Family Murders True Crime

This true story begins on a sunny morning in 2003, just before the Fourth of July, outside of Flint Michigan, when an 80-year-old grandmother has mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth. She was my mother. Three days after she disappeared, the charred remains of her new car were identified, after being completely destroyed by an intentional fire; but she was nowhere to be found.

Dozens of books are published each year trying to instruct parents on how to raise good, responsible children, but things still go wrong from time to time. Of course, it’s rare that children turn out like Lyle and Erik Menendez did. For weeks in 1993, Americans were glued to their television, watching as the lurid testimony was given and refuted on Court TV. The Menendez Brothers: The History of the Family Murders that Shocked America looks at one of the most famous true crime cases of the 20th century.

For most families that have suffered the unsolved murder of a loved one, a successful cold case investigation can finally bring closure to their tragedy and, ideally, bring the perpetrator to justice. But in 2013, when LaPorte, Indiana, police detectives arrested Jason Tibbs for the murder of sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison twenty years before, they sent an innocent man to prison, and they also removed a cloud over the victim's brother-in-law, Ray McCarty, who had previously been indicted for killing her.

Discover the dark secrets that lurk behind closed doors in Family, Friends and Neighbors: Stories of Murder and Betrayal. You will be left questioning just how well you truly know those around you in this gripping true crime collection. You'll investigate thirty-four tales of mind-boggling acts of violence, such as: the captivating downfall of prestigious attorney and community figure Alex Murdaugh, whose addiction spiraled into a web of deceit, fraud, and murder; the heartbreaking story of Michael and Robert Bever, brothers driven to commit unspeakable acts.

A psychopathic criminal on the run from prison. A family of five held hostage in their home. A frantic police manhunt across the snowbound Derbyshire moors. Just one survivor. The definitive account of the terrifying 1977 Pottery Cottage murders that shocked Britain. For three days, escaped prisoner Billy Hughes played macabre psychological games with Gill Moran and her family, keeping them in separate rooms of their home while secretly murdering them one by one.

On October 8th, 2009, Bobby Jamison, his wife Sherilynn, and their six-year-old daughter Madyson, set off for a drive from their home in Eufaula, Oklahoma, to the nearby Sans Bois Mountains. They didn't return that day, or the next. A week later, their truck was found abandoned on a mountain road. Inside was their dog, malnourished but alive, the family's cell phones, wallets, and $32,000 in cash.

RELENTLESS PURSUIT follows the personal mission of a Washington, D.C., federal homicide prosecutor who dedicated himself to bringing justice and closure to the family of a brutally murdered mother and daughter, a case during which the author's own father passed away.

In his account of the sensational life and murder of Grady Stiles Jr., also known as the legendary carnival freak Lobster Boy, author Fred Rosen explains how Stiles' death was engineered by his wife, Mary Teresa, the carny known as the Electrified Girl. Rosen describes how Mary Teresa arranged for her husband's murder after years of physical and emotional abuse. During Mary Teresa's dramatic trial, Rosen becomes a character in his own book.

In 1991 Nancy Dillard Lyon, daughter of a powerful Dallas real estate tycoon, was murdered, poisoned with arsenic. Nancy’s brother became convinced her adulterous husband, Richard, was responsible. And so Richard was arrested, tried, and convicted - and sentenced to life in prison. But did the evidence support this conviction?

Janet March had it all: a corporate lawyer husband, two beautiful children, a promising career as an artist, and a dream house she designed herself. But behind closed doors, her husband led a destructive double life. On August 16, 1996, Janet had an appointment to finally file for divorce. But she never arrived. On the night of August 15, she vanished. Janet's disappearance incited a massive search and media frenzy that revealed her husband Perry's seedy dealings.

On a snowy Christmas Day in 1929, Charles Davis Lawson, a respected tobacco farmer in rural North Carolina, murdered everyone in his family except one son. He left the world to consider the reason behind his extremely surprising and brutal act. Since that time, a huge and lonely mass grave has existed quietly in a small family cemetery deep in the North Carolina woods, and it has left generations of people wondering why.

Beneath a veneer of respectability and religion, Mary Winkler's soul festered as she struggled to be obedient and loving to her husband and her God. Her suppressed anguish exploded in a shotgun blast that took the life of her husband, preacher Matthew Winkler. Mary packed up her three young daughters and fled to the beach, leaving an endless trail of questions in her wake. Would anyone ever make sense of the tragedy in Selmer, Tennessee?

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met. When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Richard's seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah, was sitting on the living room couch with a high-powered rifle - just in case her brother missed.

For twenty years, Ken and Kristine Fitzhugh and their two sons had lived lives of comfortable middle-class normality. Then came the shocking news that Kristine Fitzhugh was dead, the victim of a terrible accident.... By the time the Palo Alto Police Department looked closer at the death of Kristine Fitzhugh, there could be only one conclusion. Someone had murdered Kristine in her own home, inflicting a series of horrific blows to the back of her head, and then cleaned up the mess to make it look like an accident.

On 22 May 2017, a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of young fans leaving an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. Twenty-two people were killed and hundreds more were injured. Saffie-Rose Roussos, aged eight, was the youngest victim to die in the attack. She had been at the concert with her mother, Lisa, and her elder sister, Ashlee.

In Backseat Tragedies: Hot Car Deaths, best-selling true crime authors RJ Parker and JJ Slate explore the circumstances that led to the deaths of over 20 children who died of hyperthermia, or heatstroke, in a car. They explore the science of how quickly a car can heat to deadly temperatures and why the human brain can so easily be tricked into forgetting something as important as a child. They also highlight important steps we can take as a community to prevent future casualties.

As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.” This observation seems especially true in matters of family, when the fury between generations is often never resolved and instead secretly carried, a wound that cannot heal. For David Berg, this is truer than for most, and once you listen to the story of his family, you will understand why he held it privately for so long and why the betrayals between parent and child can be the most wrenching of all.

In this remarkable memoir, a harrowing true story of family, violence, guilt, and atonement, a journalist reflects on his own journey to come to terms with his brother’s terrible crimes - and to find justice for the young girl he killed.

The affluent suburb of Cheshire, Connecticut, seemed like the perfect place for Dr. William Petit and his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to raise their two lovely daughters.... Until July 23, 2007, when, according to police, two ex-cons invaded the Petit home hoping to embark on a routine robbery - one that would ultimately prove deadly.