True Crime Serial Murders

Within the audio of The Trail of Ted Bundy: Digging Up the Untold Stories, you'll hear the voices - many for the first time - of some of Ted Bundy's friends, as they bring to light the secrets of what is was like to know him while he was actively involved in murder. The stories of his victims are here as well, as told by their friends, including the information and anecdotes that didn't make it into the investigative files and are being published here for the first time.

The year 1969: The hippie scene is vibrant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Long-haired teenagers roam the streets, strumming guitars and preaching about peace and love...and Tony Costa is at the center of it all. To a certain group of smitten young women, he is known as Sire—the leader of their counterculture movement, the charming man who speaks eloquently and hands out hallucinogenic drugs like candy. But beneath his benign persona lies a twisted and uncontrollable rage that threatens to break loose at any moment. Tony Costa is the most dangerous man on Cape Cod.

Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977; their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was six years old at the time the murders began and had evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. There were few credible leads and equally few credible suspects. That's what the cops had passed down to the press, and that's what the city of Detroit and J. Reuben Appelman had come to believe.

Today, neuroscientists are imaging, mapping, testing, and dissecting the source of the worst behavior imaginable in the brains of the people who lack a conscience: psychopaths. Neuroscientist Dean Haycock examines the behavior of real life psychopaths and discusses how their actions can be explained in scientific terms, from research that literally looks inside their brains to understanding how psychopaths, without empathy but very goal-oriented, think and act the way they do.

In December of 1968, a serial killer began orchestrating a campaign of terror in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not satisfied with the simple act of murder, he taunted law enforcement and the public by writing letters to local newspapers. Through often cryptic and bizarre content - including four ciphers, three of which have never been solved - the psychopath played a twisted game.

In the tranquil region of southeast South Dakota, word of the young mother who was brazenly abducted from her home in broad daylight shocked residents. Piper Streyle was the second woman to vanish, following the startling incident of a young woman who narrowly escaped abduction by fighting for her life on a dark and secluded highway. An intensive search by an elite team of investigators uncovered a secret crime location, but the discovery of a nightshirt cut in half, a burnt candle, and a homemade bondage board revealed the chilling truth behind the missing women.

What can drive a young and seemingly innocent child to kill? Murder is horrible enough when perpetrated by adults, and yet the concept takes on a whole new level of chilling morbidity when a murderer is revealed to be a young boy or girl. Is it the result of severe trauma manifesting itself in the most macabre of ways? Is it the progeny of some severe mental disorder? Or were they influenced by the actions of the people they grew up with? Most of the time, the answers to such a question are simple but no less horrific.

The World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the most comprehensive set of its kind in the history of true crime publishing. Written and compiled by Susan Hall, the four-volume set has more than 1600 entries of male and female serial killers from around the world.

Whether you know it as the ‘succulent Chinese meal’ video, or ‘democracy manifest’, chances are you have seen the video of baritone larrikin Jack Karlson getting arrested outside a Brisbane Chinese restaurant in 1991. The Guardian called it ‘perhaps the pre-eminent Australian meme of the last 10 years’. When Karlson called crime writer Mark Dapin out of the blue, though, Dapin hadn’t heard of him. But there was enough that intrigued him about this theatrical outlaw to continue the conversation. Over the following months emerged a dark and complex past.

Warning: these books contain disturbing stories of true-life murder. Viewer discretion is advised. Serial killers have haunted the public imagination for hundreds of years. They have struck fear and terror into the collective consciousness for their gruesome and malicious crimes against humanity. What motivates them to commit these murders?

To his neighbors, Anthony Sowell was a friendly and helpful former Marine. But they didn't know about his dark side - or the gruesome secret inside his house. Sowell's secret life was revealed to the nation on October 29, 2009, when a Cleveland Police SWAT team entered his house to arrest him for an alleged rape. They didn't find Sowell, but they encountered a nightmarish scene: two decomposed bodies in his third-floor living room. Eight more bodies were hidden throughout the house and buried in the back yard.

John Wayne Gacy raped, tortured, and murdered 33 boys and young men, burying most of them in the crawlspace under his Chicago home. Karen Conti was in high school at the time watching the bodies being removed on the television news. Fourteen years pass. Through a twist of fate, Conti, now a young and inexperienced attorney, is called upon to handle Gacy’s final death row appeals. The serial killer soon becomes her most famous, difficult, and haunting client.

Pine Box Parole, Part One, “The Terry Fitzsimmons Story” begins with convicted murderer Terry Fitzsimmons hanging himself in Ontario’s Kingston Penitentiary. Subsequent chapters explain his background and the senseless killings upon which he embarked after spending years in solitary confinement. Fitzsimmons’ lawyer, and author of this book, John L. Hill, defends the indefensible by putting the blame on the prison system for creating a monster.

The sound of snapping twigs closed in on the five teenagers enjoying an evening around a glowing campfire at Gitchie Manitou State Park. The night of music and laughter had taken a dark turn. Evil loomed just beyond the tree line, and before the night was over, one of the Midwest's most horrific mass murders had left its bloodstains spewed across the campsite. One managed to survive and would come to be known as the "Gitchie Girl".

On December 5, 2009, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher. In December of the following year, the appeal trial began. Despite the initial verdict, the Italian and international public opinion is widely divided: many are those who think that Amanda and Raffaele are the victims of a miscarriage of justice. Images of the couple have been seen around the world, on the web and on TV screens, creating a true media sensation.But what really took place?

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

Talking with Psychopaths: Letters from Serial Killers is the unique study of criminals in their own words based on bestselling true crime author and criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee's extensive interviews with convicted serial murderers. Step inside the mind of The Genesee River Killer, The Death Row Teddy, The Ice Queen, The Want-ad Killer, The Moors Murderer, The Amityville Horror, The I-95 Killer, and more. This rare collection has Berry-Dee at his steeliest best, exploring the downright creepy correspondence with murderers, serial killers, and psychopaths.

Of all the many psychopaths and sociopaths that have hunted for human victims throughout history, few have been more disturbing or mysterious than Christopher Bernard Wilder - the Beauty Queen Killer. From the middle of the 1960s until 1984, Wilder sexually assaulted countless women and murdered at least nine in Australia and the United States. The Beauty Queen Killer was not only a true psychopath, but also a hunter, as he carefully chose attractive girls and young women to victimize.

If you want a view into the world that lies behind the Ted Bundy murders, this last work in a series of six books on Bundy is definitely for you. For within this audiobook, you will find many questions still surrounding this fascinating and intricate case, as well as the answers that are only now being provided here. There’s so much more to learn, and new information is still surfacing about Bundy, his victims, and his potential victims. As such, there is new testimony included from those who had a brush with the killer, and others who played their own roles in this multistate case.

In 1994, after many years of movies and television portraying the evil side of the human psyche, Dr. David Canter published Criminal Shadows. Two decades on, its revolutionary descriptions of psychological profiling still helps to explain the actions of serial killers and psychopaths. These techniques can help police precisely identify and locate murderers and rapists, even those who have alluded capture for years.