True Crime Deception

Brazen impostors, unscrupulous fortune tellers and cunning con artists - True Crime success author Adrian Langenscheid tells of the craziest, most bizarre, unbelievable incidents in history. Of true destinies and perpetrators, driven by the greed for money and power. Cases written by life that leave the listener at times stunned, at times laughing, and then, again, shaking their heads.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

Dr. Mark Freestone has worked on some of the most interesting, infamous, and disturbing cases of psychopathology in recent years. His expertise has led to a consultant role on several TV series, helping them accurately portray their fictional villains. Now, he shares his phenomenal insight into the minds of some of the world's most violent real-life criminals.

In 1988, detectives from the Sacramento Police Department were called to investigate the disappearance of a man at his last known address - a boarding house for the elderly, homeless, and mentally ill. The owner, Dorothea Puente, was an adorable old lady who cared for stray cats and the rest of society’s castaways. She had a strong standing in the community and was celebrated for her selfless charitable work.

When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.

In January 2007 two young stoners from Miami Beach - one a ninth-grade dropout, the other a licensed masseur - won a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Incredibly, instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz - the dudes - bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners.

Widowed Blanche Taylor Moore was about to lose her second spouse to symptoms that mysteriously mirrored those that killed her first husband—as well as her previous boyfriend. When an investigation reveals arsenic poisoning, the hideous truth about the wife and mother comes to light. Did the abuse Blanche suffered as a child at the hands of her alcoholic father turn her into a murderer she became?

Ann Rule presents another collection of fascinating and disturbing true-crime stories - drawn from her real-life personal files - in this seventeenth volume in the #1 New York Times bestselling Crime Files series.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.

Cold-blooded murders, tragic kidnappings, cruel torture, ruthless abuse, devastating family dramas and a millennium robbery. Real criminal cases. In the third volume of his book series True Crime International, bestselling author Adrian Langenscheid once again reports truthfully, factually and free of any sensationalism about shocking crimes in people' s immediate neighborhood. Crimes that have actually happened - and not so long ago. Three excellent podcasts have contributed 5 cases to the book.

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romance-Conti, Burgundy's finest and most expensive wine. In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romance-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison - a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder - unless he paid a one million euro ransom.

As a premier antiques dealer in Savannah, Jim Williams had it all: style, culture, charisma, and sophistication. But three decades of hard work came crashing down the night he shot Danny Hansford, his wild young lover. Jim Williams stood trial four times over the next decade for premeditated murder. While Clint Eastwood's movie - starring Kevin Spacey and Jude Law - and the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt portrayed the natives of Savannah as remarkably decadent, exotic characters, they missed the surprising dark side of Jim Williams himself.

Had fate dealt Harold Henthorn an unimaginably cruel hand? Or was he a murderer? Harold Henthorn wanted to do something special for his wife, Toni, on their 12th wedding anniversary. But the romantic hike he planned ended with her broken body lying at the bottom of a steep cliff. In the aftermath of Toni's shocking death, grief wasn't the only thing shared by her friends and family. So was suspicion. Nearly 20 years before, Harold's first wife had also died under mysterious circumstances.

Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's The Art of the Con tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons.

Stolen valor occurs when a person lies about receiving military decorations that he or she has in fact never earned. It has become a major societal problem that has been discussed numerous times in the news and, most recently, by the US Supreme Court. According to The New York Times, the Department of Veterans Affairs paid disability benefits to more than six hundred people falsely claiming to have been POWs in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff’s edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it’s this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it’s that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick.

By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew older, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family—the only people she had in the world—began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere.

David Miller had a dream job and a beautiful family. But one perfect life wasn't enough. So he pretended to be an attorney, then a CIA agent. And he secretly married another woman. He juggled it all quite well—until the day his two wives found out about each other. Miller groped for ways to hold on to his finances and reputation. But when he tried using a gun to silence his second wife, his carefully constructed façade of power and wealth exploded.

Who would want to steal the identity of a minimum-wage employee at a children’s museum? In this harrowing real-life detective story, a woman searches for the truth, clue after startling clue. Rachel hit the jackpot with her doting fiancé, Zach, who was starting a promising new political career at the Massachusetts State House. Then came money problems - Rachel’s was mysteriously disappearing, bank account by new bank account. She and Zach, her only lifeline, decided to play amateur sleuths. And they had to act fast. Because Rachel’s crippling paranoia was growing.