True Crime Serial

"If anything ever happens to me, promise me that you will see that there is an investigation...And find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story," Sheila Blackthorne Bellush told her sister after she divorced multimillionaire Allen Blackthorne. Now, in perhaps the first book ever written at a victim's request, America's best selling true-crime writer, Ann Rule, untangles a horrific web of lies that culminated in Sheila's savage murder more than 10 years after she left Blackthorne.

John Christie was a man with many secrets, and his flat at 10 Rillington Place in London would become known as one of the original houses of horror. Former soldier, special constable, and husband, John was to become regarded as one of the worst British serial killers to date, and one that left a lot more questions than answers following his execution.

David Richard Berkowitz, aussi connu sous le surnom de "Fils de Sam", est un tueur en série américain qui a avoué le meurtre de six personnes et en a blessé plusieurs autres à New York dans les années 1970. Après avoir attaqué plusieurs personnes avec un couteau, il achète en 1976 un revolver Charter Arms Bulldog calibre 44 et tire au hasard et à bout portant sur des passants. Il continue pendant plus d'un an ses crimes, sans être inquiété par la police qui n'a aucune piste.

“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.

Understand history's most enigmatic serial killer. In December of 1968, a serial killer began orchestrating a campaign of terror in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not satisfied with the simple act of murder, he taunted law enforcement and the public by writing letters to local newspapers. Through often cryptic and bizarre content - including four ciphers, three (now two) of which have never been solved - the psychopath played a twisted game. Reporters dubbed the man the "Cipher Killer", but the murderer chose a different name for himself: the Zodiac.

In 1895, elderly patients were quietly dying one by one, yet no one sounded the alarm – until an entirely family passed away. All had been in the care of nurse Jane Toppan and suspicions hit the roof. Dilated pupils, feverish bodies, and erratic rambling left doctors baffled, but these weren’t the signs of illness. They were the marks of something far more sinister. Toppan manipulated her patients' dosages, watching them drift between life and death. For her, each fatal dose was not a crime, but a twisted act of mercy—a dark salvation from suffering.

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.

Real Life Evil is the first book in a compelling series of true-crime short stories for listeners who don't have time for a full-length novel.

To the average American, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Edmund Kemper before 1973. Standing at six-foot-nine, the young man was a giant, but he was gentle, soft spoken, and shy. He lived with his mother into his mid-20s and frequented local bars, cozying up to police officers. This was one reality of Kemper's life - the reality he wanted those around him to see. There was another side to the man though, a much darker side. Kemper's actions in his life shocked America, who dubbed him the Co-Ed Killer for his urge to murder and violate co-ed girls in Northern California.

Robert Charles Browne, a 68-year-old Louisiana native, who serves a double-life sentence at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility may just be one of the most prolific murderers in American history. However, some of the self-professed serial killer’s uncorroborated claims leaves plenty of room for speculation about the cold cases that remain unsolved in the wake of his imprisonment.

Spouse-killers, child-killers, and mindlessly brutal murderers all have their abhorrent crimes laid out in this book. You’ll read about Blake Leibel, who mercilessly tortured his girlfriend before killing her and draining her of her blood. I’ll tell you about the murder of Junko Furuta, which saw the teenage girl held hostage by her peers and tortured beyond belief before she succumbed to her injuries and died. The outcome of that case is as unbelievable as it is unjust.

Polygamy. Incest. Vampires. Murder. There are words you might expect to read together in the plot of a gothic horror novel, but not so long ago, in the usually quiet town of Fresno, California, those words were the headlines. What do they have to do with each other? The answer to that question is one man: Marcus Wesson. Chances are you have heard of cults, such as the Manson Family, and Jonestown, but this might be your first time hearing the story of a vampire cult led by Marcus Wesson. The members of this cult were members of Wesson’s own family.

In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas, was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.

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.

One morning in July 1974, Anita Andrews, the owner and bartender at Fagiani's Cocktail Lounge in Napa, California was found dead in her bar - raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in a bloody frenzy. She'd last been seen alive the night before talking to a drifter who sat at the end of the bar, playing cards and flirting with her. But the stranger, along with Anita's Cadillac, had disappeared. Unable to locate a suspect, police investigators sadly watched the case grow cold over the years.

Throughout his time as a murder squad detective, Trevor Marriott has seen firsthand the wanton slayings and butcheries that have been committed by both men and women who have warped, depraved and sadistic minds. In this fascinating and chilling book, he examines the world's most notorious serial killers and the despicable crimes they committed.

Der Fall um die Engelmacherin Dagmar Overby, der 1921 ganz Dänemark erschütterte: Die damals von der Presse als "Menschentier" bezeichnete Serienmörderin, die zwischen 9 und 16 Kinder ermordet hat, stammte aus ärmlichen Verhältnissen und war bereits als Kind auffällig gewesen und selbst Opfer von Missbrauch. Nach mehreren Anstellungen und missglückten Verhältnissen zu Männern brachte sie nicht nur ihre eigenen Kinder auf bestialische Weise um, sondern auch ihre Pflegekinder... Für Gänsehaut ist bei diesem spannenden True Crime-Fall gesorgt!

For Brazil, Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha is the monster in the deceptive mask, the handsome man with the suave persona that fooled so many. He is a good-looking young man, 6’4” with brown hair and brown eyes, who is considered a decent person by those who know him. Although he was a quiet child, and he kept to himself even in adulthood, he had all the physical qualities that women find attractive. Unfortunately, this fact undoubtedly helped him become the most murderous serial killer the city of Goiânia, in Brazil, had ever known.

The shocking murders carried out by an unknown serial killer in London's East End during the autumn of 1888, haunted the public imagination at the time and have continued to exert a baleful influence ever since. But what was it like to live through those terrifying weeks? This audiobook looks at the crimes of Jack the Ripper through the eyes of Londoners, including the rumors that swept through the capital city, the alarms, the riots, the persecutions, the suspicions, and the sheer naked terror of the awful autumn when a killer stalked the streets.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.