True Crime Short

Serial killers: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are often the first names that spring to mind. Many people assume serial killers are primarily an American phenomenon that came about in the latter part of the 20th century. But such assumptions are far from the truth. Serial killers have been around for a very long time and can be found in every corner of the globe - and they're not just limited to the male gender either. Some of these predators have been caught and brought to justice whereas others have never been found, let alone identified.

Real-life is stranger and more frightening than fiction, and this book serves to cement that principal even further. In this compilation, there are 11 cases of some of the most deplorable, unjust and violent crimes I’ve come across. From cannibals to rapists to the sickest, most twisted criminals you’ve not yet heard of, you’ll hear about them all in this book. I’ll tell you the story of Rurik Jutting, a British banker living in Hong Kong who held two women hostage, tortured them and raped them over a number of days.

This book contains 101 bite-sized horror stories that are intended to scare and unsettle you. These are real peoples' accounts of the creepy and the occult - of their near-misses with madmen and paranormal entities. Each chapter is a short, stand alone campfire tale, a retelling of a frightening or gruesome incident that has stuck with the teller, something that gives them pause to this day when they find themselves alone in the dark. These stories have been collected with the knowledge that real life is scarier than fiction.

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.

"The Old Man and the Gun" is the incredible story of a bank robber and prison escape artist who modeled himself after figures like Pretty Boy Floyd and who, even in his 70s, refuses to retire. "True Crime" follows the twisting investigation of a Polish detective who suspects that a novelist planted clues in his fiction to an actual murder. And "The Chameleon" recounts how a French impostor assumes the identity of a missing boy from Texas and infiltrates the boy's family, only to soon wonder whether he is the one being conned.

On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history.

Award-winning criminologist R. Barri Flowers, best-selling author of Murder at the Pencil Factory, delivers again in the gripping historical true-crime audio short, Murder of the U.S. Attorney: Congressman Sickles' Crime of Passion in 1859.

Ned Kelly the man - warts and all - the most vivid portrait yet of Australia's immortal outlaw! Author, Ian Jones, acknowledged Kelly authority, shares with us the results of a lifetime's research. For the first time, Ned Kelly truly emerges as a man - a man who hated conflict yet never escaped it. A private man incapable of being ordinary and unnoticed. A man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was.

It’s a total crime wave: A mini encyclopedia of true crime, packed with stories of killers, cons, survivors, forensics and more! More than 200 stories of killers, con artists, master thieves, and brazen kidnappers—and strong survivors, detectives, forensic breakthroughs, and legal minds on...

On Monday, December 4, 1933, attractive New York attorney Agnes Colonia Tufverson, 43, and Ivan Poderjay, a captain in the Yugoslav army, 10 years her junior, got married at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City. What promised to be a storybook romance for Agnes, with a bright future of travel and adventure, turned out to be anything but for the newlywed.

This novel take on the history of wine reveals that, whether by adding toxic sweeteners or passing off counterfeit bottles, wine fraud is abundant—and as old as wine itself. Vintage Crime will intrigue even the most sated of wine drinkers with its juicy tales of deception, raising interesting questions along the way: what counts as wine, why do we drink it, and what makes a wine truly authentic?

On the evening of Wednesday, July 12, 1922, Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a shocking and deadly assault. The victim was an attractive 21-year-old widow named Alberta Meadows. Her death came as the result of a vicious hammer and boulder attack on a twisting dirt road at the bottom of a hill in the subdivision of Montecito Heights on the city's northeast side.

The gripping tale chronicles the lives of Britain's most infamous husband and wife serial killers couple. Over the course of two decades, Fred and Rosemary West murdered more than a dozen young females. Most of the murders were sexually motivated and took place at the couple's house of horrors on 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, in South West England. Only when the killers were brought to justice did their murderous reign of rape, torture, bondage, and terror come to an end.

Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan arrived at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked, to pick up her paycheck. The next day, Mary’s bloody, battered, and bruised dead body was found in the basement of the pencil factory, the victim of foul play. The Jewish-American factory superintendent Leo Frank was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder in a controversial trial. Frank himself became the victim of a lynch mob, when they broke him out of prison and hung him from a tree.

On the morning of August 14, 1935, Virginia Seigh, an attractive 23-year-old secretary, was shot and killed as she stood in the driveway of a home in Queens, New York. Her murderer was Mrs. Etta Reisman, the 35-year-old wife of Arthur Reisman, a 42-year-old well-to-do owner of a beauty salon chain. The previous day, Reisman had confessed to his wife he had fallen in love with Miss Seigh - his secretary, who had resided with the Reismans for seven years - and wanted a separation. This did not set well with Etta, who felt totally betrayed by her husband and their house guest.

On December 15, 1927, 12-year-old Marion Parker, daughter of a prominent banker was brazenly abducted from her junior high school in Los Angeles, California, in a bizarre ransom and revenge scheme. Two days later, the girl's dismembered remains were left behind by a brutal killer, destroying a family and unnerving the entire city. This caused pandemonium as the perpetrator managed to evade immediate capture, leading to a manhunt by authorities unlike any in recent memory.

Mass Murder in the Sky: The Bombing of Flight 629 is a 7,063 word historical true crime piece about mass killer, Jack Gilbert Graham. It tells the shocking story of hatred, revenge, mass murder, terrorism, and a bizarre dynamite bomb Christmas gift that brought a plane down in the Colorado sky more than half a century ago, killing all forty-four passengers and crew, and the intense investigation that resulted in bringing the killer to justice and paying the ultimate price for his brutal crimes.

In this frightening tale of dark fantasies, pornography, rape, and murder, British serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley targeted children in the early 1960s - killing five and burying most of them in the Saddleworth Moor in Northern England - before being brought to justice. Included as a bonus is a complete true crime short, The Sunset Strip Killers, about serial killers Douglas Clark and Carol Mary Bundy, who targeted runaways and prostitutes in Hollywood, California in 1980 for rape, torture and murder.

On August 6, 1978, firefighters discovered the charred remains of a body inside a wooden crate, set ablaze in an empty lot in the Bronx, New York. The male decedent had been worked over, stabbed, and shot multiple times. The victim was identified as John “Jack” Tupper, a restaurateur, age 34. His killer turned out to be 48-year-old Howard “Buddy” Jacobson, who at one time was the country's leading Thoroughbred horse trainer. The shocking act of violence was the result of a classic love triangle turned deadly.

On April 3, 1961, 38-year-old former vocalist Ella Mae Cooley was beaten to death in her home in Willow Springs, an unincorporated area located in Kern County, California. The cruelty of the crime was shocking to local residents in the normally idyllic community. A greater shock was that the murder was committed by the victim's 50-year-old husband, Donnell Clyde Cooley, a well-known big-band leader, musician, actor, host of a television variety show, and businessman. See how this tragic story of celebrity, suspicion, and homicidal rage unfolds in the historical crime of passion.