Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Murder

As boys, Robert and Andrew Kissel competed and excelled. As men, they made millions - Robert in the Asian markets and Andrew in real estate. But a darkness was chasing the brothers down. In November 2003, Robert was murdered in his posh Hong Kong apartment. Two-and-a-half years later, Andrew was found stabbed to death in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.

One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met. When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Richard's seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah, was sitting on the living room couch with a high-powered rifle - just in case her brother missed.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school - one of the most modern in the Midwest - Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds.

He slipped like a sinister shadow in the night, stalking, then savagely attacking. Most of his unsuspecting targets were shot at close range, and one woman was stabbed over one hundred times. The taunting, bizarre letters alleged killer Heriberto Seda sent to the police and the New York Post were full of strange symbols and mysterious references to the Zodiac. For six terror-filled years, the Zodiac killer ruled the night, claiming nine victims in his homicidal rage. One of the biggest manhunts in New York City's history was unleashed.

In the summer of 1985, in his exclusive Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, Robert Bierenbaum, a prominent surgeon and certified genius, strangled his wife Gail to death. He then drove her body to an airstrip in Caldwell, N.J., and dumped it into the Atlantic Ocean from a single-engine private plane. The next day he reported her missing.

In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumors, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox of personalities - a young, beautiful puzzle with secrets. Perhaps the even trickier question is, Who was Hazel Drew? The investigation that followed her brutal murder was fraught with red herrings, wild-goose chases, and unreliable witnesses.

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow finally melted, only one of them emerged. His name was Alfred G. Packer, though he would soon become infamous throughout the country under a different name: "the Man-Eater."

A wealthy and well-connected legal ace and the proud owner of a champion show horse, Larry McNabney had every reason to love his life. But when he disappeared in September 2001, his wife, Elisa, claimed he joined a cult. When Larry's body was found in a shallow grave three months later, Elisa was already gone. In a red convertible Jaguar, her brown hair dyed blond, Mrs. McNabney was speeding toward a new life in Florida - and a brand new identity. Who was Elisa McNabney? Beautiful, seductive, and ruthless, she had thirty-eight aliases and a rap sheet a mile long.

On October 22, 2001, handsome multimillionaire financier Ted Ammon was found bludgeoned to death in the magnificent East Hampton mansion he'd built with his beautiful - and volatile - wife, Generosa. She stood to make millions, but it wasn't the money that made Ted's friends suspicious: Generosa Ammon had a history of violent outbursts and bizarre obsessions.

Nashville - a haven for aspiring musicians and a magnet for country-music fans. By the time Pat Postiglione arrived there in 1980, it was also the scene of an unsolved series of vicious sex slayings that served as a harbinger of worse to come. As Postiglione was promoted from street-beat Metro cop to detective sergeant heading Music City’s elite cold-case Murder Squad, some of America’s most bizarre, elusive, and savage serial killers were calling Nashville home. And during the next two decades, the body count climbed.

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

In 1945, Erle Stanley Gardner, noted attorney and author of the popular Perry Mason mysteries, was contacted by an overwhelmed California public defender who believed his doomed client was innocent. William Marvin Lindley had been convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl along the banks of the Yuba River, and was awaiting execution at San Quentin. After reviewing the case, Gardner agreed to help - it seemed the fate of the "Red-Headed Killer" hinged on the testimony of a colorblind witness.

Absolute Madness tells the disturbing true story of Joseph Christopher, a white serial killer who targeted black males and struck fear into the residents of Buffalo and New York City in the 1980s. Dubbed both the .22-Caliber Killer and the Midtown Slasher, Christopher allegedly claimed eighteen victims during a savage four-month spree across the state.

On a May evening in 1998, the idyllic marriage of wealthy Lake Tahoe couple Peter and Rinette Bergna ended in a crush of metal. Peter was thrown from the vehicle and lived. Rinette, strapped in her seat, died on impact. In time, the grieving widower would meet a new woman, and put the tragic past behind him. Two-and-a-half years later, his life took another fateful turn. Bergna, esteemed art appraiser and son of one of California's most prominent attorneys, was indicted for the murder of his wife. Was Rinette's death really an accident - or deliberate homicide?

Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day. In Killing Season, Smith takes listeners into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.

In late summer of 2012, millionaire landowner Göran Lundblad went missing from his farm in Sweden. When a search yielded nothing, and all physical evidence had seemingly disappeared, authorities had little to go on - except a disturbing phone call five weeks later from Göran’s daughter Maria. She was sure that her sister, Sara, was somehow involved. At the heart of the alleged crime: Sara’s greed, her father’s land holdings, and his bitter feud with Sara’s idler boyfriend. With no body, there was no crime - and the case went as cold and dark as the forests of southern Sweden.

For pretty Ohioan Joan Rogers and her two teenaged daughters, a Florida sunset cruise was a dream come true. They were so taken with friendly boat owner Oba Chandler that they gladly accepted a ride with him on beautiful Tampa Bay. Little did naive mom and two daughters know that behind Chandler's mask of a gracious host lurked a daring and ruthless ex-con, a thief and a liar, a seductive Don Juan who used and discarded wives and children. As the sun serenely sank below the Gulf of Mexico, Chandler suddenly shut down the engines, dropped anchor, and turned into a sadistic torturer.

From 1974 to 1991, someone in the midwestern city of Wichita was leaving behind slain tortured bodies and anonymously proclaiming himself to police and reporters as "BTK" for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Then, for the next 14 years, BTK was silent. But when he began sending letters again, investigators would not miss their chance... Stunningly, police arrested Dennis Rader, the president of his church board and the father of two. As a shocked community watched, evidence began to pile up.

Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held their loved ones closer and closer, terrified of the monster - or monsters - stalking the streets. Homicide detective Dennis Alsop began hunting the killer in the 1960s, and he didn’t stop searching until his death 40 years later.