True Crime Kidnapping

Growing up, Rachel Rear knew the story of Stephanie Kupchynsky’s disappearance. The beautiful violinist and teacher had fled an abusive relationship on Martha’s Vineyard and made a new start for herself near Rochester, NY. She was at the height of her life - in a relationship with a man she hoped to marry and close to her students and her family. And then, one morning, she was gone.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

When Amy Price took a temporary design job at an Art Deco hotel in Los Angeles to help a friend, she had no idea the path it would lead her down. Before long, she would become manager of the Cecil Hotel, seeking to make it more welcoming and correct its notoriety, not helped by sitting at the foot of Skid Row, or the fact that since its opening in 1927, there had been any number of deaths by suicide, and residents such as serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.

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.

The Jan Broberg Story tells the winding tale of the Brobergs, a church-going, Idaho family that falls prey to a sociopathic neighbor who will stop at nothing to be with their young daughter. Robert Berchtold, furniture store owner and family man, coaxes his way into the Broberg’s life, meticulously building their trust and bonding with their young girls. One day, Robert offers to take their 12-year-old daughter, Jan, horseback riding, only he doesn’t return her home.

In the early hours of 27th January 1996, after an evening spent celebrating at Club Bayview in the Perth suburb of Claremont, 18-year-old Sarah Spiers called a taxi to nearby Mosman Park. But when the cab arrived, she’d already gone. She was never seen again. Four months later, on 9th June 1996, 23-year-old Jane Rimmer disappeared from the same area, her body later found in bushland south of Perth. When the body of a third young woman, 27-year-old Ciara Glennon, was found north of the city, having vanished from Claremont in August 1997, it was clear a serial killer was on the loose.

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.

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.

From podcasts and documentaries to online forums, true crime is booming. But as one Audible editor and self-professed crime obsessive observes, the genre is being pulled in new and different directions along with a changing social landscape. She wanted to know: Can we ethically engage in true crime as real concerns surface around the crimes, victims, and systemic issues that directly impact the humans we are hearing about?

El oyente recorrerá el laberinto del los acontecimientos en la noche del 26 de septiembre, sus trampas, su oscuridad y la luz. Entrará en la Normal Rural "Raúl Isidro Burgos", escuchará las intensas voces de sus estudiantes....

Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff’s edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it’s this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it’s that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick.

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."

Between 1950 and 1970, the Vatican and the American Catholic Church sent nearly four thousand Italian children to the United States for adoption into “good” Catholic homes. With the religious stigma of unwed motherhood turning families against daughters and a Church and State wanting “illegitimate” children sent abroad, mothers were lied to, given forms to sign that they didn’t understand, or even told their baby had died, all to further supply this international adoption pipeline.

On October 1, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends, while her mother slept soundly in the room next door. This rarest of all kidnappings—a stranger abduction from the home—triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. New York Times bestselling author Kim Cross has written the first comprehensive account of what happened on that fateful night in October, as well as how the case forever transformed the Bureau’s approach to solving crimes.

Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor.

After suffering an emotional nervous breakdown from witnessing his longtime girlfriend cheat on him. Darren Phillips heads off into a spiritual journey to lose himself and forget the pain. But on this journey he runs into two unknown faces that are convinced he is the man responsible for abducting a friend of theirs, which leads to Darren's imprisonment. The only way for Darren to survive is to convince them of his innocence or wind up six feet underground.

At ten months old, Holly Marie was brought to the door of a church by three barefoot women in white robes and head coverings. Adopted by the pastor and raised in a loving Christian home, Holly nevertheless struggled with the ache of not knowing what had happened to her biological parents. She still felt their absence even as she married and started a family of her own. When two detectives showed up at the restaurant where she worked and informed her that she had a large family in Florida who had been searching for her for over 40 years, Holly’s past became the reality of her present.

Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster - or monsters - stalking the streets. Homicide detective Dennis Alsop began hunting the killer in the 1960s, and he didn’t stop searching until his death 40 years later.

Sixteen-year-old Patricia Columbo began working for pharmacist Frank DeLuca, a married father of five, in the 1970s, and the two soon entered into a sexual relationship. Against her father's wishes, Patricia and Frank moved in together. Then, in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, Patricia's father was brutally murdered, along with her mother and 13-year-old brother. Police were suspicious of Patricia's strange behavior after the bodies were discovered, and following their investigation, they arrested both Patricia and Frank.

Sandra Brown was eight when her friend and neighbour, twelve-year-old Moira Anderson, disappeared from the small town of Coatbridge near Glasgow in 1957. Moira has not been seen since. Twenty-seven years later, at a family funeral, Sandra's estranged father confessed to her that he had been involved in the girl's disappearance. Appalled and fascinated by his curious half confession, Sandra began to delve into the case and in so doing discovered that her father was an acknowledged child molester whose activities were known not just to everyone in Coatbridge but also to the police.