One sunny Saturday afternoon, 12-year-old Mena Griffiths was playing in the park when she was lured away by an unknown man. Hours later, her strangled body was found, mouth gagged and hands crossed over her chest, in an abandoned house. Only months later, another girl was murdered; the similarities between the cases undeniable. Crime in Melbourne had taken a shocking new turn: this was the work of a serial killer, a homicidal maniac.Despite their best efforts, police had no experience dealing with this kind of criminal. What followed was years of bungled investigations, falsely accused men - and the tragic deaths of two more girls - before the murderer was finally caught and brought to justice.With all the pace of a thriller, Katherine Kovacic recounts this extraordinary, chilling true story - of failed police enquiries, a killer with a Jekyll and Hyde personality, and the families shattered when four innocent lives were cruelly taken.

    Few people realize that the facts of his life make for a much better tale. Kidd was actually a tough New York sea captain hired to chase pirates, a married war hero whose secret mission took a spectacularly bad turn. This harrowing tale traces Kidd's voyages in the 1690s from his home near Wall Street to Whitehall Palace in London, from the ports of the Caribbean to a secret pirate paradise off Madagascar. Author Richard Zacks, during his research, also unearthed the story of a long forgotten rogue named Robert Culliford, who dogged Kidd and led Kidd's crew to mutiny not once but twice. The lives of Kidd and Culliford play out like an unscripted duel: one man would hang in the harbor, the other would walk away with the treasure. Filled with superb writing and impeccable research, The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a ripping good yarn, and it delivers something rare: an authentic pirate story for grown-ups.

    There was nothing surprising about men turning up dead in the Second City. Life was cheaper than a quart of illicit gin in the gangland capital of the world. But two murders that spring were special - worthy of celebration. So believed Maurine Watkins, a wanna-be playwright and a "girl reporter" for the Chicago Tribune, the city's "hanging paper." Newspaperwomen were supposed to write about clubs, cooking and clothes, but the intrepid Miss Watkins, a minister's daughter from a small town, zeroed in on murderers instead. Looking for subjects to turn into a play, she would make "Stylish Belva" Gaertner and "Beautiful Beulah" Annan - both of whom had brazenly shot down their lovers - the talk of the town. Love-struck men sent flowers to the jail and newly emancipated women sent impassioned letters to the newspapers. Soon more than a dozen women preened and strutted on "Murderesses' Row" as they awaited trial, desperate for the same attention that was being lavished on Maurine Watkins's favorites. In the tradition of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City, Douglas Perry vividly captures Jazz Age Chicago and the sensationalized circus atmosphere that gave rise to the concept of the celebrity criminal. Fueled by rich period detail and enlivened by a cast of characters who seemed destined for the stage, The Girls of Murder City is crackling social history that simultaneously presents the freewheeling spirit of the age and its sober repercussions.

    Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more.This is the true story of their search for—and identification of—the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide—and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.

    With no witnesses and only allegations of family greed, incest, and sexual abuse, the murder remains unsolved for years. The most likely suspects, the victims' youngest daughter Cindy, and her ex-Marine boyfriend, David West, had an alibi the police could not crack. And then West fell in love with Kim Paris, a sexy ex-stripper turned private investigator. She coaxed a confession from him that led to a complex murder case exploding into national news. Clifford Irving wrote: "I started out in Houston as a writer on assignment . . . but I became an investigator, a friend to many of the dramatis personae, and a trial witness. As a result, to my discomfort, I helped to determine the outcome of events . . ." The story of Cindy, a tortured woman, and David, a man determined to do the right thing even if it required multiple murder, is as spectacular and thrilling a true-crime courtroom drama as you will ever read.

    He would have succeeded except for three American friends who refused to give in to fear.On August 21, 2015, Ayoub El-Khazzani boarded train #9364 in Brussels, bound for Paris. There could be no doubt about his mission: he had an AK-47, a pistol, a box cutter, and enough ammunition to obliterate every passenger on board. Slipping into the bathroom in secret, he armed his weapons. Another major ISIS attack was about to begin.Khazzani wasn't expecting Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone. Stone was a martial arts enthusiast and airman first class in the US Air Force, Skarlatos was a member of the Oregon National Guard, and all three were fearless. But their decision-to charge the gunman, then overpower him even as he turned first his gun, then his knife, on Stone-depended on a lifetime of loyalty, support, and faith.Their friendship was forged as they came of age together in California: going to church, playing paintball, teaching each other to swear, and sticking together when they got in trouble at school. Years later, that friendship would give all of them the courage to stand in the path of one of the world's deadliest terrorist organizations.The 15:17 to Paris is an amazing true story of friendship and bravery, of near tragedy averted by three young men who found the heroic unity and strength inside themselves at the moment when they, and 500 other innocent travelers, needed it most.

    On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio — a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor — all raced to solve the crime.What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale — a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

    He also left behind mysteries that might never be solved. Sociologist Dr Tanya Bretherton traces the brutal story of Ellie, one of many suicide brides in turn-of-the-century Sydney; of her husband, Alicks, and his family; and their three orphaned sons, adrift in the world.From the author of the acclaimed THE SUITCASE BABY - shortlisted for the 2018 Ned Kelly Award, Danger Prize and Waverley Library 'Nib' Award - comes another riveting true-crime case from Australia's dark past. THE SUICIDE BRIDE is a masterful exploration of criminality, insanity, violence and bloody family ties in bleak, post-Victorian Sydney. **Includes an extract from THE SUITCASE BABY**

    Two young women are brutally murdered. The killer has never been found. What happened in the house on Easey Street?On a warm night in January, Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were savagely murdered in their house on Easey Street, Collingwood – stabbed multiple times while Suzanne’s sixteen-month-old baby slept in his cot. Although police established a list of more than 100 ‘persons of interest’, the case became one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in Melbourne.Journalist Helen Thomas was a cub reporter at The Age when the murders were committed and saw how deeply they affected the city. Now, forty-two years on, she has re-examined the cold case – chasing down new leads and talking to members of the Armstrong and Bartlett families, the women’s neighbours on Easey Street, detectives and journalists. What emerges is a portrait of a crime rife with ambiguities and contradictions, which took place at a fascinating time in the city’s history – when the countercultural bohemia of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip brushed up against the grit of the underworld in one of Melbourne’s most notorious suburbs.Why has the Easey Street murderer never been found, despite the million-dollar reward for information leading to an arrest? Did the women know their killer, or were their deaths due to a random, frenzied attack? Could the murderer have killed again? This gripping account addresses these questions and more as it sheds new light on one of Australia’s most disturbing and compelling criminal mysteries.‘An overdue examination of the Easey Street murders that adds tantalising new information to known and forgotten facts.’ Andrew Rule, journalist and co-author of UnderbellyHelen Thomas has been a journalist for more than forty years. In 2005, Thomas spent months researching the Easey Street murders for Radio National’s Background Briefing, shedding new light on the investigation. She is the manager of ABC News Radio and author of five books, including Moods: The Peter Moody Saga (2016).

    Stewart decided to search for his biological father. His quest would lead him to a horrifying truth and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his world.Written with award-winning author and journalist Susan Mustafa, The Most Dangerous Animal of All tells the story of Stewart's decade-long hunt. While combing through government records and news reports and tracking down relatives and friends, Stewart turns up a host of clues—including forensic evidence—that conclusively identify his father as the Zodiac Killer, one of the most notorious and elusive serial murderers in history.For decades, the Zodiac Killer has captivated America's imagination. His ability to evade capture while taunting authorities made him infamous. The vicious specificity of his crimes terrified Californians before the Manson murders and after, and shocked a culture enamored with the ideals of the dawning Age of Aquarius. To this day, his ciphers have baffled detectives and amateur sleuths, and his identity remains one of the twentieth century's great unsolved mysteries.The Most Dangerous Animal of All reveals the name of the Zodiac for the very first time. Mustafa and Stewart construct a chilling psychological profile of Stewart's father: as a boy with disturbing fixations, a frustrated intellectual with pretensions to high culture, and an inappropriate suitor and then jilted lover unable to process his rage. At last, all the questions that have surrounded the case for almost fifty years are answered in this riveting narrative. The result is a singular work of true crime at its finest—a compelling, unbelievable true story told with the pacing of a page-turning novel—as well as a sensational and powerful memoir.

    The piles of dismembered skeletons belonged to young men who has disappeared from the gay bars and cruising sites of this Midwest city.Their killer was Herb Baumeister, a beloved father and successful businessman who led a deadly double life. And until the day his son dug up a buried skull, Herb's pretty wife Julie never dreamed he was Indian's worst serial killer. She didn't know about the bizarre sexual encounters Herb held at the house when she went away with their kids...or about the brutal cravings that led him to kill.In this riveting account, two veteran journalists tell the uncensored story of Herb Baumeister--taking you into a psychopath's dark obsession to meet his victims, to witness the rituals of sex and death he forced his victims to perform, and to find out how this gruesome killing sprees finally--shockingly--came to an end...

    Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring. The officers at the local police station found Dulcie witty and charming, and looked forward to the scones and cakes she generously baked and delivered for their morning tea.That was one side of her. Only her daughter Hazel saw the real Dulcie. And what she saw terrified her.Dulcie was in fact a cold, calculating killer who, by 1958, had put three men in their graves - one of them the father of her four children, Ted Baron - in one of the most infamous periods of the state's history. She would have got away with it all had it not been for Hazel.Written by award-winning journalist Janet Fife-Yeomans together with Hazel Baron, My Mother, A Serial Killer is both an evocative insight into the harshness of life on the fringes of Australian society in the 1950s, and a chilling story of a murderous mother and the courageous daughter who testified against her and put her in jail.

    Ed Burdick, a wealthy manufacturer known for his kindness and generosity, and his wife Alice had a life few could imagine. The couple had three lovely daughters, a beautiful home, and they were fixtures in the elite Elmwood Avenue set. Despite rumors of trouble in the Burdick marriage, few believed it until Ed ordered his wife out of their home and filed for divorce. The whispers about their separation abruptly ended when Ed Burdick was found murdered in his den while his family slept upstairs. The police found a mosaic of conflicting clues at the crime scene. The investigation uncovered shocking information about the Buffalo tycoon’s life, and no shortage of suspects with a motive for murder.The murder of Ed Burdick is the true story of the great unsolved mystery of turn of the century Buffalo and a terrible wrong that was never put right.

    Louis. The case seemed impossibly complicated, but years of work by police and investigators, led by Prosecutor Don W. Weber, resulted in a plan to lure the murderer into revealing himself. Photos.

    The backpackers - the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo - a place that became synonymous with pure evil.It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.This is the story of how Ivan Milat was caught. Clive Small takes us inside the operation he led as his team painstakingly pieced together the evidence that put Milat behind bars. But questions remain. Did he act alone? Were there other victims? How much did his family know? And what of his great-nephew, who brutally killed a young man in 2010?Chilling, forensic, compassionate - this is the definitive story that could only be told by someone at the centre of the police operation. It is also a powerful argument for the investigation of more than a hundred unsolved murders.