January 2023: True Crime

Curious Cases: True Crime for Kids presents a slew of fascinating stories that are all age-appropriate, including: the cold case of D.B. Cooper, the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum theft, the disappearance of Masterpiece the poodle, two brothers' cunning escape from Alcatraz, Sherlock Holmes and the fairy photographs, the real-life ghost busters, and much more! After reading these cases, kids will be able to dive into some fun forensic science activities they can do at home to help them uncover evidence and solve their own mysteries

Joe Pompeo investigates the notorious 1922 double murder of a high-society minister and his secret mistress, a Jazz Age mega-crime that propelled tabloid news in the 20th century. In September, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were found on an abandoned farm outside of New Brunswick, NJ. The killer had arranged the bodies in a pose conveying intimacy. The murder of Hall, a prominent clergyman whose wife, Frances Hall, was a proud heiress with illustrious ancestors and ties to the Johnson & Johnson dynasty, would have made headlines on its own. But when authorities identified Eleanor Mills as a choir singer from his church married to the church sexton, the story shocked locals and sent the scandal ricocheting around the country, fueling the nascent tabloid industry. This double murder on a lonely lover's lane would soon become one of the most famous killings in American history--a veritable crime of the century. The bumbling local authorities failed to secure any indictments, however, and it took a crusade by the editor of a Hearst tabloid to revive the case and bring it to trial at last. This book freshly chronicles what remains one of this electrifying but forgotten murder mystery. It also traces the birth of American tabloid journalism, pandering to the masses with sordid tales of love, sex, money, and murder

Billed as the crime of the century in 1894, this book tells the twisted, true story of a young, unidentified woman found slain on the isolated shores of Minnesota Point, Duluth, Minn. For two weeks, her corpse was displayed for public viewing in hopes of discovering her identity. After she was buried in an unnamed pauper's grave, her assailant breathed a temporary sigh of relief. Over the next two years, city detectives pursued numerous suspects from every corner of the country. The manhunt captivated a nation enthralled with the sensational details and deepening intrigue. Only by chance, an overlooked satchel containing incriminating evidence was brought forth, breaking open the case. Speculation suggested that the wanted man was a bigamist and a serial killer, having dashed his first wife in 1890 and two other people in 1893. His evil past included chumming with the infamous Minneapolis killer Harry Hayward. The two men may have acted together in dispatching the woman in Duluth. The engrossing story of a long-forgotten murder is one that the reader will not soon forget.

Perfect for newcomers and hardened crime junkies alike, The True Crime File is an impulse gift book designed to deliver the mixed pleasures of true crime across more than 200 stories of mayhem, madness, and survival. Adapted from the perennially popular A Year of True Crime Page-A-Day® Calendar, here is a full celebration of the genre, more than 400 pages packed with tales of slashers and serial killers, grifters and con men, dogged investigators and miraculous survivors, and of course the story behind the immortal New York Post headline "Headless Body in Topless Bar," and so very much more. Compulsively readable, illustrated throughout, and animated with the frisson that comes with discovering there are real monsters under the bed, The True Crime File is a little book that delivers big to true crime fans of all stripes

It was perhaps the most infamous murder case in state history. Ladonna Mathis was shot twice in the head at point-blank range inside the family's metal shed serving as their makeshift home. Two of her three children, ages 2 and 4, were also shot in the head. The brutality of the killings shocked the state and set off a frenzy of law enforcement activity. Despite its intensity, the investigation never found the murderer or the murder weapon. Though charged with the crime, the husband was acquitted, leaving the door open for endless speculation about what really occurred on that late summer morning of Sept. 8, 1981. With renewed insight from those involved, veteran South Dakota journalist Noel Hamiel explores this cold case of murder and mystery that still haunts the Mount Rushmore state

Mystery. Manipulation. Murder. Cults are associated with all of these. But what really goes on inside them? More specifically, what goes on inside the minds of cult leaders and the people who join them? Based on the hit podcast Cults

From Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, the true-crime story of a notorious maritime hijacking at the heart of a massive conspiracy--and the unsolved murder that threatened to unravel it all. In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. How had the pirates gotten aboard so easily? And if they wanted to steal the ship and bargain for its return, then why did they destroy it? The questions didn't add up--and Mockett would never answer them. Soon after his inspection, David Mockett was murdered. This is a shocking expose of the criminal inner workings of international shipping, told through the lens of the Brillante hijacking and its aftermath. Campbell and Chellel piece together the truth behind this brazen financial fraud. It uncovers a web of conspiracy amidst the lawless, old-world industry at the backbone of our new global economy

A reinvestigation into the nearly forgotten century-old murder that inspired one of the most seductive mysteries in the history of television and film. In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumours, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox of personalities--a young, beautiful puzzle with secrets. Seeking escape from her poor country roots, Hazel found work as a domestic servant in the corrupt metropolis of Troy, New York. The investigation that followed her brutal murder was fraught with red herrings, wild-goose chases, and unreliable witnesses

This is a real-life story of four street children in contemporary Zambia whose lives are drawn together and forever altered by the mysterious murder of a fellow street child. The book immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa's fastest growing cities. When the dead body of a ten-year-old boy is discovered under a heap of garbage in Lusaka's largest landfill, a murder investigation quickly heats up due to the influence of the victim's mother and her far-reaching political connections. The children's lives become more closely intertwined as each child engages in a desperate bid for survival against forces they could never have imagined. The book exposes the perilous aspects of street life through the eyes of the children who survive, endure and dream there, and what emerges is an ultimately hopeful story about human kindness and how one small good deed, passed on to others, can make a difference in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

An essay collection weaving narratives about family, gun violence, art, and the American Dream. Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Marie Farmer's grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor; her cervical spine shattered. She asked, "I'm paralyzed, aren't I?" Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands. He was immediately arrested. This is the scene we are greeted with at the outset of Farmer's collection of hybrid essays. One of its greatest features is the variety of voices, a kaleidoscopic approach that corrals in autobiography, audio transcripts, media, legal documents, internet comments, short prose pieces, and more. The result is a moving, deeply satisfying, and eye-opening story.

This is the story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open. In 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. A lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal. She takes the job, inspired by Grayson's conviction that he could help change things forever. Over the next five years, Erika learns everything she can about P. I. technique, tracking down witnesses and investigating a culture of sexual assault and harassment ingrained in the university's football program. As the investigation grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case, Erika finds herself increasingly consumed. When the case and her life both implode at the same time, Erika must figure out how to help win the case without losing herself.-

Bestselling author, co-host of the hit podcast and Discovery + docuseries Unraveled: Long Island Serial Killer, and true-crime investigative journalist Billy Jensen goes to Columbus, Ohio, where he examines the unsolved cases of eighteen dead and missing women, whom he suspects were the victims of serial killers on the loose and operating under cover of the opioid epidemic in America's heartland.

In Chase Darkness with Me, readers and listeners learned Billy Jensen’s journalist origin story, his struggles, his call to adventure, and his first successes in solving murders.

In Killers Amidst Killers, readers will ride shotgun with Jensen as he takes on serial killers who are walking among us and planning their next moves in real time. The facts are not in old police reports and faded photos. They unfold before our eyes on the page.

Our story begins in 2017, when two young women, best friends Danielle and Lindsey go missing in Columbus, Ohio, within weeks of each other, and their bodies are found soon thereafter.

As Jensen investigates Danielle and Lindsey’s cases, he comes across other missing and murdered women, and before long, he uncovers eighteen of them. All unsolved. And no one was talking about it.

These are not women who were raised in the street. They got hooked on pills. The pills were taken away. They get hooked on heroin. And when the money is gone, they have to sell themselves. It happens very quick.

Through his investigations and the help of experts, Jensen identifies serial killers in Cleveland and Columbus. Why there? Because it’s easy. Sharks go where the swimmers are. Serial killers go where the easy prey are: Ground zero of the opioid epidemic. The heart of America.

That is what happened to Danielle and Lindsey. But serial killers murdering sex workers in the 21st century will get 45 seconds on the local news, and page 3 in the local paper, and then can disappear in the wind.

Jensen hunts these predators to bring peace to the victims’ suffering families while putting a spotlight on a system that is leaving hundreds of thousands of bodies in its wake.

May 1996. Lollie Winans and Julie Williams entered Virginia's Shenandoah National Park for a week-long backcountry camping trip. The couple had met and fallen in love the previous summer while working at an outdoor program for women. During their final days in the park, they descended the narrow remnants of a trail and pitched their tent in a hidden spot. After the pair did not return home as planned, park rangers found their tent slashed open, their dog missing, and both women dead in their sleeping bags. The murders were never solved. Kathryn Miles discovered conflicting evidence, mismatched timelines, and details that did not add up. With a growing sense of obsession, she began to uncover the truth, and believes the true culprit is a known serial killer.

The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internet. On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Their violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called "Slenderman." The children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often overlooked in coverage of the case. This book tells that full story for the first time. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had been seeing Slenderman for many years, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan's best friend Payton "Bella" Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan's twelfth birthday. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately remanded into jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal

Describes how Russ Faria was wrongfully prosecuted and convicted for his wife's 2011 murder, despite having an alibi supported by surveillance video, receipts, and friends' testimony and that her friend, Pamela Hupp, had recently replaced him as her insurance beneficiary.

A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university's lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford's murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city's machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White's search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford's imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means"

How did two teenagers brutally murder an innocent child...and why? And how did their brilliant lawyer save them from the death penalty in 1920s Chicago? This true-crime story is based on an event dubbed the "crime of the century." In 1924, eighteen-year-old college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb decided that they would commit the perfect crime by kidnapping and murdering a child they both knew. Their one crucial error: as they were disposing of the body of young Bobby Franks, whom they had bludgeoned to death, Nathan's eyeglasses fell from his jacket pocket. Candace Fleming depicts every twist and turn of this harrowing case--how two wealthy, brilliant young men planned and committed this "crime of the century," how they were caught, why they confessed, and how criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow enabled them to avoid the death penalty.

True story of the tragic murder of Long Island teen Gary Lauwers by Ricky Kasso in 1984, called a "Satanic Sacrifice" by the international media. The effects of drugs, occultism, and violent crime on the teenagers involved caught the attention of the media, deeply affected the town, and changed the national War on Drugs in the United States