Showing results for "Readers Digest" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

The first digital collection of true crime tales from Reader's Digest, featuring the most gripping thrillers and mind-blowing mysteries from its digitized archives.

I had no idea that a monster hid behind his perfect mask, but my normally affectionate dog, Toby, instantly sensed the danger - standing in front of me was a serial killer, a sadist whose days and nights were consumed by murderous obsession.

The 1967 kidnapping of 10-year-old Kenneth Young loomed as one of the few unsolved major kidnaping cases in the FBI's history. His ransom of $250,000 was the second-largest payoff in the annals of the bureau's cases at the time. Yet more than 30 months had passed without a clue being found to the criminal's identity.

Too much fun wasn't a problem for good-looking Brent Wilson "Wil" Hicks and his athletic girlfriend, Alex Santini. In a case that has drawn comparisons to the infamous Bonnie and Clyde, the couple robbed $500,000 from a half dozen banks then lived the high life on the lam.

Robert Durst was once on top of the world. At age 35, he was the first-in-line heir to one of New York's greatest real-estate fortunes. But by the new millennium, Durst's future was looking anything but promising after he became the target of a police investigation in connection with three grisly murders.

After four members of his family were brutally murdered, Charlie Otero went from honor student to paranoid outlaw. It took 31 years to catch the killer - and for Charlie to heal himself.

Helen Dean was enjoying a smooth recovery from surgery at a New Jersey hospital in August 1993 when a thin, sharp-featured male nurse entered her room and told her son, Larry, to leave. When Larry returned a few minutes later, Helen angrily announced, "He stuck me!" Larry thought that was odd, as his mother wasn't scheduled to receive any medications. Strange, too, was the location of the shot - on her inner thigh, where it was very hard to see.

At the crest of a hill in Kansas City, Missouri, in the old stone house on Grandview Road where he had been born, Donin Wright and his girlfriend, Janet Clark, held loaded rifles. Wright regularly patrolled his property with a gun slung on his hip, but today's plan called for something more extreme.

Three years ago, a little painting caused big trouble for undercover agent Bob Wittman. Here, for the first time, he tells all.

An arsenic poisoning sends a small New England church into turmoil in April 2003.

Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men conned their way into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and pulled off a stunning robbery: They took a dozen works by such master artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet, which have never been recovered.

Justin Barber said he and his wife, April, were tipsy and amorous, having celebrated their third wedding anniversary with dinner and cocktails, as they strolled along the water's edge in Jacksonville, Florida. That's when a strange man approached them in an attempted robbery that left April dead, according to Justin's testimony. But when police took a closer look at the case, the details didn't add up.

It was a profound "Aha!" moment for Karen Lodrick: She suddenly realized how she knew the vaguely familiar looking woman in jeans and Gucci glasses, carrying a brown suede coat and a Prada purse, standing beside her at a local Starbucks. Karen's ID had been stolen five months earlier. Her bank account had been emptied, and her life sent reeling out of control. The suede coat was the same one she'd seen in the bank surveillance tape, worn by the woman who'd stolen Karen's ID.

Justin Barber said that he and his wife, April, were tipsy and amorous, having celebrated their third wedding anniversary with dinner and cocktails, as they strolled along the water's edge in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 17, 2002. That's when a strange man approached the couple in an attempted robbery that left April dead, according to Justin's testimony. But when police looked deeper into the case, the details didn't add up.

"Excuse me, sir, can I help you?" Mike Gibbs asked as a heavyset man with a duffel bag stepped into the driver's well of his 45-foot-long shuttle bus. "You're not allowed down here while the bus is moving." The man responded by leveling a .38-caliber revolver at the driver's right temple. "We're robbing the bus," he said quietly.

Police cited the deaths of his wife and daughter as a murder-suicide - but he knew that couldn't be.

To the amazement of those who knew Sally Mercer only as a vital, healthy housewife, the cause of her 1968 death was ruled as polio. Forty years later, new evidence may finally solve the mystery.

Forcing Susan Meyer to lie face-down on the floor, the intruders tied her hands behind her back with nylon rope. "Don't call the police," they warned as they led her 23-year-old daughter, Beth, away, "or you'll never see your daughter alive again." The men then pulled a pillowcase over Beth's head, forced her into the back of her mother's Oldsmobile, and drove off.

Tammi Smith was at the register of a Cincinnati convenience store, holding a copy of The Shelbyville News, on a seemingly ordinary day in 2005 when a stocky man in a long-sleeved white shirt and jeans burst through the front door with a gun in his hand. "Everybody get out, or I'm going to kill you!" he shouted, marking the start of what would be a 20-hour hostage ordeal for the mother of five children and two stepchildren.

The emergency medical crew that responded the night of November 6, 2000, had arrived too late. Greg de Villers, Kristin Rossum's husband of just 17 months, was dead - the result of an apparent suicide. Or was it?