Crime Con

Sheila Davalloo was young, attractive, and successful. When she started a new job at a cutting-edge research lab in Stamford, Connecticut, she met the man of her dreams. Nelson Sessler had no idea how violently Sheila would react when he began seeing a co-worker, Anna Lisa Raymundo. Sheila eliminated her rival in a bloody knife attack - and then turned her rage on another victim she saw as an obstacle to her passions.

As with the two prior volumes of True Crime Case Histories, I want to start with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the sticky details of truly gruesome crimes. In my books I don't gloss over the facts, regardless of how horrible they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is the astonishing tale of Lara's descent from middle class soccer mum with an enviable lifestyle, beautiful home and family to an opiate addict and identity thief. Convicted of 32 felonies, her children are taken away and she is placed in a local jail. In this strange and frightening new world, she has to get grips with life behind bars. Lara becomes known in prison as Mama Love. She helps the women around her get to grips with their own troubles, writes letters for them, acts as an advocate, and comforts them in their darkest moments.

The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI’s confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case.

MG Martin thought she’d turned the last page on the dangerous Golden Arrow case. The bad guys are behind bars, and the rest is up to her detective boyfriend, Matteo Kildaire. But when Golden Arrow impersonators start popping up all over Los Angeles, the writer in MG can’t help but be intrigued. Are they impostors, or has the original Golden Arrow returned? A reemergence of drug crime has left the LAPD baffled, and golden arrows are once again being left at crime scenes. Matteo asks MG if she’ll resume consulting on all things geek, and she jumps at the opportunity.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes. What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated film, Molly's Game. But Houston Curtis, the card shark who co-founded the game with Tobey Maguire, knows that Sorkin's is the whitewashed version. In Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, Curtis goes all-in, revealing the true story behind the game.

Real rock stars do truly insane thing and invite truly insane things to happen to them: murder, drug trafficking, rape, cannibalism and the occult. We allow this behavior. We are complicit because a rock star behaving badly is what's expected. It's baked into the cake. Deep down, way down, past all of our self-righteous notions of justice and right and wrong, when it comes down to it, we want our rock stars to be bad. We know the music industry is full of demons, ones that drove Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, and Sid Vicious and that consumed the Norwegian black metal scene.

Toby Dorr's memoir exemplifies a story of redemption through her recounting the events that led to aiding a convicted murderer's escape from prison. Her story is a testament to the power of transformation and personal growth in a most unexpected way.

While the mainstream media protects the innermost circles of the establishment, this audiobook reveals the harrowing truth of elite child molesters and the calculated methods they employ to conceal their horrific activities, which often span decades.

In 2007, Dr. Martin MacNeill - a doctor, lawyer, and Mormon bishop - discovered his wife of 30 years dead in the bathtub of their Pleasant Grove, Utah, home, her face bearing the scars of a facelift he had persuaded her to undergo just a week prior. At first the death of 50-year-old Michele MacNeill, a former beauty queen and mother of eight, appeared natural. But days after the funeral, when Dr. MacNeill moved his much younger mistress into the family home, his children grew suspicious.

La estudiante de perfilado de criminales (y recién casada), Jessie Hunt, de 29 años, descubre que en su nuevo hogar en los suburbios acechan secretos ocultos; cuando aparece un cadáver, se ve atrapada entre el punto de mira de sus nuevas amistades, los secretos de su marido, el trabajo con casos de asesinos en serie—y los secretos de su propio pasado tenebroso.

In some murder cases, the truth behind the most tragic of crimes crystallizes with relative ease. Not so with these fascinating accounts drawn from the personal files of Ann Rule. What happens when the case itself becomes an intractable puzzle, when clues are shrouded in smoke and mirrors, and when criminals skillfully evade law enforcement in a maddening cat-and-mouse chase? Even the most devoted true-crime listener won't predict the outcome of these truly baffling cases until the conclusions revealed in Ann Rule's marvelously insightful narrative.

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters, and snake-oil salesmen of the digital age - and why we can’t stop falling for them.

In this volume, you’ll hear some stories that take place as recently as a few years ago, while others date back as far as the 1930s. There’s the story of a young Russian immigrant who came to the United States seeking the exciting lifestyle he’d seen on television, only to be stabbed, set on fire, and left to die in the desert by his own friends. There’s also the story of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. There’s one of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. And more.

After bursting onto the scene in 2002, Rudy Kurniawan quickly became the leading purveyor of rare wines to the American elite. But in April 2008, his lots of Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis red burgundy - dating as far back as 1945 - were abruptly pulled from auction. The problem? The winemaker was certain that this particular burgundy was first produced only in 1982.

A former US naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one best seller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated - because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth - by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy; and much more.

Operation White Rabbit traces the rise and fall - and rise and fall again - of the psychedelic community through the life of the man known as the "Acid King": William Leonard Pickard. Pickard was a legitimate genius, a follower of Timothy Leary, a con artist, a womanizer, and a believer that LSD would save lives. He was a foreign diplomat, a Harvard fellow, and the biggest producer of LSD on the planet - if you believe the DEA.

When Mary met Will Jordan online, she was a single mother who’d given up trying to find Mr Right. And yet here he suddenly was: articulate and attractive, with a fascinating background. Soon they were in love, and when he proposed after a month it seemed recklessly romantic. Caught up in a whirlwind, Mary accepted that Will’s work often took him away from home, out of contact. She was his rock, supporting him emotionally when a misunderstanding led to criminal charges, and even selling everything when blackmailers threatened to kidnap their children. Together, they took on the world.

A true story detailing the events surrounding the murder of wealthy North Carolinian Lieth von Stein. The case seemed cold until police followed a trail leading to von Stein's stepson, a smart young man who was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and wrapped up in drugs.