True Crime Memoir

Cold blooded murders, fatal family dramas, and a spectacular robbery. It's no secret that "True Crime" is not for the faint-of-heart. These true and authentic criminal cases tell the stories of people known to us - friendly neighbours, devoted parents and/or loving partners. This book is about the people behind their bourgeois façade, where unspeakably deep human abysses exist that nobody, not even those closest to them, would have thought was possible.

Mike Browne, host of the popular Canadian podcast Dark Poutine, chronicles some of his all-time favourite stories of true crime and dark history from Canada and around the world.

Pretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and motherhood were not enough to satisfy Marie, and she soon began to act out in troubling ways. Only when her husband, Frank, became sick with a mysterious illness, did it seem that she was ready to put someone else's needs ahead of her own. The truth was far more disturbing.

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents.

In this groundbreaking book, renowned psychiatrist Michael H. Stone explores the concept and reality of evil from a new perspective. In an in-depth discussion of the personality traits and behaviors that constitute evil across a wide spectrum, Dr. Stone takes a clarifying scientific approach to a topic that for centuries has been inadequately explained by religious doctrines.

It’s a chilling reality that homicide investigators know all too well: The last face most murder victims see is not that of a stranger, but of someone familiar. Whether only an acquaintance or a trusted intimate, such killers share a common trait that triggers the downward spiral toward death for someone close to them: They are masters at hiding who they really are. Their clever masks let them appear safe, kind, and truthful. They are anything but - and almost no one can detect the murderous impulses buried deep in their psyches.

Dans le cinquième volume de sa série True Crime, Adrian Langenscheid, auteur allemand de best-sellers sur les grandes affaires criminelles des dernières décennies, nous propose une fois de plus une lecture passionnante et addictive. Cette peinture à couper le souffle des abîmes glaçants de l’esprit humain réveille des émotions puissantes précisément en raison de la froideur et de la neutralité du récit.

Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the North Dallas suburbs known as Silicon Prairie. But beneath the placid surface of their seemingly perfect lives, both women simmered with unspoken frustrations and unanswered desires. On a hot summer day in 1980, the secret passions and jealousies that linked Candy and Betty exploded into murderous rage.

Ann Rule was working on the biggest story of her career, tracking the trail of victims left by a brutal serial killer. Little did this future best-selling author know that the savage slayer she was hunting was the young man she counted among her closest friends. Everyone's picture of a natural winner, Ted Bundy was a bright, charming, and handsome man with a promising future as an attorney. But on January 24, 1989 Bundy was executed for the murders of three young women - and had confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more women from coast to coast.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

Based on years of research and extraordinary access to former gang members, reporter Jonthan Green creates an epic character-driven narrative, drawing on first-person interviews, police reports, and court transcripts to offer a unique and engrossing work of gritty urban reportage. Magisterial in its scope, Sex Money Murder offers an extraordinary perspective on modern-day America.

Verteran investigative journalist Stevie Cameron first began following the story of missing women in 1998, when the odd newspaper piece appeared chronicling the disappearances of drug-addicted sex trade workers from Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside. It was not until February 2002 that pig farmer Robert William Pickton would be arrested, and 2008 before he was found guilty, on six counts of second-degree murder. These counts were appealed and in 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its conclusion.

Martin Corona, a US citizen, fell into the outlaw life at 12 and worked for a crew run by the Arellano brothers, founders of the Tijuana drug cartel that dominated the Southern California drug trade and much bloody gang warfare for decades. Corona's crew would cross into the United States from their luxurious hideout in Mexico, kill whomever needed to be killed north of the border, and return home in the afternoon. Martin Corona played a key role in the downfall of the cartel when he turned state's evidence.

The world can be a very strange place in general, and when you listen to this true crime anthology, you will quickly learn that the criminal world specifically can be as bizarre as it is dangerous. In the following book, you will be captivated by mysterious missing person cases that defy all logic and a couple of cases of murderous mistaken identity. Follow along as detectives conduct criminal investigations in order to solve cases that were once believed to be unsolvable. Every one of the crime cases chronicled in this book is as strange and disturbing as the next.

The true crime cult classic that inspired an upcoming Netflix documentary series and companion podcast, The Ultimate Evil follows journalist Maury Terry’s terrifying investigation into the true evil behind the Son of Sam murders.

Here is the critically acclaimed inside story, now in an expanded edition, about the rise and fall of Philadelphia's notorious Scarfo organization. Blunt and unsparing, it is a firsthand account of murder, money, and corruption told by wiseguy-turned-witness Nick Caramandi, whose testimony put Nicky Scarfo and many of his associates behind bars for the rest of their lives. In this updated edition of Blood and Honor, author George Anastasia picks up the story where he left off, filling us in on the fates of all the characters - major and minor - in recent years.

Only Ann Rule, who unknowingly worked alongside the smart and charming Ted Bundy - America's most notorious serial killer - could lend her razor-sharp insight into these cases of the spouse, lover, family member, or helpful stranger who is totally trusted but whose lethally violent nature, though masterfully disguised, can and will kill.

For 10 years, the California Interstate 5 highway was haunted by a dangerous serial killer. Incredibly skilled at staying ahead of the investigators as the bodies started to pile up, there wasn't enough evidence to charge the culprit with murder even once he'd been identified. Instead, they had to build a first-degree murder case in a few months while the killer was locked up on an assault conviction. Key to this was a cast of four: Vito Bertocchini, Kay Maulsby, Ray Biondi, and Faye Springer.

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.

Robert and Doris Angleton seemed to have the perfect life. Until she was coldly murdered in her own home, shot 13 times in the head, chest, and abdomen.... Suddenly, the ideal husband seemed anything but perfect: He was jailed, accused of hiring his older brother, Roger, to kill his wife for money - possibly as much as $2 million. However, without the crucial eyewitness testimony of Roger - who soon committed suicide in a Houston jail cell - the case against Robert rested entirely on circumstantial evidence. But the facts raise more questions than answers....