As oil boom money poured into Anchorage, the city quickly became a prime destination for the seedier elements of society: prostitutes, pimps, con men, and criminals of all breeds looking to cash in. However, something even worse lurked in their midst.   To all who knew him, Robert Hansen was a typical hardworking businessman, husband, and father. But hidden beneath the veneer of mild respectability was a monster whose depraved appetites could not be sated. From 1971 to 1983, Hansen was a human predator, stalking women on the edges of Anchorage society—women whose disappearances would cause scant outcry, but whose gruesome fates would shock the nation. After his arrest, Hansen confessed to seventeen brutal murders, though authorities suspect there were more than thirty victims.   Alaska State Trooper Walter Gilmour and writer Leland E. Hale tell the story of Hansen’s twisted depredations—from the dark urges that drove his madness to the women who died at his hand and finally to the authorities who captured and convicted the killer who came to be known as the “Butcher Baker.”

    Dayton Leroy Rogers lived a normal life during the day, but at night he revealed his true violent personality as he abducted women from the streets of Portland and tortured and murdered them in sadistic rituals. 8 pages of photos.

    Led into an adult world of drugs and kinky sex parties by Frank DeLuca, a married man twice her age, the fifteen-year-old had become his sexual slave--desperately, blindly devoted to him. when her parents discovered their daughter's shocking secret life, her enraged father threatened to kill them both. But the lovers struck first, leaving a scene of appalling family carnage. Growing into womanhood in a maximum security prison, Patricia Ann Columbo has finally revealed to author Clark Howard what really happened that dark and fateful night. From their intimate conversations come a chilling, first-hand view of cold-blooded murder--and a twisted love gone horribly wrong.

      On a warm spring evening in 1982, thirty-seven-year-old accountant Margaret Barbera left work in New York City and walked to the West Side parking lot where she kept her BMW. Finding the lock on the driver’s side door jammed, she went to the passenger’s side and inserted her key. A man leaned through the open window of a van parked in the next spot, pressed a silenced pistol to the back of Margaret’s head, and fired. She was dead before she hit the pavement.   It was a professional hit, meticulously planned—but the killer didn’t expect three employees of the nearby CBS television studios to stumble onto the scene of the crime. “You didn’t see nothin’, did you?” he demanded, before shooting the first eyewitness in the head. After chasing down and executing the other two men, the murderer sped out of the parking lot with Margaret’s lifeless body in the back of his van.   Thirty minutes later, the first detectives arrived on the scene. Veterans of Midtown North, a sprawling precinct stretching from the exclusive shops of Fifth Avenue to the flophouses of Hell’s Kitchen, they thought they’d seen it all. But a bloodbath in the heart of Manhattan was a shocking new level of depravity, and the investigation would unfold under intense media coverage. Setting out on the trail of an assassin, the NYPD uncovered one of the most diabolical criminal conspiracies in the city’s history.   Richard Hammer’s blow-by-blow account of “the CBS Murders” is a thrilling tale of greed, violence, and betrayal, and a fascinating portrait of how a big-city police department solved the toughest of cases.

    Drawing on extensive interviews with key witnesses and lead investigators, as well as secret evidence files that never made it to trial, Crier traces Scott's bizarre behavior; shares dozens of transcripts of Scott's chilling and incriminating phone conversations; offers accounts of Scott's womanizing from two former mistresses before Amber Frey; and includes scores of never-before-seen police photos, documents, and other evidence.The result is thoroughly engrossing yet highly disturbing -- an unforgettable portrait of a charming, yet deeply sociopathic, killer.

    Sandy Johnson was in shock. Her husband, Duane, and young daughter, Sherrie, were violently ill when word arrived that her infant nephew just died of mysterious causes. Days earlier, the entire family was happy, healthy, and living the American dream. Now they were at the center of a terrifying medical crisis.   Duane soon died in a condition unlike anything the doctors had ever seen. As they raced to discover what disease or toxin could have done so much damage so quickly, Lt. Foster Burchard of the Omaha police began to suspect foul play. Sandy herself became a primary suspect, as did her ex-boyfriend Steven Harper—a man prone to violence who never got over their breakup.   In Toxic Love, investigative reporter and true crime author Tomás Guillén offers a detailed and vivid account of this baffling case from the day of the poisoning to the harrowing trial and the murderer’s eventual suicide on death row.

    A father. A killer. Chris Watts was a family man. Everybody, including his family, believed that. Yet, on August 13, 2018, he murdered Shanann, his pregnant wife, and two young daughters, burying Shanann and their unborn son in a shallow grave and dumping their daughters’ bodies in separate oil tanks. As terrible as his story is, it is also a warning because, to this day, living behind bars, Watts is still acting out the character traits that made him kill in the first place. In this, the first and only psychological exploration of the Watts family murders, psychotherapist Lena Derhally has pieced together the crime, the events leading to it, and most of all, her beliefs about the “why,” including the fact that Chris Watts—now a self-described “man of God”—is not in the least remorseful about killing his family. Using police discovery and other sources, Derhally recreates the night of the murders and the investigation that followed. She explores the childhoods, families of origin, meeting, and early relationship of Shanann and Chris Watts. She also examines Watts’s double life and duplicity regarding his well-publicized affair with a co-worker, who, although she claimed their affair was casual, was searching online for wedding dresses at the time of the murders. The book includes an in-depth look at community psychopaths, the different subtypes of narcissism, how to prevent this type of violence, and interviews with a neuroscientist, a criminal psychologist, and a journalist in order to determine what in Watts's twisted makeup allowed him to hide who he really is for so long. Using her knowledge of attachment theory, Imago relationship theory, and psychopathology, Derhally draws a profile of the real Chris Watts and--just as important--she warns readers that he is still a danger today. **$1 from each book sold during the pre-sale and first week of sales will be donated to St Jude Children's Research Hospital (in the name of Shanann, Bella, CeCe and Nico), which is one of the designated charities named by Shanann's family on Dr. Phil. The author will post receipts of sales and donation receipt on her website upon payment of the initial sales.

    . .In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of Taunja Bennet, a troubled 23-year-old barfly who had suffered mild retardation since birth. Pavlinac had come forth and confessed, implicating her boyfriend and producing physical evidence that linked them to the crime. Authorities closed the case.There was just one problem. They had the wrong people.And the real killer wasn't about to let anyone take credit for his kill. Keith Hunter Jesperson was a long haul truck driver and the murderer of eight women, including Taunja Bennet. As the case wound through police precincts and courts--ending in life sentences for both Sosnovke and Pavlinac--Jesperson began a twisted one man campaign to win their release. To the editors of newspapers and on the walls of highway rest stops, Jesperson scribbled out a series of taunting confessions:I killed Tanya Bennett . . . I beat her to death, raped her and loved it. Yes I'm sick, but I enjoy myself too. People took the blame and I'm free . . ..Look over your shoulder. I may be closer than you think.At the end of each confession, Jesperson drew a happy face, earning for himself the grisly sobriquet "The Happy Face Killer."Based on access to interviews, diaries, court records, and the criminal himself, I: The Creation of a Serial Killer is Jesperson's chilling story. It chronicles his evolution from angry child to sociopathic murderer, from tormentor of animals to torturer of women. It is also the story of the fate that befell him after two innocent citizens were imprisoned four years for one of his killings.Edgar Award winner Jack Olsen lets the killer to tell his story in his own words, offering unprecedented insight into the twisted thought process of a serial murderer. Olsen takes his readers along on Jesperson's vicious cross-country killing spree, letting him describe how he played his "death game" with eight innocent victims and how he finally came to grips with the fate he deserved.I: The Creation of a Serial Killer is one of the most revealing and insightful pieces of crime reporting ever published.

      On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages ten and twelve, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the mystery endured.   Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware.   The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.

    The Oakland County Child Murders spawned panic across southeast Michigan, triggering the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history. Yet after less than two years, the task force created to find the killer was shut down without naming a suspect. The case "went cold" for more than 30 years, until a chance discovery by one victim's family pointed to the son of a wealthy General Motors executive: Christopher Brian Busch, a convicted pedophile, was freed weeks before the fourth child disappeared.Veteran Detroit News reporter Marney Rich Keenan takes the reader inside the investigation of the still-unresolved murders—seen through the eyes of the lead detective in the case and the family who cracked it open—revealing evidence of a decades-long coverup of malfeasance and obstruction that denied justice for the victims.

    What really happened in 1969? In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his teenage followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, long enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed. Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from the Summer of Love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with cover-ups and coincidences. Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.

    In each were body parts of a man. In a forensics room, the truth was discovered: William McGuire had been horribly murdered and dismembered.William and his loving wife, a registered nurse named Melanie, had just closed on their New Jersey dream home. Little did William know about the nightmare that was in store... For Melanie had been involved in a long-term affair with a married doctor at the fertility clinic where she worked--and she had plans for the future that didn't include William.Investigators believe that on April 29, 2004, Melanie first drugged her husband, then murdered him in cold blood. Three years after America witnessed the details of the suitcase incident unfold--on "48 Hours, Dateline NBC, "and" ABC Primetime," and in "People "magazine, among other news outlets--Melanie was convicted of first-degree murder and desecrating human remains. This is the true story of a marriage that turned deadly...

    As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year.What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors.

    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.

    But beyond the media coverage of her heinous crimes, there is a story that only investigative reporter Suzanne O'Malley has fully illuminated.THIS IS THE BOOK THAT INCLUDES THE REVELATION THAT LED TO THE OVERTURNING OF ANDREA YATES'S CONVICTION.The updated edition of "Are You There Alone?" features a new chapter on the appeal of the Yates case, as well as personal updates on both Andrea and Rusty Yates. Having drawn upon hundreds of interviews -- with expert witnesses, close friends, family advisers, and Andrea and Rusty themselves -- O'Malley has produced a riveting true-crime account that shatters our notions about criminal law, mental illness, death-penalty politics, and religious fanaticism in America today.