John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most people have never heard of Israel Keyes, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in modern history. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prosecutor as "a force of pure evil," Keyes was a predator who struck all over the United States. He buried "kill kits"--cash, weapons, and body-disposal tools--in remote locations across the country. Over the course of fourteen years, Keyes would fly to a city, rent a car, and drive thousands of miles in order to use his kits. He would break into a stranger's house, abduct his victims in broad daylight, and kill and dispose of them in mere hours. And then he would return home to Alaska, resuming life as a quiet, reliable construction worker devoted to his only daughter.When journalist Maureen Callahan first heard about Israel Keyes in 2012, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade. And so began a project that consumed her for the next several years--uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keyes, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keyes to exist. A killer who left a path of monstrous, randomly committed crimes in his wake--many of which remain unsolved to this day.American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.

    But the nightmare to come was worse than they could ever imagine. Only five doors away, in the home of John and Elizabeth Golub, police found Kelly Ann's body stuffed in a plastic garbage bag. She'd been brutally beaten, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated. After weeks of intense investigation, police arrested the Golubs twenty-one-year-old son, Robert - a reclusive young man obsessed with bodybuilding and given to fits of rage. The sensational trial and subsequent conviction of Robert Golub shocked the nation and tore the once peaceful community apart. Neighbors took sides. So did the media. And no one who lived on Horton Road would ever be the same.NOTE: This book was re-edited in May, 2013 to correct OCR conversion errors.

    William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer.  In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.

    Jewelry and valuables were left in plain sight, bodies were piled together, faces covered with cloth. Some of these cases, like the infamous Villasca, Iowa, murders, received national attention. But few people believed the crimes were related. And fewer still would realize that all of these families lived within walking distance to a train station.When celebrated baseball statistician and true crime expert Bill James first learned about these horrors, he began to investigate others that might fit the same pattern. Applying the same know-how he brings to his legendary baseball analysis, he empirically determined which crimes were committed by the same person. Then after sifting through thousands of local newspapers, court transcripts, and public records, he and his daughter Rachel made an astonishing discovery: they learned the true identity of this monstrous criminal. In turn, they uncovered one of the deadliest serial killers in America.Riveting and immersive, with writing as sharp as the cold side of an axe, The Man from the Train paints a vivid, psychologically perceptive portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, when crime was regarded as a local problem, and opportunistic private detectives exploited a dysfunctional judicial system. James shows how these cultural factors enabled such an unspeakable series of crimes to occur, and his groundbreaking approach to true crime will convince skeptics, amaze aficionados, and change the way we view criminal history.

    They heard the power saw buzzing in the dead of night but neighbors never imagined the horrors happening right next door.The hot sultry night of July 22, 1991 was one the tenants of the Oxford Apartments would never forget. A panic stcricken young man--a pair of handcuffs still dangling from his wrists--ran out of Apartment 213 and told police an incredible tale of terror.Shaking with fear, he led officers back to his captor's lair, where they made the gruesome discovery. Inside were the body parts of at least fifteen men--including torsos stuffed into a barrel, severed heads in a refrigerator, and skulls boiled clean and stashed in a filing cabinet. Tacked to the freezer were Poloroid photographs of mutilated corpses.When investigators arrested 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer, they realized they had stumbled onto a "real-life Hannibal Lecter"--a sadistic murderer who told them he had saved a human heart "to eat later". What could turn a handsome, former tennis player, the son of middle-class parents, into a perverse serial killer whose unthinkable acts shocked the nation?The Jeffrey Dahmer Story takes you into Jeffrey Dahmer's twisted world of bizarre sexual encounters, mutilation and cannibalism--in one of history's most appalling true crime cases.With 8 pages of chilling photographs.

    It is a gory, grotesque tale befitting a Stephen King novel. It is also a David and Goliath saga—the story of a young lawyer fresh from the Public Defender’s Office whose first client in private practice turns out to be the worst serial killer in our nation’s history. Sam Amirante had just opened his first law practice when he got a phone call from his friend John Wayne Gacy, a well-known and well-liked community figure. Gacy was upset about what he called “police harassment” and asked Amirante for help. With the police following his every move in connection with the disappearance of a local teenager, Gacy eventually gives a drunken, dramatic, early morning confession—to his new lawyer. Gacy is eventually charged with murder and Amirante suddenly becomes the defense attorney for one of American’s most disturbing serial killers. It is his first case. This is a gripping narrative that reenacts the gruesome killings and the famous trial that shocked a nation.

    John Wayne Gacy, the “Killer Clown,” was a suburban Chicago businessman sentenced to death in 1980 for a string of horrific murders after the bodies of his victims were found hidden in a crawl space beneath his Des Plaines, Illinois, home. The serial killer had preyed on teenagers and young men—at the same time entertaining at children’s parties and charitable events dressed as “Pogo the Clown.” Drawing on exclusive interviews and previously unreported material, journalist Tim Cahill “offers the stuff of wrenching nightmares” (The Wall Street Journal): a harrowing journey inside the mind of a serial killer. Meticulously researched and graphically recounted, Buried Dreams brings to vivid life the real John Wayne Gacy—his complex personality, compulsions, inadequacies, and torments—often in the murderer’s own words.

    So get ready for another deliciously dark sampling of some of the most fascinating true murder cases of the first half of the 20th Century. These stories, the SECOND of three short collections, are unified by a single theme: they all involve physicians. And not for the autopsy, but as perpetrators or accused perpetrators. You may never see your family care giver again in the same light. Told in the characteristic wry, anecdotal reportorial style that made Alan Hynd famous in his day (two wartime best sellers in 1943, contributions to The Reader's Digest, Colliers, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post, True, Liberty, The American Mercury and almost every true detective magazine in print) these tales will have you cringing one minute, laughing the next, and gasping in shock a moment later. Truly, no one could make up classics like these. Take for example, the case of the man who used rattlesnakes to speed the demise of a fading relationship, a case where non-barking dogs pointed out a killer, and the Great Swope poison case, where a man's in-laws just couldn't wait for their inheritance. As a bonus, consider "Pretty: Louie Amberg, the Brooklyn, N.Y., psychopath of the 1920s and '30s, as well as an unusual couple in Southern California kept the neighbors up at night --- and gossiping. Pulp non-fiction? Maybe. True crime is always more macabre than any novelist could imagine. So sit back and enjoy these forays into some of the darkest aspects of human nature. (With illustrations)

    

    She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm.” Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they hadn’t merely been poisoned, like victims of other female killers. They’d been butchered.Hell’s Princess is a riveting account of one of the most sensational killing sprees in the annals of American crime: the shocking series of murders committed by the woman who came to be known as Lady Bluebeard. The only definitive book on this notorious case and the first to reveal previously unknown information about its subject, Harold Schechter’s gripping, suspenseful narrative has all the elements of a classic mystery—and all the gruesome twists of a nightmare.

    Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.

    Manson...It started with a college course assignment, then escalated into a dangerous obsession. Eighteen-year-old honor student Jason Moss wrote to men whose body counts had made criminal history: men named Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez, and Gacy.Dear Mr. Dahmer...Posing as their ideal victim, Jason seduced them with his words. One by one they wrote him back, showering him with their madness and violent fantasies. Then the game spun out of control. John Wayne Gacy revealed all to Jason -- and invited his pen pal to visit him in prison...Dear Mr. Gacy...It was an offer Jason couldn't turn down. Even if it made him...The book that has riveted the attention of the national media, this may be the most revealing look at serial killers ever recorded and the most illuminating study of the dark places of the human mind ever attempted.

    He still remains one of the lesser known serial killer of his generation. Read about this psychopath who wanted fame before his life ended November 7, 1974As she entered her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, all Ellen Carr probably had on her mind was going to bed. She was a registered nurse who worked a night shift, and although the small family welcomed the money, the job was a demanding one.Inside, the house was unnaturally quiet. She found that odd. Her husband, forty-five-year-old businessman Carswell Carr and fifteen-year-old daughter Amanda usually greeted her when she came home from the hospital. That wasn’t the only sign that something was seriously amiss. As an investigator later put it, “The (place) looked as if it had been attacked by an animal.” Mirrors were smashed. Slashed furniture lay everywhere, some of it in pieces. Books from the bookshelves littered the floor. Had they been robbed? Where were Carswell and Mandy? Heart pounding, Mrs. Carr ran from room to room, calling out. Minutes later, she was back outside, screaming hysterically. Neighbors called the police to what was obviously the scene of gruesome double homicide.Carswell Carr’s nude corpse was lying face down on the couple’s bed, hands bound behind his back and twenty-seven stab wounds, inflicted by scissors, all over his body. The medical examiner later determined that he had died of a heart attack, likely brought on by the torture. Down the hall, Amanda was also face down in her room, one nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck and the other shoved down her throat. To compound the horror, she appeared to have been raped after death.When Mrs. Carr regained her senses, she went through the house with the police and identified several things that were missing: Carswell’s briefcase, shaving kit, credit cards, identification, and most of his clothing. While detectives searched for more clues, the murderer, wearing his victim’s clothes, was in an Atlanta bar, flirting with a lady reporter. He told her his name was Daryl Golden, but his real name was Paul John Knowles, and he was destined to be remembered as one of most vicious and unpredictable serial killers of his generation. Scroll back up and grab your copy today!

    Joe Kenda, star of Homicide Hunter, shares his deepest, darkest, and never before revealed case files from his 19 years as a homicide detective.Are you horrified yet fascinated by abhorrent murders? Do you crave to know the gory details of these crimes, and do you seek comfort in the solving of the most gruesome? In I WILL FIND YOU, the star of Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda shares his deepest, darkest, and never-before-revealed case files from his two decades as a homicide detective and reminds us that crimes like these are very real and can happen even in our own backyards. Gruesome, macabre, and complex cases. Joe Kenda investigated 387 murder cases during his 23 years with the Colorado Springs Police Department and solved almost all of them. And he is ready to detail the cases that are too gruesome to air on television, cases that still haunt him, and the few cases where the killer got away. These cases are horrifyingly real, and the detail is so mesmerizing you won't be able to look away. The tales in I WILL FIND YOU will shock you like the best horror stories-divulging insights into the actions, motivations, and proclivities of nature's most dangerous species. Don't mind the blood.

    Now, with the benefit of twenty years' worth of additional knowledge and insight, Stanton Samenow offers a completely updated edition of his classic work, including fresh perceptions into crimes in the spotlight today, from stalking and domestic violence to white-collar crime and political terrorism. Dr. Samenow's three decades of working with criminals have reaffirmed his argument that factors such as poverty, divorce, and media violence do not cause criminality. Rather, as Samenow documents here, all criminals share a particular mind-set--often evident in childhood--that is disturbingly different from that of a responsible citizen. While new types of crime have grown more prevalent, or at least more visible to the public eye--from spousal abuse to school shootings--little has changed in terms of our approach to dealing with crime. Rehabilitation programs based on the assumption that society is more to blame for crime than the criminal, an assumption for which a causal link has yet to be established, have proved to be grossly inadequate. Crime continues to invade every aspect of our lives, criminal court dockets and prisons are oppressively overcrowded and expensive, and recidivism rates continue to escalate.To embark on a truly corrective program, we must begin with the clear understanding that the criminal chooses crime; he chooses to reject society long before society rejects him. The criminal values people only to the extent that he can use them for his own self-serving ends; he does not justify his actions to himself. Only by "habilitating" the criminal, so that he sees himself realistically and develops responsible patterns of thought, can we change his behavior. It is vital that we know who the criminal is and how and why he acts differently from responsible citizens. From that understanding can come reasonable, compassionate, and effective solutions.