First True Crime

On January 15, 1947, the naked, dismembered body of a black-haired beauty, Elizabeth Short, was discovered lying next to a pavement in a Hollywood suburb. She was quickly nicknamed The Black Dahlia. The homicide enquiry that followed consumed Los Angeles for years, and the authorities blew millions of dollars of resources on an investigation that threw up dozens of suspects. But it never was solved - until now.

For more than thirty years, Mark Dapin has been hanging out with crooks, and both types of cop – from Chopper Read and John Killick to Roger Rogerson and Gary Jubelin. In The First Murderer I Ever Met, he sorts the tall stories from the truth about true crime and tells us what some of Australia’s most famous felons are really like. Underbelly meets Louis Theroux.

Get ready to experience the real-life drama from behind the walls of one of the country’s worst maximum-security facilities. Experience horrific assaults, bloodthirsty murders, and the kind of drama that needs to be heard to be believed. Simon King shares a raw and uncensored look beyond the razor wire, giving you the opportunity to see how life really runs inside a place filled with those the society would rather forget.

Pursued by one demon into the clutches of another, the ordinary life of Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols is made extraordinary by horrible, inhuman circumstance. Jack the Ripper's first victim comes to life in this sensitive and intimate fictionalized portrait, from humble beginnings, to building a family with an abusive husband, her escape into poverty and the workhouse, alcoholism, and finally abandoned on the streets of London where the Whitechapel Murderer found her.

The scene on May 10, 1973, seemed like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. In the town of Kenora, on the north shore of the Lake of the Woods near the Ontario-Manitoba border, a man was robbing a bank in the most bombastic way. Paul Higgins walked into the bank armed with a homemade bomb and a dead man’s switch in his mouth to detonate it. If anyone were to shoot him and he let go of the switch, he would blow himself up and take as many people with him as possible. The police were in a standoff. Was it worth the risk to shoot?

In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a “spiritual harem” that practiced “free love” and other gross immoralities.

In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder.

John Stone was a prolific American serial killer who was found dead from a shotgun wound in Houston Texas in early 2021. In the typewriter next to his corpse, the police found this confession. Stone committed some of the most horrific and disgusting crimes in US history during his 40-year reign of terror.

When he regained consciousness, Chris found himself bloodied and bruised, being loaded into an ambulance. He had no idea that his life had permanently changed. Because, a few days later, an elderly man he had hit with his bicycle would die of injuries sustained in the accident. News would go viral internationally, including articles in the New York Times and Forbes Magazine. The District Attorney of San Francisco would see Chris' case as an opportunity to send a message to the city’s cyclists. But this isn’t a story about cycling. It’s about criminal justice.

This book is an essential resource for young listeners to learn about the Reign of Terror against the Osage people – one of history's most ruthless and shocking crimes. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, thanks to the oil that was discovered beneath their land. Then, one by one, the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances, and anyone who tried to investigate met the same end.

In July 1864, Thomas Briggs was travelling home after visiting his niece and her husband for dinner. He entered a First Class carriage on the 9.45pm Hackney service of the North London railway. At Hackney, two bank clerks entered the carriage and discovered blood in the seat cushions; also on the floor, windows and sides of the carriage. A bloodstained hat was found on the seat along with a broken link from a watch chain.

Terror in the Flesh is a Nia Riddle quick-listen book that dives into the grim world of serial killers, examining the different types of killers, the most famous serial killers, and even how to protect yourself from these skinwalker-like monsters that blend into society effortlessly in some cases.