Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Murder

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."

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.

Thanks to one reporter's skill, we can fix the exact moment on November 22, 1963 when the world stopped and held its breath: At 12:34 p.m. Central Time, UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith broke the news that shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. Most people think Walter Cronkite was the first to tell America about the assassination. But when Cronkite broke the news on TV, he read from one of Smith's dispatches.

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.

"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.

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?

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 March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally beaten and murdered in the street near her apartment, in full view of more than three dozen friends and neighbors - and no one did a thing to stop it. More than thirty-five years after its first publication, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the true account of what transpired that night in Queens, New York, continues to disturb us. We would like to think that we would step in and do what we could to stop the carnage.

Lance Herndon was at the top of his game in 1996. At age forty-one he was a self-made millionaire, the owner of Access, Inc., a successful information-systems consulting company. As a prominent member of Atlanta's young, wealthy, and powerful set, he was surrounded by black Atlanta's "beautiful people." But when he failed to show up for work one day, friends and family started to worry. Their worry soon turned to horror when he was found murdered in his own home, his head smashed in - in what appeared to be either an act of jealousy-fueled rage or a seedier sex crime.

In 1935, the Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from the reluctant hobos (many of them displaced farmers who had fled the midwestern dust bowls), robbed dairies, and engaged in all manner of nefarious crimes, including murder. This history was suppressed until 1989, when former logger, Vietnam vet, and Spokane cop Tony Bamonte discovered a strange 1955 deathbed confession while researching a thesis on local law enforcement history.

In The Assassin’s Accomplice, historian Kate Clifford Larson tells the gripping story of Mary Surratt, a little-known conspirator in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and the first woman ever to be executed by the federal government. A Confederate sympathizer, Surratt ran the boarding house where the conspirators met to plan Lincoln’s assassination. Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, The Assassin’s Accomplice tells the intricate story of the Lincoln conspiracy through the eyes of its only female participant, offering a fresh perspective on America’s most famous murder.

A seemingly perfect world held an even more unlikely killer... Julie Keown had a great job, financial security, and a perfect husband who was attending Harvard Business School. But after Julie suddenly died, and doctors discovered she’d been poisoned with the main ingredient in antifreeze, her parents began to suspect that her husband, James, was not so perfect. This blow-by-blow account shows how investigators and state police unraveled James Keown’s chilling web of deceit.

This is not a manufactured dialogue from a thriller but the words of attorney Sharon Muse. They came after she survived an attempted kidnapping, rape, and murder at the hands of Hank Morrison, a former client. On April 7, 2006, Muse miraculously escaped from the sociopathic Morrison, only to find that the threat to her life was just beginning. Ineptitude in the justice system threatened to release Morrison and allow him the opportunity to finish the job, which he adamantly pledged to do. Muse would have to fight at every step to ensure her safety.

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.

Dr. John Yelenic was a successful dentist in a small Pennsylvania town. When he met Michele Kamler, he thought he'd finally found the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful, intelligent, and seemed to want all the same things out of life as he did. Michele married Yelenic in 1997. But by 2002, the relationship fell apart…and what followed was a bitter, three-year-long battle. Michele began dating Kevin Foley, a Pennsylvania State Trooper. When, in 2006, Yelenic was found murdered―slashed to death in his own home―Foley was the prime suspect.

They were the golden boys of Huntington, Indiana: Jarrod Wall, a 17-year-old Sunday school teacher, track star, top student, and local heartthrob; and his friends Erick Esch, a high school football hero, and John Jesus Valasquez. They were well-liked, all-American teens. Until one night when Jarrod and Erick entered the house of a local car collector Eldon Anson and burglarized the bachelor’s home - and Jarrod murdered him with repeated hatchet blows to the skull….

Seventeen-year-old Tyler Hadley posted an invitation on Facebook: party at my crib tonight. But this was no ordinary house party in the Florida suburbs; it was a grisly crime scene. Later that night, Tyler revealed to his best friend, Michael, that he'd bludgeoned his parents to death with a hammer. Michael didn't believe him…until he entered the master bedroom and saw the bodies of Tyler's parents on the floor - murdered, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Mary Jo and Blake Hadley had always known their son had a dark side. He would make disturbing jokes about murder on Facebook.

He was a captain in the U.S. Air Force. She was a psychologist in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On the surface, Marty and Michelle Theer appeared to be the perfect married couple. But no one knew of the double life Michelle was leading. Tired of spending one too many nights apart from Marty who was often away on his flight missions, Michelle turned to the Internet to meet men and relieve her loneliness. With each encounter, Michelle became more daring in her sexual escapades. But one man stood out among all the rest: former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant John Diamond.

West Coast doctor Kenneth Stahl would do anything to free himself from his wife Carolyn. Then Adriana Vasco - Kenneth's former receptionist and mistress of nine years - obliged by introducing him to ex-con Dennis Earl Godley. The deal was set. Godley would murder Carolyn for thirty-thousand dollars. On the day after her 44th birthday, the trusting victim was lured to a lonely stretch of road. The deadly rendezvous took a shocking turn. Not only was Carolyn gunned down with a .357 Magnum, but Kenneth would also be killed.

Kathy Augustine was a controversial two-term Nevada State Controller. In 2003, her husband Chuck died of an apparent stroke. Only a month later, she married Chaz Higgs, an ER nurse who, it was later revealed, had attended to her late husband just before his death. Three years later, fifty-year-old Kathy died after a heart attack - the result, her family and friends believed, of a stressful political campaign. But when an autopsy of Kathy's body revealed no signs of heart disease, investigators dug into Kathy's case…only to find the presence of a paralyzing drug in Kathy's system.