She even worked as a nurse's aide in a pediatric ward. But this seemingly normal woman killed her ninth child by smothering it and is suspected of doing the same to her other eight children--while escaping suspicion for more than a decade.

    Mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers-fiendish killers all. Society is conditioned to think of murderers and predators as men, but in this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women who kill-and the political, economic, social, and sexual implications. From history's earliest recorded cases of homicidal females to Irma Grese, the Nazi Beast of Belsen, from Britain's notorious child-slayer Myra Hindley to 'Honeymoon Killer' Martha Beck, from the sensational murder-spree of Aileen Wournos, to cult killers, homicidal missionaries, and the sexy femme fatale, Vronsky challenges the ordinary standards of good and evil and defies the accepted perceptions of gender role and identity.

    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.

    Decades later, in the mid 1970's, they would meet again. By then, Connolly was a major figure in the FBI's Boston office and Whitey had become godfather of the Irish Mob. What happened next -- a dirty deal to being down the Italian mob in exchange for protection for Bulger -- would spiral out of control, leading to murders, drug dealing, racketeering indictments, and, ultimately, the biggest informant scandal in the history of the FBI.Compellingly told by two Boston Globe reporters who were on the case from the beginning, Black Mass is at once a riveting crime story, a cautionary tale about the abuse of power, and a penetrating look at Boston and its Irish population.

    Newspapers and television programs detailed the brutal slayings of a beautiful actress--twenty six years old and eight months pregnant with her first child--as well as a hair stylist, an heiress, a businessman, and other victims. The City of Angels was plunged into a nightmare of fear and dread. In the weeks and months that followed, law enforcement faced intense pressure to solve crimes that seemed to have no connection.Finally, after months of dead-ends, false leads, and near-misses, Charles Manson and members of his "family" were arrested. The bewildering trials that followed once again captured the nation and forever secured Manson as a byword for the evil that men do.Drawing upon deep archival research and exclusive personal interviews--including unique access to Manson Family parole hearings--former federal prosecutor and Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl has written a propulsive, page-turning historical thriller of the crimes and manhunt that mesmerized the nation. And in the process, she reveals how the social and political context that gave rise to Manson is eerily similar to our own.

    This is the heartbreaking chronicle of John Walsh's transformation from grieving parent to full-time activist—and the infuriating conspiracy of events that have kept America's No. 1 crime-fighter from obtaining justice and closure for himself and his family. From the day Adam disappeared from a mall in Hollywood, Florida, John Walsh faced a local police department better equipped to track stolen cars than missing children—and a criminal justice system that would work against him in unimaginable ways. Outraged but determined, he ultimately enlarged the search for Adam's killer into an exhaustive battle on behalf of all missing and abused children, beginning with his efforts to put missing children's faces on milk cartons. Today, John Walsh continues the fight for legislative change and public awareness, driven by his own personal tragedy. Tears of Rage is the story of a true American hero: a man who challenged the system in the name of his son.

    Freshly paroled, he stumbled into San Francisco in 1967 just as thousands of impressionable young people were streaming into town for the Summer of Love.Posing as a musician-come-guru-come-Christ-figure, Manson built a commune cult of hippies, consisting mainly of troubled young women. But what made this group set out on the four-week killing spree that claimed seven lives? Former Journalism Professor, David J. Krajicek, seeks to discover just that.

    Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

    Trace Evidence, by contrast, has a steady relentlessness that allows the reader to become fascinated by the characters of the investigators and the facts of how the evidence was assembled. This killer specialized in picking up his victims along Interstate 5, near Sacramento, California, and he had an odd penchant for snipping at their clothes with scissors. As deaths of young women in several different jurisdictions began to form a pattern, a few detectives with contrasting approaches (excitable and given to hunches vs. cool and logical) formed a team. Author Bruce Henderson relates how they followed through on a bewildering number of leads, how they ranked their potential suspects on a point system that proved remarkably effective, and how, finally, a trace evidence expert spent many long hours looking through a microscope to cinch the case with analysis of fibers. Trace Evidence is skillfully structured, emphasizing the investigation rather than the trial, and includes crisp photographs of the key evidence. It would have been a better book if the author had included a timeline of the crimes and a map of the area, but that is a small nitpick about an excellent work of journalism. --Fiona Webster

    There are more than 60 serial murderers in Canadian history. For too long awareness of serial murder in Canada has been confined toWest Coastbutcher Clifford Olson and the "Schoolgirl Murderers" Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, along with the horrific acts of pig farmer Robert Pickton. Unlike our American neighbours, Canada has been viewed as a nation untouched by the shadow of multiple murder. Then came Colonel Russell Williams and his bizarre homicides and serial home invasions, which were sensational news worldwide on the Internet and television and in scores of newspapers and magazines.The reason for Canada’s serial killer blackout is clear: until now such information has never been compiled and presented in a single concise work. ColdNorth Killers is a wake-up call. This detailed and haunting account of Canada’s worst monsters analyzes their crimes, childhoods, and inevitable downfalls. It is an indispensablecompendium for any true crime lover, criminologist, or law-enforcement officer.

    And yet still, from outrageous robberies to haunting serial killings, there remain those cases that refuse to be cracked.'Unsolved Crimes' collects together the most notorious and mind-boggling felonies ever committed.

    A secret internal investigation reveals the sickening explanation: Genene Jones, a nurse on the 3-11 shift, is a cold-blooded killer. This true-life thriller reveals how Jones was able to work again--and kill again.

    One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer who had raped and mutilated six women, murdering three of them. Yet the town had denied all early signs of the radical evil that was growing within Corwin. What had led the local media to ignore his early rapes? Why had the local Presbyterian Church tried to shield him from prison? Why had local law enforcement been unable to solve and prosecute his murders as they continued? Burrough is widely admired as a master storyteller, and this chilling tale raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare. This title contains mature themes, including physical and sexual violence, that some listeners may find unsettling.

    But before the suit could be settled, Avery was arrested again--this time for the brutal murder of Teresa Halbach--and, through the office of a special prosecutor, convicted once more.When the saga exploded onto the public consciousness with the airing of Making a Murderer, Michael Griesbach, a prosecutor and member of Wisconsin's Innocence Project who had been instrumental in Avery's 2003 exoneration, was targeted on social media, threatened--and plagued by doubt. Now, in this suspenseful, thorough narrative, he recounts his own re-examination of the evidence in light of the whirlwind of controversy stirred up by the blockbuster true-crime series.As Griesbach carefully reviews allegations of tampering and planted evidence, the confession by Avery's developmentally disabled nephew, Brendan Dassey, and statements by Avery's former girlfriend Jodi Stachowski, previously sealed documents deemed inadmissible at trial by Judge Patrick L. Willis--and a little-known, plausible alternate suspect--Griesbach shows how the filmmakers' agenda, the accused man's dramatic backstory, and sensational media coverage have clouded the truth about Steven Avery.Now as Avery's defense counsel files an appeal and prepares to do battle in the courtroom once more, Griesbach fights to set the record straight, determined that evidence should be followed where it leads and justice should be served--for as surely as our legal system should not send an innocent man to prison, neither should it let a guilty man walk free. Includes 16 pages of photos

    Part memoir, part woman-in-prison story, part prognostication, part political expose, in Karla, Williams lets Karla and the key players speak for themselves. What they have to say is surprising, horrifying and enlightening. Karla: A Pact with the Devil also asks and answers two essential questions: Who is Karla Homolka and how did she come to have a future? Given the fact she is out among us enjoying that future right now makes those answers essential information today. Karla: A Pact with the Devil is, as, one reviewer put it “almost unique in our literature. It is an extraordinary act of the imagination brought to bear on the facts.” (Includes pictures from the original Canadian print edition) Karla: A Pact with the Devil has not been previously available in the United States."People want me in max so my life with be hard but it really isn't. There are absolutely no responsibilities here. Everything is provided. We can spend the day sleeping, sun-tanning or doing whatever we want all day every day."- Karla Homolka in a letter to author Stephen Williams"Well, they say 'never say never' and they're right," Karla wrote in her startling first letter to Stephen Williams. "Never in a million years did I think I would ever write a letter to someone from the media, let alone you who has condemned me so harshly."Thus began one of the most controversial correspondences in criminal history.Karla picks up where Williams' first book on the case, Invisible Darkness, left her, painting her nails in her cell in solitary confinement in the gothic tower of Kingston's Prison for Women. After testifying against her ex-husband in 1995, Karla's life in prison was soon going to take a very different, dramatic turn.