American True Crime

In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associatesas the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Mafia. Author James Higdon takes listeners back to the 1970s and ‘80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers.

In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him - only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal Midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son's death.

Greg DeVillers was a top biotech executive, and Kristin Rossum was embarking on a career in toxicology at the San Diego Medical Examiner's office. They seemed to be happily married, living the American dream. But only months shy of their second anniversary, Kristin found her handsome husband dead from a drug overdose - his corpse sprinkled with rose petals. By his side was their wedding photo. Authorities deemed it a suicide. Until they discovered that the rare poison found in Greg's body was the same poison missing from Kristin's office.

From the bestselling author of If You Knew Her comes this harrowing tale of suspense—a story ripped from today’s headlines—of a tight-knit English community, who’s rocked by the murder of a mother and the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, and the secrets that lie concealed...

The man who would become the Father of Organized Crime in the United States was born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily, but he would quickly make a name for himself after his family moved to New York City when he was still a child. By his teenage years, he was running the streets, organizing his own teenage gang, and moving in circles with the likes of Meyer Lansky, who would become key figures in Lucky's rise to power.

According to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: Organized crime. In his classic expos, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America's favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors...and then went back to bed. Howard Unruh went from obscurity to infamy overnight. Even after his obsessive diaries were discovered - a catalogue of simmering rage, petty grievances, and sexual repression - the anomalous crime seemed incomprehensible. Succeeding decades would confirm that Unruh’s “Walk of Death” was just the beginning. The prototype for the modern mass murderer, he would usher in a new age of violence in America.

Edited and introduced by MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, The Trump Indictments collects the complete charging documents brought by the Department of Justice and the Fulton County (GA) and Manhattan (NY) district attorneys—a riveting and shocking narrative of the former president’s alleged crimes and...

In 'Beyond the Grassy Knoll: How JFK's Death Changed American Society Forever,' A.M. Wolf charges through the fog of history with a piercing gaze, dissecting one of America's most catastrophic moments. Wolf's narrative is a relentless pursuit of truth amidst the chaos and sorrow that drowned the nation after Kennedy's fall in Dallas. This book isn't just a recount; it's a crusade against the shadows that have lingered over the American soul since that fateful day in November 1963.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

Summertime in Florida. Tourists flock to the subtropical paradise for its beautiful beaches, abundant sunshine, and the magical allure of Disney World. For one Midwestern mother and her two teenaged daughters, a trip to the Sunshine State seemed like a dream vacation.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

The hood is an addiction. An addiction that pulls as seductively and fiercely as the drugs hustled on its streets. And living in it is a daily exercise in survival. Raised impoverished in the streets of Miami, David Lee Windecher was only 11 years old when he was arrested for shoplifting. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, deciding to take what he believed he deserved. But that was the beginning for David.

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.

"Hunting Charles Manson the best true crime book you will ever read...Lock your doors, keep the night lights on, and read this book." - Linda Fairstein, New York Times bestselling crime novelist In the late summer of 1969, the nation was transfixed by a series of gruesome murders in the hills...

On Thursday 9th October, Michelle Hadaway's worst fears came true. After watching her daughter Karen playing in the neighbour's garden with her best friend Nicola, Michelle returned to cook dinner for her family. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the last time she would ever see Karen alive. In the following days and months, shocking details would come to light about the nature of Karen and Nicola's murders, and the case which had come to be known as 'the Babes in the Wood murders' would lead to one of the most infamous and cruellest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Billy the Kid once said that he killed 22 men - one for each year that he lived. While it’s more likely that he only killed eight or nine, this young outlaw was clearly deadly. But his brief and brutal life reveals how his tragic existence led him into a life of crime. After growing up in poverty as an Irish immigrant in New York City and losing his father at a young age, Billy the Kid had to endure losing his mother when he was only 15.

America has a long and complicated fascination with serial killers. When we think about the most infamous of these killers, we generally think of men like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or John Wayne Gacy. Those names make headlines while there’s the often-repeated myth that suggests there are no female serial killers. After all, most of us couldn’t name a woman on the same scale of infamy at BTK or the elusive Zodiac Killer, can we? As it so often is, the truth is far more complicated. Women kill.

Thomas Horn Jr. was an infamous figure in the 19th-century American Old West. Cowboy, soldier, government scout, translator, and gunman, Horn’s storied life has become an important part of western folklore. In 1902, he was convicted for murdering a 14-year-old boy after a run-in during a feud with a cattle rancher. The Life of Tom Horn is his life story in his own words, written from prison before he met his fate at the gallows the following year.