Serial Killers True Crime Science

Joel Rifkin trolled the streets on Manhattan and Long Island under the cover of night searching for a way to ease the intense urges he couldn’t deny. Prostitutes were his targets, and although he allowed some to live, there were many who were much less fortunate. Of all the serial killer audiobooks out there, this one delves into the controversy surrounding the death penalty and discusses whether monsters like Rifkin should be executed or allowed to live their days out in prison.

Carl Eugene Watts, Coral to his friends, was a serial killer during the latter stages of the 20th century. His crimes are forgotten by the mainstream, but he may have had a hand in the murder of over 100 women. Stalking around Michigan and Texas during the 1970s and 1980s, his family had no idea of his true nature. His friends and associates had no clue. Behind the mask of normalcy hid one of the country's most brutal killers.

Between December 1968 and October 1969, a hooded serial killer called Zodiac terrorized San Francisco. Claiming responsibility for 37 murders, he manipulated the media with warnings, dares, and bizarre cryptograms that baffled FBI code-breakers. Then, as suddenly as the murders began, Zodiac disappeared into the Bay Area fog. After painstaking investigation and more than 30 years of research, Robert Graysmith finally exposes Zodiac's true identity.

Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than 80 serial killers around the world. What she has learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious killers known to man.

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt?

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

In 1994, after many years of movies and television portraying the evil side of the human psyche, Dr. David Canter published Criminal Shadows. Two decades on, its revolutionary descriptions of psychological profiling still helps to explain the actions of serial killers and psychopaths. These techniques can help police precisely identify and locate murderers and rapists, even those who have alluded capture for years.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds.

This audiobook examines the media and cultural responses to the awful crimes of Brady and Hindley, whose murders provided a template for future media reporting on serial killers. It discusses the nature of evil and psychopaths and how they are represented in film, drama, novels and art. It also questions the ethics of the 'serial killing industry' and how the modern cultural fixation on celebrity has extended to serial killers and it explores the impact on the journalists and police officers from being involved in such cases including some interviews with them.

The Anatomy of Motive offers a dramatic, insightful look at the development and evolution of the criminal mind. The famed former chief of the FBI's Investigative Support Unit, John Douglas was the pioneer of modern behavioral profiling of serial criminals. Working again with acclaimed novelist, journalist, and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, and using cases from his own fabled career as examples, Douglas takes us further than ever before into the dark corners of the minds of arsonists, hijackers, bombers, poisoners, serial killers, and mass murderers.

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer—and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

No Stone Unturned recreates the genesis of NecroSearch International: a small ,eclectic group of scientists and law enforcement personal, active and retired, who volunteer their services to help locate the clandestine graves of murder victims and recover the remains and evidence to assist with the apprehension and conviction of the killers.

Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity.

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.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?

Criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee goes behind bars to get the last word from some of the worst criminals in the world. They speak of their violence and shocking deeds in their own words, from within some of the hardest prisons on earth. These interviews have been collated into this disturbing and unflinching analysis of the criminal mind. Here is what happens when you meet the people most of us know only from our nightmares and newspaper headlines.

Gosnell is the untold story of America's most prolific serial killer. In 2013, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of killing four people, including three babies, but is thought to have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands more in a 30-year killing spree. ABC News correspondent Terry Moran described Gosnell as "America's most prolific serial killer".

When he was arrested in July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer had a severed head in the refrigerator, two more in the freezer, two skulls and a skeleton in a filing cabinet. But if anything could be more disturbing than the brute horror of this scene, it was the evidence that Dahmer had been using these human remains not only for sexual gratification but as part of a dark ritual of his own devising - to furnish a shrine to himself.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Kristen Gilbert was known as a hardworking, dedicated nurse - so why were her patients dying? So many emergencies and sudden deaths occurred while Kristen made her rounds on Ward C that her colleagues jokingly called her the "Angel of Death".