True Crime Kidnapping

Oskar's school teacher raises the alarm. Oskar's mother is abroad, and he has been left in the care of friends, but has been arriving in school hungry, unkempt and with bruises on his arms, legs and body. Experienced foster carer Cathy Glass is asked to look after him, but as the weeks pass, her concerns deepen. Oskar is far too quiet for a child of six and is clearly scared of something or someone.

To solve a high-profile abduction, one former police officer must confront a dark past. A child's abduction reveals a frightening pattern within a small town where nothing is as it seems. Katy Dowry's world shatters when her son, Denny, is abducted from his school. Amidst heavy snowfall and rising tensions, Katy uncovers a web of secrets involving the disappearance of the child.

In 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Almost all of America believed Hauptmann guilty; only a few magazines and tabloids published articles questioning his conviction. In the ensuing decades, many books about the Lindbergh case have been published. Some have declared Hauptmann the victim of a police conspiracy and frame-up, and one posited that Lindbergh actually killed his own son and fabricated the entire kidnapping to mask the deed.

In Hoffa’s Shadow tells the moving story of how Goldsmith reunited with the stepfather he’d disowned and then set out to unravel one of the 20th century’s most persistent mysteries and Chuckie’s role in it. Along the way, Goldsmith explores Hoffa’s rise and fall and why the golden age of blue-collar America came to an end, while also casting new light on the century-old surveillance state, the architects of Hoffa’s disappearance, and the heartrending complexities of love and loyalty.

There is perhaps no crime more disturbing than the abuse of a child—and no court cases as upsetting as those in which juveniles who have faced abuse are tried for fighting back. In this gripping memoir Sara Kruzan, a survivor of childhood abuse and sex trafficking, tells the honest, disturbing, and ultimately empowering story of her journey from abuse to incarceration without parole for killing her abuser to finally gaining her liberation.

Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown LA's Cecil Hotel - a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa's nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms.

When her son disappears, a mother is forced to confront a past she thought she had left behind. When young Charlie is abducted from a hardware store, his mother Bria must uncover the secrets hidden within their small town of Hollow Oak, North Dakota. As winter sets in, Bria and her husband Lester rely on their tight-knit community and relentless determination to bring Charlie home.

Saving Abigail is a true story about a little girl taken hostage by Hamas the morning of October 7, 2023, after thousands of terrorists breached Israel by land, sea, and air. That day, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 men, women, and children, and 246 innocent people were dragged across the border into Gaza against their will. Among them was three-year-old Abigail Mor Edan.

It is plausible that Donald Henry Gaskins was born a psychopath; it may also be said that his life experiences helped turn him into a sociopath. The Meanest Man in America earned the title of the most prolific serial killer in South Carolina’s history. Although it was never confirmed, Gaskins claimed to have murdered more than 100 people, with some reports as high as 181.

In his early thirties Justin Alexander Shetler quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey: across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal, in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters, while also documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures.

At ten months old, Holly Marie was brought to the door of a church by three barefoot women in white robes and head coverings. Adopted by the pastor and raised in a loving Christian home, Holly nevertheless struggled with the ache of not knowing what had happened to her biological parents. She still felt their absence even as she married and started a family of her own. When two detectives showed up at the restaurant where she worked and informed her that she had a large family in Florida who had been searching for her for over 40 years, Holly’s past became the reality of her present.

The girls' names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in Western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard.

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.

La crónica de un secuestro real magistralmente retratado por Gabriel García Márquez. "Era, en efecto, el automóvil de Maruja. Había transcurrido por lo menos media hora desde el secuestro, y sólo quedaban los rastros: el cristal del lado del chofer destruido por un balazo, la mancha de sangre y el granizo del vidrio en el asiento, y la sombra húmeda en el asfalto, de donde acababan de llevarse al chofer todavía con vida. El resto estaba limpio y en orden."

One hot summer, two young children disappeared from their first-floor apartment in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York. Their mother, Alice Crimmins, reported them missing to the police. Later that day, the body of four-year-old Missy was found in a vacant lot, showing signs of having been strangled. The body of five-year-old Eddie, Jr., was found several days later.

Chris Thomas is not yet 30 years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the reputation of her family. Now, 20 years later, Thomas takes listeners behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary on finding Elizabeth Smart.

True crime stories are everywhere - from our screens to podcasts, capturing our imaginations and haunting our dreams. It's raw, it's real, and it's a deep dive into humanity's dark side. Whether you think you've heard it all or are just getting started, "The Ultimate True Crime Trivia Book" is your next must-listen.

It’s a freezing winter’s night in 1954. A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside. After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.

When Julia Henry's daughters disappear, she uncovers a web of secrets rooted in their birth mother's past. Every mother's nightmare becomes Julia Henry's reality when her daughters, Jewel and Opal, vanish without a trace. The secret to their abduction might lie buried in a dark past, tangled in a web of secrets and deceit of their birth mother. As Julia digs deeper, she uncovers secrets that stretch to her own doorstep, challenging everything she knows about her life. In a race against time, Julia must navigate a maze of lies to rescue her daughters.

In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then 18 years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.