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 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.

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.

Shirley Wolf and Cindy Collier met in a juvenile detention center and had known each other for only a few hours when they decided to escape and randomly kill a stranger. They would go to a senior condominium center in Auburn, California, where they would seek an elderly victim. They would find one in the 85-year-old Anna Brackett. They entered her home under the ruse that they needed to use the phone to call their parents.

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.