True Crime Memoir

A tanker steaming through the deep Northwest Providence Channel of the Bahamas comes across a shocking sight: a lone dinghy carrying Captain Julian Harvey and the body of a young girl. They are all that remain of the ketch Bluebelle, a handsome sixty-foot sailing yacht chartered by the Duperrault family of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

​C'est l'un des tueurs en série les plus terrifiants des États-Unis. Vous ne connaissez pas encore son nom, mais vous n'êtes pas prêts de l'oublier. Anchorage, sur les rivages glacés de l'Alaska. Dans la nuit du 2 février 2012, la jeune Samantha Koenig termine son service dans un petit kiosque à café, battu par la neige et le vent. Le lendemain, elle n'est toujours pas rentrée chez elle. Une caméra de vidéosurveillance apporte vite la réponse : on y voit clairement un inconnu emmener l'adolescente sous la menace.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

In this volume, you’ll hear some stories that take place as recently as a few years ago, while others date back as far as the 1930s. There’s the story of a young Russian immigrant who came to the United States seeking the exciting lifestyle he’d seen on television, only to be stabbed, set on fire, and left to die in the desert by his own friends. There’s also the story of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. There’s one of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. And more.

On Christmas Eve in 1985, a hunter found a young boy's body along an icy corn field in Nebraska. The residents of Chester, Nebraska buried him as "Little Boy Blue", unclaimed and unidentified - until a phone call from Ohio two years later led authorities to Eli Stutzman, the boy's father. Gregg Olsen's Abandoned Prayers is an incredible true story of murder and Amish secrets.

On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium and made off with over $108 million dollars worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process.

This audiobook uncovers 10 amazing true crimes that exploded into the national news, shocking Americans from coast to coast - crimes that were eventually forgotten - until now. Many of these incredible cases went unexplored for decades.

Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered around the murky canals and crawfish ponds of Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the Jefferson Davis parish. Law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, opening a floodgate of media coverage, from CNN to the New York Times. Collectively the victims became known as the "Jeff Davis 8," and their lives, their deaths, and the ongoing investigation reveals a small community's closely guarded secrets.

Colorado, 1976. When Reverend Mike Fuller and his beautiful wife, Sharon, arrive in the sleepy town of Rocky Ford, local residents think something’s off about the new couple. The God-fearing minister is gruff and cold, while charismatic Sharon has her husband wrapped around her finger.

An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Only one in 10,000 are found dead. Yet unsolved child murders are almost a daily occurrence - of nearly 52,000 juvenile homicides between 1980 and 2008, more than 20 percent remain open. Drawing on FBI reports, police and court records, and interviews with victims’ families, this book provides details and evidence for 18 unsolved cases from 1956 to 1998.

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

Petrifying. Bone-chilling. Depraved. Their acts made headlines. Their names live in infamy in the darkest recesses of the internet, but for those who are left behind, these heartless monsters are always there, looming over their every move. This true crime four-book set exposes their inner secrets, details their heinous crimes, and pulls the curtain on the long, hard-fought investigations.

Born on a dying farm and soon abandoned by his father, Carl Panzram's life was bleak from the start. While other children played and went to school, he toiled away on his family's land, the threat of brutal punishment always looming over his head. Yet, instead of shaping him into the meek, obedient boy his family wanted, Panzram grew meaner with each passing year. His first arrest happened before he had even turned 10.

Daisy is a black baby adopted into a white family in rural 1970’s England. Alienation and loss of identity dominate her childhood. After discovering she was conceived through child rape, she begins a lifelong mission to find and prosecute her birth father using the only irrefutable evidence left. Her own DNA. But justice isn’t just for her birth mother. She too, is a victim, and when the world around her doesn’t agree, she is forced to reckon with external and internal powers out of her control.

On a December night in Austin, Texas, teenagers Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas closed up the yogurt store where they worked. The girls were joined by Jennifer's younger sister, Sarah, and her friend Amy Ayers. Less than an hour later, all four girls were dead - tragic victims of an apparent fire. Until it was discovered that the girls had been bound and gagged, sexually assaulted, and shot execution style.

Montréal, 1978. Alors que survient l'assassinat du parrain calabrais Paolo Violi, nul ne devine l'ampleur de la «machine» mafieuse qui se cache derrière ce meurtre. Pour le clan adverse des Siciliens, c'est le début d'une épopée qui va durer plus de 30 ans. Après avoir échappé à la justice pendant des décennies, les chefs mafieux Nicolò et Vito Rizzuto sont arrêtés et condamnés au milieu des années 2000, l'un à Montréal et l'autre aux États-Unis. Or, dans le cœur du clan sicilien, frappé d'une série de meurtres stratégiques, la débandade continue.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

As the adopted son of two cult leaders, Benjamin Risha was raised to someday assume a place of leadership in the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation with the Bible, and his parents’ interpretation of it, as his guide. He believed the prophecies of his adoptive mother and father. However, when none of it happened, and the foundation slid from bucolic communal lifestyle to insufferable criminality that included absolute obedience to the Alamos, Benjamin knew he had to escape.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

The case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficianados. A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America’s Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness.