True Crime Women

He's a predator. She's his latest prey. Will she fall for him or bring him to his knees? When it is revealed there is a serial predator in the midst, the women of the congregation must come together to stop him before someone else gets hurt. It may already be too late. Scroll up and "Click Buy to Buy" for your Instant Copy

The lush, green hills that mark the border of North and South Carolina are home to a close-knit community. When the savaged remains of high-spirited Heather Catterton and sweet-natured Randi Saldana were found and a local man was linked to their murders, residents were forced to face an evil in their midst. The killer was one of their own….

Kevin, Meg's cyber-savvy nephew who lives in the basement, comes to her with a problem. He's become involved as the techie for a true-crime podcast, one that focuses on Virginia cold cases and unsolved crimes. And he thinks their podcast has hit a nerve with someone...one of the podcast team has had a brush with death that Kevin thinks was an attempted murder, not an accident. Kevin rather sheepishly asks for Meg's help in checking out the people involved in a couple of the cases.

A tanker steaming through the deep Northwest Providence Channel of the Bahamas comes across a shocking sight: a lone dinghy carrying Captain Julian Harvey and the body of a young girl. They are all that remain of the ketch Bluebelle, a handsome sixty-foot sailing yacht chartered by the Duperrault family of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

By day, Gary Heidnik was a man of God with money, charisma, and a growing congregation. But behind closed doors, he was building a torture chamber by hand and filling it with women.

Every mother's worst fear became Sharon Rocha's reality. On Christmas Eve 2002, she received a phone call from her son-in-law saying that her daughter, Laci, was missing. In the hours, days, and eventually months that followed, Sharon struggled to avoid accepting what no parent should ever have to face: the certain knowledge that her child is never coming home.

Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of the trade. She swept from town to town, assuming new identities and running new swindles at each railroad stop. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, years after the robber barons had amassed their fortunes, she was amassing her own. Using her wits and a series of forged documents, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland to New York City that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. The con made her impossibly rich.

Jennifer Sweet was a blissfully ignorant 22-year-old recent college graduate living the good life in sunny Orange County, California; but misplaced trust in a deviant, drug-running boyfriend led her into a dark corner of the O.C. underworld known as Orange County Women’s Jail. There was the extraordinarily-troubled and intensely-insecure Ardith Cribbs, who shot her husband to death while he was handcuffed naked to their bed; the petite, savvy and wealthy Lisa Peng, who stabbed her husband’s mistress to death and smothered their love child in a brutal attack; friendly but rageful ...

Professional bakers and a local food blogger are participating in the Baking Spirits Bright holiday baking competition and they aren’t about to go down without a fight. The competition quickly heats to a boiling point, with flaring tempers and mysterious happenings. When one of the entrants is found dead, stabbed with Becca’s chocolate chipper, Becca tries to salvage the season by finding the killer. But the heat is on, and Becca is in danger of getting burned.

A real-estate lawyer in Connecticut's moneyed seaside communities, Beth Ann Carpenter, 30, had beauty, brains, and success. But she wanted more - namely guardianship of her two-year-old niece, Rebecca, daughter of Beth's estranged sister, Kim.

Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a “contract wife” performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment. Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA.

In June of 1968, Irene Izak, a young French teacher from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was pulling an all-nighter on the road toward the promise of a new life in Quebec. The last time she was seen alive was at 2:09 a.m. by a toll collector at Thousand Island Bridge, who claimed Irene was visibly afraid. Less than a half-hour later, Irene was found bludgeoned to death in a ravine bordering DeWolf Point State Park. There were no signs of robbery or sexual assault. For reasons unknown, Irene had been compelled to pull off the interstate and abandon her car, only to be brutally murdered.

When Ella Watson, a woman of wealth and status, is brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight, it sends a shockwave through the Lake District community. Later that day, Keira Bradley meets the same fate. But whereas Ella’s murder is a tragedy, Keira’s death on the notorious Beacon Estate is just another statistic in a dangerous place.

She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral. Now, she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.

For decades, osteopathic physician Larry Nassar built a sterling reputation as the go-to doctor for America's Olympians while treating countless others at his office on Michigan State University's campus. It was largely within the high-pressure world of competitive gymnastics that Nassar exploited young girls, sexually assaulting hundreds of them under the guise of medical treatment. In Start by Believing, John Barr and Dan Murphy confront Nassar's acts, which represent the largest sex abuse scandal to impact the sporting world.

In 2006, Mary Turner Thomson’s world shattered when she discovered her husband Will was a bigamist, con man and convicted sex offender. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the start of a bold new chapter in her life, fighting to protect other women from his heartless gaslighting campaigns—and putting a stop to his endless deception. Mary thought her story would end with the revelation that Will in fact had several families—and numerous children. But when she discovered that he had continued to prey on new victims, she vowed to turn his betrayal into a force for good.

"In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I dont think of myself as a victim. I survived...."

Stephen L. Carter delves into his past and retrieves the inspiring story of his grandmother’s life. She was Black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s - and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected 20 lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.

A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer - the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade - from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.