True Crime Women

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

In April 1999, reporter Tamara Leitner woke to an active crime scene outside her Arizona apartment. Her neighbor had been sexually assaulted by a man who would later be identified as Claude Dean Hull II, a serial rapist who escaped justice for decades. New identities. New states. New victims—more than one hundred suspected across the country and thousands more victimized in myriad ways. Tamara’s twenty-year compulsion to follow the investigation began.

Sonia Orchard was in her forties when she told a therapist about the boyfriend she had when she was fifteen. Sure, he had been a decade older than her, but it was consensual ... wasn't it? To her surprise, Sonia broke down in tears, then began to shake uncontrollably–an unmistakable expression of trauma that lasted for days. She was clearly not okay, but could the relationship she'd thought was love really have been abuse? Had she been groomed?

In this provocative book, award-winning journalist Patricia Pearson argues that our culture is in denial of women's innate capacity for aggression. We don't believe that women batter their husbands or abuse the majority of children in North America. We ignore the 200 percent increase in crime by women in a period when most crime statistics are dropping. Pearson weaves the stories of women such as Karla Homolka and Mary Beth Tinning (who smothered eight of her children) with the results of criminologists and psychiatrists to expose the myth of female innocence.

Homicide at Rough Point, the latest book by best-selling HarperCollins author Peter Lance, based in part on Lance’s piece in Vanity Fair's July/August 2020 issue, solves the 54-year-old cold case murder of Eduardo Tirella, a gay Hollywood set designer whose career was just taking off when he told the notoriously jealous and vindictive billionaire Doris Duke that he was leaving her employ.

This is not a manufactured dialogue from a thriller but the words of attorney Sharon Muse. They came after she survived an attempted kidnapping, rape, and murder at the hands of Hank Morrison, a former client. On April 7, 2006, Muse miraculously escaped from the sociopathic Morrison, only to find that the threat to her life was just beginning. Ineptitude in the justice system threatened to release Morrison and allow him the opportunity to finish the job, which he adamantly pledged to do. Muse would have to fight at every step to ensure her safety.

Mason "Mace" Perry was a firebrand cop on the D.C. police force until she was kidnapped and framed for a crime. She lost everything-her badge, her career, her freedom-and spent two years in prison. Now she's back on the outside and focused on one mission: to be a cop once more. Her only shot to be a true blue again is to solve a major case on her own, and prove she has the right to wear the uniform.

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.

En 1988, los detectives del Departamento de Policía de Sacramento, fueron llamados para investigar la desaparición de un hombre en su última dirección conocida: una casa de huéspedes para ancianos, indigentes y enfermos mentales. La propietaria, Dorothea Puente, era una adorable anciana que cuidaba de los vagabundos y del resto de los náufragos de la sociedad. ¿Estaban perdiendo el tiempo persiguiendo a una anciana encantadora y caritativa o se estaban acercando a una asesina encubierta que explotaba a los miembros más vulnerables de la sociedad?

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.

A pause-resisting and harrowing crime thriller featuring a brilliant and tortured FBI agent, the Harley Cole series is a riveting mystery, packed with non-stop action, suspense, twists and turns, revelations, and driven by a breakneck pace that will keep you listening late into the night.

Psychology student Olivia Eriksen’s family is notorious among true-crime buffs. Faced with a legacy of psychopathy that spans generations, Olivia has spent much of her academic life trying to answer one chilling question: Nature or nurture? Although she’s kept a safe distance from her blood relatives for years, Olivia agrees to attend a weekend reunion. After all, her fiancé is eager to meet his future in-laws, and the gathering may give her a chance to interview her elusive grandfather about the family traits.

From mob wife with blood on her hands to straight-arrow breadwinner for her four kids, a tale of transformation and empowerment from a woman whose life in organized crime makes Carmella Soprano look like June Cleaver.

The OneCoin global cryptocurrency fraud stole tens of billions of dollars from ordinary people around the world. Unlike Madoff or Enron, who relieved the world’s wealthiest investors of their cash, the exploiting genius of the OneCoin scam was targeting the poorest people in the world, the “unbanked”—those who struggled to live or get mainstream banking support. The arrogant assumption was that the downtrodden wouldn't have the means or will to fight back. They didn’t reckon on Jen McAdam—a teenage mother, young grandmother, and modern-day Erin Brockovich.

Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was 18. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future, and now in her memoir she explores the mystery of her parents' lives through interviews and police records.

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class Black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial - which spanned several months - were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the Black community to public attention.

The Blood Countess is an ambitious, sweeping investigation into the singularly fascinating case of Elizabeth Báthory, a woman who, until now, has been known as "the Western World’s most prolific female murderer.” If The Dark Queens is about the systemic erasure of powerful women, then The Blood Countess is about the culturally sanctioned, coordinated smearing of one, how it happens and why, which leads to even bigger questions: how do we construct our personal and cultural realities? How do we parse the truth?

Through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly, Agents of Change tells an enthralling and, at times, disturbing story set against the backdrop of the evolving women’s movement. It was the 1960s, a “secretarial” era, when women first gained a foothold and pushed against the one-dimensional, pop-culture trope of the sexy Cold War Bond Girl. Underestimated but undaunted, they fought their way, decade-by-decade, through adversity to the top of the spy game.

Groomed and procured by a woman, raped by several men and labelled ‘one of the most abused girl in Rotherham’, now Elizabeth Harper is fighting for answers as to why so many people paid to protect our children simply turned a blind eye. Aged just 15, lonely and bullied by her peers, Elizabeth ‘El’ Harper felt like an outcast. But then a chance encounter in the street with a friendly woman suddenly brought hope to her world. A friendship between El and this benevolent stranger blossomed, and life began to feel worth living again.

From the drug addicts who call Amanda ‘the mother I never had’ to the women who’ve pushed back at domestic abuse, to women close to release in their 70s, who just want to stay in the place that they’ve always known, these are stories that are heartbreaking, harrowing and heart-warming. Amanda listens, prescribes and does what she can. After all, she’s their doctor.