True Kidnapping

Ein junger Mann bringt scheinbar aus dem Nichts seine ganze Familie und sich selbst um; ein medizinisches Experiment endet tödlich; ein verschwundenes Kind und die Suche nach den Schuldigen - Sabine Rückert und ihre Kolleg:innen aus der ZEIT Verbrechen-Redaktion haben erneut die spannendsten und spektakulärsten Kriminalfälle aus Deutschland zusammengetragen. In diesem Hörbuch zum beliebten True Crime-Podcast berichten sie von ihnen - fachkundig, fesselnd und immer mit Mut zu den Zwischentönen der Geschichte.

Astrid Holleeder's brother Willem Holleeder, best known for his involvement in the 1983 kidnapping of the CEO and chairman of Heineken brewing company, is one of the most notorious criminals in contemporary history. For decades, Wim ruled over his family mafia style, threatening death if any of them betrayed him. Now, she's turning the tables on him. Charged for his involvement in multiple assassinations, including that of his former partner and brother-in-law, Holleeder is finally on trial for murder, all due to the shocking testimony of his own family.

At ten months old, Holly Marie was brought to the door of a church by three barefoot women in white robes and head coverings. Adopted by the pastor and raised in a loving Christian home, Holly nevertheless struggled with the ache of not knowing what had happened to her biological parents. She still felt their absence even as she married and started a family of her own. When two detectives showed up at the restaurant where she worked and informed her that she had a large family in Florida who had been searching for her for over 40 years, Holly’s past became the reality of her present.

Kathi Spiars can't believe she's found such a good man to marry as Stephen Marcum. Twelve years later, she starts to suspect that he isn't who he says he is. As she digs into his past, she doesn't realize that learning the truth will lead to a lifetime of fear and hiding.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns contains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story - they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe.

Es la real y cruda narración de uno de los secuestros que mayor consternación ha causado en la opinión públicamexicana. Escrito por Ernestina Sodi y Laura Zapata, hermanas de la cantane Thalía, que fueron privadas de su libertad, golpeadas y encerradas con los ojos vendados, mientras los secuestradoresiniciaban las negociaciones para pedir su rescate

It’s one of the most shocking unsolved missing-child cases in the world. Where is Kyron Horman? Why hasn’t the woman who police suspect is responsible for his 2010 disappearance - Kyron’s stepmother - been charged? That the seven-year-old disappeared from his grade school got the attention of parents around the world.

A shattering, utterly immersive work of investigative journalism, The Good Girls slips behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India to tell the real story behind the tragic deaths of two teenage girls and an epidemic of violence against women.

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.

In 1974, Alice, a desperate young mother in a gritty Wyoming boomtown, kills her husband and dumps his body where it will never be found, then slips away and starts a new life. But when her new man's ex-wife and two kids start demanding more of him, Alice delivers an ultimatum: fix the problem or lose her forever. With Alice's help, Gerald fixes the problem in an extraordinarily ghastly way...and they live happily ever after...that is, until 2013, almost 40 years later, when somebody finds a dead man's skeleton in a place where Alice thought he'd never be found.

The Lady Vanishes is an engrossing story of how a small team of seasoned investigative journalists and storytellers, a daughter's intuition, and a team of listener super-sleuths uncovered a web of intrigue spanning nine decades and three continents, and how—after 57 episodes, 20 million downloads, and sparking a coronial inquiry—they discovered at the heart of the mystery a stranger-than-fiction international man of mystery who could hold the key to what really happened to Marion.

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.

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and a ghostly vision she reported once she was found—would eventually connect her disappearance to another almost forgotten story from twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of brainwashing and murder and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

At 8.00 a.m. on Monday 18th June 2001, Danielle Jones left home dressed in her schoolgirl uniform - and promptly vanished. The 15-year old’s body was never recovered, but Danielle’s parents soon learned that her ‘Uncle Stuart’, a close family friend, had concealed a decades-long history of sexual violence against teenage girls. Despite the absence of a body, Stuart Campbell was jailed in 2002 for Danielle’s abduction and murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

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.

Crisis Cops 2, much like the first book, will take you into the world of Hostage/Crisis Negotiations. These are interesting real-life stories from police officers that have been negotiating crisis situations for decades. Crisis Cops 2 will explore first-hand accounts of some of the most intense, life-or-death situations that have happened over the last several decades.

When he was 10 years old, Paul Fronczak was snooping around for Christmas presents in a crawl space in his family’s Chicago home. There, he found hundreds of old newspaper clippings about the kidnapping of a one-day-old infant in a hospital in 1964. He also learned that, two years later, the boy was found and returned to his family - and that the boy was him. Nearly 50 years later, Paul, acting on long-held suspicions, took a DNA test that proved he was not the kidnapped boy. In an instant, he found himself at the center of two half-century-old mysteries.

When Amy Price took a temporary design job at an Art Deco hotel in Los Angeles to help a friend, she had no idea the path it would lead her down. Before long, she would become manager of the Cecil Hotel, seeking to make it more welcoming and correct its notoriety, not helped by sitting at the foot of Skid Row, or the fact that since its opening in 1927, there had been any number of deaths by suicide, and residents such as serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.

They’re here one second, and then they’re gone. Without rhyme or reason, people going about their mundane day-to-day affairs vanish without a trace. Sure, missing person cases may be a dime a dozen, but some are just a little stranger than others. Because there are disappearances—and then there are mind-bogglingly mysterious disappearances.