American True Crime

It has been eleven years since Diane Foley’s son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending. In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane’s story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death.

Caught between the Mob and the feds in a plot to save the casinos in Havana from Castro's revolution, Wolfe Rabin pulls the biggest money-laundering scheme in history, but his hubris leads to the conspiracy unraveling in a sensational trial. At a time when there was a jukebox in every restaurant, diner, bar, barracks, arcade, and canteen, Rabin's trajectory from inventor to promoter to outlaw is set against the Mob's growing infiltration of the jukebox industry.

October 25, 2023 was just an ordinary night in Lewiston, a small, working class city of 37,000 in central Maine. Friends and families had gathered to do what they loved to do with the people they wanted to be with at a bowling alley called Just-in-Time Recreation Center and Schemengees, a popular sports bar and restaurant. They felt immune from the violent crime that seemed to wrack the rest of the country in a state that the FBI had just named the safest in America.

On December 10, 1953, tragedy was visited on a family when Nathaniel Allen was murdered on the Sampit River by his White employer, who lured him into the meeting under the false promise of reconciliation. Allen's death was recorded as an accidental drowning, a deliberate cover-up of the bullet hole seen by more than one witness. Three generations later, Phil Allen Jr. revisits this harrowing story and recounts the "baton of bitterness" that this murder passed down in his family.

​C'est l'un des tueurs en série les plus terrifiants des États-Unis. Vous ne connaissez pas encore son nom, mais vous n'êtes pas prêts de l'oublier. Anchorage, sur les rivages glacés de l'Alaska. Dans la nuit du 2 février 2012, la jeune Samantha Koenig termine son service dans un petit kiosque à café, battu par la neige et le vent. Le lendemain, elle n'est toujours pas rentrée chez elle. Une caméra de vidéosurveillance apporte vite la réponse : on y voit clairement un inconnu emmener l'adolescente sous la menace.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

In July 1970, 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. A cold case for 50 years, Paula’s story had been largely forgotten when Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could a community give up and move on? Could there ever be justice for Paula?

On Thursday 9th October, Michelle Hadaway's worst fears came true. After watching her daughter Karen playing in the neighbour's garden with her best friend Nicola, Michelle returned to cook dinner for her family. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the last time she would ever see Karen alive. In the following days and months, shocking details would come to light about the nature of Karen and Nicola's murders, and the case which had come to be known as 'the Babes in the Wood murders' would lead to one of the most infamous and cruellest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Every catastrophe has a beginning. For the opioid crisis in America, the seed was a drug called OxyContin. First hailed as a miracle drug for severe pain in the early 1990s, OxyContin went on to ignite a plague of addiction and death across America. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story and business exposé, Pain Killer is the origin story of the opioid crisis, a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the trigger for a national tragedy.

The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies - Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.

In 1974, Pan American Flight 806 was hoping to land safely in Pago Pago, Samoa, but instead plummeted at 140 miles per hour into the jungle floor. The 101 passengers and crew members all survived this devastating crash. Unfortunately, only four of them escaped the wreckage before the ensuing fire that followed and lived to tell their story. After the disaster, Pan American was found guilty of "willful misconduct" after the longest and most expensive trial in aviation history.

American Desperado is possibly the most jaw-dropping, event-filled, adrenaline-soaked criminal autobiography ever written. Like a real-life Scarface Jon was born into the upper levels of the Gambino crime family and witnessed his first murder at age seven. He became a one-man juvenile crime wave before joining an assassination squad in Vietnam.

What happened in Kirven, Texas, in May 1922, has been forgotten by the outside world. It was a coworker's whispered words, "Kirven is where they burned the [Negroes]", that set Monte Akers to work at discovering the true story behind a young white woman's brutal murder and the burning alive of three black men who were almost certainly innocent of it. This was followed by a month-long reign of terror as white men killed blacks while local authorities concealed the real identity of the white probable murderers and allowed them to go free.

The first hundred years of the American Mafia's existence would come to be seen as a golden age. From small-town Sicily to glittering Las Vegas, the mob had carefully expanded and consolidated their power until their influence touched almost every aspect of American society. But in the 1960s, everything changed. In CLASH OF TITANS, the second volume of former Mafia associate Louis Ferrante's groundbreaking Borgata trilogy, we discover for the first time the true scale of the conflicts that rocked the organisation between 1960 and 1985.

The thrilling untold story of the trailblazing writer Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, who sounded the alarm about the rise of fascism in Europe while becoming enmeshed in the sensational case of a German serial killer stalking the streets of the French capital on the eve of WWII.

The '90s were a time when big changes were happening across the world. Unfortunately, with big changes also comes instability and crime, resulting in many heinous individuals that got a chance to commit them and cases that many are terrified to just hear about. In this audiobook, find 12 such cases from all over the world.

From New York Times reporter and Pulitzer finalist Ali Watkins, this true-crime saga is the long-buried story of how a group of Philadelphia gunrunners armed the IRA at the height of the Troubles. A ragtag band of carpenters, family men and fugitives, the Philadelphia Five, as they came to be known, banded together, bolstering the fight for a united Ireland but fuelling the Troubles at an untold cost.

Outsiders call Manuel a villain. After spending his youth entangled in inner-city gang warfare, he’s lied, robbed, and murdered his way to the top. His path was set long ago, when two killers massacred his family in front of him. While Manuel was able to take down one of the murderers, his bloodlust has grown for the killer who got away. When he gets the chance to complete his vengeance, the city cowers beneath his thirst for retribution....

In 'Beyond the Grassy Knoll: How JFK's Death Changed American Society Forever,' A.M. Wolf charges through the fog of history with a piercing gaze, dissecting one of America's most catastrophic moments. Wolf's narrative is a relentless pursuit of truth amidst the chaos and sorrow that drowned the nation after Kennedy's fall in Dallas. This book isn't just a recount; it's a crusade against the shadows that have lingered over the American soul since that fateful day in November 1963.

When John Wilkes Booth fired his Derringer point-blank into President Abraham Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of dramatic consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Washingtonians and Americans alike. In a split second, the story of a nation was changed. During the hours that followed, America's future would hinge on what happened in a cramped back bedroom at Petersen's Boardinghouse, directly across the street from Ford's Theatre.