From ancient Rome through the Dark Ages to the burgeoning West to the open highways of urban America, from the unconscionable exploits of French religious zealot Gilles de Rais to such all-American monsters as Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wournos.Katherine Ramsland makes an eye-opening case for the existence of serial killers throughout time, offering a complete chronological record of the serial-killer phenomenon-as well as the parallel development of psychology, forensic science, and FBI profiling in the serial killer's evolving manifestation throughout human history.

    Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family—and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood. Finally, roughly his father’s age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night. Died “after visiting friends,” the obituaries said. But the details beyond that were inconsistent. What friends? Where? At the heart of his quest is Michael’s all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity—and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father’s buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he’d imagined with the one he comes to know—and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother.A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, After Visiting Friends is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists.

    The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing.While rumors of drug debts, revenge, and police collusion abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved and the girls were never found.In 2015, crime writer Jax Miller--who had been haunted by the case--decided to travel to Oklahoma to find out what really happened on that winter night in 1999, and why the story was still simmering more than fifteen years later. What she found was more than she could have ever bargained for: jaw-dropping levels of police negligence and corruption, entire communities ravaged by methamphetamine addiction, and a series of interconnected murders with an ominously familiar pattern.These forgotten towns were wild, lawless, and home to some very dark secrets.

    His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California. He became involved in electoral politics, and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.

    Until now.For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother’s dark and perverse web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.

     Starved and beaten, the little boy's world was a darkened room that measured just eight feet by ten with a single makeshift bed, bare light bulb, and a solitary table. Steve would spend his days conjuring up an imaginary world full of monsters he would draw to try and block out the physical and mental torture inflicted on him by his brutal father. Apart from a few admissions to hospital as a result of his 'imprisonment', Steve remained in the coal cellar of the family home where he was deprived of daylight, his childhood, school, and human contact until he'd reached his teenage years. Eventually, he escaped only to fall prey to the instigators of two of the worst cases of institutional abuse in the UK at Aston Hall hospital and St. William's Catholic School. The Boy in the Cellar is a horrifying true story of torture and cruelty, that reveals a human's full capacity to fight for survival and search out happiness and hope.

    And yet Kermit Gosnell was no obvious criminal. The abortion doctor was a pillar of his community, an advocate for women’s “reproductive health,” and a respected member of Philadelphia’s professional elite. His Women’s Medical Society Clinic looked like admirable community outreach by a brave doctor committed to upholding women’s rights. Meanwhile, inside the filthy building, Gosnell was casually murdering born-alive infants, butchering women, and making a macabre collection of severed babies’ feet. His accomplices in crime were a staff of dropouts, drug addicts, and unlicensed medical professionals posing as doctors. But even more important to his decades-long crime spree were his enablers in the outside world—from the state bureaucrats who had copious evidence that Gosnell was breaking the law but did nothing to the politicians whose fervent support for abortion rights kept health inspectors away. The “pro-choice” political, bureaucratic, and media establishment smiled on Gosnell—and gave him carte blanche to kill. Even law enforcement seemed to not care. Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit received a complaint about Gosnell years before he was caught, gave it a cursory look, and ignored the evidence. Two women and hundreds of babies died after they closed the case. Luckily, Detective Jim Wood—a narcotics detective—opened a drug case against Gosnell. What he found when he served his warrant left even the most grizzled members of the police force stunned. Now Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, the veteran investigative journalists and filmmakers behind FrackNation, dig into Gosnell’s crimes. A record-breaking crowdfunding campaign financed their Gosnell movie starring young Superman Dean Cain, but in the research for the film, McElhinney and McAleer uncovered fascinating and previously unreported revelations that couldn’t be included in the film. Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer contains the full results of their investigation.

    It was the last her family and friends saw of her for over eighteen years. On 26 August 2009, Dugard, her daughters, and Phillip Craig Garrido appeared in the office of her kidnapper's parole officer in California. Their unusual behaviour sparked an investigation that led to the positive identification of Jaycee Lee Dugard, living in a tent behind Garrido's home. During her time in captivity, at the age of fourteen and seventeen, she gave birth to two daughters, both fathered by Garrido. Dugard's memoir is written by the 30-year-old herself and covers the period from the time of her abduction in 1991 up until the present. In her stark, utterly honest and unflinching narrative, Jaycee opens up about what she experienced, including how she feels now, a year after being found. Garrido and his wife Nancy have since pleaded guilty to their crimes.

    During an armed robbery, several hostages were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Victim focuses on the members of one family -- including a mother who died after the attack and a son who was left barely alive -- as they fought for his survival and struggled to rebuild their lives. Victim was the first book to go beyond the headlines and statistics about violent crime, to tell the victims' dramatic story of love, loss and courage. It remains one of the most influential books in the victims' rights movement and has become required reading in criminology courses across the country. It may be more relevant now than ever. "Victim is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood turned inside out." -- Newsweek; "Just as Capote did, Kinder has somehow created a story that is truer than true." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    He would be the final victim of John Wayne Gacy's horrifying compulsion. Then, ten days after the boy's disappearance. Detectives, finding a human bone in the crawl space of Gacy's house, dug into the lime-covered ground. With mounting horror, they pulled bone after bone from Gacy's suburban home until finally they had gathered the remains of twenty-eight more youths who had fallen prey to the killer clown. 16 Pages of Shocking Photos! "An unnerving true story of murder, terror and justice." –The Dallas Morning News

    

    a notorious "murder house" which was once the scene of a brutal and bloody crime. If the walls of number 25 Cromwell Street had ears, what horrifying acts would they have overheard during the occupancy of serial killers Fred and Rose West? Brutal torture sessions and grisly murders were a regular occurrence. Even after the evidence has been removed and the perpetrators imprisoned or executed, an aura of horror, fear and disgust can linger on for decades. Houses of Death provides an incredible insight into ordinary homes and institutional buildings that have played host to extraordinary events. It explores the infamous buildings, the murderers and victims who called them ‘home’, as well as the bizarre and bloody events that took place behind their closed doors.Contents including:Countess Erzsebet Bathory,Castle Csejthe; Eastern State Penitentiary; The Bender family log cabin; Sing Sing;Lizzie Borden, 92 Second Street, Fall River; H H Holmes, The Murder Castle, Chicago; Newgate Prison; Lemp Mansion, St Louis; Bangkwang Prison, Thailand; Collingwood Manor Massacre; Washington State Penitentiary; John Christie, 10 Rillington Place; Ed Gein, Gein’s Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin; Holloway Prison; Alcatraz; The Manson Family, 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles; Jonestown; Fred and Rose West, 25 Cromwell Street; Jeffrey Dahmer, 213 Oxford Apartments;Gary Heidnik, 3520 North Marshall Street; Ian Huntley, 5 College Close, Soham.

    It also shed light on the guarded world of Hollywood and stripped away the façade of Christina's relentless, alcoholic abuser: her adoptive mother, movie star Joan Crawford. Christina was a young girl shown off to the world as a fortunate little princess. But at home, her lonely, controlling, even ruthless mother made her life a nightmare. A fierce battle of wills, their relationship could be characterized as an ultimately successful, for Christina, struggle for independence. She endured and survived, becoming the voice of so many other victims who suffered in silence, and giving them the courage to forge a productive life out of chaos.

    "Now everyone is going to know." "I know," I said. "I’m sorry."Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love, and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long, difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.To understand herself and her violent marriage, Sundberg looks to her childhood in Salmon, a small, isolated mountain community known as the most redneck town in Idaho. Like her marriage, Salmon is a place of deep contradictions, where Mormon ranchers and hippie back-to-landers live side-by-side; a place of magical beauty riven by secret brutality; a place that takes pride in its individualism and rugged self-sufficiency, yet is beholden to church and communal standards at all costs.Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a harrowing, cautionary, and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one woman’s transformation as she gradually rejects the painful reality of her violent life at the hands of the man who is supposed to cherish her, begins to accept responsibility for herself, and learns to believe that she deserves better.

    To understand human character, one must first explore the depraved reaches of human consciousness.