True Crime Memoir

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt?

When a mysterious stranger unveils a long-hidden truth, Lauren Malloy’s life is thrown into chaos. For years, Lauren believed her mother, Lori, died of natural causes, but the shocking reality is that her loving mother was brutally murdered when Lauren was just an infant. Now, 30 years later, Lauren is on a relentless quest for justice. Over the past four years, she’s embarked on an emotional journey filled with unexpected twists, recording hundreds of hours of interviews with law enforcement, family, friends, and even potential suspects.

Getting shot in the chest as a rookie ATF agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols - these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Jay Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard to imagine, but true story of how he infiltrated the legendary Hells Angels.

Daisy is a black baby adopted into a white family in rural 1970’s England. Alienation and loss of identity dominate her childhood. After discovering she was conceived through child rape, she begins a lifelong mission to find and prosecute her birth father using the only irrefutable evidence left. Her own DNA. But justice isn’t just for her birth mother. She too, is a victim, and when the world around her doesn’t agree, she is forced to reckon with external and internal powers out of her control.

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now. For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined.

In the basement of one of the world's most prestigious universities, there was a classroom lined with a collection of human skulls from around the globe. Join award-winning journalist Marc Fennell (It Burns, Nut Jobs, Stuff the British Stole) as he takes you on a captivating global journey through the mysterious Morton Cranial Collection.

Dear Cousin: The Stalking of Susan Fensten is the gripping true story of one woman's quest for long lost family. After the deaths of her sister and estranged father, Susan searches for relatives on an early online genealogy forum. When she meets cousins from her grandfather's other family, they're everything she'd hoped for—until it all goes to hell.

The close knit community in San Miguel de Allende Mexico was plagued by a string of sophisticated kidnappings for nearly a decade. When the police finally made an arrest the townspeople were shocked by who was accused of masterminding the criminal enterprise. It's everyone's favorite neighbor and a pillar of the community, Ramon Guerra. Except Ramon isn't who he says he is.

One of the most feared Chicago mobsters, Sam Giancana, clawed his way to the top of the Mafia hierarchy by starting as a hit man for Al Capone. He was known as one of the best vehicle escape artists, a tenacious business man, and a ruthless killer. He partied with major stars such as Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and did business with agents ranging from the CIA to the Vatican to the shah of Iran. When politician Joe Kennedy gave Giancana the chance to use mob muscle to get his son John elected, Giancana jumped at the task.

The Detroit True Crime Chronicles sets forth the rich history of criminal activity in the Motor City. Using information from declassified federal documents and many firsthand accounts, the book focuses on the city's local Mafia, key mobsters, drug kingpins, serial killers, and unsolved crimes.

Every one of us fears the things that go bump in the night. We’re told tales of happenings when evil is conjured or footsteps are heard while alone in a dark house. But those are just stories, right? What would we do if those fears became an intense reality we could not escape? On the night of November 17, 2018, Danielle Leukam went to bed as a newly single mother and nurse from Minnesota. On the morning of November 18, 2018, she awoke to a sinister world that would never be the same for her again. A home invasion gone awry, Danielle was held at gunpoint and raped repeatedly for five ...

Before the internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive US citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" - Smithsonian.

Dubbed the "Hippie Mafia", the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary's mantra of "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.

For weeks, the body count of sexually violated, brutally murdered young women escalated. With increasing alarm, Los Angeles newspapers headlined the deeds of a serial killer they named the Hillside Strangler. The city was held hostage by fear. Darcy O'Brien weds the narrative skill of an award-winning novelist with the detailed observations of an experienced investigator to unravel this chilling true-crime story.

Twins David and Dennis Pischke's lives change forever when their father dies and a man damaged by the war arrives at their farm near the isolated town of Moosehorn, Manitoba. Boleslaw Domko quickly works his way into their lives and their mother's bed. Where Children Run opens with one of their earliest memories - the day Domko throws their infant stepsister against the wall. In this firsthand account, the twins recall years of neglect, starvation, and enslavement; horrific beatings and candlelit nights spent in the nearby St. Thomas Lutheran Church.

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America...until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime family values. And by guys like Sal Polisi. As a member of New York's feared Colombo Family, Polisi ran the Sinatra Club, an illegal after-hours gambling den that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters. But the nonstop thrills of Polisi's criminal glory days abruptly ended.

The first edition of Greentown helped reopen one of America's most shameful unsolved murder cases, the savage slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in an exclusive enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, the night before Halloween 1975. Soon after Martha's body was discovered, attention focused on members of the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Ethel Skakel and Robert Kennedy had married in Greenwich, and the two families were close.

For 10 years, the California Interstate 5 highway was haunted by a dangerous serial killer. Incredibly skilled at staying ahead of the investigators as the bodies started to pile up, there wasn't enough evidence to charge the culprit with murder even once he'd been identified. Instead, they had to build a first-degree murder case in a few months while the killer was locked up on an assault conviction. Key to this was a cast of four: Vito Bertocchini, Kay Maulsby, Ray Biondi, and Faye Springer.

Hollywood's make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can't hold a candle to real-life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the serial killer phenomenon.

On a clear autumn morning in 2004, Rachel O'Reilly, a 30-year-old mother of two, was brutally battered to death in her home. It was a merciless killing that stunned the small, trusting community where she lived and devastated her close-knit family. In the days that followed the discovery of her body, it was thought that Rachel was the victim of a bungled robbery attempt. It soon emerged, however, that police investigating the case believed Rachel had known her killer and that her murder had been carefully planned months in advance.