True Crime Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

Poisoned Dreams: A True Story of Murder, Money, and Family Secrets

In 1991 Nancy Dillard Lyon, daughter of a powerful Dallas real estate tycoon, was murdered, poisoned with arsenic. Nancy’s brother became convinced her adulterous husband, Richard, was responsible. And so Richard was arrested, tried, and convicted—and sentenced to life in prison. But did the evidence support this conviction? Mystery novelist A. W. Gray made his nonfiction debut with this provocative true-crime account of sex, incest, infidelity, drugs, and murder—one that raises doubts about the justice that was served in this case. “Must reading.”—Jack Olsen, Edgar Award–winning true-crime writer

A. W. Gray (Author), Jim Manchester (Narrator)

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Celebrated Crimes 7: Nisida

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times. However, in this, the seventh of the series, Dumas turns away from the bitter hatreds and bloody cruelty of the preceding stories. He lets the novelist take over from the historian, giving free rein to his storytelling instincts. The story of Nisida is worthy of an Italian opera in the great romantic tradition, and indeed Donizetti attempted it, but without success. It is the story of an attempt by a womanizing nobleman to seduce and ruin the daughter of a poor but admirable fisherman, an attempt that ends in his death at the hands of her brother, who is then sentenced to die and is executed, but not by the hands of the law. The story is told in lush and melodramatic style, tending in places to comedy. It is as if Dumas just had to give himself a break after the harsh, tense history of the preceding titles in the series, and turned his gift for melodrama and high coloring loose with a passion. Dumas does claim that the story is based on the records of an actual case. If so, the case is well buried, or Dumas changed too many names and details to permit us to track it down with certainty. Enjoy! A Freshwater Seas production.

Alexandre Dumas père (Author), Robert Bethune (Narrator)

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Stranger than Fiction

A riveting collection of true stories which are so strange as to be almost unbelievable.The Terrible Story of the “Mary Russell”The Murder of the Countess GörlitzThe Great Bank ForgeryMoonlight SonataGretna Green MarriagesCount BorulawskiJen Grenier, the French WerewolfI will Pay you all TomorrowThe Telephone at the OratoryThe Ghostly PassengerThe DiverThe Bloody HandThe Story of Kaspar HauserAcross the Australian Desert

Andrew Lang, J. G. Lockhart, Sabine Baring-Gould (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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The Terrible Story of the 'Mary Russell'

The 'Mary Russell' was a trading boat that set sail from the harbour of Cobh in County Cork on 8 February 1828, carrying a cargo of mules bound for Barbados. When it returned to Cobh on 25 June 1828, the horrified people of Cork found a cabin awash with blood and the bound and battered corpses of the ship's crew. Two mutilated survivors and a group of young boys who were unharmed were able to testify to the bizarre events of the voyage, during which the ship's captain, William Stewart, had become increasingly paranoid about an imagined mutiny on board and felt himself compelled to murder his shipmates.

J. G. Lockhart (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker

The astonishing story of Benny Binion—a rip-roaring saga of murder, money, and the making of Las Vegas Benny Binion was many things: a cowboy, a pioneering casino owner, a gangster, a killer, and founder of the hugely successful World Series of Poker. Blood Aces tells the story of Binion’s crucial role in shaping modern Las Vegas. From a Texas backwater, Binion rose to prominence on a combination of vision, determination, and brutal expediency. His formula was simple: run a good business, cultivate the big boys, kill your enemies, and own the cops. Through a mix of cold-bloodedness, native intelligence, folksiness, and philanthropy, Binion became one of the most revered figures in the history of gambling, and his showmanship, shrewdness, and violence would come to dominate the Vegas scene. Veteran journalist Doug J. Swanson uses once-secret government documents and dogged reporting to show how Binion destroyed his rivals and outsmarted his adversaries—including J. Edgar Hoover. As fast paced as any thriller, Blood Aces tells a story that is unmatched in the annals of American criminal justice, a vital yet untold piece of this country’s history. “The big life and fast times of one of the most charismatic and dangerous good ol’ boys in America’s criminal history…An entertaining and provocative portrait of a man whose dichotomies were largely a product of the violent times in which he thrived.”—Kirkus Reviews

Doug J. Swanson (Author), John McLain (Narrator)

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Celebrated Crimes 6: Urbain Grandier

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the sixth of the series, Dumas tells the story of Urbain Grandier, a Catholic priest, little known to the English-speaking world, but famous among French speakers; he was the target of a religous and political conspiracy that began among his personal and political enemies in the town of Loudon and ended at the highest levels of political and religious power in the kingdom of France, with the direct involvement of Cardinal Richelieu and possibly of the king himself. Grandier was handsome; Grandier was magnetic; Grandier was highly attractive to women. He was also arrogant, vindictive, and bitterly exacting of every jot and tittle of his rights. These qualities ran him foul of the religious and political bigwigs of the small, provincial town of Loudon. He made many enemies; they made up their minds to kill the man, and kill him they did. They plotted to create the appearance of witchcraft on the loose by arranging for what would look like demonic possession among the nuns of the Ursuline convent at Loudon, so that they could pin a charge of witchcraft on Grandier. However, once they turned their wild horses loose, they had no choice but to ride them; what began as a personal vendetta turned into a devil's nightmare of a lurid witchhunt and trial. Though Dumas clearly takes Grandier's part, he is quite objective about how Grandier, faced with a noose strung up by his enemies, could not restrain himself from putting his head into it and grinning. Dumas shows clearly how his enemies went to work with a will to do what has necessary from that point. In this volume, he is less then novelist than the historian, but he brings all the figures involved fully to life. He leaves us shaking our heads at the depths of murderous passion and barbarous cruelty hidden under the mask of religious fervor. Enjoy! A Freshwater Seas production.

Alexandre Dumas père (Author), Robert Bethune (Narrator)

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The Murder of the Countess Görlitz

The bizarre death of the Countess Görlitz at Darmstadt in Germany, in 1847, was one of the greatest mysteries of the age. For several years it was widely believed that the Countess had spontaneously combusted at her writing desk. Another popular theory was that her husband, Count Görlitz, a Privy Councillor and Chamberlain to the Grand-Duke of Hesse had murdered her - a charge which he vigorously denied. It was not until three years later that light was finally shed on the case...and then the events of that fateful night turned out to be even stranger than anyone could have imagined.

Sabine Baring-Gould (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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The Great Bank Forgery: The Story of Macdonnell and the Bidwells

Sir Basil Thomson (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

Told in her own words, this is the story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Charlize Theron in the film Monster. There have been few female serial killers, but Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in 2002, was a remarkable example of this rare breed of death row inmate. All too often, female prostitutes have been the victims of male serial killers-Wuornos' killings were the inverse of this pattern. After escaping an abusive childhood at the hands of her grandparents, she became a child prostitute, progressing into a disastrous adulthood of prostitution and damaging affairs with both men and women. Her eventual metamorphosis from victim to attacker had brutal consequences-a stream of dead men. This is her story, as told to Christopher Berry-Dee, editor of The New Criminologist and director of Britain's Criminology Research Center.

Aileen Wuornos, Christopher Berry Dee (Author), Matthew Lloyd Davies (Narrator)

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Lost and Found: The True Story of Jaycee Lee Dugard and the Abduction That Shocked the World

In 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her morning walk to the school bus. The search for Jaycee made national headlines, and the case was repeatedly featured on America's Most Wanted. But despite her family's tireless efforts, Jaycee's disappearance remained a mystery. Then, in August 2009, a registered sex offender named Phillip Garrido appeared on the University of California, Berkeley, campus alongside two young women whose unusual behavior sparked concern among campus officials and law enforcement. That visit would pave the way for a shocking discovery: that Garrido was Jaycee Lee Dugard's kidnapper. For eighteen years Jaycee had lived on the Garrido property in Antioch, California. Kept in complete isolation, she was repeatedly raped by Garrido, who fathered her two daughters. When news broke of Jaycee's discovery, there was a huge outpouring of relief across the nation. But questions remain: How did the Garridos slip past authorities? And how did Jaycee endure her captivity? This is the story of a girl-next-door who was lost and found.

John Glatt (Author), Randye Kaye (Narrator)

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Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder

June 26, 2010. A Pennsylvania state trooper witnesses a car speeding and crashing into trees. Stopping to help, he finds that the driver, Michael Ballard, is alive—and drenched in blood. When asked what happened, the man answers, "I just killed everybody." Not far from the accident, police make a gruesome discovery. In the home of Michael's ex-girlfriend, Denise Mehri, they find four bodies that had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife: Denise, on the kitchen floor; her grandfather, in his wheelchair; her neighbor; and her father, in a room with a blood-smeared obscenity painted on the wall. How could anyone do something so horrendous? Michael had already been convicted of murder, sent to prison when he was only eighteen. Despite several incidents of misconduct during his time in prison, he was found suitable for parole shortly after his minimum sentence lapsed. But this time, his deadly rampage would not be so easily pardoned.

Colin McEvoy, Lynn Olanoff (Author), Roger Wayne (Narrator)

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Disposable Income: A True Story of Sex, Greed and Im-purr-fect Murder

In 1948, when elderly Anna Homeyer and her much younger husband, Charles, decided to sell their home in the Bronx and move to Pennsylvania, residents of the small town of Factoryville couldn't understand why. With no family or friends in the area, the isolated little village seemed an odd choice for strangers to relocate to. But Factoryville warmly welcomed their new neighbors, who seemed eager to fit in—at first. Soon, however, the Homeyers' pleasant disposition began to change. Anna, once highly visible and engaging, was rarely seen at all anymore, and Charles, who was always kind and neighborly, became distant and withdrawn. Local residents were baffled by their behavior. But their curiosity soon turned to suspicion when Anna Homeyer suddenly disappeared, leaving the town with a number of unanswered questions: Why was Charles Homeyer, a married man, receiving numerous lonely hearts magazines and scores of letters from unattached women all over the country? Why was he burning his wife's clothing and selling off her personal belongings? Why did he leave Factoryville, only to return with his wife's most cherished possession? Where was Anna? And what was that foul, putrid odor billowing from the Homeyers' chimney?

Tammy Mal (Author), Michael Kramer (Narrator)

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True Crime Audiobooks in Non-Fiction