Small Towns True Crime

In the quiet, close-knit town of Benning, North Dakota, single mother Susan Groves is living a simple life—until her son Gus disappears from school without a trace. As rumors swirl and unsettling secrets about the townspeople come to light, Susan turns to her best friend, Ryan, a local detective, for help. Together, they uncover eerie clues pointing to a mysterious woman who has been watching Gus. In a town where everyone knows everyone, Susan must unravel the dark secrets hidden in plain sight before it's too late.

As of 2015, it is believed that there are at least 200 serial killers active in the United States at any given time - 33 of them were from Indiana. Nobody in their own home town would have wanted to imagine a fledgling serial killer lurking about, searching for his next victim. Or imagine one being their next door neighbor or the relative of a friend or even attending the local college. Yet, since the early 1970s, Vincennes, Indiana, Knox County, and Indiana in general has had it's share of cold blooded murder.

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.

All farmer Mathew Dunbar ever wanted was to find love and have a family of his own. That’s why, just months after meeting Natasha Darcy, the much-loved grazier didn’t hesitate to sign over his multi-million-dollar estate to her. When Mathew died in an apparent suicide soon afterwards, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Natasha's estranged husband – who she was once charged with trying to kill – was the first paramedic on the scene.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further—into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more. Fiona McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

March 12, 1985, Columbia, Mississippi, Police Station Dispatch Office, 8:58 pm. "This is James Jackson at Red Carpet Motors. We've been robbed. My wife is hurt bad. I need an ambulance." Thus began, a year-long investigation and prosecution into Mary Nell Jackson's killer....

Arabelle's beloved town matriarch, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, is snatched from her car, held for ransom, and propped up to the sympathy of thousands online. Her leaked ransom video might have been enough to placate the headline-starved, but for the endlessly bored detective, Robert Ellery, the ticking time-bomb, Alice Daniels, and for Mrs. Thomas herself, a simple headline could never unfurl the secrets they keep from the lies they tell. There is far more to this story than meets the eye. There is more to the dueling towns of affluent, picturesque Arabelle and impoverished, crime-riddled Wood's...

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone's child whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor's daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a "good girl" become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall's life.

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.

Blood was found at his home in Franklin County, PA. All evidence pointed to one suspect: Scott North, a former employee of Carl’s, a regular attendee of Franklin County courts, and the son of a Chambersburg, PA cop. After burglarizing a tavern, a judge granted him work release, and then another dismissed a recent gun charge. Days later, he ran from his unsupervised worksite and began a crime spree that may have ended with the murder of Carl Wade Ryder.

Before David Wilson became the UK's pre-eminent criminologist, he was just a young boy growing up in the Scottish town of Carluke. As a child, the brutal murder of a young woman rocked this small community, but very quickly a man was arrested for the crime, convicted and put behind bars. For most, life slowly carried on - case closed.

Inspired by a true story. In 1825, in a remote Irish valley lying between the mountains and Flesk River of Killarney, three women are brought together by strange and troubling events. Nora Leahy, a widow, has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year and is now burdened with the care of her grandson, Michael. The boy cannot walk or speak, and Nora has kept him hidden from neighbours, who might see in his deformity evidence of supernatural interference.

Over 40 years, two British police units acted undercover to infiltrate activist groups. At least 20 of those officers deliberately targeted women and entered relationships with them. One of those women was me. This is my story.

County Kerry, Ireland, 1825. Nóra, bereft after the sudden death of her beloved husband, finds herself alone and caring for her young grandson Micheál. Micheál cannot speak and cannot walk, and Nóra is desperate to know what is wrong with him. What happened to the healthy, happy grandson she met when her daughter was still alive? Mary arrives in the valley to help Nóra just as the whispers are spreading: the stories of unexplained misfortunes, of illnesses, and the rumours that Micheál is a changeling child who is bringing bad luck to the valley.

Chasing Down the Zombie Hunter is the extraordinary, detailed inside story of how a small-town ex-CPA, Detective Troy Hillman, and an elite team of detectives—hounded by the press, a frustrated and frightened public, and their own doubts and exhaustion—solved a double murder that had haunted the Valley of the Sun for more than twenty years.

Mike and his wife, Barbara, moved to Lincoln, Illinois, in 1972. The town of 17,000 was charming, friendly, and safe. Then the campus was hit with a series of burglaries and a student disappeared. Finally, the murders began. This is Mike Hartnett’s personal story, memories that have taken him more than 40 years to write. This is not a true crime exposé or a whodunnit mystery. This is simply a story about one man on the periphery of a series of events that devastate a community for a time. It is a story about the guilt that lingers and the questions that remain.

Inspired by True Events An assassin on their trail, a buried secret, and time is running out... Former Delta Force operator John Stone had no idea a nuclear device was out in the open. But when he accepts an assignment to protect a beautiful Israeli Mossad agent, she reveals the terrifying plot, and the chase is on. The weapon, secretly stolen and hidden for fifty years, was known to exist by only one man. Now, that man is dead and the weapon disappears without a trace. Together, Stone and the female agent are compelled to follow a bizarre trail of clues to track it down. But they find ...

True Crime and Folklore from Pulaski County and Beyond Step back into the hollers, hills, riverbanks, and even downtown to the courthouse, to the whispers of Southern Kentucky in the second volume of Hometown Murders & Mysteries, a collection of chilling true crime and local legend rooted in the heart of Pulaski County and its neighboring communities. From a brutal Christmas night murder beneath the bluffs of Fishing Creek to the unsolved disappearance of strangers whose bones were found in a forgotten well, these stories carry the weight of justice delayed, and sometimes denied. Volume II ...

July 2007. A letter arrives on Inspector Barbarotti’s doorstep detailing a murder that is about to take place in his quiet Swedish town. By the time the police track down the subject of the letter, he is already dead. So when a second letter arrives, then a third, and a fourth, it’s a game of cat and mouse to stop the killer before he can make good on all of his promises.

What secrets does the new sexy stranger hold, and will he be Anna’s knight in shining armor? Anna Shelby grew up in a small, rural town in the Midwest where everyone knew everyone. She was happy teaching her sixth grade class in her little town, but she’d always thought something was missing. She was glad she’d made one change—breaking up with Alan, who was nothing but controlling and mean-spirited. Meanwhile, there have been rumors about a handsome man renovating a small farmhouse on some acreage a few miles out of town. Who is this secretive man, and what is he doing in their ...