True Crime Serial Murders

In 1975, after Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempt to kill President Gerald Ford, the FBI found a cache of letters in the would-be assassin’s Sacramento apartment. The return address belonged to future forensic psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon, then a young undergraduate. A decade later, after the shocking murders of two co-workers, Smalldon’s quest to understand the twisted minds and motivations of killers became personal in a way it never had been before.

During the early 1970s, more than three dozen teenage boys went missing from the working-class neighborhood of Houston Heights, in the south of Texas. The parents of a number of these boys received strange postcards from their sons, telling them that they were fine and that they had found jobs somewhere else in the state, anywhere from Dallas to Austin. Then, in August 1973, the Houston Police Department made a shocking discovery; something that would later become known as the Houston Mass Murders.

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.

The fourth volume of this comprehensive work features hundreds of serial killers from Sacramento to Soviet Russia—plus numerous unsolved cases.

There have been countless attempts to solve the brutal murders committed by Jack the Ripper more than 100 years ago. It seems that almost everyone has their own theory and their own suspect, ranging from the reasonably likely to the entirely preposterous. What this most famous of British criminal cases has always required is a professional eye to analyse it with all the benefits of modern investigate techniques. Now that has been provided in the shape of the man most qualified to solve the case: former British murder-squad detective Trevor Marriott.

In September 1973, Stephen Downing was convicted and indefinitely sentenced for the murder of Wendy Sewell, a young legal secretary in the town of Bakewell in the Peak District. Wendy was attacked in broad daylight in Bakewell Cemetery. Stephen Downing, the 17-year-old groundskeeper with learning difficulties and a reading age of 11, was the primary suspect. He was immediately arrested, questioned for nine hours, without a solicitor present, and pressured into signing a confession full of words he did not understand.

To all outward appearances, he was a hard-working, successful family man with a lavish new house, a devoted wife, and a healthy young son. But he concealed a hidden side of his personality, a dark secret tied to a hunger for blood and the overriding need to kill.

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.

Have you ever come face-to-face with the devil? In a tapestry of sports, business, and dating, there is an evil presence that is not quite visible to anyone: the Bedroom Strangler. A serial killer who scales 15-story buildings, enters through the balcony, and stealthily slithers under the bedroom bed, with the sole intent of raping and murdering innocent women in their sleep. He has been classified as the worst serial killer in Ontario's history and Canada's most dangerous criminal ever, operating at the height of London's 40-year serial killer period, from 1974 to 1978.

One morning in July 1974, Anita Andrews, the owner and bartender at Fagiani's Cocktail Lounge in Napa, California was found dead in her bar - raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in a bloody frenzy. She'd last been seen alive the night before talking to a drifter who sat at the end of the bar, playing cards and flirting with her. But the stranger, along with Anita's Cadillac, had disappeared. Unable to locate a suspect, police investigators sadly watched the case grow cold over the years.

A chilling genre-busting memoir by a major American essayist. Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book, Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered 35 years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969.

The Colonial Parkway Murders - the name given eight murders that took place in the Tidewater region in the late 1980s, two of which were on the historic Colonial Parkway, the nation’s narrowest National Park. Young people in the prime of their lives were the targets. But the pattern that stitched this special kind of evil together was more like a spider web of theory, intrigue, and mathematics. Then, mysteriously, the killing spree stopped. Now, father-daughter true crime authors Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester blow the dust off of these cases.

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.

While other profilers tend to conceal the clear facts behind complex technical language and psychobabble, investigator Pat Brown actually tells it like it is. With the same dark wit that gets people who work with the criminally insane through their workday, Brown speaks frankly about the monsters among us who kill for sport. In Killing for Sport, Brown provides an honest portrayal of the predator-next-door, how he hunts for him victims, why he likes to torture them, where he tends to stash their bodies, and more.

Eleven murders over a period of four years sent shockwaves through the Krugersdorp community and made headlines nationwide. Eventually these murders were connected to Cecilia Steyn and her cult, Electus per Deus (chosen by God). Members of the cult were willing to do anything for Cecilia - even if it meant committing murder.

Only one TV interview with a serial killer has ever been recorded in a British jail and broadcast. The Dennis Nilsen Tapes: In Jail with Britain's Most Infamous Serial Killer covers four hours of interrogation, two days spent face to face with Nilsen and two years of graphic correspondence and confessions. With fresh insight from world famous psychological profilers and a leading pathologist, Morley completes almost three decades of investigation into what turned the former chef, policeman and civil servant into one of the world's most notorious murderers and necrophiles.

Author Stu Armstrong delves into the horrifying and shocking case of Lucy Letby, a seemingly ordinary neonatal nurse whose quiet demeanor masked a terrifying secret. This true-crime narrative explores Letby’s early life in the small town of Hereford, her promising career as a nurse, and the disturbing string of infant deaths that would eventually lead to her exposure as one of the most notorious medical killers in modern British history.

Chilling. One of the best words to describe the cases recounted in this audiobook. These gruesome crimes seemed to hit a dead end. That is until the case was reopened for investigation years later and solved. From the more famous cases to the more obscure, the crimes and hardships that the victims had to suffer will send shivers down your spine. Notably detailing the disappearance of Chandra Levy to the multiple murders committed by Dennis Rader.

The prostitutes working New York City's Times Square were more than a little bit nervous. A deranged serial killer who apparently melted into the crowd was picking up hookers and sadistically torturing them, leaving some girls wondering if there was a real-life Dr. Frankenstein out there attempting to create his own personal plaything from pieces of his dismembered victims.

Among the annals of American serial killers, few were as complex and prolific as Joseph Paul Franklin. At a gangly 5'11, Franklin hardly looked imposing, but once he put a rifle in his hands and an interracial couple in his cross hairs, Joseph Paul Franklin was as deadly as any serial killer. In this true crime story, you will learn about how one man turned his hatred into a vocation of murder, which eventually left over 20 people dead across America.