True Crime Audiobooks | Mystery, Thriller & Horror

The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder

In this superb work of literary true crime—a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense—a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us. "Well, well, Claudia. Can I call you Claudia? I’ll have to give it to you, when confronted at least you’re honest, as honest as any reporter. . . . You want to go into the depths of my mind and into my past. I want a peek into yours. It is only fair, isn’t it?"—Kendall Francois In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite twenty-seven-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness, and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women—and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil. Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control; an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss, forcing her to clearly see herself and her own past—and why she was drawn to danger.

Claudia Rowe (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

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Wasted

On an August night in 1986, Jennifer Levin left a Manhattan bar with Robert Chambers. The next morning, her strangled, battered body was found in Central Park. Linda Wolfe goes beyond the headlines and media hype to re-create a story of a teenager whose immigrant mother was determined to make a better life for her son, a petty thief and drug user who'd been expelled from the best schools. It's all here, from the initial police investigation, during which Chambers claimed Levin died accidentally during rough sex, to the media frenzy of the courtroom, where Chambers took an eleventh-hour plea. Wasted powerfully depicts the freewheeling 1980's society that spawned a generation steeped in violence and the fatal impulses that drove Robert Chambers to kill.

Linda Wolfe (Author), Pete Cross (Narrator)

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Pill City :How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire

April 28, 2015, West Baltimore, Maryland: Ground Zero in America's Opiate Wars. In this crime-plagued section of the city, the death of Freddie Gray has triggered the worst domestic rioting since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and created a terrifying new breed of criminal entrepreneur. Here, as looters and arsonists lay waste to already blighted parts of Baltimore, two of the city's brightest students are helping to carry out a historic drug robbery spree-one that will flood the city with highly addictive pain pills and heroin. The teens' plan: to use their gang connections and computer programming skills to set up a high-tech drug delivery service and Dark Web marketplace. The result: the boys became America's youngest drug lords, in the process sparking bloody gang warfare and a nationwide wave of addiction and murder. Now mixing in deadly circles, Brick and Wax soon found their own lives were on the line. In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, Newsday criminal justice reporter Kevin Deutsch chronicles the rise of these gangland upstarts as they help steal $100 million worth of high-powered opiates and build a national narcotics empire from scratch. As gripping and compulsive as a thriller, Pill City takes listenters into the heat of the action as Brick and Wax outwit the FBI and DEA, as gang members like Damage and Lyric live and die by their own brutal code, as the cops battle to stop the carnage, and as a high school coach risks a bullet to get addicts into rehab. A gritty, hard-hitting story of gangland survival, Pill City will open the world's eyes to the plague of drug-related killings rocking America and reveal the deadly cost of the Baltimore riots.

Kevin Deutsch (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

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By Their Father's Hand: The True Story of the Wesson Family Massacre

Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California-the home of an imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces, and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home, and police officers responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered. By Their Father's Hand is a chilling true story of incest, abuse, madness, and murder, and one family's terrible and ultimately fatal ordeal at the hands of a powerful, manipulative man-a cultist who envisioned vengeful gods and vampires, and totally controlled those closest to him before their world came to a brutal and bloody halt.

Monte Francis (Author), John Glouchevitch (Narrator)

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Above Suspicion

A personal look at a crime of passion describes an FBI agent's successful career, family life, and extramarital affair that ended in murder, and of the guilt that drove him to confess in spite of his impenetrable government shield. In a true story of crime, guilt, and conscience, a model agent's illicit involvement with an informant leads him to commit a crime that reveals all the workings of the human heart--and the dark side of the FBI.

Joe Sharkey (Author), Marc Cashman (Narrator)

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Scores: How I Opened the Hottest Strip Club in New York City, Was Extorted out of Millions by the Ga

Meet Michael Blutrich, mild-mannered New York lawyer and founder of Scores, the hottest strip club in New York City history, funded by the proceeds of an insurance embezzlement scheme. All Blutrich wanted was to lay low, make the club a success, and put his criminal acts behind him. But the Mafia got involved, and soon the FBI came knocking. Scores became wildly popular, in part thanks to Blutrich's ability to successfully bend the rules of adult entertainment. It was the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dancing by ignoring existing requirements. He also sidesteped statutes requiring topless dancers to wear pasties. His formula worked, and Scores grew into the hottest club in Manhattan, frequented by sports superstars, Oscar-winning actors, television icons, Grammy-winning singers, and political notables alike. Unfortunately for Blutrich, it would all soon implode. Scores was located in a neighborhood controlled by the Gambino crime family, and it became a hotbed for illicit mob activity, culminating in a double murder of two of his employees. When federal prosecutors started sniffing around for potential crimes, he went from carefree club owner to undercover spy in a heartbeat. To obtain maximum leniency for his insurance fraud, Blutrich became an unlikely but highly successful undercover FBI informant. He wore body wires and placed ceiling cameras in his offices, and he was eventually credited with more than thirty Mafia convictions, including a crime-family head and associates from multiple international families. For his cooperation, the Department of Justice and the FBI assured him he would avoid any significant jail time-or so they said. Here Blutrich tells it all: recording armed gangsters in the act of committing felonies, stealthily evading discovery, living with death threats, revealing long-covered-up celebrity doings, enduring a psychotic break from the pressures, and losing everything in his life in the name of earning redemption.

Michael D. Blutrich (Author), Michael D. Blutrich (Narrator)

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The Boy They Tried to Hide: The true story of a son, forgotten by society

The Boy They Tried to Hide is the startling, true account of how truth is sometimes stranger than fiction ... Shane Dunphy was working as a resource teacher in a rural town when he was approached by the mother of one of his pupils, seeking help. She is worried for her troubled young son, who has been found leaving the house late at night to go deep into the woods near their home. He has spoken of meetings with a friend, Thomas, but no one else has seen him or knows who he is. As Shane tries to discover what's going on, a sexual predator he helped bring to justice years before reappears. The man is looking to settle a score, and has picked someone close to Shane as his next victim. In The Boy They Tried to Hide, Shane Dunphy revisits cases he encountered during his time as a child protection worker and journalist and, in doing so, once again discovers that leaving the past behind is harder than it seems.

Shane Dunphy (Author), Shane Dunphy (Narrator)

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JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation

Perhaps the most compelling murder case of our day, the death of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey galvanized the nation-and years after it occurred, the mystery still endures. Who killed the young beauty queen and why? Who is covering up for whom and who is simply lying? In JonBenet, the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the Ramsey murder, a former lead Boulder Police detective, Steve Thomas, explores the case in vivid and fascinating detail-pointing the way toward an analysis of the evidence some deem too shocking to consider. Here, Thomas raises these and many other provocative questions: How was the investigation botched from the beginning, and why did police so carelessly allow the crime scene to be tampered with? Why were John and Patsy Ramsey protected from early questioning and any lie-detector tests, even though their stories and behavior were erratic, suspicious and inconsistent? Why was crucial evidence ignored, why were certain key witnesses unquestioned by detectives, and why were the Ramseys privy to sensitive information about the case and even police reports?

Donald A. Davis, Steve Thomas (Author), Paul Boehmer (Narrator)

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The Girl in the Leaves

In the fall of 2010, in the all-American town of Apple Valley, Ohio, four people disappeared without a trace: Stephanie Sprang; her friend, Tina Maynard; and Tina's two children, thirteen-year-old Sarah and eleven-year-old Kody. Investigators began scouring the area, yet despite an extensive search, no signs of the missing people were discovered. On the fourth day of the search, evidence trickled in about neighborhood "weirdo" Matthew Hoffman. A police SWAT team raided his home and found an extremely disturbing sight: every square inch of the place was filled with leaves and a terrified Sarah Maynard was bound up in the middle of it like some sort of perverted autumn tableau. But there was no trace of the others. Then came Hoffman's confession to an unspeakable crime that went beyond murder and defied all reason. His tale of evil would make Sarah's survival and rescue all the more astonishing-a compelling tribute to a young girl's resilience and courage and to her fierce determination to reclaim her life in the wake of unimaginable wickedness.

Larry Maynard, Robert Scott, Sarah Maynard (Author), Callie Beaulieu (Narrator)

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The Reporter Who Knew Too Much:The Mysterious Death of What's My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy

Was What's My Line TV Star, media icon, and crack investigative reporter and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen murdered for writing a tell-all book about the JFK assassination? If so, is the main suspect in her death still at large? These questions and more are answered in former CNN, ESPN, and USA Today legal analyst Mark Shaw's twenty-fifth book, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much. Through discovery of never-before-seen videotaped eyewitness interviews with those closest to Kilgallen and secret government documents, Shaw unfolds a "whodunit" murder mystery featuring suspects including Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Mafia Don Carlos Marcello, and a "mystery man" who may have silenced Kilgallen. All while by presenting through Kilgallen's eyes the most compelling evidence about the JFK assassinations since the House Select Committee on Assassination's investigation in the 1970s. Called by the New York Post "the most powerful female voice in America" and by acclaimed author Mark Lane "the only serious journalist in America who was concerned with who killed John Kennedy and getting all of the facts about the assassination," Kilgallen's official cause of death, reported as an overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol, has always been suspect since no investigation occurred despite the death scene having been staged. Shaw proves Kilgallen, a remarkable woman who broke the "glass ceiling" before the term became fashionable, was denied the justice she deserved-until now.

Mark Shaw (Author), Gabra Zackman (Narrator)

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Masquerade

In the exclusive suburb of Grosse Pointe, Alan Canty was a respected psychologist, with clients drawn from wealthy families across Detroit. But at night, he ventured into the city's seedy south side, where, under the name Dr. Al Miller, he met with prostitutes. One girl in particular caught Dr. Al's eye: a skinny teenage drug addict named Dawn, an ex-honor student who had fallen under the spell of a pimp named Lucky. Canty became their sugar daddy, spending thousands to buy them clothes, cars, and gifts. But when the money ran out, Canty's luck went with it-and he was soon found hacked to pieces, his body scattered across Michigan. In this thrilling true crime tale, Cauffiel shows what happens when deception turns fatal.

Lowell Cauffiel (Author), Dan John Miller (Narrator)

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Eye of the Beholder: The Almost Perfect Murder of Anchorwoman Diane Newton King

Battle Creek, Michigan, is famous as the birthplace of breakfast cereal, and the nearby suburb of Marshall is as wholesome as shredded wheat. On a frigid night in February of 1991, newscaster Diane Newton King was stepping out of her car, her children strapped into the backseat, when a sniper's bullet cut her down. The police assumed that the killer was her stalker-a crazed fan who had been terrorizing King for weeks. But as their investigation ground to a standstill, the police turned to another suspect-one much closer to home. Journalist Lowell Cauffiel re-creates the atmosphere of terror that marked King's last days, giving us a story of celebrity, obsession, and what it means to kill.

Lowell Cauffiel (Author), Luke Daniels (Narrator)

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True Crime Audiobooks in Mystery, Thriller & Horror