True Crime Girls

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.

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.

A girl uses her wits to survive a maniacal killer who wipes out her family. A woman is condemned for the "final betrayal of motherhood" for killing her children. A grieving mother becomes convinced that the man convicted of murdering her beautiful teenage daughter is innocent.

This is one of the most stirring and remarkable true crime stories in the history of America. From bank fraud, bribery, “blind tiger” saloons and cheating at cards, to poisoning, insurance fraud, Mickey Finns, murder and more, this is a fascinating look at the treacherous Taylor Boys. Well-heeled, well-educated, and well-protected by their cronies and cohorts, the two Missouri brothers would stop at nothing in pursuit of their prolific criminal enterprises. But there was one courageous little girl named Nellie Meeks, who brought down their whole operation and brought on a Hanging Bee.

Three harrowing tales of three teenage girls who left behind a trail of murder and mayhem.

Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime. Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’. However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby. Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation.

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?

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.

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.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter comes the captivating true-crime story of a Mafia moll - “the female counterpart of the pseudonymous Henry Hill, the star of Wiseguy.... An insider’s view of mob life that is by turns comic and chilling” (Los Angeles Times).

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.

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.

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?

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"?

Before Bonnie and Clyde there were Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid. In the wake of world war, a pandemic, and an economic depression, Margaret and Richard Whittemore, two love-struck working-class kids from Baltimore, reached for the dream of a better life. The couple headed up a gang that in less than a year stole over one million dollars’ worth of diamonds and precious gems—over 10 million dollars today.

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.

Over 40 years, two British police units acted undercover to infiltrate activist groups. At least 20 of those officers deliberately targeted women and entered relationships with them. One of those women was me. This is my story.

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.

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.