Serial Killers True Crime Science

Eighty thousand words, 100 serial killers, 100 short stories - but thousands of victims. I've selected at random 100 from A to Z. For many beginner true-crime fans, this will give you just enough taste to each story that, if you want to find out more about a particular serial killer, you can search for related books.

On Halloween night, 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing 16 people over the course of 12 months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection.

This gripping book gives you an inside look into 13 of the most frightening serial killer stories of the 1980s. Learning about the lives of these 13 serial killers - along with the lives they took - is a roller-coaster of emotions. It’s scary, shocking, heartbreaking, and enraging all at the same time. This book will leave you feeling almost too scared to leave your house and stunned at how one human could do these things to another.

Michael Ross was a serial killer who raped and murdered eight young women between 1981 and 1984, and several years ago the state of Connecticut put him to death. His crimes were horrific, and he paid the ultimate price for them. When journalist Martha Elliott first heard of Ross, she learned what the world knew of him - that he had been a master at hiding in plain sight.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For 13 years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders", though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward.

The terrifying story of the most monstrous serial killers through history. Serial killers are the most notorious and disturbing of all criminals, representing the very darkest side of humanity. Yet they endlessly fascinate and continue to capture the public's attention with their strange charisma and deadly deeds. From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy and the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, these killers transfix us with their ability to commit utterly savage acts of cruelty and depravity.

The depraved crimes of both real and imagined serial killers and mass murderers have long transfixed us in newspapers and books, but perhaps nowhere more so than on the big screen. Best-selling author Christopher Berry-Dee talks to the serial killers whose wicked stories have most thrilled and fascinated us at the movies, and, through far-ranging and disturbing interviews, he tells the stories of the mass murderers who provided the inspiration for some of cinema’s most shocking films.

In 2013, the Toronto Police Service announced that the disappearances of three men—Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Majeed Kayhan—from Toronto's gay village were, perhaps, linked. On January 18, 2018, Bruce McArthur would be arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder, and later sentenced for the murders of eight men. This book tells the complete story of the McArthur murders. Based on more than five years of in-depth reporting, this is also a story of police failure, of how the queer community responded, and the story of the eight men and the lives they left behind.

During the early 1970s, more than three dozen teenage boys went missing from the working-class neighborhood of Houston Heights, in the south of Texas. The parents of a number of these boys received strange postcards from their sons, telling them that they were fine and that they had found jobs somewhere else in the state, anywhere from Dallas to Austin. Then, in August 1973, the Houston Police Department made a shocking discovery; something that would later become known as the Houston Mass Murders.

The Story of Fred and Rosemary West examines the horrifying account of an incestuous butcher and his wife, a bisexual nymphomaniac, who kept their deadly secrets buried in their garden at 25 Cromwell Street.

We could swear some people are incapable of murdering another human being. Serial killer Ronald Dominique, also known as the Bayou Killer, was such a man. With an exterior that seems almost normal and some would say pitiful, this serial murderer was on a mission - not one anyone could have ever imagined.

In this first-person account of becoming the FBI's top serial-killer hunter and a member of a religious order in an attempt to discern the true nature of good and evil, Roger L. Depue searches for an understanding of how evil develops. Between Good and Evil is Depue's look back at a life spent apprehending criminals, especially serial killers, first as a small-town police chief, then an FBI-SWAT team member, Behavioral Sciences Unit chief, and a developer of revolutionary law enforcement programs.

Seven Bones is the story of one of the more bizarre murder investigations in Australia’s history. Two wives die in suspicious circumstances: co-incidence or, as husband Thomas Keir describes it, ‘bad luck’? Three years after Thomas Keir alleged his first wife, Jean, deserted him and her young son for another man, his second wife, Rosalina, Jean’s cousin, lay scorched and strangled on her bed. Arriving on the scene, Detective Peter Seymour realised he was either dealing with the world’s unluckiest husband or a serial wife killer.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

From perverse acts of cannibalism and dark sexual fantasies to vicious acts motivated by greed and a simple lust for blood, this book reveals the methods and motivations of some of the world's most notorious serial killers, including Juan Corona, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Pee Wee Gaskins, and Ivan Milat.

They thought they had got away with murder. They were wrong. Discover the vital clues, the crucial evidence, the lucky breaks, the chases, the painstaking detective work, and the unlikely heroes that led to the capture of some of the world's most notorious murderers and serial killers, such as "The Good Nurse" poisoner Charles Cullen, finally detected by a young colleague; "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez, spotted by a 13-year-old boy; "Son of Sam", unmasked by a parking ticket; John Wayne Gacy, connected to his final victim by a stray receipt; and, Rodney Alcala, spotted on a TV game show...

Two journalists with unprecedented direct access speak to Ted Bundy and those closest to him - friends and family. What follows is a candid and chilling full account of the life and crimes of the most notorious serial killer in history. What Bundy had to say in more than 150 hours of face-to-face interviews is as relevant today as it was at the time.

Criminals reveal who they are and where they live not just from how they commit their crimes, but also from the locations they choose. This is the claim of renowned criminal psychologist and profiler David Canter. In this groundbreaking book, now fully revised and updated, Canter leads us into the labyrinthine psyche of serial killers, rapists, and other violent criminals, and reveals how geographical profiling is changing the way police work and our understanding of the criminal mind.

In this gripping tale of sex, jealousy, con artists, and murder, the author gets to the root of the violent crimes perpetrated by 1940s serial killers Fernandez and Beck, who preyed on lonely women through personal ads, stealing from them, and murdering them before the ultimate justice was served on the killer lovers.