Do you think "true crime" refers just to the work of serial killers? Think again. Whether you're fascinated by robbers, kidnappers, gunslingers, fugitives, outlaws, white-collar criminals, gang members, Mafia dons, assassins, or cold-blooded murders, true crime covers it all. We've rounded up some of the best true crime books of all time — including memoirs, journalistic investigations, and real-life stories so crazy, they read like fiction — and we bet even the biggest true crime fans haven't heard of them all. Check out the gallery to see the wildest tales of deception, corruption, and destruction that have ever been published.
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If you think that the most famous serial killers in history are all men, then you need to read Hell's Princess by Harold Schechter, which tells the story of Belle Gunness, a female psychopath known as Lady Bluebeard, who lured several unsuspecting victims to her Indiana murder farm to be butchered in the early 20th century.
Written by veteran investigative journalists and filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Gosnell follows the little-known story of abortion doctor and purported women's reproductive health advocate Kermit Gosnell, who secretly slaughtered infants and women behind the walls of his well-respected Philadelphia clinic.
When bestselling author Douglas Preston learned that the new 14th-century Italian farmhouse he and his family had moved into was the site of an infamous double-murder (committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence), he reached out to Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more. The Monster of Florence tells the true story of their investigation, as well as the twist of fate that resulted in Preston and Spezi becoming targets of a police investigation themselves.
Set during the events of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City tells the haunting true story of Henry H. Holmes, a man who erected his World's Fair Hotel — complete with crematorium and gas chamber — to lure unsuspecting fair-goers into a torture palace. Time to finally read it before the movie comes out!
Published after journalist Michelle McNamara's sudden death, I'll Be Gone in the Dark tracks McNamara's dogged pursuit of the Golden State Killer, a mysterious and violent predator who committed 50 sexual assaults and 10 sadistic murders in California.
In this fascinating new memoir, A Serial Killer's Daughter, Kerri Rawson tells the story of how the man who raised her — whom she only knew as a loving father, a devoted husband, and a public servant — was in fact a notorious serial killer known as BTK, which stood for his method of murdering his victims: bind, torture, kill.
Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me tells the story of one of the most fascinating killers in American history, Ted Bundy, through an unexpected lens: his friend and coworker at a Seattle crisis clinic, Ann, who had no idea the man she was tracking down for her story was actually her close confidant.
If you think Stephen King's It is scary, then just wait until you read prosecutor Terry Sullivan and author Peter T. Maiken's Killer Clown, which follows the investigation of hospital volunteer and model citizen John Wayne Gacy's murderous rampage in a Chicago suburb.
Assuming the perspective of Herb Baumeister, who may have been one of the most prolific serial killers in history, author Ryan Green's You Think You Know Me attempts to fill in the many mysteries surrounding the crimes of the man known as the I-70 Strangler, who committed several murders along Interstate 70 and at his family's own Fox Hollow Farm before taking his own life — and the answer to exactly how many bodies he buried with him.
This terrifying account by Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and author James B. Stewart, Blind Eye, follows the story of licensed physician Michael Swango and the events that allowed the death-obsessed young doctor to fly under the radar at the Ohio State Medical Center and commit as many as 60 fatal poisonings of both patients and colleagues.
John Grisham's first work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man (which was later turned into a Netflix docuseries), follows two murders that shook Ada, OK, in the 1980s — that of cocktail waitress Debbie Carter and Ada resident Denice Haraway — and the mishandled police investigations that sent two innocent men to jail.
You may know Truman Capote better for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the writer was also made famous by his 1966 true crime book, In Cold Blood, which has inspired at least 20 different movies and TV dramas. Accompanied by his childhood friend and To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, Capote researched and wrote the story of the 1959 quadruple murder of the Clutter family, who lived in the small farming community of Holcomb, KS.
Written by acclaimed journalist Dave Cullen, Columbine recounts the events of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, examining the two high school seniors who perpetrated the gruesome school shooting that killed 12 students and one teacher. Cullen draws insight from leading forensic psychologists and the killers' own words and drawings to figure out what could lead to such a tragedy — as well as why, two decades later, these school shootings keep happening.
Award-winning journalist Mara Leveritt's The Devil's Knot is widely considered the most comprehensive book written about Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley — the three infamous teenagers from West Memphis, AR, who allegedly murdered three young boys as part of a Satanic ritual in 1993. In the book, Leveritt tracks the investigation, trials, and convictions of the West Memphis Three, leading up to their inexplicable and unjust release from prison in 2011.
Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, The Executioner's Song, tells the story of Gary Gilmore, who robbed and murdered two men in 1976 and who became famous when — after he was tried and convicted — he insisted on being executed for his crime, leading to a battle with a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive against his wishes.
If you know the story of the Manson family, then chances are you've heard of Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, which follows the seemingly random murders of seven victims by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson. Bugliosi (who served as the prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial) offers an account of how he built his case, providing a rare look from the prosecutor's view of a complex murder trial.
In award-winning foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness, he tells the little-known story of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old woman who was snatched from the streets of Tokyo in 2000 and later found dismembered and buried in a seaside cave. In the book, Parry (who covered Lucie's disappearance, investigation, and trial over 10 years) offers a unique look at Japan's convoluted legal system and delves into the disturbed mind of the man accused of the crime: Joji Obara.
Tim Reiterman's Raven dives deep into the wild history of Rev. Jim Jones, leader of the religious Peoples Temple cult. In his book, Reiterman explains why Jones's followers found him so compelling, and he clarifies the misconception that the many people who died as a result of Jones's teachings in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 were victims of mass murder, not a mass suicide.
The indulgent world of the '90s New York City club scene may appear harmless and fun, but James St. James's Edgar Award-nominated Party Monster works to dispel that notion, bringing readers into a world of drugs, sex, and music through his close friendship with Michael Alig, a former club promoter who served almost 17 years in prison after killing a drug dealer known as Angel.
Famous crime writer James Ellroy's My Dark Places is a personal tale, telling the story of his mother, Jean Ellroy (who was murdered and dumped on a road in Los Angeles in 1958), and the 36 years Ellroy spent running from the truth before teaming up with a homicide cop to finally find out what happened that night.
When Mexican-American journalist Alfredo Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group, he was given 24 hours to figure out if there was any truth to that threat. Midnight in Mexico follows Corchado's journey as he attempts to protect himself while also working to expose the government corruption, murders, and ruthless drug cartels of Mexico.
David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon takes readers back to 1920s Osage Nation in Oklahoma, where the discovery of oil made the Osage rich — as well as targets of a murderous spree. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the newly created FBI took up the case, working to understand why more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances and eventually exposing one of the wildest conspiracies in history.
In Lost Girls, award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker tells the story of five young prostitutes who were abducted and murdered in Long Island after placing online personal ads, a mystery that is still unsolved while the search for the killer continues.
In The Grim Sleeper, investigative crime reporter Christine Pelisek tells the story of a terrifying serial killer who she investigated for more than a decade after officially breaking the story in 2006. The killer — whom she dubbed "The Grim Sleeper" for the 14-year break he appeared to take from his crimes — took the lives of at least 10 women in poverty-stricken Los Angeles communities, but Pelisek (as well as the families of the victims) refused to let the killer go quietly.
As a young lawyer, Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (a legal practice dedicated to defending those without the means to pay for help themselves), and in Just Mercy, he tells the remarkable story of Walter McMillian — a young man who was sentenced to death for a murder he insisted he didn't commit — and their fight to win McMillian justice despite a flawed system.
In Missoula, journalist and Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer uses a respected state university in the college town of Missoula, MT, as a case study, where — over the course of four years — hundreds of students reported sexual assaults to the police, but very few of those cases were actually properly handled by either the university or local authorities.
In John Bloom and Jim Atkinson's Evidence of Love, they tell the chilling true story of friends and fellow housewives Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore, who seemed to have idyllic, happy lives in Lucas, TX — that is, until Candy began an affair with Betty's husband and — when confronted by Betty — brutally murdered her friend with an axe under the guise of self-defense.
For her senior thesis, Harvard student Melanie Thernstrom wrote about the disappearance and murder of her best friend, Roberta "Bibi" Lee, and eventually that thesis became The Dead Girl in 1990. In it, she tells the story of Berkeley student Bibi, who went on a run with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, in 1984 and never returned, only to have her battered body found five weeks later after one of the largest missing-person searches in California history.
Recently turned into a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele, Ron Stallworth's memoir Black Klansman tells the story of how — as the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department — Stallworth managed to infiltrate and sabotage the KKK as an undercover officer in 1978.
Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher follows the gruesome murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in 1860 and the man who was sent to solve the crime: Scotland Yard's best inspector, Jonathan Whicher. Though Whicher believed that someone in the family was responsible for the crime, his lack of sufficient evidence or a confession (as well as England's growing obsession with detection) ended up destroying his career, and it would be five years before Mr. Whicher was finally vindicated.
Researched and written by Monica Hesse, American Fire offers insight into troubled addict Charlie Smith and his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick, the arsonists who launched a series of attacks on buildings throughout rural Virginia's Accomack County, bringing destruction not just to the once-thriving coastal community, but to the trust and well-being of the people who lived there as well.
Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song tells the story of Gary Gilmore, who campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977, but even more interesting is the perspective of Gary's brother, Mikal Gilmore. In Shot in the Heart, he describes his incredibly dysfunctional family, as well as the shame he feels knowing that family is inextricably associated with a violent murderer.
When aspiring novelist Walter Kirn met young banker and art collector Clark Rockefeller in 1998, he never imagined that he would find himself living a real-life version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, but their 15-year relationship eventually led to Blood Will Out. Though Rockefeller introduced Kirn to a world of eccentric privilege, that whirlwind adventure eventually came to an end, and Rockefeller gradually exposed himself an imposter masquerading as a gentleman, one who was capable of conning, kidnapping, and even murder.
In The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich revisits her Summer job at a New Orleans defense firm and the first client she was introduced to: a child murderer named Ricky Langley, who the firm had just successfully gotten off of death row. The more she learns about the case, the more Marzano-Lesnevich (who'd always been staunchly anti-death penalty) finds herself wishing this man had been put to death, and by examining the details of Langley's childhood, she is forced back into her own dark history, which she has kept suppressed for far too long.
Homicide by David Simon (creator of HBO's The Wire) introduces readers to a year in the life in Baltimore's homicide unit, where Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access. There he experienced firsthand the violence of the city, which saw another citizen shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death twice every three days.
National Book Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's The Brothers follows the unbelievable true story of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, descendants of ethnic Chechens who — after struggling to assimilate in America — created two homemade pressure cooker bombs and orchestrated the devastating Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Timothy B. Tyson's National Book Award-nominated The Blood of Emmett Till recounts a pivotal event of the civil rights movement: the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till by white men in the Mississippi Delta. His murder — which was part of a wave of white terrorism following the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional — has become known as one of the most notorious hate crimes in history, and Tyson's book works to bring justice to Till and tell his story.
Back in 2004, Maggie Nelson was just about to publish her book Jane: A Murder (which told the story of the aunt who was murdered 35 years earlier) when the unsolved case was reopened and a new suspect was tried. In The Red Parts, Nelson reflects on the months and the trial that followed, during which all the fear that hung over her childhood and her aunt's memory was again made new.
Award-winning journalist Nikki Meredith's The Manson Women and Me tells the story of her prison visits to Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel (two of the women responsible for carrying out the murderous orders of cult leader Charles Manson), during which she attempted to learn what exactly causes "normal" people to commit unspeakable crimes.
In Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington's The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, they tell the story of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two innocent men who were convicted for the rape and murder of two three-year-old girls in rural Mississippi and who spent a collective 30 years in prison before they were exonerated. What's worse: medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne and dentist Dr. Michael West took advantage of Mississippi's faulty criminal justice system and became the go-to experts for prosecutors, helping to put countless innocent people in prison while the real criminals escaped.
In Little Shoes, lawyer and former journalist Pamela Everett revisits the 1937 murders of the Three Babes of Inglewood — which claimed the lives of two of her father's sisters — and raises questions about the innocence of the triple murder's supposed perpetrator, Albert Dyer, a man with a diminished mental capacity who became the last man hanged in California.
In Sex Money Murder, reporter Jonathan Green chronicles the rise and fall of one of the most notorious gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, setting the story in Soundview — one of the city's most dangerous projects — and following the gangsters who helped give the Bronx the highest per capita murder rates in the country during that time.
Piper Weiss's memoir, You All Grow Up and Leave Me, tells the story of her childhood in Manhattan's exclusive private-school scene in the early 1990s and her middle-aged tennis coach, who killed himself after a failed attempt to kidnap one of his teenage students.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, A False Report recounts the true story of 18-year-old Marie — a victim of sexual assault who was coerced by the police and those closest to her into saying her report was a lie — and the two detectives who eventually discovered the serial rapist behind Marie's attack, as well as the attacks on many others.
Kathryn Casey's In Plain Sight revolves around the crimes of Eric Williams, a former attorney and Justice of the Peace for Kaufman County, who had been convicted of burglary and theft while in office. To exact his revenge while out on probation, Williams shot the two prosecutors who found him guilty, Mark Hasse and Michael McLelland, as well as McLelland's wife Cynthia, in a murderous rampage that became known as the Kaufman County murders.
When a shooting occurs in America, the shooter is almost always presumed the guilty party, but the realities behind gun violence are more complex than one might think. In The Trigger, Daniel J. Patinkin offers portraits of six ordinary Americans who share the experience of having shot someone and the unique circumstances that compelled them to use a firearm against another person.
In Asha Bandele's bestselling memoir, The Prisoner's Wife, she recounts her experience of visiting a group of prisoners to read poetry during a Black History Month program, never expecting that she would meet Rashid, a man serving 20 years to life for his part in a murder, who would eventually become her husband.
In this searing essay collection, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles while dissecting our society's fixation on battered, brutalized women, exploring everything from iconic pieces of literature to popular culture.
In Fatal Vision, bestselling author Joe McGinniss tells the chilling story of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, a handsome and charismatic Princeton-educated physician convicted of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and their two young children in 1970, a crime he vehemently denied committing against all evidence.
Because the story of Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple cult is too bizarre for just one book, Manson author Jeff Guinn penned The Road to Jonestown. In it, he dives deeper into the history of the Indianapolis minister through visits to Jones's hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed and uncovered wild new information from Jonestown survivors.
Everyone knows the disturbing premise of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but few know about the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner, the real-life case that inspired Nabovok's novel. In The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman provides readers with extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives to piece together how much Nabovok knew of the case — as well as how much of that information he pretended not to know.
Joseph Wambaugh, a sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department, wrote his 1973 book The Onion Field to chronicle the kidnapping of two young LAPD officers by a pair of young robbers during a traffic stop, as well as the gruesome execution in a deserted Los Angeles field that followed.
In the controversial Portrait of a Killer, famous crime novelist Patricia Cornwell defends the theory that Walter Sickert, a British painter, was the 19th-century serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, who killed and mutilated as many as 11 women in the impoverished Whitechapel district of London between 1888 and 1891. 15 years later, she followed this book up with Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, presenting even more evidence to argue for her theory.
In her revolutionary autobiography Assata, JoAnne Chesimard — better known as Black Panther Assata Shakur — shares how she came to live a life of fierce activism, as well as how the takedown of Black nationalist organizations led to Shakur's incarceration as an accomplice to murder.
In his wild book, Bad Blood, John Carreyrou uncovers the story of Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, the brilliant Stanford dropout who promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing much faster and easier and who received billions of dollars through fundraising efforts — which would have been great if the technology actually worked.
In Midnight in Peking, historian and China expert Paul French follows the unsolved murder of a British schoolgirl in 1937, as well as its bizarre aftermath. When the mutilated body of Pamela Werner was found at the base of the Fox Tower — which, according to local superstition, is home to evil fox spirits — a British and a Chinese detective worked together to solve the case, while rumors circulated and the promise of war loomed over the city that is now Beijing.
Written by Tom Shachtman and FBI veteran Robert K. Ressler (who later served as the inspiration for Agent Bill Tench in the TV series Mindhunter), Whoever Fights Monsters shares the stories that Ressler learned firsthand from notorious convicted murderers — including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Edmund Kemper, and Son of Sam — who helped him and the FBI better understand the inner workings of a killer.
In The Mastermind, award-winning investigative journalist Evan Ratliff chronicles the five years the DEA spent chasing down Paul Calder Le Roux, the reclusive programmer turned criminal genius whose online prescription drug network morphed into a multinational conglomerate with a hand in nearly every criminal activity imaginable.
In one of the most peculiar and memorable true crime books out there, Kirk Wallace Johnson's The Feather Thief follows the story of Edwin Rist — a 20-year-old American flautist with a passion for the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying — who stole hundreds of bird skins from the British Museum of Natural History, as well as the years-long worldwide investigation that followed the bizarre heist.
You're probably familiar with the media giant Hearst, but in Jeffrey Toobin's American Heiress, he revisits one of the strangest chapters from the Hearst family history. When Patty Hearst — then a sophomore in college — was kidnapped in 1974 by a group of revolutionaries calling itself the Symbonese Liberation Army, no one imagined that the result would be the wildest case of Stockholm syndrome since Beauty and the Beast.
In American Kingpin, a book that is almost too weird to be true, Nick Bilton tells the story of Ross Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer who created what was known as the Silk Road: a clandestine website on the Dark Web where anything you could imagine — including drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, and even poison — could all be exchanged behind the government's back.
The only thing creepier than reading about serial killers is probably becoming pen pals with them. That's exactly what happened to 18-year-old college student and aspiring FBI agent Jason Moss, whose book, The Last Victim (written with the assistance of Jeffrey Kottler, Ph.D.), follows the intense and disturbing bond Moss developed with John Wayne Gacy — better known as the Killer Clown — before Gary's execution in 1994.
In the 1976 book The Michigan Murders, Edward Keyes chronicles the shocking series of young women brutally murdered between 1967 and 1969 in the Ann Arbor area and the perpetrator who was arrested one week after the final murder: a quiet, unassuming young man named John Norman Collins.
Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses revolves around the scandalous life of Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, a mob hitman who was known for his supposed involvement in labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa's death (and it's soon to be a Netflix movie!).
Set during The Troubles in late 20th-century Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing examines the actions of both I.R.A. terrorists and corrupt British Army members, questioning whether many of the killings that occurred during the vicious conflict — such as that of 38-year-old mother of 10 Jean McConville, around whom the story revolves — were casualties of guerrilla warfare or simply cold-blooded murders.
If Errol Morris' A Wilderness of Error proves anything, it's that you can't believe everything that you read. In his book, he revisits the infamous Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald murder case (where MacDonald was said to have murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970) and demonstrates just how much of the information given to the public about the case is unreliable, as well as how many crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply false.
You may be familiar with Serial — the Peabody Award-winning podcast with more than 500 million listeners, which tells the story of Adnan Syed, a young man convicted and sentenced to life in 2000 for allegedly killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee — but that doesn't mean you know everything there is to know about Adnan's case. In Adnan's Story, close family friend Rabia Chaudry presents new evidence that she believes capable of dismantling the State's case, all in her effort to finally exonerate Adnan. It's also soon to be a series on HBO.
Joe Sharkey's Above Suspicion follows a newlywed FBI agent named Mark Putnam after he relocates to a mining town in Pikeville, KY, on his first mission. While there, he begins a two-year affair with a local woman, Susan Smith, who also happens to be his best informant (and it's soon to be a movie starring Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke).
If you love spy thrillers, then you'll love Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor, which tells the true story of Oleg Gordievsky, an infamous double-agent during the Cold War who helped the West expose Russian spies and foil several critical intelligence plots, all while posing as the Soviet Union's top man in London. The best part: the man assigned to exposed Gordievsky, Aldrich Ames, was a CIA officer secretly spying for the Soviets.
Written by Joakim Palmkvist, one of Sweden's most experienced and well-known crime reporters, The Dark Heart follows the mysterious disappearance of millionaire landowner Göran Lundblad and the Missing People investigator, Therese Tang, who obsessively dove into the case for two years, determined to find an answer, or at least a body — even if it meant putting her own safety at risk.
In her memoir, One Day She'll Darken, Fauna Hodel — granddaughter of Dr. George Hodel, a physician considered the suspect in Elizabeth Short's murder — tells the story of growing up caught between identities and unsure of her race, as her birth mother falsely reported her father's race as black on her birth certificate. Her memoir later helped inspire the TNT series I Am the Night.
Rarely is there is a murder case without a body, but that's exactly what happened when Radford University freshman, Gina Renee Hall, disappeared after visiting a Virginia Tech nightclub one Saturday night in 1980. In Ron Peterson, Jr.'s Under the Trestle, he details the history-making investigation that led to former Virginia Tech football player Stephen Epperly's murder charge, despite the fact that the case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence.
In bestselling true crime writer Diane Fanning's Written in Blood, she walks readers through the haunting true story of novelist Michael Peterson, who claimed that his wife's 2001 death was due to an accidental fall down the staircase. However, a medical examiner later determined that Kathleen Peterson had been beaten to death and that her husband was likely the perpetrator — especially when it was revealed that, 16 years earlier, Peterson was the last to see his neighbor alive before she was found dead at the bottom of a staircase.
Ryan Green's incredibly disturbing Torture Mom is not for the faint of heart. In it, Green reveals what happened when two teens, Sylvia and Jenny Likens, were left in the temporary care of a single mother of seven, Gertrude Baniszewski, in 1965, and the circumstances that led to Sylvia's imprisonment, torture, and eventual murder in the basement of the Baniszewski home.
A little-known fact about the late 1960s: in the wake of the Vietnam War, airplane hijackings became a surprisingly routine occurrence. In The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan I. Koerner recounts the bizarre story of disillusioned Army veteran Roger Holder and wild child Cathy Kerkow, who together managed to take over Western Airlines Flight 701 and escape across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom — a heist that still remains the longest-distance hijacking in American history.
In the 1950s, expressways in America led to much more convenient means of travel, but also an insane increase in murder rates. In Ginger Strand's Killer on the Road, she goes through the development of America's highways and the birth of its violent highway killers — some imagined and the stuff of legend, but many very real.
In Vulgar Favors, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth offers a portrait of Andrew Cunanan (created from over 400 interviews with those who knew him and thousands of pages of police reports) and tells the story of how Cunanan met legendary designer Gianni Versace, as well as what eventually led the man to perpetrate his infamous five-person killing spree during a three-month period in 1997.
Everyone knows about the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but few know about the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, and the massive 65-day manhunt that ensued when he fled. In Hampton Sides's Hellhound on His Trail, he recounts the story of the largest manhunt in American history, which involved a Canadian passport, a false name, and even facial reconstruction.
There are plenty of theories about the identity of the Zodiac killer, the elusive sadist who killed as many as 50 victims over the course of 11 months, but reporter Robert Graysmith's Zodiac offers one of the most comprehensive books on the unidentified serial killer out there, with hundreds of previously unreleased facts and even a complete text of the killer's cryptic letters.
Even seven years after schoolteacher Susan Reinert was found dead in a hotel parking lot near Philadelphia's Main Line, her killer had yet to be found, but in Joseph Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness, he attempts to find the answer. In his book, he reconstructs the 1989 case from the beginning, focusing on the principal at the school where Reinert taught (who harbored some dark habits) and the charismatic English teacher and classics scholar who may have been dating Reinert (along with two other women).
In Sarah Perry's heartbreaking memoir, After the Eclipse, she tells the story of her mother's mysterious murder (which happened right outside 12-year-old Sarah's bedroom door) and the ensuing police interrogations, trial, and eventual conviction that inspired her to lead an investigation of her own into her unexamined childhood and haunting past.
Similar to James Ellroy's My Dark Places, Leah Carroll's Down City traces her own personal history through interviews, photos, and police records, where she questions why her talented photographer mother was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four, as well as what led her father to become the charming but troubled alcoholic that he was.
Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds serves as both a gripping crime thriller and a fascinating history of criminal justice. In it, Starr tells the story of serial murderer Joseph Vacher (who terrorized the French countryside in the late 19th century) and the prosecutor and renowned criminologist who managed to stop him with one of the earliest uses of forensic science for criminal investigations.
In The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère follows the story of respected French doctor Jean-Claude Romand, who police believed to be devastated when his whole family perished in a house fire in 1993 — that is, until they discovered evidence of blunt trauma on his wife's skull, found bullets in his children, and learned that Romand was not actually a doctor at all, but had been weaving a web of lies for nearly 20 years.
No one yet knows who bound and killed four young Austin frozen yogurt shop employees in 1991, but in Beverly Lowry's Who Killed These Girls?, she demonstrates just how many people can be affected by a horrifying case such as this, and that even when a case has long since gone cold, a heinous crime that takes four lives will never be put to bed.
Written by The Road to Jonestown author Jeff Guinn, Manson takes a different approach to the story of the Manson family murders than Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, instead tracing Charles Manson's eventual criminal career back to his childhood. Rather than the story of what happened after the murders, Guinn shows who the person was before, including information from Manson's sister and cousin (neither of whom had ever previously agreed to speak with an author), as well as childhood friends, cellmates, and members of the Manson family.
You may know Alice Sebold better for her haunting novel, The Lovely Bones, but in Lucky, she tells a story that is even more terrifying, because it is her own. As an 18-year-old college freshman, Sebold was raped and beaten in a park near campus, and her memoir tells the story of her fight to see her rapist arrested and convicted, as well as her personal journey of carrying on after experiencing such trauma.
When Judith Tebbutt and her husband David set out on a trip to Kenya, they never imagined that they would soon be living a nightmare. In A Long Walk Home, Tebbutt shares the terrifying tale of her husband's murder, her capture by Somalian pirates, and the 192 days she spent starving in a Somalian prison, kept alive only by her fierce desire to see her son again.
Forget Chicago, the musical — in Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It, he tells the story of the most shocking actual murder in Jazz Age Chicago. When two wealthy college students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, decided in 1924 to kill Loeb's 14-year-old cousin just for fun, their families took a chance on America's most famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow, in the hopes that he could save their sons from the gallows — despite the fact that the state's attorney had already elicited their confessions.
Though certainly not perfect, Alston Chase's A Mind for Murder does makes you wonder if everything you've previously heard about the infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is actually true. Rather than the primitive mountain man the media would have you believe Kaczynski to be, Chase offers a completely different interpretation of the domestic terrorist's motives, suggesting that the Unabomber was actually a calculating killer (and that his participation as an experimental subject in a Harvard-based psychiatric research program may have had more of an impact on Kaczynski than people realize).
Truevine by Beth Macy (the same author who wrote Factory Man and Dopesick) follows a mother's journey over 28 years to find her two sons, who'd been kidnapped in 1899 from the tobacco farm they worked on in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine. Little did that mother know, George and Willie Muse were sold into a circus and had become global superstars — but only because they were black and forced to perform as offensive racial caricatures.
Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight sex workers (all impoverished, abused, or mentally ill) were discovered in the canals and ponds of the Jefferson Davis parish, and for Murder in the Bayou, investigative journalist Ethan Brown spent five years investigating the final days of the "Jeff Davis 8," all of their stories revolving around the seedy Boudreaux Inn, a no-tell motel that seemingly connected them all.
In Jeremy Grimaldi's A Daughter's Deadly Deception, he tells the horrifying story of a model immigrants' daughter who went to insane lengths to create the illusion of orderly life, even if that meant forging school documents and inventing fake jobs, all to hide the fact that most of her time was spent with her boyfriend, Daniel. However, when her double life was finally discovered, Jennifer Pan decided that her only option was to take her parents' lives.
Written by Dennis L. Breo (the journalist who won an award for his coverage of the Richard Speck case) and William J. Martin (the prosecutor who put Speck in prison), The Crime of the Century revisits Speck's violent attack and murder of eight Chicago nurses in 1966, covering who he was, how he was caught, and what has become of Corazon Amurao, the only nurse who survived Speck's rampage.
In Richard Hammer's The CBS Murders, he follows the chain of events that led to accountant Margaret Barbera's 1982 murder (contracted by shady diamond merchant Irwin Margolis) and the subsequent murder of three CBS employees who accidentally became witnesses to the crime.
When glamorous world-class equestrian and Houston high society member Joan Robinson Hill fell mysteriously ill one morning in 1969 and died at 38, it let to a bizarre string of murders that included Joan's husband John (who was believed to have murdered Joan), and then later the man who was accused of murdering John. In Thomas Thompson's 1976 book Blood and Money, he follows the chain of evidence back to the beginning, attempting to figure out what the motive was behind it all.
When Charlie Cullen (who later confessed to killing as many as 40 patients during his 16-year nursing career) was arrested in 2003, there was only one person he was willing to tell his story to: journalist Charles Graeber. In The Good Nurse, Graeber uses hundreds of interviews with Cullen's friends, family, and coworkers — as well as Cullen himself — to tell the story of why he did it, and how he got away with it for as long as he did.
In Billion Dollar Whale, Tom Wright and Bradley Hope recount the epic story of unassuming Wharton School of Business graduate Jho Low, a man who spent a decade stealing billions of dollars from an investment fund with the help of Goldman Sachs to finance elections, buy luxury real, and help maintain his insanely luxurious lifestyle. The wildest part: Low is still at large as an international fugitive.
In Ghettoside, reporter Jill Leovy expounds on the epidemic of "ghettoside" killing (the act of one black man killing another), questioning why these murders keep happening, why America continues to ignore them, and how detectives such as John Skaggs — who dedicate themselves to pursuing justice for forgotten victims — work to put an end to these senseless killings.
Janet Malcolm's controversial The Journalist and the Murderer offers yet another book about Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, but this time with a twist, as her book revolves around MacDonald's lawsuit against Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision. In it, she explores the uneasy relationship between journalist and subject, offering a new perspective on journalistic ethics and questioning whether a reporter can truly every capture the "truth" of a person — especially if that person might be a murderer.
