True Crime Memoir

Ten years after the school massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, school shootings are a new and alarming epidemic. While sociologists have attributed the trigger of violence to peer pressure, such as bullying and social isolation, prominent psychologist Peter Langman, argues here that psychological causes are responsible. Drawing on 20 years of clinical experience, Langman offers surprising reasons for why some teens become violent. Langman divides shooters into three categories, and he discusses the role of personality, trauma, and psychosis among school shooters.

In 1961, 25-year-old Herbert Jay Stern, fresh from reserve duty, stood in his green army uniform in a New York County courtroom to be sworn in as an attorney. He could only guess what his life as a prosecuting lawyer would be. A dozen years later, in the wake of the national scandal of Watergate, Stern, draped in black robes now, would take the oath of office as a federal judge. In the years between, the idealistic young Stern would sharpen his skills in the realities of the criminal courts of New York City, to emerge as the lead trial attorney for the Justice Department....

For the first time, the full story of a crime that has haunted New England since 1873. The cold-blooded ax murder of two innocent Norwegian women at their island home off the coast of New Hampshire has gripped the region since 1873, beguiling tourists, inspiring artists, and fueling conspiracy theorists. The killer, a handsome Prussian fisherman down on his luck, was quickly captured, convicted in a widely publicized trial, and hanged in an unforgettable gallows spectacle.

The Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel reputedly visited by the queen's grandson, shocked Victorian Britain in 1889. This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working-class, Irish-Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.

In 1981, ambitious young Ma Anand Sheela transported the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to the United States to fulfill his dream of creating a utopia for his thousands of disciples. Four years later, the incendiary Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon collapsed under the weight of audacious criminal conspiracies hatched in its inner sanctum, including the largest bioterrorism attack in US history, an unprecedented election fraud scheme, and multiple attempted murders. Rajneeshpuram explores how this extraordinary spiritual community went so wrong.

Beautiful, accomplished, and beloved, Ellen Greenberg was a vivacious and affectionate teacher of young children she adored. Always upbeat, she deeply loved her family and friends, and especially her fiancée, Sam Goldberg, with whom she was planning a wedding. In fact, they’d just sent out the save-the-date announcements when, on January 26, 2011, Ellen was found in the kitchen of the luxury apartment she shared with Sam, a knife still plunged in her chest.

Broadmoor. Few place names in the world have such chilling resonance. For more than 150 years, it has contained the UK's most violent, dangerous, and psychopathic.

An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Only one in 10,000 are found dead. Yet unsolved child murders are almost a daily occurrence - of nearly 52,000 juvenile homicides between 1980 and 2008, more than 20 percent remain open. Drawing on FBI reports, police and court records, and interviews with victims’ families, this book provides details and evidence for 18 unsolved cases from 1956 to 1998.

Dr. Carder Stout's clientele includes Oscar-, Golden Globe-, Emmy-, Tony- and Grammy-winners, best-selling authors, and billionaires. He may not be able to share their dark secrets, but for the first time, everyone will know his. At the age of 34, Carder would have gladly pawned the silver spoon he was born choking on for a rock of crack. His downfall was as swift as his privilege was vast - or had he been falling all along?

Mumbai, 2008. On the night of November 26, Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists attacked targets throughout the city, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, one of the world's most exclusive luxury hotels. With a deep understanding of the region and its politics and a narrative flair reminiscent of Midnight in Peking, journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy vividly unfold the tragic events in a real life thriller filled with suspense, tragedy, history, and heroism.

Grace Metalious, born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, came from humble beginnings. A former mill worker, mother of three, and school principal’s wife, she would shock the nation in 1956 with the publication of Peyton Place, her first novel about a murder in a small town. Quickly becoming the best-selling book of its time, the sexually charged book spawned sequels, two Hollywood movies, and a long-running television series on ABC starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal.

Shaun Attwood was a millionaire day trader in Phoenix, Arizona, but his hedonistic lifestyle of drugs and parties came to an abrupt end in 2002 when a SWAT team broke down his door. Attwood found himself on remand in Maricopa Jail with a $750,000 cash bond and all of his assets seized. The nightmare was only just beginning as he was submerged in a jail in which rival gangs vied for control, crystal meth was freely available, and where breaking rules could result in beatings or death.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

I start all of my true crime books with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the vile details of truly horrible crimes. In my books, I don’t gloss over the facts, regardless of how disgusting they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

One time king of the underworld, Jack Spot was known as one of the most powerful criminals in Britain—amassing incredible wealth, and being associated with a string of women, throughout his 30-year career. From taking to the streets of London in the thirties and associating with the pantheon of criminals who led the '60s organisations, Jack Spot’s tale is a gripping cocktail of dastardly crimes and glamourous associations.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

In this fifth volume of his True Crime series, Germany's bestselling True Crime author, Adrian Langenscheid, unleashes a heart-pounding, addictive reading yet again. A breathtaking and deeply harrowing portrait of the human abyss, it arouses powerful emotions with its chilling, matter-of-fact descriptions. Free from sensationalism, eighteen True Crime short stories retell some of the most spectacular French criminal cases in recent decades. A gripping collection of murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, abuse, fraud, betrayal, and theft accounts that take the reader to the limits of the bearable.

An unrepentant true crime memoir about the life of a man who sold and used cocaine daily for thirty-eight years. A man with over fifty years of involvement with illegal drugs starting at the age of thirteen. Offering a fair and balanced account of how drugs and drug dealing affected his life, those closest to him as well as the lives of others. This is a different kind of drug dealer story. The kind you don't hear. The kind they don't want told.

The pitch went like this: Chris Butler, a retired cop, ran a private investigator firm in Concord, California. His business had a fascinating angle - his firm was staffed entirely by soccer moms. In fact, Butler employed PI Super Moms: attractive, organized, smart, and trained in investigative techniques, self-defense, and weaponry. This American Life host Ira Glass described them as "MILF: Charlie's Angels." When this story came across Pete Crooks's desk when he was working at Diablo magazine in 2010, he was instantly hooked.

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?