Serial Killers True Crime Science

By day, Sam Smithers was a deacon of his church in Tampa, Florida. But by night, he was a serial killer, who picked up prostitutes and brutally murdered them. This is the story of one man's twisted, double life.

The second volume of my series on serial killers will introduce you to women who committed serial killings. These evil women are every bit as cruel and ruthless as their male counterparts. I am going to introduce you to a few well-known killers such as Elizabeth Bathory, a.k.a. the Countess of Blood; Aileen Wuornos, the woman who inspired the film Monster; Leslie Van Houten, a woman who committed murder for Charles Manson; Jane Toppan, a nurse, who killed dozens of her patients; and Amelia Dyer, the baby farm murderer.

Jack the Ripper. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Locusta of Gaul. If that last name doesn’t seem to fit with the others, it’s likely because our modern society largely believes that serial killers are a recent phenomenon. Not so, argues Debbie Feltonin fact, there’s ample evidence to show that serial killers stalked the ancient world just as they do the modern one.

Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant asks, what is it about murder that fascinates us? Is it the chill whisper of fear reminding us we too can kill? Grant describes 10 true murder cases, each with unique triggers. For most of us, murder is an arm's length experience, close enough to frighten and fascinate yet far enough not to traumatise. For those directly affected, murder can be scarring. Our restless chatter about murder, our state of heightened alert, our endless appetite for news, may all just be play therapy, reassuring us that our own killer instincts are under control.

For decades, it has been assumed that the United States of America was the serial killer capital of the world. Now, criminologists believe that Russia (and previously the Soviet Union) has been, secretly, the biggest home of serial killers for almost a century. In Serial Killers of Russia, Wensley Clarkson reveals the inside stories and gruesome details behind the country's most notorious and previously unknown murderers.

Having worked for 16 years in a high security women’s prison dealing with the likes of Rosemary West and Myra Hindley, Vanessa Frake thought she’d seen just about everything. That was until she was transferred to the notorious Wormwood Scrubs as head of security and operations. Thrust into a ‘man’s world’, her no nonsense approach and fearless attitude saw her rise through the ranks, as she engaged in daily battles of the wits with both inmates and staff.

Asesinos Seriales recopila las historias de los criminales más famosos y despiadados hasta el momento conocidos. Un documental dramatizado que narra la parte más oscura de la humanidad, la prueba de que el alma puede llegar a regiones repletas de sombras y profunda maldad.

In Volume 3 of my Serial Killers series, The Serial Killers: Butchers and Lunatics, you will be introduced to some of the most vicious and disturbed Serial Killers. In Butchers in Lunatics we are going to explore the crimes and lives of men such as Ted Bundy, killer of at least 36 woman and perhaps more than 60.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds.

Jana Monroe was no ordinary cop: a cofounder of - and, at the time, the only female agent in - the world-renowned FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, over the course of her career she consulted on more than 850 homicide cases. But to the people who know her best, Monroe is the BSU analyst upon whom the film character of Clarice (Jodie Foster) in The Silence of the Lambs was modeled. Hearts of Darkness is Monroe's story and will have Monroe finally stepping out from the shadows to tell the range of remarkable tales from the top moments of a life chasing the monsters among us.

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The highway is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. Highway of Tears is a piercing exploration of our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.

Fractured skulls. Gas masks. Brain buckets. Vats of acid. Pickled body parts. Not the usual tools of trade, but for chief forensic medical scientist Derek and forensic secretary Pauline they were just part of a normal day in the office inside the world-famous Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. Derek has played a pivotal role in investigating some of the UKs most high-profile mass disasters and murder cases.

By day, Robert Lee Yates, Jr., was a respected father of five, a skilled helicopter pilot who served in Desert Storm and the National Guard, and a man no one suspected of a deadly hidden life. By night he prowled the streets where prostitutes gathered, gaining their trust before betraying them with a bullet to the head. On August 26, 1997, the decomposed bodies of two young women were discovered in Spokane, Washington. Within months, four more women were added to the mounting death toll.

Much has been written about the brutal crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and - 35 years after he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 13 women - scarcely a week goes by without some mention of him in the media. In any story featuring Sutcliffe, however, his victims are incidental, often reduced to a tableau of nameless faces. But each woman was much more than the manner of her death, and in Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Daughter, Carol Ann Lee tells, for the first time, the stories of those women who came into Sutcliffe’s murderous orbit.

This is the shocking story of a doctor who was addicted to murder: a man who wickedly abused the trust of his patients with horrifying results. He was a pillar of the community: attentive, kind, never too busy to chat. Yet behind this charming facade lay the world's most prolific serial killer, with at least 200 victims. Small, bespectacled Dr Shipman was making house calls - and then committing murder with bloodcurdling expertise and professionalism. He saw himself as playing God.

This audiobook examines the media and cultural responses to the awful crimes of Brady and Hindley, whose murders provided a template for future media reporting on serial killers. It discusses the nature of evil and psychopaths and how they are represented in film, drama, novels and art. It also questions the ethics of the 'serial killing industry' and how the modern cultural fixation on celebrity has extended to serial killers and it explores the impact on the journalists and police officers from being involved in such cases including some interviews with them.

Charles Manson, the Yorkshire Ripper, Aileen Wuornos: take a closer look at some of the world's most prolific serial killers with in-depth profiles of history's most evil men and women. Explore their early lives, their twisted predilections, their horrifying crimes and the chase to bring them to justice, and marvel at how so many of these brutal murderers were, until their crimes came to light, seemingly just another face in the crowd.

Mark Williams-Thomas is a former police detective and multi-award-winning investigative journalist. He has been at the centre of some of the most high-profile investigations of recent years involving killers and paedophiles. In this gripping and unflinching audiobook, Mark reveals how he has pieced together these complex cases. Through tireless research and perseverance, Mark takes us on a journey of discovery gathering and pursuing new evidence, earning the trust of silent witnesses and sharing the personal toll this extraordinary job takes on him.

David Berridge has spent 28 years working as a prison officer, with 22 years at Parkhurst. A tough character with a big personality and a dark sense of humour, David has had to deal with it all - serial killers and gangsters, terrorists and sex offenders, psychopaths and addicts. Inside Parkhurst is his raw, uncompromising look at what really went on behind the massive walls and menacing gates of one of Britain's highest security prisons.

Michael Finkel was a top New York Times Magazine journalist publicly fired and disgraced for making up a composite character for a big investigative news piece about Africa. This audiobook is about how this brilliant, high achieving journalist found himself at that point in his life. But in parallel it's also about Christian Longo, a man accused of the multiple murder of his own wife and three children. After the deaths, Longo fled to Mexico, where he passed himself off as Michael Finkel, New York Times journalist.