Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Murder

Jocelyn Branham Earnest was found dead on the floor of her living room in Forest, Virginia. By her side was a gun and a suicide note-typed, lacking a signature, and with one fingerprint on it. A fingerprint apparently belonging to Jocelyn's estranged husband.Wesley Earnest was a respected high school administrator, poised to restart his life in a new community. Parents entrusted their children to his care and believed he was above reproach.

True tales of serial killers who went viral. Serial killers have been with us for decades. The internet has put them in our pockets. Psycho.com is a chilling look at what happens when murderous minds meet modern technology.

In 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years old. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier.

Edwin Valero's life was like a rocket shot into a wall. With a perfect knockout record in twenty-seven fights, the demonic Venezuelan boxer, known as "El Inca" and "El Dinamita," seemed destined for a clash with all-time great Manny Pacquiao. But the Fates had other ideas. Fueled by cocaine and booze and paranoia, Valero blazed into a mania that derailed his career in the ring and resulted in the brutal death of his young wife Jennifer—and soon afterward, his own.

Ben Novack, Jr., was born into a hotel empire, Miami's lavish Fontainbleau. But his luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would ironically end in another hotel room - where the police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death. Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation - when his ex-stripper wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for 24 hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce.

George Diener, World War II veteran and traveling salesman, and his wife, Carol, had old-fashioned values and ordinary aspirations: a home, a family, the pleasure of watching their two sons grow up. But in February 1972, an unthinkable tragedy occurred in the basement of their Nassau County residence, shattering their hopes and dreams forever.

On the morning of September 26, 1974, the body of Fern Cowen Rodgers was discovered on the floor of her home in Searcy, Arkansas. The 68-year-old socialite was murdered, sometime in the night, by two bullets fired into her head.

Ax assault, kidnapping, brutal murder: how could these things happen in a small town? Although regional crimes hardly ever make it to the national circuit, they will always remain with the families and communities of the victims and a part of the area's history. After working with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division for twenty-four years, Rita Shuler has a passion for remembering the victims. From an unsolved case that has haunted her for thirty years to a cold case solved after fifteen years by advanced DNA technology, Shuler blends her own memories with extensive research.

From mild mannered coworkers to doting parents. Some might be your jack-of-all-trades friend, or others might be your family member with an altruistic persona. The Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals takes you deeper into the unconventional criminal's psyche. The ones where their most prominent feature isn't a bloodied knife, but a bright smile and warm gaze meant to lure their next victim.

The plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy has been shrouded in secrecy and deceit, leading most Americans to doubt the veracity of the Warren Commission's findings. Now, after forty years, Barr McClellan exposes the secret, high-level conspiracy in Texas that led to Kennedy's death and L.B.J.'s succession as President.

In 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley's body was found in the backyard of her family's Connecticut home, and a member of America's beloved Kennedy family, then also 15, was accused of the crime. What ensued was a media firestorm and a whodunit that transfixed the nation, providing daily debates - and cruel, dinner table entertainment. Now, 40 years after Michael Skakel's conviction, his cousin, acclaimed activist and writer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has taken matters into his own hands to get the charges dropped and clear his cousin's name.

A prominent New Jersey doctor and members of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang transform the doctor's office into a drug ring, pumping thousands of highly addictive opioid pain pills onto the streets in exchange for cash. Everything was going smoothly until one person discovered their plan: the doctor's wife. When she threatened to divorce him, the doctor's unholy alliance with his partners in crime turned deadly, and the doctor hired a hitman to kill her.

Between the summers of 1967 through 1969, before the term serial killer was coined, a predatory killer stalked the campuses of Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan seeking prey until he made the arrogant mistake of killing his last victim in the basement of his uncle's home. All-American boy John Norman Collins was arrested, tried, and convicted of the strangulation murder of Karen Sue Beineman.

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.

1985. Gun Barrel City, Texas. Police searching for missing Fire Department captain Jimmy Don Beets dug inside a wishing well in the neatly tended garden of Beets's wife, forty-eight-year-old Betty Lou Beets. Not only did they find his body, but they also found the body of Betty Lou's fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker. It wasn't long before investigators unearthed the terrible truth. As Betty Lou's sordid past emerged, so did her chilling trail of marital violence.

When Carol Montecalvo began writing to a man in prison through a program at her church, she considered it her Christian duty. But the letters soon became her lifeline, something she actually looked forward to sending and receiving. She fell in love with the man behind the letters and just before Dan was released, they wed in the prison chapel. Their marriage lasted nine years, until the fateful night when Dan stoically called 911 to report his wife's murder.

Sometimes a murder story lingers for years after the event. This one has lingered for more than a century, especially in New England. The setting is winter, 1873 on a small, obscure island 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Three women await the return of their men the following morning. A killer, who learns they are alone for one night, is rowing to their island, across 10 miles of open sea. The next day, a horrific scene is discovered. It stuns the seacoast towns and begins a series of events that are covered nationally in the months that follow.

At once disturbing and fascinating, Women Who Love Men Who Kill is a compelling psychological study of prison passion in the new millennium. Through extensive research and interviews with women who seek relationships with convicted killers through snail and email, and through conversations with psychiatrists, social workers, and prison officials, Isenberg sheds light on why these women are drawn into relationships with incarcerated outcasts.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China's "Wild East"—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth.

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust - in ghettos, on death marches, and in concentration camps - a young couple seeks refuge in Canada. They settle into a new life, certain that the terrors of their past are behind them. They build themselves a cozy little cottage on a lake in Muskoka, a cottage that becomes emblematic of their victory over the Nazis. The charming retreat is a safe haven, a refuge from haunted memories. That is, until a single act of unspeakable violence defiles their sanctuary.