Child Murders True Crime

Don’t miss the next captivating page-turner from Sunday Times bestseller Susan Lewis! Book 3 in the Cristy Ward series A dead husband. A missing wife. Will they find her in time? Romy Kaplan has vanished from her home. Or has she? When Romy begins posting on her social media accounts asking...

In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy's home. The murder cast a palpable gloom over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors among Lisa's friends and peers. With a fresh perspective and painstaking research, James Renner reconstructs the events leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents.

A blonde beauty queen, missing children, six suspicious deaths, and the twisted Mormon doomsday writings of her fifth husband are only the beginning of a tragic crime saga that gripped Americans and instigated frantic searches all over the country. It all started when Lori Vallow met Chad Daybell at a doomsday prepper event. Their story grew like a wildfire that creates its own weather, and what happened next will shock even the most experienced true crime listener.

Perhaps the most compelling murder case of our day, the death of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey galvanized the nation - and years after it occurred, the mystery still endures. Who killed the young beauty queen and why? Who is covering up for whom, and who is simply lying? In JonBenet, the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the Ramsey murder, a former lead Boulder Police detective, Steve Thomas, explores the case in vivid and fascinating detail.

Paced like a thriller and full of insider information, this book embeds readers in one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation—the kidnapping of Polly Klaas. On October 1, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a...

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust - in ghettos, on death marches, and in concentration camps - a young couple seeks refuge in Canada. They settle into a new life, certain that the terrors of their past are behind them. They build themselves a cozy little cottage on a lake in Muskoka, a cottage that becomes emblematic of their victory over the Nazis. The charming retreat is a safe haven, a refuge from haunted memories. That is, until a single act of unspeakable violence defiles their sanctuary.

On Australia day, 26 January 1966, Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont were abducted from Colley Reserve, Glenelg, South Australia, and never seen again, leading to one of Australia's most extensive police investigations and manhunts. Five decades later, no trace of the children has ever been found.

Ted Bundy killed at least 35 girls and women, and possibly hundreds. Was his first victim eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr who disappeared from their Tacoma, Washington neighborhood in 1961? Her body was never found and there were no clues, just two tenacious detectives who spent the rest of their lives trying to solve the case.

Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977; their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was six years old at the time the murders began and had evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. There were few credible leads and equally few credible suspects. That's what the cops had passed down to the press, and that's what the city of Detroit and J. Reuben Appelman had come to believe.

Police found the body of 16-year-old Calyx on her bed under a white blanket. They found her 13-year-old brother Beau in the family car covered up the same way. Both had two gunshots to the head. Both had been dead for hours. The only other person who had been in the home was their mother, Julie Schenecker. She told law enforcement that she could no longer tolerate her kids talking back to her. Was this a case of premeditated murder? Or a horrible tragedy fueled by a mental illness that had spun out of control?

Grief, mental illness, and the bonds of family are movingly explored in this extraordinary memoir “suffused with emotional depth and intellectual inquiry” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises) as a writer delves into the tragedy of his mother’s violent death at the hands of...

This audiobook tells 7 horrific true crime stories of parricide, the killing of one's parent(s). In this thought provoking, thrilling true crime piece, you will get an insight and understanding of this topic that most people will never receive or thankfully, never experience.

In 1988 a troubled young man and his flamboyant mother were arrested for murdering a wealthy widow in her New York City mansion. Suddenly America was transfixed by a pair of real-life film noir characters. The media couldn't get enough of the twisted relationship between Sante Kimes and her 23-year-old son Kenny. But the most chilling story of all was never told - until now. Kent Walker, Sante's elder son, reveals how he survived 40 years of "the Dragon Lady's" very special brand of motherly love and still managed to get away.

The killing of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey—found in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado, with a smashed skull and a garrote placed around her neck—remains one of America’s most shameful unsolved crimes. A flawed investigation, fraught with police, prosecutorial misconduct, and widespread evidence tampering, means that the little girl’s killer remains at large after more than two decades.

From the summer of 1979 through the spring of 1981, Atlanta, Georgia, was held under siege by a serial killer, and dozens of victims started to appear. The series of murders, which became known as the “Atlanta Child Murders case”, gripped the city of Atlanta with fear and shocked the nation because most of the victims were children. In this true-crime audiobook, you will hear about how the Atlanta Child Murders case put a city under siege and how a task force of law-enforcement officers from several different agencies eventually captured the killer.

In 1981, just nine years old, Jennifer Cardy was abducted and murdered, her bicycle found standing where she had left it. There followed dark days for the Cardy family, days of searching for their missing daughter, grieving her death, wrestling with the questions. It would be thirty years before they would find any answers; thirty years before her killer, Robert Black, would face any kind of justice.

On 9 October 1986, Russell Bishop sexually assaulted and strangled nine-year-old Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, in woods near Brighton. He did not answer for his crimes for over 30 years. Bishop - a petty criminal known to both girls' families - was charged after his suspiciously close involvement in the search for the bodies. But a last-minute change of testimony from his then-girlfriend allowed him to go free, and the Babes in the Woods murders became one of Britain's most infamous cold cases.

On Christmas Night 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her family's home in Boulder, Colorado. A ransom note was found, but it was hours before her father, John, found her body in the basement. She had been strangled with a garrote and her skull was fractured. The media sensationalized the tragic death of the "child beauty queen" and public speculation and rumors ran rampant. What followed was one of the most notorious unsolved murder investigations in American history.

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.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.