True Crime Deception

In 1979, a fiery preacher named Jane Whaley attracted a small group of followers with a promise that she could turn their lives around. In the years since, Whaley’s following has expanded to include thousands of congregants across three continents. Based on hundreds of interviews, secretly recorded conversations, and thousands of pages of documents, Pulitzer Prize winner Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr’s Broken Faith is a terrifying portrait life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, and the harrowing account of one family who escaped after two decades.

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.

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.

Since its release in fall 2017, the Dirty John podcast - about a con man who terrorizes a Southern California family - has been downloaded more than 20 million times. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This audiobook gathers together for the first time “Dirty John” and the rest of his very best work.

Probing into a trial that deliberated on Betty's promiscuity, her alcoholism, and her adulterous affair with a black man rather than any physical evidence against her, critically acclaimed journalist Jim Schutze reveals how sex, politics, and corruption could possibly have led to a scandalous miscarriage of justice that kept the real killer from facing full penalty for his cold-blooded deed. A fascinating true crime account, By Two and Two is a must-listen investigation into the harrowing details of a sensational murder case.

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.

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.

It began with the whispers. In the woods, in the park, and always at night. Then they came into town, down dark alleys, and in the shadows. Before long, the black-eyed children were moving closer, until finally there was a knock on the door. When the couple were found dead with their faces frozen in horror, the children were nowhere to be seen. Until it happened again. Join Detective Sarah Noble as she investigates another dark case in the town of Slayton.

The dark web is the internet's evil twin, where anything can be bought and sold. Drugs, weapons, and hackers-for-hire are available at the touch of a button. Most who visit merely look around, happy to satisfy their curiosity before leaving, never to return. But some are sucked into the criminal underworld and find themselves doing things they would never have contemplated in the real world—ordering a hit on a love rival or bidding on an auction for a sex slave—like the people in this book.

What exactly is this controversy about Netaji’s ‘disappearance’? Efforts by the authors led to the declassification of more than 1,300 secret files on Bose. Does new material offer new evidence on Bose’s reported death in 1945? The Bose Deception: Declassified opens a window to this and much more.

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.

A seemingly perfect world held an even more unlikely killer... Julie Keown had a great job, financial security, and a perfect husband who was attending Harvard Business School. But after Julie suddenly died, and doctors discovered she’d been poisoned with the main ingredient in antifreeze, her parents began to suspect that her husband, James, was not so perfect. This blow-by-blow account shows how investigators and state police unraveled James Keown’s chilling web of deceit.

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.

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.

Nashville 1964. Eighteen-year-old babysitter Paula Herring is murdered in her home while her six-year-old brother apparently sleeps through the grisly event. A few months later, a judge's son is convicted of the crime. Decades after the slaying, Michael Bishop, a private citizen, stumbles upon a secret file related to the case and with the help of some of the world's top forensic experts - including forensic psychologist Richard Walter (aka "the living Sherlock Holmes") - he uncovers the truth. What really happened is completely different from what the public was led to believe.

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.

Run, Hide, Repeat is a memoir of a childhood steeped in unexplained fear and menace. Gripping and suspenseful, it moves from Dakin's uneasy acceptance of her family's dire situation to bewildered anger. As compelling and twisted as a thriller, Run Hide Repeat is an unforgettable portrait of a family under threat and the resilience of family bonds.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder. Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy.

Rob Sand, the youngest attorney in his office, was assigned a new case by his boss, who was days away from retirement. Inside the thin accordion binder that Sand received was meager evidence that had been gathered over the course of two years by Iowa authorities regarding a suspicious lottery ticket. No one expected the case to go anywhere. No dead body, no shots fired, and no money paid out. Why should they care?

What triggers activate an all-out rage that leads people to commit mass murder? What is the motive behind some of the most shocking killing sprees in US history? Enter the chilling and murderous mind of a spree killer to find out. In Volume 4 of True Crime Stories, prepare for crimes like never before, as we examine what makes people snap and commit gruesome, calculated, and disturbing crimes that will have you questioning about humanity.