and whether some cops were as dangerous as the monsters they were hunting.

Jodie Evelyn can't think of a better place for a fresh start than the exclusive gated community of The Grove. But from the moment she passes through the wrought iron gates, she starts to suspect she's made a mistake. Despite her vow to keep apart from the other residents, Jodie can't help but feel drawn to her unnerving neighbour Norah Williams and terminally ill daughter, Lacey. Jodie knows she should stay away, but something draws her in.When a murder shocks The Grove, Jodie vows to do everything in her power to save Lacey from her mother.

A look back at a trio of teenage girls who belied their innocent looks to become serial killers. Sisters Regina and Margaret DeFrancisco were two teenage girls who made national headlines for murdering Oscar Velazquez, a suitor of Regina. Marlene Olive was the teenage girl who became notorious for the "BBQ murders" in which she murdered her adopted parents and tried to dispose of their bodies in a barbecue pit. Marlene was 16 at the time, and would go on to serve only four years for the crime.

Una no ficción atípica que combina percepciones y recuerdos personales con la investigación de tres femicidios en el interior de la Argentina durante la década del 80 y que revelan, de modo sutil, la ferocidad del machismo y la indefensión de las mujeres pobres. Tres asesinatos entre los cientos que no alcanzan para titulares de tapa ni convocan a las cámaras de los canales de Buenos Aires. Tres casos que llegan desordenados: los anuncia la radio, los conmemora un diario de pueblo, alguien los recuerda en una conversación.

Gypsy Jane stood toe-to-toe with some of the most dangerous men in the land and won. Her blood-soaked march through the criminal ranks is a unique tale of villainy in modern Britain. In a murky world where shootings and stabbings were part of daily business, Jane never forgot her Gypsy blood and stayed loyal to a personal honour code that always gave her the edge. 'If today is the day I die, it's a good day to die,' she would tell herself in the full knowledge that every day of her violent life could well be her last.

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school. Profoundly shaken by the news and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial.

Curl Curl, Sydney, January 1978. Angie's a looker. Or she's going to be. She's only 14, but already, heads turn wherever she goes. Male heads, mainly...Jane worships her older cousin Angie. She spends her summer vying for Angie's attention. Then Angie is murdered. Jane and her family are shattered. They withdraw into themselves, casting a veil of silence over Angie's death. Thirty years later, a journalist arrives with questions about the tragic event. Jane is relieved to finally talk about her adored cousin. And so is her family.

A story from the anthology Masters of True Crime, which spans murder cases from the beginning of the 20th century to today. This is a must-hear for fans of true crime and will also be compelling to mystery and thriller listeners.

'The only way to comprehend this tragic story of mine is to write it.' On the 10th of February 2017, there was a sentencing hearing for murder in the Victorian Supreme Court. The young woman in the dock, who sat quietly with her hands in her lap, had perfect skin and light-brown hair tied back as neatly as a private school prefect's. When the judge asked her to confirm her plea, the young woman answered in a clear and polite voice. 'Guilty, Your Honour.' That killer is Mary K. Pershall's beloved daughter, Anna.

The chilling true story of the heinous murder of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and daughter Khandalyce and how the case was cracked. How did two girls go missing for seven years and nobody noticed? In August 2010, dirt bike riders discovered human bones in the notorious Belanglo State Forest, where Ivan Milat had so cruelly tortured and slain seven young backpackers. The remains were those of a young woman, who the police dubbed 'Angel' after a T-shirt emblazoned with the word 'Angelic' that was found near the body.

A savage murder, committed the same day Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. A young black man is falsely accused. In the style of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Erik German's Kindle Single Dead Girls picks up where the reporters left off - just in time for the 50th anniversary of a crime that captivated the nation. On August, 28, 1963, two young white women were found slain and mutilated in their apartment on New York's Upper East Side.

In July 1970, 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. A cold case for 50 years, Paula’s story had been largely forgotten when Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could a community give up and move on? Could there ever be justice for Paula?

Eddie and the Gun Girl is the true story of the shooting of Philadelphia Phillies All-Star first baseman Eddie Waitkus by a deranged female admirer in 1949. While such incidents would become commonplace in ensuing years, as stars of every persuasion would surround themselves with bodyguards and live in increasing fear of unannounced assailants, the events of that June 14 at the elegant Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago were unprecedented.

The shocking true story of a serial killer in 1930s Melbourne. November, 1930. One sunny Saturday afternoon, 12-year-old Mena Griffiths was playing in the park when she was lured away by an unknown man. Hours later, her strangled body was found, mouth gagged and hands crossed over her chest, in an abandoned house. Only months later, another girl was murdered, the similarities between the cases undeniable. Crime in Melbourne had taken a shocking new turn: this was the work of a serial killer, a homicidal maniac.