True Crime Kidnapping

College student Lauren Spierer was pursuing her dreams, joining her boyfriend at a party school eight hundred miles from home. Social and gregarious, studying fashion and rooming with friends, Lauren embraced her new adventure with the zeal of a young woman who suddenly had everything she desired. But there was a dark side that she and her inner circle kept secret. And one warm June evening, after heading out with friends, she seemingly vanished.

When Sasha’s son Simon vanishes, she teams up with Beth, a former FBI agent, to find him. Their investigation leads them to Tyler, a mysterious newcomer whose guarded behavior only deepens their suspicions. As they uncover a chilling pattern of boys aged 7 to 9 disappearing every December within a 100-mile radius, they also unravel the town’s tangled web of secrets and deception. In this tight-knit community, friends and neighbors harbor hidden motives and dark pasts, where trust becomes a luxury Sasha can't afford.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

In May 1971, Pam Jackson and Sherri Miller were two seventeen-year-olds driving to an end-of-the-school-year party in a rundown Studebaker Lark, when they seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Police back then didn't do enough to try and find them. Investigators thirty years later did too much. Two families endure decades of pain as they await answers of what happened to their girls. When a third family is pulled into the mystery, they quickly learn their nightmare is just beginning.

Nine wholesome university students mountaineering in the Urals go missing, and are later uncovered from the snows of a bleak forest's edge in the Siberian Taiga, in a series of grisly discoveries. Why were the climbers wearing no boots? Why were stout branches of the forest pines singed to a height of 30 feet? What were the mysterious markings in the bark of nearby trees? What was so-called "overwhelming force" that was capable of breaking eight ribs in a single blow without bruises?

Dive into two dark stories of crime and murder from best-selling author James Patterson, and can be seen on ID, inspired by true crime horrors where murder isn't always the worst thing that can happen to you.

Based off Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala's popular podcast of the same name, RedHanded explores real-life true-crime cases to help answer once and for all if a killer is born or made.

Kathi Spiars can't believe she's found such a good man to marry as Stephen Marcum. Twelve years later, she starts to suspect that he isn't who he says he is. As she digs into his past, she doesn't realize that learning the truth will lead to a lifetime of fear and hiding.

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?

What would you do if your son suddenly disappeared in Syria, and you had no idea what had happened to him? Would you contact the FBI? The State Department? Pray? Would you Google “What to do if your son disappears in Syria”? When the unthinkable happened, the answer, in the case of Ann Goodwin and her husband Tag, was: all of the above. Their 30-year-old son Sam, who was attempting to become one of the few people in history to travel to every single country on the planet, vanished in a supposed safe-zone run by the Kurds on the Turkish border.

When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven-year-old J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow’s case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her.

Serial killer Gary Heidnik's name will live on in infamy, and his home, 3520 North Marshall Street in Philadelphia, is a house tainted with the memory of unbelievable horrors. What police found there was an incredible nightmare made real. Four young women had been held captive - some for four months - half-naked and chained. They had been tortured, starved, and repeatedly raped. But more grotesque discoveries lay in the kitchen: human limbs frozen, a torso burned to cinders, an empty pot suspiciously scorched....

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.

Beautiful, bubbly, 20-year-old Kim Antonakos was returning to her New York City apartment after a night of clubbing with a friend. A business major with wild black hair, long polished fingernails, and a new Honda her loving father had bought her, Kim took good care of herself and looked forward to a bright future. But on her way home in the early morning darkness of that Ash Wednesday, Kim was abducted - and her mysterious kidnappers would be the last people to see her alive. Kim's father, wealthy computer executive Tommy Antonakos, launched a widespread search for his daughter.

Everyone thinks they know the story of Milly Dowler. Haunting headlines about the missing schoolgirl splashed across front pages. The family's worst fears realised when her body was found months later. The years of waiting for the truth, only to learn that the killer, known to the police, lived just yards from where Milly had vanished. The parents subjected to horrific psychological torture at a trial orchestrated by the murderer.

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.

Lindsey always knew she wanted to be a detective. Her inspiration came after reading about the murders committed by Ted Bundy, who grew up in her hometown of Tacoma, Washington. Also seared into her memory was the 1986 murder of a young girl who'd been out for a bike ride when she went missing. The teen was later found murdered, but the case was never solved. The senseless killing of an innocent young girl would leave a black cloud over Tacoma for three decades.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

It’s one of the most shocking unsolved missing-child cases in the world. Where is Kyron Horman? Why hasn’t the woman who police suspect is responsible for his 2010 disappearance - Kyron’s stepmother - been charged? That the seven-year-old disappeared from his grade school got the attention of parents around the world.

It is plausible that Donald Henry Gaskins was born a psychopath; it may also be said that his life experiences helped turn him into a sociopath. The Meanest Man in America earned the title of the most prolific serial killer in South Carolina’s history. Although it was never confirmed, Gaskins claimed to have murdered more than 100 people, with some reports as high as 181.