True Crime Serial Murders

In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for The New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite 27-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois.

In this Notorious USA collection, Death of a Cheerleader, New York Times best-selling author Gregg Olsen and true crime journalist Kevin M. Sullivan write about notorious crimes in the Bluegrass State. In a scene right out of Hitchcock's "Rear Window", a young woman vanishes from a beach on a summer day and a neighbor views the abduction through his telescope. A newlywed disposes of his bride but doesn't know what to do with her head. Selling tickets at a drive-in movie theater proves deadly.

With a boom in cold-blooded cases throughout the 1980s, police began to rely on DNA evidence to help them find perpetrators, and since then forensic science has taken off as a powerful tool in solving murders. Best-selling true-crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us beyond the headlines to examine the real-life stories where forensics have played a crucial role. He speaks to experts who have worked on the most gruesome, most chilling and most shocking crime scenes and explains how notorious criminal cases from across the world were solved.

In March 1976, Ted Bundy was convicted of the aggravated kidnapping of a young woman near Salt Lake City, Utah. Bundy had not been accused or convicted of any violent crime except this one. No one knew then how many women Bundy had murdered, and many thought him incapable of doing so.

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.

It is often difficult to comprehend what makes a person kill. But when they kill and then commit further acts of depravity on their victim, it gives a whole new meaning to wrongdoing. In volume three of the True Crime Stories, we examine murderers who have all displayed the same gut-churning, wicked twist - each of them ate their victims. Each of these violent killers is examined in detail, including their backgrounds, the crimes they committed, and how they were brought to justice.

Chris Dorner was a cop with the LAPD who was fired after reporting that his training officer beat up a handcuffed, nonresisting suspect. He appealed. Lost. Then snapped. In his manifesto that he posted on Facebook, he vowed to kill those associated with him being fired as well as their families. His first victims were the daughter of the LAPD lawyer who represented him and her fiancé. This recent case from 2013 includes some graphic scenes, including the all-out manhunt for Dorner and his controversial death.

On a December night in 1978, Courtney Lund O'Neil's mother, teenaged Kim Byers, saw her friend Rob Piest alive for the last time. At the end of his shift at the pharmacy where they both worked, fifteen-year-old Rob went outside to speak to a contractor named John Wayne Gacy about a possible job. That night Rob became Gacy's final victim; his body was later found in the Des Plaines River. Kim's testimony, along with a receipt belonging to her found in Gacy's house, proving that Rob had been there, would be pivotal in convicting the serial killer who killed over thirty young men and boys.

Known as the "Vampire Rapist" or "Strangler Bill" for his distinctive modus operandi, Wayne Boden would rape, strangle, and bite the breasts of his victims. His rampage would continue in two cities over three years, only caught by superior evidence-gathering and the help of an orthodontist. True crime author Alan R. Warren takes you through the details of the case including the dental impressions used in court to convict Boden, a first in Canadian history, as well as Boden's escape from a maximum-security prison.

“No kill. No thrill.” The macabre mantra of Charles Ng shocked coworkers, but nobody really believed the soft-spoken ex-marine really meant it, even as those coworkers began disappearing. It was his favorite expression–and it also led to his undoing. No Kill No Thrill draws upon meticulous research to tell the true story of two violent psychopaths who plotted to capture and confine women as sex slaves and to kill friends and strangers alike for their coveted property.

In 1894, Leonarda Cianciulla was born into an abusive household. As a young girl, she attempted suicide twice. After decades of abuse, Leonarda sought stability and married Raffaele Pansardi. Her mother did not approve and conveyed her anger in the strongest possible sense. She cursed the marriage. Leonarda believed that her mother’s words had power and they haunted her. In 1939, Leonarda’s eldest son, Giuseppe, informed her that he was going to join the Army. She decided that the only way to protect him was through the most extreme means - human sacrifice.

On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland’s Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed “The Lady of the Lake,” was only the first of a butcher’s dozen. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some were beheaded while still alive.

Bizarre, compelling, terrifying, and authentic true crime stories of murder and mayhem. In this audiobook you will find 18 stories about love affairs gone deadly, mass murder, a family slaughter, even a story about a killer who impersonated his victim - chilling crimes that could only be perpetrated by the twisted minds and gruesome obsessions of coldblooded killers, the stuff that horror movies and novels are made of.

Many have seen and studied the classic films of Alfred Hitchcock, but how many know a lot of these movies were inspired by real life murders? These cases range from his native England in the 1800’s to 1950’s America. Influencing his work from The Lodger, his third directorial effort and first true suspense thriller, all the way down to Frenzy, his next to final film. Such minor details appear in his films as a woman’s necklace or being buried in a garden. Or can be so detailed that one film, about a wrongly accused musician, is based on a true story outright.

Eleven women went missing over the spring and summer of 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an old fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin-dealing represent just a few of the many threads in the community's diverse fabric. In Shallow Graves, investigative reporter Maureen Boyle tells the story of a case that has haunted New England for 30 years.

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. Incredibly, at the time the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in print in the Strand Magazine, a real-life Canadian doctor, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighborhood. In this book, Dean Jobb reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt officials and failed prosecutions allowed Cream to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again.

In 1992, 12-year-old Shanda Sharer was tortured and killed by four teenage girls, led by Melinda Loveless. Caught in a lesbian love triangle, the four girls would torture the young Shanda and burn her alive. The case would shock the picture-sque town in southern Indiana and make national headlines, making an entire nation ask, "why"?

In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on the The Dating Game, one of America's most popular television shows at the time. Handsome, successful, and romantic, he was embraced by the audience - and chosen as the winner by the beautiful bachelorette. To viewers across the country, Rodney seemed like the answer to every woman's dreams. Until they learned the truth about his once and future crimes.

Uncover the shocking and brutal truths behind some of the most heinous crimes committed against innocent victims in Killer Case Files, the true crime anthology that takes you on a gripping journey into the minds of depraved murderers.

Sarah Sak's son, Anthony Walgate, was murdered by gay serial killer Stephen Port after they met on dating app Grindr. Stephen Port was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey in November 2016. The case received extensive press coverage not only because of the horrific nature of the crimes but also because the police refused to investigate Anthony's death despite three more bodies being found in near identical circumstances. It was not until Scotland Yard's crime squad took over that Stephen Port was arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.