true crime stories

"[The author] tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process. [This book] . . . guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, [the author] reminds us, still affect us. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to . . . vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care"--Provided by publisher.

"Tells the . . . story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the . . . con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them"--Provided by publisher.

"In June 2013, three upstanding citizens of a small town on Cape Breton Island murdered their neighbor, Phillip Boudreau, at sea. While out checking their lobster traps, two Landry cousins and skipper Dwayne Samson saw Boudreau in his boat, the Midnight Slider, about to vandalize their lobster traps. Like so many times before, the small-time criminal was about to cost them thousands of dollars out of their seasonal livelihood. Boudreau seemed invincible, a miscreant who would plague the village forever"--Provided by publisher.

After 30 years, Detective Jim Scharf arrested a teenage couple's murderer--and exposed a looming battle between the pursuit of justice and the right to privacy. When Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook were murdered during a trip to Seattle in the 1980s, detectives had few leads. The murder weapon was missing. No one witnessed any suspicious activity. And there was only a single handprint on the outside of the young couple's van. The detectives assumed Tanya and Jay were victims of a serial killer--but without any leads, the case seemed forever doomed. In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime scenes sat waiting. Meanwhile, California resident CeCe Moore began her lifetime fascination with genetic genealogy. As DNA testing companies rapidly grew in popularity, she discovered another use for the technology: solving crimes. When Detective Jim Scharf decided to send the cold case's decades-old DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, he hoped he would bring closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families. He didn't know that he and Moore would make history. Anyone can submit a saliva sample to learn about their ancestry. But what happens after the results of these tests are uploaded to the internet? As lawyers, policymakers, and police officers fight over questions of consent and privacy, the implications of Scharf's case become ever clearer. Approximately 250,000 murders in the United States remain unsolved. We have the tools to catch many of these killers--but what is the cost?.

David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that nineteen-year-old Jon Bowie's body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school's baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon's body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy. Soon, David would learn of a brutal incident at a local motel where Jon and his brother had been severely beaten by police officers, the charges filed against those officers, and the months of harassment and intimidation Jon and his brother endured. Few in the utopian community of Columbia, Maryland, believed Jon could commit such a final act. Like many others, David wondered how a fateful night of teens blowing off steam could lead to such a tragic end. As law enforcement failed to find answers and seemed intent on preventing the truth from surfacing, David uncovered a system of cover-ups that could only lead to one conclusion--Jon's death was an act of murder.

A disturbing account of murder, paranoia, and disinformation explores modern-day survivalism and end-times extremism through the story of Lori Vallow and her grave digger-turned-doomsday novelist husband, Chad Daybell, who were responsible for unspeakable crimes.

"For nine years, South Carolina officials struggled to identify "the boy in the woods," a young man whose body had been discovered just south of Myrtle Beach in a fishing village called Murrells Inlet. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, Frank McGonigle's family searched for him at Grateful Dead concerts and in the face of every long-haired hitchhiker they passed. Consumed by guilt for how they'd treated him, Frank's eight siblings slowly came to understand that--like Jerry Garcia sang--he's gone and nothin's gonna bring him back. Frank McGonigle was finally found--and identified as "the boy in the woods." Four years later, the case still unsolved, Jim Cosgrove, a McGonigle family friend and investigative journalist, picked up the trail of Frank's cold case and began uncovering connections to a ruthless local crime boss and blunders by the threadbare sheriff's department. When his research began to stall, a chance meeting with the soft-hearted, straight-talking "energy reader" Carol Williams provided a metaphysical spark that reignited Jim's resolve. Although his work as a journalist trained him to be skeptical, Cosgrove found himself starting to become a believer when Carol provided details about Frank's murder that turned out to be freakishly accurate. In 2019, Cosgrove returned to Murrells Inlet with one of Frank's brothers to dredge up some old leads and settle Frank's case once and for all"--Provided by publisher.

"The fascinating story of Ted Bundy, a brilliant law student now suspected of thirty-eight murders nationwide, as told by a crime reporter, former policewoman, and long-time personal friend of the convicted murderer"--OCLC.

"Profiles the most notorious serial killers of the 1980s, including the Night Stalker, the BTK Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Aileen Wuornos, revealing the facts about their crimes along with the advances in forensics that helped lead to their capture"--Provided by publisher.

"Framed around one salacious trial in 1891 London, a . . . true-crime narrative about the hunt for one of the first known serial killers, whose poisoning spree in the US, Canada, and England coincided with the birth of forensic science as well as the public's growing appetite for crime fiction such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels"--Provided by publisher.