First True Crime

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

Upon graduating from the FBI academy, newly minted Special Agent James “Fitz” Fitzgerald heads to his first office - New York City. Once there, Fitz is immediately assigned to the highly-respected bank robbery squad. The investigations begin. Before long, he’s involved in the arrest of serial killers, murderers, robbers, kidnappers, extortionists, and pedophiles (including a fellow FBI agent), all on his way to a promotion to Quantico to the profiling unit. Fitz’s first assignment as a profiler is to the Unabom task force in San Francisco.

Howard Hughes was a true American original: legendary lover, record-setting aviator, award-winning film producer, talented inventor, ultimate eccentric, and, for much of his lifetime, the richest man in the United States. His desire for privacy was so fierce and his isolation so complete that even now, 25 years after his death, inaccurate stories continue to circulate, and many have been published as fact. Hughes explodes the illusion of his life and exposes the man behind the myth. He was a playboy whose sexual exploits with Hollywood stars were legendary.

90 Church is both the unbelievable memoir of one man's confrontation with the dark corners of the human experience and a fascinating window into a little-known time in American history. Learn the story of the agents who make the DEA look like choirboys.

Charged with the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in 1984, Kirk Bloodsworth was tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in Maryland's gas chamber. Maintaining his innocence, he read everything on criminal law available in the prison library and persuaded a new lawyer to petition for the then-innovative DNA testing. After nine years in one of the harshest prisons in America, Kirk Bloodsworth became the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

A boy with a rifle walks into a middle school, intent on carrying out Western-style vigilante justice. A wife and mother of four kisses her twelve-year-old student and forever changes our definition of student-teacher conferences. The world's most famous serial killers put Washington on the map. A bathtub, a handgun, a meat grinder, and a burn barrel play a role in the murder of the captain of a freighter.

In 1979, Brenda Spencer, a seemingly average teenage girl living in a nice suburban neighborhood, made and executed plans that would place her in infamy and set a violent and terrifying national precedent. She recieved a rifle for Christmas and a month later set her sights and opens fire on the elementary school across the street. The event is forever glorified by the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by The Boomtown Rats and marks the bloody beginning of the American phenomenon of school shootings.

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives.

Listen as five criminals tell their stories. Jay Jay found trouble young, very young. Serving time at age 12 is not the beginning of Jay Jay’s descent into criminality. Cjay has been in nearly as many prisons as she has fingers, yet nothing in her upbringing predestined her for crime. Lawrence, a child raised in American ghetto circumstances, became the epitome of extreme violence while at the same time holding tight an inner secret of female identity. Brian was a young man with a twinkle in his eye and a propensity for getting caught.

Appointed to conquer the "crime capital of the world", the first police chief of Paris faces an epidemic of murder in the late 1600s. Assigned by Louis XIV, Nicolas de La Reynie begins by clearing the streets of filth and installing lanterns throughout Paris, turning it into the City of Light. The fearless La Reynie pursues criminals through the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the city. He unearths a tightly knit cabal of poisoners, witches, and renegade priests.

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150.

In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a “spiritual harem” that practiced “free love” and other gross immoralities.

Pursued by one demon into the clutches of another, the ordinary life of Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols is made extraordinary by horrible, inhuman circumstance. Jack the Ripper's first victim comes to life in this sensitive and intimate fictionalized portrait, from humble beginnings, to building a family with an abusive husband, her escape into poverty and the workhouse, alcoholism, and finally abandoned on the streets of London where the Whitechapel Murderer found her.

It is 1935, and the deaths of Isabella Ruxton and Mary Rogerson would result in one of the most complex investigations the world had ever seen. The gruesome murders captured worldwide attention, with newspapers keeping the public enthralled with all the gory details. But behind the headlines was a different, more important story: the groundbreaking work of Scottish forensic scientists who developed new techniques to solve the case and shape the future of scientific criminal investigation.

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.

Sandy Johnson was in shock. Her husband, Duane, and young daughter, Sherrie, were violently ill when word arrived that her infant nephew just died of mysterious causes. Days earlier, the entire family was happy, healthy, and living the American dream. Now they were at the center of a terrifying medical crisis. Duane soon died in a condition unlike anything the doctors had ever seen. As they raced to discover what disease or toxin could have done so much damage so quickly, Lt. Foster Burchard of the Omaha police began to suspect foul play.

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.

Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper. Robin Odell's Ripperology is the first study to present a sequential history of literary investigations of Jack the Ripper's crimes and to address the seven principal phases of Ripper speculations....

Get ready to experience the real-life drama from behind the walls of one of the country’s worst maximum-security facilities. Experience horrific assaults, bloodthirsty murders, and the kind of drama that needs to be heard to be believed. Simon King shares a raw and uncensored look beyond the razor wire, giving you the opportunity to see how life really runs inside a place filled with those the society would rather forget.

Mark Dapin was still in school when he met his first murderer—a boy called Ian. In reporting the murder Ian eventually committed, newspapers used the cliché that it ‘shocked even those who knew him best.’ But it didn’t shock Dapin, because he knew Ian in real life, not in clichés. The First Murderer I Ever Met is the truest true crime—it’s what actually happened.