American True Crime

O’Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard trace the brutal history of 20th-century organized crime in the United States, and expertly plumb the history of this nation’s most notorious serial robbers, conmen, murderers, and especially, mob family bosses. Covering the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, O’Reilly and Dugard trace the prohibition-busting bank robbers of the Depression Era, such as John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby-Face Nelson.

In the spirit of Devil in the White City comes a true detective tale of the highest standard: the haunting story of Eliot Ness' forgotten final case - his years-long hunt for "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run", a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland through the Great Depression and tormented Ness to his dying breath.

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives.

Forty years before the names Snowden and Manning entered the world's cultural lexicon, Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee became America's youngest convicted spies - condemned to federal prison in 1977 for their roles in one of the most highly publicized espionage cases in Cold War history. Yet the story of their crime, as told in the book and movie The Falcon and the Snowman, was only the beginning.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

John Carter, a Chicago Cartel King is on his way to Federal Prison. The Authorities couldn’t pin on anything on his enterprise, so they try to put him on ice so everything he built is destroyed by his enemies. Damian Jordan is John’s right hand man. It’s his job to keep things afloat until if and when John comes home. Elijah, is John’s son, the heir to the kingdom. However Elijah is not ready to run things yet and John knows he would be no match for his competitors. Regardless, Elijah is set on making his mark and showing his father he’s ready to lead. This causes friction between...

What would you do if your son suddenly disappeared in Syria, and you had no idea what had happened to him? Would you contact the FBI? The State Department? Pray? Would you Google “What to do if your son disappears in Syria”? When the unthinkable happened, the answer, in the case of Ann Goodwin and her husband Tag, was: all of the above. Their 30-year-old son Sam, who was attempting to become one of the few people in history to travel to every single country on the planet, vanished in a supposed safe-zone run by the Kurds on the Turkish border.

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.

Meet Marcel and Sabrina, a hitman and a bookkeeper for the Mob. The couple should have never met, let alone fallen in love. When they decide to go against the grain, all hell breaks loose. Somebody wants them dead; they just don't know who. It could be Leo, Marcel's jealous older brother; Othello, Sabrina's crooked father; or it could be The Family, a roundtable of the top contenders in the underworld. There is no honor amongst thieves. Marcel and Sabrina will find the old adage to be true the hard way.

In 2008 veteran journalist Evan Wright, acclaimed for his New York Times best-selling book Generation Kill and co-writer of the Emmy-winning HBO series it spawned, began a series of conversations with super-criminal Jon Roberts, star of the fabulously successful documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Those conversations would last three years, during which time Wright came to realize that Roberts was much more than the de-facto “transportation chief” of the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, much more than a facilitator of a national drug epidemic.

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors...and then went back to bed. Howard Unruh went from obscurity to infamy overnight. Even after his obsessive diaries were discovered - a catalogue of simmering rage, petty grievances, and sexual repression - the anomalous crime seemed incomprehensible. Succeeding decades would confirm that Unruh’s “Walk of Death” was just the beginning. The prototype for the modern mass murderer, he would usher in a new age of violence in America.

He didn’t want fame. He didn’t leave clues. He didn’t fit the mold. He was the FBI’s worst nightmare: a killer without a pattern. In Invisible Predator, author E.V. Black delivers a gripping true-crime account of Israel Keyes — one of the most cold-blooded and enigmatic serial killers in modern American history. Keyes crisscrossed the United States, murdering victims at random and burying "kill kits" years in advance to fuel a chilling campaign of violence that went undetected for over a decade. From the abduction of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig in Alaska to the unsolved murders he...

Where Was Skip? is an informative and thrilling guide to the life of JFK Assassination suspect and a potential D.B. Cooper person of interest (POI), Loran “Skip” Hall. The author, John Limbach, goes back to Hall’s birth in 1930 to detail an entire life of covert activity, crime, love affairs, and the conspiracies that surrounded this self-described jackal for the CIA until his death in 1995. While never suspected by the FBI for the only unsolved hijacking in United States history, Limbach paints a picture with facts, circumstances, and profiling that puts Hall right in the center of ...

The True American tells the story of Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force officer who dreams of immigrating to America and working in technology. But days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into the Dallas minimart where Bhuiyan has found temporary work and shoots him, maiming and nearly killing him. Two other victims, at other gas stations, aren't so lucky, dying at once. The True American traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter.

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.

"50 States, 50 Mysteries" is the ultimate travel guide for mystery enthusiasts, featuring unexplained phenomena, haunted places, true crime stories, and more from every corner of America. Take a journey through the country and explore the local legends and unsolved mysteries that make each state unique. Embark on a road trip like no other as you explore the paranormal activity and ghost stories that surround mysterious places and secret locations across the country. From strange occurrences to infamous crimes, this book has it all, providing a mix of true crime, folklore, and regional ...

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.

Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington.

A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe's sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream.

TRUE TALES OF MURDER & MAYHEM - VOLUME #1 (Edition #2. Updated and corrected 28th Feb 2024)*MURDEROUS FAMILIES The process of growing up as part of a small family group prepares a child to take a constructive part in the world. But when a family turns to crime together, there seems to be no limit to their ambition. This is clearly seen in the case of the Bender family. Kate Bender would charm the travellers who stopped at their house for a meal cooked by her mother. The men of the family then killed, robbed and buried them, sharing out the proceeds. The trial is of the Manson "family" for ...