Book picks similar to
Danger In The Dorm by Ann Rule


true-crime
ann-rule
non-fiction
tbr-nonfiction

The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers


Scott Carney - 2011
    As gripping as CSI and as eye-opening as Mary Roach’s Stiff, Carney’s The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.

Zodiac


Robert Graysmith - 1986
    A sexual sadist who taunted police with anonymous notes. A madman who was never apprehended. This is the first, complete account of Zodiac's reign of terror. Is he still out there?

Final Analysis: The Untold Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case


Catherine Crier - 2007
    The arrest in her sleepy northern California town kicked off what would become one of the most captivating murder trials in recent memory, as police, local attorneys, and the national media sought to unravel the complex web of events that sent this seemingly devoted housewife over the edge.Now, with the exclusive access and in-depth reporting that made A Deadly Game a number one New York Times bestseller, Catherine Crier turns an analytical eye to the story of Susan Polk, delving into her past and examining how over twenty years of marriage culminated in murder. Tracing the family's history, Crier skillfully maneuvers the murky waters of the Polk's marriage, looking at the real story behind Susan, Felix, and their unorthodox courtship. When Susan was in high school, Felix, who was more than twenty years her senior, had been her psychologist, and it was during their sessions that the romantic entanglement began. From these troubling origins grew a difficult marriage, one which produced three healthy boys but also led to disturbing accusations of abuse from both spouses.With extraordinary detail, Crier dissects this dangerous relationship between husband and wife, exposing their psychological motivations and the painful impact that these motivations had on their sons, Adam, Eli, and Gabriel. Drawing on sources from all sides of the case, Crier masterfully reconstructs the tumultuous chronology of the Polk family, telling the story of how Susan and Felix struggled to control their rambunctious sons and their disintegrating marriage in the years and months leading up to Felix's death.But the history of the Polk family is only half the story. Here Crier also elucidates the methodical police work of the murder investigation, revealing never-before-seen photos and writings from the case file. In addition, she carefully scrutinizes the many twists and turns of the remarkable trial, exploring Susan's struggles with her defense attorneys and her shocking decision to represent herself.Dark, psychological, and terrifying, Final Analysis is a harrowing look at the recesses of the human mind and the trauma that reveals them.

The Last Sheriff in Texas


James P. McCollom - 2017
    A divided populace who sees him as savior or sinner. Streets filled with guns. Anger toward those who can't speak English. The presence of the Klan. A media in its infancy, awakening to their ability to sway public discourse. This is not modern day America, but postwar Texas. Beeville was the most American of small towns--the place that GIs had fantasized about while fighting through the ruins of Europe, a place of good schools, clean streets, and churches. Old West justice ruled, as evidenced by a 1947 shootout when outlaws surprised popular sheriff Vail Ennis at a gas station and shot him five times, point blank, in the belly. Ellis managed to draw his gun and put three bullets in each assailant; he reloaded and put in each three more. Then he drove himself sixteen miles to a hospital. Time Magazine's full-page article on the shooting was seen by some as a referendum on law enforcement owing to the sheriff's extreme violence, but telegrams, cards, and flowers from all across America poured into the Beeville's tiny post office. Most of Beeville took comfort in knowing that Ennis kept them safe, that Texas was still Texas Yet when a second violent incident threw Ennis into the crosshairs of public opinion once again, his downfall was orchestrated by an unlikely figure: his close friend and Beeville's favorite son, Johnny Barnhart. Feeling the town had to take responsibility for the violence, Barnhart confronted and overthrew Ennis in the election of 1952: a landmark standoff between old Texas, with its culture of cowboy bravery and violence, and urban Texas, with its lawyers, oil institutions, and a growing Mexican population. The town would never be the same again. The Last Sheriff of Texas is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, Anglo-Mexican relations, racism, gun control, the influence of the media, urban-rural conflict, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process--all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.

Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders


Christopher Goffard - 2018
    The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time “Dirty John” and the rest of his very best work.“The $40 Lawyer” provides an inside account of a young public defender’s rookie year in the legal trenches. “Framed” offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed.Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection—a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction—underscores his reputation as one of today’s most original journalistic voices.

Michigan's Strychnine Saint: The Curious Case of Mrs. Mary McKnight


Tobin T. Buhk - 2014
      The spring of 1903 proved disastrous for the Murphy family. On April 22, the infant Ruth Murphy died in her crib. Within an hour, her mother, Gertrude, experienced a violent spasm before she, too, died. Ten days later, John Murphy followed his wife and child to the grave after suffering from a crippling convulsion. While neighbors whispered about a curse and physicians feared a contagious disease, Kalkaska County sheriff John W. Creighton and prosecuting attorney Ernest C. Smith searched for answers. As they probed deeper into the suspicious deaths, they uncovered a wicked web of intrigue. And at the center stood a widow in a black taffeta dress.   Includes photos

True Stories from the Morgue. Stories from a Forensic Counsellor


John Merrick - 2017
    What’s it like to work in a morgue? This book describes, first hand, coping with mutilated or decomposed bodies and the carnage of large-scale disasters like the Bali bombings. Equally as traumatic, the suicides, accidental drownings, car accidents and murders. But forensic counsellors do much more, witnessing autopsies, attending crime scenes and coronial enquiries. It’s all in a day’s work. Find out what it’s like behind the scenes. Those working at the morgue come face to face with death on a daily basis, and forensic counsellors like John have to find the compassion and kindness to ease the grief of those left behind.

What Lisa Knew: The Truth and Lies of the Steinberg Case


Joyce Johnson - 1990
    A brilliantly researched investigation into the psychological, sexual, and social forces behind one of the most horrifying domestic crimes of the decade--the murder of six-year-old Lisa Steinberg.

Cannibal: The True Story Behind the Maneater of Rotenburg


Lois Jones - 2005
    He received 430 responses. Among them was Bernd Juergen Brandes, who arrived at Meiwes's isolated country home literally to be eaten alive. Escorted to the "slaughtering room"--equipped with meat hooks, a cage, and a butcher's table--Meiwes assisted Bernd in a gourmet candlelight dinner of his own cooked flesh. Meiwes then stabbed his victim in the throat--bringing the ghastly videotaped ordeal to an end.From a childhood perverted by unhealthy obsessions to his notorious trial that ended in a stunning verdict, Cannibal discloses for the first time the true story of a real-life Hannibal Lecter and his victim. And with details never before divulged to the public, it takes readers step-by-step through the unspeakable crime that fascinated and revolted the world.INCLUDES PHOTOS

Burned: A Story of a Murder and the Crime that Wasn't


Edward Humes - 2019
    Their mother, Joann Parks, couldn’t save them but did manage to escape with her own life. She was of course bereft. With emotions exploding her husband accused her of abandoning the children at the scene of the fire when he arrived. It was soon determined that a worn extension cord was the cause of the tragedy. But then doubts arose. As firefighters investigated further, they came to believe that the fire was the result of arson, a heinous crime committed by a wicked young woman who, they argued, had never really wanted to be a mother. Joann Parks was tried and convicted and has languished in prison for the last twenty-five years. But now, as certain investigative methods from that era have been debunked, a pair of young lawyers from the Innocence Project have come to believe that Joann was wrongfully convicted, and that the fire might not have even been caused by arson at all.

Hijacked: The True Story of the Heroes of Flight 705


Dave Hirschman - 1997
    They had one jumpseat passenger, an off-duty colleague who they assumed was simply taking advantage of the FedEx perk allowing virtually all employees to ride the company jet for free. The shock came twenty minutes later, before the plane had reached its normal cruising altitude.The lone passenger attacked the pilots with hammers and a spear gun. He'd had his diabolical plan in the works for months: By crashing the plane into the Federal Express Memphis hub, he'd ruin the company, which he felt had treated him unfairly. With superhuman strength fueled by sheer fury, the attacker struck. What he didn't count on was the skill and intelligence of the pilots. While Sanders and Peterson tried to stop the relentless battering, copilot Tucker swung the aircraft into dangerous flight maneuvers in an attempt to literally knock the man off his feet. Covered in their own blood and exhausted from the struggle, the pilots finally managed to subdue their attacker, returning the plane safely back to Memphis as heroes.

The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock


Lucy Worsley - 2013
    And a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of modern England, murder entered our national psyche, and it's been a part of us ever since.The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.

The Hunt for the 60s' Ripper


Robin Jarossi - 2017
    A look at the 1960s Nude Murders in West London, a series of prostitute killings that were never solved, with contemporary insights from ex-detectives and experts.

Death on the Devil's Teeth: The Strange Murder That Shocked Suburban New Jersey (True Crime)


Jesse P. Pollack - 2015
    That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the local woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police coverup ran rampant, and the case went unsolved--along with the murders of several other young women. Now, four decades after Jeannette DePalma's tragic death, authors Jesse P. Pollack and Mark Moran present the definitive account of this shocking cold case.

The Killer's Shadow: The FBI's Hunt for a White Supremacist Serial Killer


John E. Douglas - 2020
    John Douglas, the FBI’s pioneering, first full-time criminal profiler, hunted the shooter—a white supremacist named Joseph Paul Franklin, whose Nazi-inspired beliefs propelled a three-year reign of terror across the United States, targeting African Americans, Jews, and interracial couples. In addition, Franklin bombed the home of Jewish leader Morris Amitay, shot and paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, and seriously wounded civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. The fugitive supported his murderous spree robbing banks in five states, from Georgia to Ohio. Douglas and his writing partner Mark Olshaker return to this disturbing case that reached the highest levels of the Bureau, which was fearful Franklin would become a presidential assassin—and haunted him for years to come as the threat of copycat domestic terrorist killers increasingly became a reality. Detailing the dogged pursuit of Franklin that employed profiling, psychology and meticulous detective work, Douglas and Olshaker relate how the case was a make-or-break test for the still-experimental behavioral science unit and revealed a new type of, determined, mission-driven serial killer whose only motivation was hate.A riveting, cautionary tale rooted in history that continues to echo today, The Killer's Shadow is a terrifying and essential exploration of the criminal personality  in the vile grip of extremism and what happens when rage-filled speech evolves into deadly action and hatred of the “other" is allowed full reign. The Killer's Shadow includes an 8-page color photo insert.