"Until You Are Dead": Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History


Julian Sher - 2001
    That summer, Canada lost its innocence and the shocking story of Steven Truscott became imprinted on the nation’s memory. First published in 2001, “Until You Are Dead” revealed new witnesses, leads and evidence never presented to the courts. Now this national bestseller is fully revised and updated, and takes readers from that fateful night in 1959 up to the new appeal granted to Truscott in 2006. Julian Sher’s award-winning and insightful chronicle details Steven Truscott’s dramatic final battle – with the help of his family, investigative journalists and lawyers – to clear his name once and for all.

The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough


Anne E. Schwartz - 1991
    16 pages of photographs.

Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy's Last Lawyer


Polly Nelson - 1994
    Defending the Devil is a unique and candid look at the Bundy case and at Nelson's three-year personal battle to balance her duties as a lawyer, her compassion for human life, and the inhuman crimes her client had committed. Through the obstacles and setbacks faced by Nelson there was Ted Bundy himself. While his crimes show the extremely violent side of his personality, there were many other sides --many other extreme sides--that the public never saw. Ranging from shy and defensive to a narcissistic performer, Bundy professed his innocence by day while offering confessions to the police and helping the FBI at night. His own worst enemy, Bundy seemed never to understand the severity of his crimes, the punishment, or the public's reaction to them. Through it all stood Nelson, defending him from both the system and himself.

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa


Michael Finkel - 2005
    A young, highly intelligent man named Christian Longo, on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for killing his entire family, has recently been captured in Mexico, where he'd taken on a new identity -- Michael Finkel of the New York Times.The next day, on page A-3 of the Times, comes another bit of troubling news: a note, written by the paper's editors, explaining that Finkel has falsified parts of an investigative article and has been fired. This unlikely confluence sets the stage for a bizarre and intense relationship. After Longo's arrest, the only journalist the accused murderer will speak with is the real Michael Finkel. And as the months until Longo's trial tick away, the two men talk for dozens of hours on the telephone, meet in the jailhouse visiting room, and exchange nearly a thousand pages of handwritten letters.With Longo insisting he can prove his innocence, Finkel strives to uncover what really happened to Longo's family, and his quest becomes less a reporting job than a psychological cat-and-mouse game -- sometimes redemptively honest, other times slyly manipulative. Finkel's pursuit pays off only at the end, when Longo, after a lifetime of deception, finally says what he wouldn't even admit in court -- the whole, true story. Or so it seems.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy


Elizabeth Kendall - 1981
    However, very rarely do we hear from the women he left behind—the ones forgotten as mere footnotes in this tragedy. This updated and expanded reissue of Elizabeth Kendall’s 1981 book The Phantom Prince chronicles her intense, six-year relationship with Ted Bundy and its eventual unraveling. Featuring a new introduction and a new afterword by the author, never-before-seen photos, and a new chapter from the author’s daughter, Molly, this gripping account presents a remarkable examination of obsession, intrigue, and the darkness that love can mask.

Final Truth: The Autobiography of Mass Murderer/Serial Killer Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins


Donald Gaskins - 1992
    This graphic account is not recommended for young readers. but should be required reading for all law enforcement personnel, attorneys, sociologists, physchiatrists, psychologists, and anyone in the forensic field.

JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation


Steve Thomas - 2000
    Who killed the young beauty queen and why? Who is covering up for whom and who is simply lying? In JonBenet, the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the Ramsey murder, a former lead Boulder Police detective, Steve Thomas, explores the case in vivid and fascinating detail-pointing the way toward an analysis of the evidence some deem too shocking to consider. Here, Thomas raises these and many other provocative questions:-How was the investigation botched from the beginning-and why did police so carelessly allow the crime scene to be tampered with?-Why were John and Patsy Ramsey protected from early questioning and any lie-detector tests, even though their stories and behavior were erratic, suspicious and inconsistent?-Why was crucial evidence ignored, why were certain key witnesses unquestioned by detectives, and why were the Ramseys privy to sensitive information about the case and even police reports?

Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived


Ron Franscell - 2011
    A nursing student unwittingly opens her home to the serial killer on her front porch... An 11-year-old girl drifts alone at sea on a flimsy cork raft for almost four days after a mass murderer kills her vacationing family aboard a chartered yacht... A brave firefighter suddenly finds himself in the crosshairs of a racist sniper almost nine stories above the ground... And, astonishingly, they all survived. From Howard Unruh's 1949 shooting rampage through a quiet New Jersey neighborhood to Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee's reign of terror in 2002, the corpses piled up and few lived to tell the horror. Now, award-winning journalist Ron Franscell explores the wounded hearts and minds of the ordinary people these monsters couldn't kill. His mesmerizing accounts crackle with gritty details that put the reader in the midst of the carnage-and offer a front-row seat on the complex, painful process of surviving the rest of their haunted lives. In intimate, gripping prose, Franscell takes the reader on a pulse-pounding dash through the murky intersection of pure evil and the potency of the human spirit. This journey into the darkest corners of the American crime-scape is a penetrating work of literary journalism by a writer hailed as one of the most powerful new voices in true crime.

Slow Death


Jim Fielder - 2001
    Transcripts of audio and videotapes are featured, as well as over 16 pages of shocking photos.

This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward


Susan Braudy - 1992
    While she was cleared by a grand jury, which believed her story that she had mistaken Billy for a prowler who had been recently breaking into neighboring houses, New York society was convinced that she had deliberately murdered Billy and that her formidable mother-in-law, Elsie Woodward, had covered up the crime to prevent further scandal to the socially prominent family. The incident became fiction in Truman Capote's malicious 1975 Esquire story, leading to Ann's suicide, and later was the subject of Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Now, after years of research, Braudy reveals the truth behind the legend. Tracing Ann's life from her difficult Kansas childhood through her early years as a model and aspiring actress to her stormy marriage to Billy Woodward and the sad years of her social exile after his death, Braudy shows how Ann, a victim of cruel gossip and class snobbery, could not have deliberately killed Billy.

Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History


Maureen Orth - 1999
    Now the award-winning journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent tells the complete story of Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed, hedonistic world in which they lived and died, culled from interviews with over 400 people, and details from thousands of pages of police reports.In chilling detail, Maureen Orth reveals how Andrew Cunanan met his superstar victim...why police and the FBI repeatedly failed to catch Cunanan...why other victims' families stonewalled the investigation...controversial findings of the Versace autopsy report, and more. Here is a late-century odyssey that races across America from California's wealthy gay underworld to modest midwestern homes of families mourning their slaughtered sons to the celebration of decadence that is Versace's South Beach. It is at once a landmark work of investigative journalism and a riveting account of a sociopath, his savage crimes, and the mysteries he left along the way.

Before He Wakes


Jerry Bledsoe - 1994
    When she "accidentally" shot her husband, a popular high school coach, the police believed it was an accident. Then they found out her previous husband had died in a similar manner, and her facade began to unravel. Photos.

Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer


Steven Nickel - 1989
    Ness follows up his Untouchables fame with a search for America's first serial killer in Cleveland, Ohio

Serpico


Peter Maas - 1973
    A culture of corruption pervaded the New York Police Department, where payoffs, protection, and shakedowns of gambling rackets and drug dealers were common practice. The so-called blue code of silence protected the minority of crooked cops from the sanction of the majority.Into this maelstrom came a working class, Brooklyn-born, Italian cop with long hair, a beard, and a taste for opera and ballet. Frank Serpico was a man who couldn't be silenced—or bought—and he refused to go along with the system. He had sworn an oath to uphold the law, even if the perpetrators happened to be other cops. For this unwavering commitment to justice, Serpico nearly paid with his life.

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder


Charles Graeber - 2013
    But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who helped bring him down, THE GOOD NURSE weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.In the tradition of In Cold Blood, THE GOOD NURSE does more than chronicle Cullen's deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in them, in an entirely different way.