His wife and step-daughter are in shock, and so is the medical examiner when he performs the autopsy. Aside from being dead, Frank is in perfect health. Demanding to know the cause of her husband’s death, Angie Rodriguez badgers the police, insisting that Frank was murdered. The cops attribute her assertions to overwhelming grief, but soon they too believe that Frank didn’t die of natural causes. When the police enlist their number one suspect to help in the investigation, things spiral out of control until police are dealing with a daring plot to murder Angie’s best friend, and allegations of another homicide so evil and perverse that even seasoned L.A County Detectives are shocked beyond belief ... and so will the readers!

     This true story begins on a sunny July morning in 2003, just outside of Flint Michigan, when an eighty year old grandmother has mysteriously disappeared from the face of the earth. Days later the charred remains of her car were identified, after being completely destroyed by an intentional fire; but she was nowhere to be found. We had to find her. She was my mom...

      In June 1985, Theresa Cross Knorr dumped her daughter Sheila’s body in California’s desolate High Sierra. She had beaten Sheila unconscious in their Sacramento apartment days earlier, then locked her in a closet to die. But this wasn’t the first horrific crime she’d committed against her own children.   The previous summer, Knorr had shot Sheila’s sister Suesan, then ordered her son to dig the bullet out of the girl’s back with a knife to hide the evidence. The infection that resulted led to delirium—at which point Knorr and her two sons drove Suesan into the mountains, doused her with gasoline, and set her on fire.   It would be almost a decade before her youngest daughter, Terry Knorr Graves, revealed her mother’s history of unfathomable violence. At first, she was met with disbelief by law enforcement and even her own therapist. But eventually, the truth about her monstrous abuse emerged—and here, an award-winning journalist details the jealousy, rage, and domineering behavior that escalated into homicide and shattered a family.    A former reporter for the New York Times and Los AngelesTimes and the author of true-crime classics including Angel of Darkness, about serial killer Randy Kroft, and Blood Cold, about Robert Blake and Bonny Lee Bakley, Dennis McDougal reveals the shocking depths of depravity behind a case that made headlines across the nation.

    Former stripper turned suburban housewife Marjorie Orbin filed a missing person’s report on her husband. She claimed that Jay, a successful art dealer, had left town on business after celebrating their son’s birthday more than a month before. Jay loved his family more than life itself—and no one believed he would ever abandon them. Authorities suspected foul play…A WIFE LYING IN WAITThe search for Jay made local headlines. But key elements in Marjorie’s story still weren’t adding up: Why did she wait so long before going to police? If Jay was away on business, as she claimed, why were there charges made to his credit card in Phoenix? Then, the unthinkable happened.A SHOCKING DISCOVERYJay’s headless, limbless torso was discovered on the outskirts of the Phoenix desert—and all evidence pointed to Marjorie as the killer. Soon, an exhaustive investigation would reveal surprising new details about her life—six previous marriages, an ongoing and passionate affair with a man from her gym, alleged ties to the New York mafia, a drug habit—and lead to her conviction for the murder and dismemberment of her seventh husband.With 8 pages of dramatic photos

    The next morning, the girls were found in a desolate mountain arroyo; one raped and murdered, the other savagely stabbed 33 times and left for dead. As fear engulfed the University of New Mexico's quiet campus, police had few clues to assist them in tracking down the vicious killer. This book is based on the true story of what happened that night in the Sandia Mountains, a shockingly brutal crime that changed the city of Albuquerque forever. It is a gritty tale of unspeakable violence and the relentless search for justice, but it is also the story of a young woman's incredible will to live ... and her life-long struggle to escape the legacy of that deadly arroyo.

    Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia—the trail’s end—Aspen and Justin were in love.Embarking on a new pilgrimage the next summer, they returned to those same mossy mountains where they’d met, and they married. They built a world together, three years of a happy marriage. Until a cold November morning, when, after kissing Aspen goodbye, Justin left to attend the funeral of a close friend.He never came back. As days became weeks, her husband’s inexplicable absence left Aspen unmoored. Shock, grief, fear, and anger battled for control—but nothing prepared her for the disarming truth. A revelation that would lead Aspen to reassess not only her own life but that of the disappeared as well.The result is a brave and inspiring memoir of secrets kept and unearthed, of a vanishing that became a gift: a woman’s empowering reclamation of unmitigated purpose in the surreal wake of mystifying loss.

    Full-page ad in People magazine and TV commercials on Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted.

    All were young, pretty, and petite. Most were hustlers and crackheads. By August 1998, as the toll reached eight, a victim's mother said bitterly, “When they find one, they'll find them all.” She didn't know how horrifyingly right she was.HULKING AND HOMICIDALAt the height of the manhunt, prostitute Christine Sala, hysterical, told police she had barely escaped being strangled by Kendall Francois, 27, a 6'4," 300-lb. middle-school hall monitor whose slovenly personal hygiene had earned him the nickname “Stinky.” When caught, Francois said that he'd killed the women because they hadn't given him all the sex he claimed he'd paid for.HOUSE OF HORRORSInvestigators in white bio-hazard suits entered the house where Francois lived and found eight female corpses, almost all decomposed. Some were placed in plastic bags together in the attic. Others lay in shallow graves in the crawl space under the house. It was such a tangle of rotting flesh and bones, even the investigators couldn't tell how many bodies there were. Now, sentenced to life in prison without parole, the man whom others dismissed as a smell oaf had finally been unmasked as one of the most bizarre serial sex-killers of modern times.Includes pages of disturbing photos.

    A detailed exploration into the murder of TV anchorwoman Diane Newton King in 1991 describes how her husband was convicted of the crime a year later only after playing mind games with the police and leading them on several wild goose chases.

    A unique, horrifying self-portrait of one of the most savage sex killers in history.This updated edition contains a new foreword by Robert Keppel, president of the Institute for Forensics.

    Through meticulous reporting, Francis uncovers the shocking truth about how the Alaskan justice system failed and allowed a warped predator to strike again."--Henry K. Lee, author of Presumed Dead: A True-Life Murder MysteryOn a clear, brisk night in September of 2000, 33-year-old Della Brown was found sexually assaulted and beaten to death inside a filthy, abandoned shed in seedy part of Anchorage, Alaska. She was one of six women, mostly Native Alaskan, slain that year, stoking fears a serial killer was on the loose. A tanned and thuggish 20-year-old would eventually implicate himself in three of the women’s deaths and confess, in detail, to Della’s murder. Yet, after a three-month trial, Joshua Wade would walk free. In 2007, when Wade kidnapped a well-loved nurse psychologist from her home and then executed her in the remote wilderness of Wasilla, two astute female detectives joined forces to finally bring him to justice. ICE AND BONE is the chilling true account of how a demented murderer initially evaded police and avoided conviction only to slip back into the shadows and kill again. Journalist and writer Monte Francis tells the harrowing story of what eventually led to Wade’s capture, and reveals why the true scope of his murderous rampage is only now, more than a decade later, coming into view.

    The Japanese are encircling the city, and the discovery of Pamela Werner's body sends a shiver through already nervous Peking. Is it the work of a madman? One of the ruthless Japanese soldiers now surrounding the city? Or perhaps the dreaded fox spirits? With the suspect list growing and clues sparse, two detectives—one British and one Chinese—race against the clock to solve the crime before the Japanese invade and Peking as they know it is gone forever. Can they find the killer in time, before the Japanese invade?Historian and China expert Paul French at last uncovers the truth behind this notorious murder, and offers a rare glimpse of the last days of colonial Peking.Winner of the both the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the CWA Non-Fiction Dagger

    The women came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, and local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, opening a floodgate of media coverage and stirring a wave of panic across Jennings’ class-divided neighborhoods. The Jeff Davis 8 had been among society’s most vulnerable—impoverished, abused, and mired with mental illness. They engaged in sex work as a means of survival. And their underworld activity frequently occurred at a decrepit no-tell motel called the Boudreaux Inn. As the cases went unsolved, the community began to look inward. Rumors of police corruption and evidence tampering, of collusion between street and shield, cast the serial killer theory into doubt. But what was really going on in the humid rooms of the Boudreaux Inn? Why were crimes going unsolved and police officers being indicted? What had the eight women known? And could anything be done do stop the bloodshed? Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to posit what happened during each victim’s final hours.

    The investigation that follows uncovers an extraordinarily complex and puzzling true-crime story. Only Vincent Bugliosi, who recounted his successful prosecution of mass murderer Charles Manson in the bestseller Helter Skelter, was able to draw together the hundreds of conflicting details of the mystery and reconstruct what really happened when four people found hell in a tropical paradise. And the Sea Will Tell reconstructs the events and subsequent trial of a riveting true murder mystery, and probes into the dark heart of a serpentine scenario of death.

    When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom.   The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.   Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.