Western True Crime

Infamous as a con artist, charming cult leader, and madman who spewed a toxic and twisted ideology, Charles Manson continues to fascinate and intrigue people to this very day. Long since the terrible moments when his followers committed their violent killing spree, Manson has been cemented in pop culture as the iconic cult leader - a man who hid his insanity behind a veil of cunning and manipulation.

Lady Jacqueline invades the Old West. In 1870, the world’s largest diamond field is discovered in American Indian country. London financier Nathan Rothschild joins forces with San Francisco entrepreneur Asbury Harpending to control the new wealth. To protect his investment, Rothschild dispatches consulting detective, and sometime spy, Lady Jacqueline Bennett to shadow Harpending. Jacqueline’s adventures stretch from London to San Francisco. Through the desert and chased by Indians, she finally scales Diamond Mountain to find the secret of the treasure. As with many of my books, this one...

Expertly told with gritty realism and authentic detail drawn from eye-witness testimony, news reports, and the latest speculation, this gripping serial killer collection paints a morbidly fascinating picture of three infamous and heinous killers who baffled law enforcement, ruined lives, and sent whole cities into panic.

The Allied invasion of Europe during summer 1944 was widely expected, and it fell to the Axis intelligence services to provide High Command with advance warning of the precise date and place of the landings. Using cryptanalysis of Allied signals, undercover agents and ships, and photographic evidence, Axis intelligence was pitted directly against their Allied counterparts, who actively tried to create a decoy and aim their enemies at the wrong location.

You probably heard the stories of Pablo Escobar, the Medellín Cartel, and Narcos. But do you know the story of the equally essential founder of the cartel and the guy who appears in FORBES 1988 World's Billionaires List as a Druglord?—Meet José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha

The reverberations from Fred West's crimes continue to this day. The story never dies. West was perhaps one of Britain's most evil, feared serial killers. His horrifying compulsion to kidnap, rape and torture his victims before murdering them showed a savagery and cruelty that can barely be believed. His 'House of Horrors' at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, became a burial ground for the women who fell into his hands. This new publication of Geoffrey Wansell's iconic, best-selling true-crime masterpiece comes 30 years after West was arrested, in 1992.

On a warm night in September 1985, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in Westside Park in Muncie, Indiana. Their killer has never been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee. The case grew cold.

One of the biggest concerns as the Civil War wrapped up was that Confederate troops might disappear into the Appalachian Mountains where they could conduct guerrilla raids with relative impunity. If they did, the war could have been extended for years, maybe even decades as the insurgents crept out of their strongholds to conduct hit-and-run raids.

When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn’t already stripped. The military ousted the new nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country’s gold and hiding it overseas. Into this story stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah – a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions.

From the capture of Sidney Reilly, the "Ace of Spies", by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1925, to the deportation from the USA of Anna Chapman, the "Redhead under the Bed", in 2010, Kremlin and Western spymasters have battled for supremacy for nearly a century. In Deception Edward Lucas uncovers the real story of Chapman and her colleagues in Britain and America, unveiling their clandestine missions and the spy-hunt that led to their downfall. It reveals unknown triumphs and disasters of Western intelligence in the Cold War,

Author Orlando (Ori) Spado honestly recants his humble beginnings from the small town of Rome in upstate New York, to becoming known as "The Mob Boss of Hollywood." A candid account documenting his fall from a well-known Hollywood fixer mixing with A list celebrities to serving 62 months in Federal prison, and ultimately making a determined comeback.

Stalking the streets of 19th-century London, Jack the Ripper left a gruesome trail of terror in his wake—and then slipped away. Now, this riveting true-crime book peels back the myths and mysteries, providing a gritty and detailed exploration of the clues and theories that have plagued this long-dead criminal investigation. Retracing his most infamous murders, this book will take listeners on a thrilling journey back in time, drawing on the accounts of eyewitnesses, reporters, and detectives to paint a compelling picture of the monster who hunted in the shadows of Victorian London.

Even after WWI had ended, the region of Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas stubbornly refused to be tamed. It was still a place where frontier gunfights broke out at an alarming rate. Utilizing official records, newspaper accounts, and oral histories, Cowboys and Gangsters tells the story of the untamed "Wild West" of the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s and introduces a rogues' gallery of six-gun-packing Western gunfighters and lawmen.

John Wesley Hardin! His name spread terror in much of Texas in the years following the Civil War as the most wanted fugitive, with a $4,000 reward on his head. A Texas Ranger wrote that he killed men just to see them kick. Hardin began his killing career in the late 1860s and remained a wanted man until his capture in 1877 by Texas Rangers and Florida law officials. He certainly killed 20 men; some credited him with killing 40 or more.

The gripping tale chronicles the lives of Britain's most infamous husband and wife serial killers couple. Over the course of two decades, Fred and Rosemary West murdered more than a dozen young females. Most of the murders were sexually motivated and took place at the couple's house of horrors on 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, in South West England. Only when the killers were brought to justice did their murderous reign of rape, torture, bondage, and terror come to an end.

They were the first outlaws to rob a moving train. But from 1864 to 1868, the Reno brothers and their gang of counterfeiters, robbers, burglars, and safecrackers also held the town of Seymour, Indiana, hostage, making a large hotel near the train station their headquarters. When the gang robbed the Adams Express car of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad on the outskirts of Seymour on October 6, 1866, it shocked the world - and made other burgeoning outlaws like Jesse James sit up and take notice. The extraordinary efforts to take them out defined the term "frontier justice".

For those who are in any way interested in the depths of human morality, the Wests represent some of the most depraved and sadistic murderers ever to have lived. Not only did they prey on unsuspecting young girls, but their attentions were even turned toward their own daughters. In a case involving kidnap, rape, and murder, Fred and Rose went beyond the realms of what many of us consider possible as people.

Just before Christmas in 1996, a beautiful French woman - the wife of a movie mogul - was brutally murdered outside of her holiday home in a remote region of West Cork, Ireland. The crime was reported by a local journalist, Ian Bailey, who was at the forefront of the case until he became the prime murder suspect. Arrested twice, he was released without charge.

A gripping work of reportage that, for the first time, tells the story of "Chucky" Taylor, a young American who lost his soul in Liberia, the country where his African father was a ruthless warlord and dictator.

Billy the Kid - born Henry McCarty in 1859, and also known as William H. Bonney - emerges from this audio in all his complexity, at once a gentleman and gregarious companion and a thief and violent murderer. Tapping new depths of research, Etulain traces Billy’s short life from his mysterious origins in the East through his wanderings in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.