True Crime Kidnapping

In Hoffa’s Shadow tells the moving story of how Goldsmith reunited with the stepfather he’d disowned and then set out to unravel one of the 20th century’s most persistent mysteries and Chuckie’s role in it. Along the way, Goldsmith explores Hoffa’s rise and fall and why the golden age of blue-collar America came to an end, while also casting new light on the century-old surveillance state, the architects of Hoffa’s disappearance, and the heartrending complexities of love and loyalty.

On January 21, 1998, the night before his 38th birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car full of gun-toting thugs. Hoping to make a large withdrawal with his ATM card, they took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, and improvised. All night, his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and even offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present."

La crónica de un secuestro real magistralmente retratado por Gabriel García Márquez. "Era, en efecto, el automóvil de Maruja. Había transcurrido por lo menos media hora desde el secuestro, y sólo quedaban los rastros: el cristal del lado del chofer destruido por un balazo, la mancha de sangre y el granizo del vidrio en el asiento, y la sombra húmeda en el asfalto, de donde acababan de llevarse al chofer todavía con vida. El resto estaba limpio y en orden."

In 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Almost all of America believed Hauptmann guilty; only a few magazines and tabloids published articles questioning his conviction. In the ensuing decades, many books about the Lindbergh case have been published. Some have declared Hauptmann the victim of a police conspiracy and frame-up, and one posited that Lindbergh actually killed his own son and fabricated the entire kidnapping to mask the deed.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.

It’s a freezing winter’s night in 1954. A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside. After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.

In July 2002, the Eastlake police discovered a decomposed body in a modest studio apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. It appeared to be a suicide by firearm. The man was Joseph Newton Chandler III, a retiree whom neighbors and former colleagues described as quiet, secretive, and strange. But as the investigation progressed, less and less about Joseph's life and identity made sense. In 2018, thanks to scientific advances in DNA, the man's true identity was finally discovered: Robert Ivan Nichols.

In March 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn awoke from a sound sleep into a nightmare. Armed men bound and drugged them, then abducted Denise. Warned not to call the police or Denise would be killed, Aaron agonized about what to do. Finally he put his trust in law enforcement and dialed 911. But instead of searching for Denise, the police accused Aaron of her murder. His story, they told him, was just unbelievable. When Denise was released alive, the police turned their fire on her, dubbing her the “real-life ‘Gone Girl’” who had faked her own kidnapping.

A gripping journey of a mother's relentless pursuit through danger and deceit to reclaim her missing son. In a gripping tale of courage and desperation, Annabelle's world spirals when her son Fergus is abducted. Teaming up with her husband Benny and best friend Barb, she embarks on a relentless quest for clues. Facing uncooperative local police, they turn to the FBI, uncovering chilling ties to Annabelle's past and a kidnapper driven by vengeance. With time against them, Annabelle forms an unlikely alliance with a mob boss, both united in a single mission. This intense story captures the ...

In May of 2005, Beth Holloway received the worst phone call a parent can imagine. Her beautiful daughter, Natalee, had vanished without a trace in Aruba during her high school senior class trip. Four years later, Beth Holloway steps forward to tell the story of her daughter's disappearance and her own harrowing ordeal—and her never-ending belief in the power of faith that gave her hope against all odds.

Cuando fue secuestrado, a plena luz del día, en mitad de una de las ciudades más pobladas de México, la vida del empresario Alberto de la Fuente cambió para siempre. Esta es la crónica de nueve meses de infame cautiverio dentro de una diminuta celda prefabricada. Los 290 días para elegir, una y otra vez y a pesar de todo, continuar viviendo para volver a abrazar a su familia.

There is perhaps no crime more disturbing than the abuse of a child—and no court cases as upsetting as those in which juveniles who have faced abuse are tried for fighting back. In this gripping memoir Sara Kruzan, a survivor of childhood abuse and sex trafficking, tells the honest, disturbing, and ultimately empowering story of her journey from abuse to incarceration without parole for killing her abuser to finally gaining her liberation.

In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then 18 years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.

In the depths of the Depression, millions worldwide followed every twist and turn of the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder. Yet what was reported was largely fake news. Nearly a century after undocumented immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the dastardly crime, questions still linger. If the wrong man was convicted, who did it? When? Why? Where? How? The shocking answers have eluded all prior authors.

Testimonios de sobrevivientes y secuestradores. El secuestro en México es un delito que ha revolucionado y crecido de forma voraz: lo mismo destroza la vida de personas millonarias que de hombres y mujeres con escasos recursos.

A single night, a vanished child, and a hidden truth that turns desperation into a deadly game In this riveting abduction mystery, Chloe's world shatters when her daughter vanishes, dismissed by police as a custody issue. Driven by maternal instincts, she embarks on a frantic search, uncovering a personal vendetta against her by a ruthless predator. As Chloe battles against time and a psychopathic kidnapper, she's drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse. This heart-stopping novel offers relentless suspense, a courageous heroine, and a villainous twist that will leave you breathless. ...

The girls' names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in Western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard.

The Momster Diaries shines the light on riveting and compelling survival stories with intimacy and candor.

In his international best seller A Beautiful Child, award-winning investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck told the heartbreaking story of a brilliant and beautiful young woman known as Sharon Marshall. Caught in the murderous web of the monster she called her father, Sharon wasn’t her real name. But her horrifying story captured the hearts of people everywhere and lead to a 10-year search to resolve two great mysteries - what was her true identity and what became of her young son Michael, who was kidnapped from his first grade classroom and never seen again.

For more than a year, over two brutal Northeast winters, the whole of Vermont was captivated by the hunt for a runaway golden retriever named Murphy. He was more than a missing dog - he was a target for capture, and journalistic obsession. This is that story. Murphy’s disappearance would unite the dog’s increasingly anxious owners with an impassioned reporter - Wilson Ring, the state’s correspondent for the Associated Press - and an online community of animal lovers. As Murphy kept running, the quest to bring him home, safe and sound, seemed more and more impossible.