True Crime Memoir

The astonishing story of Benny Binion - a rip-roaring saga of murder, money, and the making of Las Vegas. Benny Binion was many things: a cowboy, a pioneering casino owner, a gangster, a killer, and founder of the hugely successful World Series of Poker. Blood Aces tells the story of Binion's crucial role in shaping modern Las Vegas. From a Texas backwater, Binion rose to prominence on a combination of vision, determination, and brutal expediency.

Robert Pickton, inherited a pig farm worth a million dollars and used his wealth to lure skid row hookers to his farm, where he confessed to murdering 49 female victims; dismembering and feeding their body parts to his pigs, which he supplied to Vancouver area restaurants.

The pitch went like this: Chris Butler, a retired cop, ran a private investigator firm in Concord, California. His business had a fascinating angle - his firm was staffed entirely by soccer moms. In fact, Butler employed PI Super Moms: attractive, organized, smart, and trained in investigative techniques, self-defense, and weaponry. This American Life host Ira Glass described them as "MILF: Charlie's Angels." When this story came across Pete Crooks's desk when he was working at Diablo magazine in 2010, he was instantly hooked.

In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country.

I was known as the traitor's daughter. When I was five years old, my father was tortured, branded with the letter Z, then beaten and left for dead. The grueling punishment for his crime was a reminder to all others who dared threaten the Russian's reign. I was the young girl left behind. A living piece of the traitorous puzzle the Russian leader tried so diligently to ignore - until I grew up. No longer could he deny how much my existence had always been intertwined with his. And in order to survive the life I was thrown into, I was forced to learn my place inside of it.

The most fatal mistake? Trust. It's the foundation of any enduring relationship between friends, lovers, spouses, and families. But when trust is placed in those who are not what they seem, the results can be deadly. Ann Rule, who famously chronicled her own shocking experience of unknowingly befriending a sociopath in The Stranger Beside Me, offers a riveting, all-new collection from her true-crime files, with the lethally shattered bonds of trust at the core of each blood-soaked account.

Billionaires, philanthropists, socialites...victims. Barry and Honey Sherman appeared to lead charmed lives. But the world was shocked in late 2017 when their bodies were found in a bizarre tableau in their elegant Toronto home. First described as murder-suicide - belts looped around their necks, they were found seated beside their basement swimming pool - police later ruled it a staged, targeted double murder. Nothing about the case made sense to friends of the founder of one of the world’s largest generic pharmaceutical firms and his wife....

In Sworn to Silence, award-winning reporter Jim Tracy tells the lawyers' story within the framework of a true crime narrative. He uncovers a criminal who police and the public never learned was an American serial killer. Tracy does so while taking the listener back briefly to American life in the early 1970s.

In September 2011, M. William Phelps made a bold decision that would change the landscape of reality-based television - and his own life. He asked a convicted serial killer to act as a consultant for his TV series. Under the code name Raven, the murderer shared his insights into the minds of other killers and helped analyze their crimes. As the series became an international sensation, Raven became Phelps' unlikely confidant, ally - and friend.

The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake. Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact.

"A Rose for Her Grave" - the principal story of this collection - vividly recreates the cautionary tale of Randy Roth, a misogynistic sociopath from the Pacific Northwest whose rage was directed primarily at women and children. Addicted to his own greed, Roth exercised a powerful aura of control over his victims, using his ability to charm and boyish good looks to lower their defenses. By the time they saw the reality of the madness in his eyes, it was usually too late.

It is dawn on Thursday, 14 February 2019, and armed FSB agents are raiding Michael Calvey’s Moscow apartment. He is being arrested for a crime that never happened.

You are about to witness how 12 criminals turned their darkest fantasies into a reality! What does one must have done to earn the nickname the Lonely Hearts Killer or the Giggling Granny? How does an argument with a tenant led to one being turned into ashes? True Crime Storytime, Volume 1 will examine these and other horrific crimes, and delves deep into the grotesque thinking of the monstrous individuals who perpetrated them.

Depuis la fin des années 1960, les crimes à caractère occulte connaissent une progression foudroyante. À tel point que des corps policiers ont mis sur pied des unités d’élite spécialisée; en effet, la vision intime du monde de ces meurtriers est souvent peuplée de démons, de vampires et de goules. Ici, nous ne parlons plus de meurtres ou de modus operandi, mais de rituels et de sacrifices. Mais qui sont ces «tueurs de l’occulte»? Par quelle «logique» tordue en viennent-ils à croire qu’ils sont les messagers de quelque divinité?

The case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficianados. A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America’s Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness.

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence. Now in this book, Black builds on that memoir, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones.

Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy O'Brien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984. Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense. But during the subsequent trial, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge.

In the summer of 2003, the Houston suburb of Clear Lake, Texas, was devastated when four young residents were viciously slain. The two female victims, Tiffany Rowell and Rachael Koloroutis, were just 18 years old - popular and beloved. But when a killer came knocking, it turned out to be someone they knew all too well. Seventeen-year-old Christine Paolilla was an awkward outsider until the girls befriended her. In this gripping true story, M. William Phelps delves into the heart of a baffling mystery to get to the truth of an act so brutal it could not be understood - until now.

Detective Michael Palermo built his career on his unique ability to inhabit two worlds at once: the world of law enforcement and the underworld of New York’s crime family organizations. Palermo participated in over 2,000 arrests while maintaining close relationships with the kingpins of organized crime - ties that allowed him to stay one step ahead of the rest of the New York City Police Department. This true crime drama takes you inside the police force at its most corrupt.