True Crime Women

Olivia and Mia Flores are married to the highest level drug traffickers ever to become US informants. Their husbands worked with - and then brought down - El Chapo as well as dozens of high-level members of the Mexican cartels. They had everything money could buy - luxury cars, huge houses, and expensive jewelry - but they chose to give it all up when they cooperated with the US government. They knew that life was about more than wealth; it was about love, family, and doing what's right.

Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of the trade. She swept from town to town, assuming new identities and running new swindles at each railroad stop. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, years after the robber barons had amassed their fortunes, she was amassing her own. Using her wits and a series of forged documents, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland to New York City that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. The con made her impossibly rich.

The infamous double murder that inspired elementary school rhymes is a controversial one: partially because of the insidious nature and grossness of the crime and on the other hand because some people still believe the defendant is innocent. There are many reasons to believe why Lizzie killed both her parents with an axe, and there are some that could be used to argue that she didn’t.

For decades, osteopathic physician Larry Nassar built a sterling reputation as the go-to doctor for America's Olympians while treating countless others at his office on Michigan State University's campus. It was largely within the high-pressure world of competitive gymnastics that Nassar exploited young girls, sexually assaulting hundreds of them under the guise of medical treatment. In Start by Believing, John Barr and Dan Murphy confront Nassar's acts, which represent the largest sex abuse scandal to impact the sporting world.

Audrey Edmunds was a happily married young mother of two with a baby on the way; the neighborhood soccer mom in a small Wisconsin town providing casual childcare when the unthinkable happened. An infant died in her care at the same time the unknown science of Shaken Baby Syndrome hit the media. Swept up in a media frenzy, Edmunds was accused of killing the child through SBS. She was stripped from her children and husband and sent to prison where she would fight for freedom 13 years before she was finally exonerated.

In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation.

Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown LA's Cecil Hotel - a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa's nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms.

Dangerous Odds - a true crime thriller memoir - is the explosive, never-been-told, behind-the-scenes look into the world of illegal sports betting, revealed by an insider. Marisa Lankester, a young beauty with a privileged New York upbringing, stumbles into the back door of the largest illegal sports betting organization in the US, run by Ron (The Cigar) Sacco. Marisa, a thrill-seeker, maneuvers herself into this mob-run men-only bookmaking operation and becomes a trusted insider.

In January 2003, 28-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun received an email from the US National Security Agency that would turn her world upside down. The message requested Katharine’s assistance in co-ordinating an illegal US-UK spy operation which would secure UN authorisation for the Iraq invasion. Horrified, she decided to leak the information to the British press. Katharine’s decision would change her life forever, as she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act whilst becoming a cause célèbre for political activists.

What if a respected surgeon could destroy your life with just one diagnosis? In early twentieth century Green Bay, Wisconsin, this terrifying reality was all too true for two women. Mary, an illiterate maid, and Mollie, a college-educated socialite, fell victim to the physical violence and mental abuse of celebrated surgeon Dr. John R. Minahan. To silence them, he claimed they had the shameful and dreaded disease of syphilis.

In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the “Big Red” high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman spent four years embedded in the town, documenting the case and its reverberations. Ten years after the assault, Roll Red Roll is the culmination of that research, weaving in new interviews and personal reflections to take listeners beyond Steubenville to examine rape culture.

Award-winning filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam bravely recounts the intimate abuse she suffered from former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, using her story as a prism to examine the domestic violence crisis plaguing America. Sensitive and nuanced, Assume Nothing details how Tanya’s relationship devolved into abuse, how she found the strength to leave - risking her career, reputation, and life - and how she reclaimed her freedom and her voice.

This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and audiences of both fiction and true-crime nonfiction. It's the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, and wrote her out of the will.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than 30 years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then.

Sophie Crockett spent most of her childhood suffering from crippling anxiety. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, she became a virtual prisoner in her own home, afraid to venture outside. After battling with depression, eating disorders and self-harm, Sophie had the courage to re-enter society in her late teens.

Former actress Becca Ransom lived her dream in Hollywood for seven years before returning to her hometown of Larch Haven, known as the Venice of North America. The Vermont town has canals instead of roads, gondolas instead of cars, and charming cottages plucked from the pages of a fairy tale. It’s also where Becca is pursuing her newest passion as a chocolatier at True Confections, the chocolate shop owned by her grandparents, Lolly and Pops.

When Mary met Will Jordan online, she was a single mother who’d given up trying to find Mr Right. And yet here he suddenly was: articulate and attractive, with a fascinating background. Soon they were in love, and when he proposed after a month it seemed recklessly romantic. Caught up in a whirlwind, Mary accepted that Will’s work often took him away from home, out of contact. She was his rock, supporting him emotionally when a misunderstanding led to criminal charges, and even selling everything when blackmailers threatened to kidnap their children. Together, they took on the world.

Number 4 Euston Square was a respectable boardinghouse, like many others in Victorian London. But beneath this ordinary veneer lurked a murderous darkness. On 8th May 1879, the corpse of former resident Matilda Hacker was uncovered in the coal cellar. The investigation that followed stripped bare the shadow-side of Victorian domesticity, throwing the lives of everyone within into an extraordinary maelstrom.

In the summer of 1969, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel carried out horrific acts of butchery on the orders of the charismatic cult leader Charles Manson. At their murder trial the following year, lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi described the two so-called Manson Women as "human monsters". But to anyone who knew them growing up, they were bright, promising girls, seemingly incapable of such an unfathomable crime. Award-winning journalist Nikki Meredith began visiting Van Houten and Krenwinkel in prison to discover how they had changed during their incarceration.

When Ella Watson, a woman of wealth and status, is brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight, it sends a shockwave through the Lake District community. Later that day, Keira Bradley meets the same fate. But whereas Ella’s murder is a tragedy, Keira’s death on the notorious Beacon Estate is just another statistic in a dangerous place.