American True Crime

On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland’s Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed “The Lady of the Lake,” was only the first of a butcher’s dozen. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some were beheaded while still alive.

Lizzie Borden took an axe...or did she? Forget everything you already think you know about this compelling case and discover what did - and what did not - happen in the story of Lizzie Borden! What dark secrets have never been told? What happened in the grim aftermath of the murder trial? Do the spirits of the dead still linger in the house where the Bordens were killed? You’ll find these answers and more and you’ll never look at this chilling story in the same way again!

With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers. In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the 1950s to the early 21st century. From Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer, our fascination with these classic serial killers seems to grow by the day.

At first glance Gabriel Cardona is the poster-boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. His younger friend, Bart, as well as others from Gabriel's childhood join him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of the cartel's leadership.

On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin?

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind.

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.

He's a predator. She's his latest prey. Will she fall for him or bring him to his knees? When it is revealed there is a serial predator in the midst, the women of the congregation must come together to stop him before someone else gets hurt. It may already be too late. Scroll up and "Click Buy to Buy" for your Instant Copy

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 ...

Based on hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and access to exclusive sources and materials, Sandy Hook is Elizabeth Williamson’s landmark investigation of the aftermath of a school shooting, the work of Sandy Hook parents who fought to defend themselves, and the truth of their children’s fate against the frenzied distortions of online deniers and conspiracy theorists.

More than a million listeners have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln, the can't-stop-listening work of nonfiction about the shocking assassination that changed the course of American history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and how a sequence of gunshots on a Dallas afternoon not only killed a beloved president but also sent the nation into the cataclysmic division of the Vietnam War and its culture-changing aftermath.

Growing up during the Depression in the segregated coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, Doris Payne was told her dreams were unattainable for poor Black girls like her. Surrounded by people who sought to limit her potential, Doris vowed to turn the tables after the owner of a jewelry store threw her out when a White customer arrived. Neither racism nor poverty would hold her back; she would get what she wanted and help her mother escape an abusive relationship.

Memoirs of a Hitman dives deep into the chilling life and crimes of William Dean Wickline Jr., a man whose violent legacy left a lasting scar on Ohio’s criminal history. This investigative true crime narrative explores not just the grisly murders and criminal empire Wickline built, but also the shadowy underpinnings of his psyche, the social environments that shaped him, and the law enforcement struggles that ultimately brought him to justice. Born in 1952 to a troubled working-class family, Wickline’s early years were marked by domestic violence and emotional neglect. From an early age...

In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.

Blending history and memoir, retired U.S. Marshal Mike Earp - a descendant of the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp - offers an exclusive and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the most storied law enforcement agency in America, illuminating its vital role in the nation's development for more than two hundred years. Setting his own experiences within the long history of the U.S. Marshals service, Earp offers a moving and illuminating tribute to the brave marshals who have dedicated their lives to keeping the nation safe.

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.

By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as "the Corporation", the Cuban mob's power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida's exile community - those who had been chased from the island by Castro's revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.

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.

The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don", John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways, an image perpetuated in popular Mafia mythology. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell.

A blend of Manhunt, Killing Pablo, and Zero Dark Thirty, this sensational investigative high-tech thriller - soon to be a major motion picture from Sony - chronicles a riveting chapter in the 20th-century drug wars: the exclusive inside story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that captured El Chapo - the world's most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the law for more than a decade.