True Crime Serial Murders

As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called “sex murderers” who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.

In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for The New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite 27-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois.

Moira Martingale’s comprehensive study, Cannibal Killers: The Impossible Monsters, was originally written in 1993, when the Internet was in its infancy, when few homes had computers and when the character Hannibal Lecter from the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs was regarded as an entirely fictional character, with no real-world counterparts or inspirations. The book demonstrated that this was an erroneous assumption.

When Chris Bryson was discovered nude and severely beaten stumbling down Charlotte Street in Kansas City in 1988, police had no idea they were about to discover the den of one of the most sadistic American serial killers in recent history. This is the true story of Robert Berdella, nicknamed by the media the Kansas City Butcher, who from between 1984 and 1988 brutally raped, tortured, and ultimately dismembered six young male prostitutes in his unassuming home on a quiet street in Kansas City.

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.

From perverse acts of cannibalism and dark sexual fantasies to vicious acts motivated by greed and a simple lust for blood, this book reveals the methods and motivations of some of the world's most notorious serial killers, including Juan Corona, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Pee Wee Gaskins, and Ivan Milat.

Here’s a harrowing array of spine-chilling stories that will make your heart race nonstop. This book is full of twists and turns, dark corners, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and devilish plots that get your blood pumping. Horror Anthology contains 19 short stories of terrifying real tales of horror. With exceptional articulation and clarity, author Ann Gaiman spins dark but real tales that will make you sit on the edge of your seat.

H. H. Holmes’ story has become one of legend. Holmes committed his crimes during a time in history where the idea of murdering on a mass scale was being introduced to the world through the actions of Jack the Ripper. Unlike Jack the Ripper, Holmes’ motives were clear; he killed out of greed, convenience, and curiosity.

In this collection of true crime murder stories, discover three books containing a full graphic account of the exploits of monstrous individuals.

Have you ever wondered what is in the mind of a killer? Are you fascinated by what makes someone snap and kill, or carry out a carefully planned murder? In this second book in the series, List of Twelve, Volume 2, author Ryan Becker examines 12 individuals who did just that and became notorious as a result.

On a December night in 1978, Courtney Lund O'Neil's mother, teenaged Kim Byers, saw her friend Rob Piest alive for the last time. At the end of his shift at the pharmacy where they both worked, fifteen-year-old Rob went outside to speak to a contractor named John Wayne Gacy about a possible job. That night Rob became Gacy's final victim; his body was later found in the Des Plaines River. Kim's testimony, along with a receipt belonging to her found in Gacy's house, proving that Rob had been there, would be pivotal in convicting the serial killer who killed over thirty young men and boys.

This is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of the murderer who has become one of America's great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century.

When he was arrested in July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer had a severed head in the refrigerator, two more in the freezer, two skulls and a skeleton in a filing cabinet. But if anything could be more disturbing than the brute horror of this scene, it was the evidence that Dahmer had been using these human remains not only for sexual gratification but as part of a dark ritual of his own devising - to furnish a shrine to himself.

In 1994, an aspiring young cold-case investigator in California’s East Bay, Paul Holes, puts aside trying to solve the Golden State Killer case as he waits for science to catch up. Paul returns to an old file cabinet at the back of the forensic lab to look for another cold case he can work—something with DNA. He finds one. The 1978 murder of a married mother who went for a morning jog in a nearby park. The original investigators believed that a serial killer named Phillip Hughes was responsible; they just couldn’t prove it.

On Halloween night, 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing 16 people over the course of 12 months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection.

From suicide attempts to claiming her mother cursed her, to miscarriages, and losing 10 of her 14 children, Leonarda’s life wasn’t easy. Protecting her four surviving children became something of an obsession for the woman. Perhaps tragedy loosened her grip on reality, or maybe the fear of losing her oldest to war caused a mental break. Whatever the cause, Leonarda’s chilling deeds will raise the hair on the back of your neck and leave you wondering if those around you are capable of the same evil.

With a boom in cold-blooded cases throughout the 1980s, police began to rely on DNA evidence to help them find perpetrators, and since then forensic science has taken off as a powerful tool in solving murders. Best-selling true-crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us beyond the headlines to examine the real-life stories where forensics have played a crucial role. He speaks to experts who have worked on the most gruesome, most chilling and most shocking crime scenes and explains how notorious criminal cases from across the world were solved.

Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.

Jenn Corbin appeared to have it all: two dear little boys, a posh home in one of the upscale suburbs of Atlanta, expensive cars, a plush houseboat, and a husband, Dr. Bart Corbin, a successful dentist, who was tall, handsome, and brilliant. But gradually their seemingly idyllic life together began to crumble. Bart was distraught and Jenn seemed disenchanted. Then, just a few weeks before Christmas 2004, Jenn was found dead with a bullet in her head, an apparent suicide.

Charles Manson is instantly recognizable as the deranged cult leader who was responsible for the deaths of nine people in the late 1960s. Manson was a career criminal who got his education in the US prison system and learned at an early age that only those who have power over others will survive. In less than three years, Manson transformed his followers from a group of freedom-loving, LSD-dropping hippies into a pack of blood-thirsty murderers who carried out acts of astounding brutality at his request.