True Crime Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

A former Seattle policewoman, Ann Rule has extensive experience of violent crime and brings this knowledge to bear in this, her latest collection of fascinating case studies. You Belong to Me focuses on one of Florida's most shocking criminals - Tim Harris, the poster-perfect 'All-American' State Trooper who hid bizarre and fatal fantasies behind his badge of authority. Bearing the stamp of classic Ann Rule that makes her books such extraordinary page-turners, this and other cases from her personal files prove once again her undisputed status as the Queen of True Crime.

Ann Rule (Author), Laural Merlington (Narrator)

Audiobook

You Belong to Me

A former Seattle policewoman, Ann Rule has extensive experience of violent crime and brings this knowledge to bear in this, her latest collection of fascinating case studies. You Belong to Me focuses on one of Florida''s most shocking criminals-Tim Harris, the poster-perfect ''All-American'' State Trooper who hid bizarre and fatal fantasies behind his badge of authority. Bearing the stamp of classic Ann Rule that makes her books such extraordinary page-turners, this and other cases from her personal files prove once again her undisputed status as the Queen of True Crime.

Ann Rule (Author), Laural Merlington (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dead Run

On a sunny May morning in 1998, three friends in a stolen truck passed through Cortez, Colorado, on their way to commit sabotage of unspeakable proportions. Evidence suggests that their mission was to blow up the Glen Canyon dam. Had they succeeded, the structure's collapse would have unleashed a five-hundred-foot-high inland tsunami, surging across the American Southwest and pulverizing everything in its path - crashing through the Grand Canyon, overflowing Hoover Dam, washing away downstream communities, and crippling the water supply of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Instead, the truck was pulled over by an unsuspecting small-town cop and the outlaws opened fire. After shooting him twenty times, they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and vanished into ten thousand square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. The pursuit that ensued pitted the most sophisticated law-enforcement technology on the planet against three self-trained survivalists. Seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies; dozens of Swat teams; U.S. Army Special Forces; and more than five hundred officers from across the country followed the fugitives into a landscape only they could survive. Nine years later, the last of the fugitives was finally accounted for, but what really happened to them remained shrouded in mystery. The first in-depth account of this sensational case, Dead Run is replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posses on horseback, suspicion of police cover-ups, rumors of vigilante justice, and the blunders of the nation's most exalted crime fighters pursuing outlaws against the unforgiving backdrop of the Utah wilderness. More than a thrilling crime story, Dead Run is also an examination of the seductive allure of outlaw culture in the West and how it continues to inform national attitudes toward guns, authority, and unfettered freedom. Exhaustively researched, Dead Run offers a stunning portrayal of an enduring Wild West landscape, where the American spirit is most boldly and confusingly, even tragically, lived.

Dan Schultz (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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A Rose for Her Grave

A Rose for Her Grave - the principal story of this collection - vividly recreates the cautionary tale of Randy Roth, a misogynistic sociopath from the Pacific Northwest whose rage was directed primarily at women and children. Addicted to his own greed, Roth exercised a powerful aura of control over his victims, using his ability to charm and boyish good looks to lower their defences. By the time they saw the reality of the madness in his eyes, it was usually too late. This, along with five other chilling cases, bears the stamp of classic Ann Rule - informed, comprehensive, and eerily evocative of man's inhumanity to man.

Ann Rule (Author), Laural Merlington (Narrator)

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The World's Most Bizarre Murders: True Stories That Will Shock and Amaze You

This is no ordinary true crime book. If you think you've got the stomach for the most bloodcurdling, sickening and downright strangest murders you will ever come across, then look no further than these pages. You have been warned... Take, for example, Enriqueta Marti who kidnapped children from the streets of Barcelona, then boiled away their flesh and crushed their bones for ingredients for her coveted 'magic potions'. Or take Randy Kraft, known as The Scorecard Killer, a computer genius by day and a a deranged psychopath by night. Finally arrested with a corpse slumped in the passenger seat of his car, it emerged that Kraft had spent over a decade cutting up and disposing of his numerous victims along the California highways. In this stomachchurning collection, all the stories have one thing in common a unique bizarre twist. True crime writer James Marrison draws upon the material that has featured in the hugely successful column The Murder File in cult magazine Bizarre in order to disclose the kind of sickening deeds that are perpetrated more often than you might think, but which sometimes go largely unreported by the media. Welcome to The World's Most bizarre Murders the most shocking true crime book you will ever read.

James Marrison (Author), Drew Campbell (Narrator)

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Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss

From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss since Al Capone. Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material, Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the crime boss and killer who brought the FBI to its knees. He is an American original --a psychopath who fostered a following with a frightening mix of terror, deadly intimidation and the deft touch of a politician who often helped a family in need meet their monthly rent. But the history shows that despite the early false myths portraying him as a Robin Hood figure, Whitey was a supreme narcissist, and everything--every interaction with family and his politician brother Bill Bulger, with underworld cohorts, with law enforcement, with his South Boston neighbors, and with his victims--was always about him. In an Irish-American neighborhood where loyalty has always been rule one, the Bulger brand was loyalty to oneself. Whitey deconstructs Bulger's insatiable hunger for power and control. Building on their years of reporting and uncovering new Bulger family records, letters and prison files, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill examine and reveal the factors and forces that created the monster. It's a deeply rendered portrait of evil that spans nearly a century, taking Whitey from the streets of his boyhood Southie in the 1940s to his cell in Alcatraz in the 1950s to his cunning, corrupt pact with the FBI in the 1970s and, finally, to Santa Monica, California where for fifteen years he was hiding in plain sight as one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. In a lifetime of crime and murder that ended with his arrest in June 2011, Whitey Bulger became one of the most powerful and deadly crime bosses of the twentieth century. This is his story.

Dick Lehr, Gerard O'Neill (Author), John Rubinstein (Narrator)

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Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors

It's a chilling reality that homicide investigators know all too well: the last face most murder victims see is not that of a stranger, but of someone familiar. Whether only an acquaintance or a trusted intimate, such killers share a common trait that triggers the downward spiral toward death for someone close to them: they are masters at hiding who they really are. Their clever masks let them appear safe, kind, and truthful. They are anything but - and almost no one can detect the murderous impulses buried deep in their psyches. These doomed relationships are the focus of Ann Rule's sixteenth Crime Files collection. In these shattering inside views of both headlined and little-known homicides, Rule speaks for vulnerable victims who relied on the wrong people. She begins with two startling novella-length investigations. In July 2011, a billionaire's Coronado, California, mansion was the setting for two horrifying deaths only days apart - his young son's plunge from a balcony and his girlfriend's ghastly hanging. What really happened? Baffling questions remain unanswered, as these cases were closed far too soon for hundreds of people; Rule looks at them now through the eyes of a relentless crime reporter. The second probe began in Utah when Susan Powell vanished in a 2009 blizzard. Her controlling husband, Josh, proved capable of a blind rage that was heartbreakingly fatal to his innocent small sons almost three years later in a tragedy that shocked America as the details unfolded. If anyone had detected the depth of depravity within Josh Powell, perhaps the family that loved and trusted him would have been saved. In these and seven other riveting cases, Ann Rule exposes the twisted truth behind the faÃ§ades of Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors.

Ann Rule (Author), Laural Merlington (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Inventor and the Tycoon

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads. One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media. Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

Edward Ball (Author), John H. Mayer (Narrator)

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Unsolved Murder Mysteries

First published in 1924, Charles E. Pearce's account of some of the most gruesome and intriguing unsolved murders of the nineteenth century continues to captivate amateur sleuths to this day. Pearce guides us through a fascinating world of wicked assassinations, missed clues, ingenious stratagems and cunning deceits in one last attempt to track down historical villains who evaded justice. It is impossible to establish the truth beyond reasonable doubt in any of the cases at this distance, but the light which Pearce sheds on the investigations and contemporary testimony, encourages us to evaluate the evidence anew and using our own Holmesian powers, to come up with new theories.

Charles E. Pearce (Author), Cathy Dobson (Narrator)

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Farewell

1981: Ronald Reagan's inauguration marks a new escalation in the United States' Cold War with the USSR. Months later, FranÃ§ois Mitterrand is elected president of France with the support of the French Communist Party. The predicted tension between these two men, however, is immediately defused when Mitterrand gives Reagan the Farewell dossier, a file he would later call "one of the greatest spy cases of the twentieth century." Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, a promising technical student, joins the KGB to work as a spy. Following a couple of murky incidents, however, Vetrov is removed from the field and placed at a desk as an analyst. Soon, burdened by a troubled marriage and frustrated at a failing career, Vetrov turns to alcohol. Desperate and in need of redemption, in 1980 he offers his services to the DST, the French counterintelligence service. Thus Agent Farewell is born. Soon he is sneaking files and photographing sensitive documents, keeping the West informed of the USSR's plans - right in the heart of KGB headquarters. The most complete account of these dramatic events ever recorded, Kostin and Raynaud's thorough investigation is a fascinating tour de force. Probing further into Vetrov's psychological profile than ever before, they provide groundbreaking insight into the man whose life helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

Eric Raynaud, Sergei Kostin (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation

There have been countless attempts to solve the brutal murders committed by Jack the Ripper more than a hundred years ago. It seems that almost everyone has their own theory and their own suspect, ranging from the reasonably likely to the entirely preposterous. What this most famous of British criminal cases has always required is a professional eye to analyse with all the benefits of modern investigate techniques. Now that has been provided in the shape of the man most qualified to solve the case: former British murder squad detective Trevor Marriott. His long and arduous investigation dispels the rumours, fantasies and urban legends which have for so long stalked through the shadowy world of this vile killer. The results are startling: for many years it has been accepted that Jack the Ripper killed only five, but now, it can be revealed that up to nine were victims. And, most astonishing of all, a new prime suspect never previously considered has emerged, with evidence linking him not only to the Whitechapel cases, but to murders all over the world. "Jack the Ripper: the 21st Century Investigations" reveals the Ripper's true identity at last, and the fate that befell him.

Trevor Marriott (Author), Norman Gilligan (Narrator)

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Depravity: A Narrative of 16 Serial Killers

Their crimes span the globe, but one thing unites them: they are sixteen of the twentieth century's most notorious serial killers. In this well-researched volume, discover their motives and what made them tick. Walk the path of the investigators who broke their cases and listen to the killers' own words. All of them made their communities tremble in fear. They include: Johann Otto Hoch, who moved to America from Germany in the 1890s and married a string of women. Instead of being the man of their dreams, he became their worst nightmare. Fritz Haarmann, "The Vampire of Hanover," who killed dozens of young male vagrants and prostitutes from 1919 to 1924 in Germany. Béla Kiss, a Hungarian serial killer, who killed young women and tried pickling them in giant metal drums. Robert Hansen, who began killing prostitutes in Alaska around 1980. He let them flee in the wilderness before hunting them down with a knife and rifle. Learn about these and other serial killers. See what motivated them to lead such horrible lives and how they were finally brought to justice in Depravity: A Narrative of 16 Serial Killers.

Harvey Rosenfeld (Author), Tom Weiner (Narrator)

Audiobook

True Crime Audiobooks in Non-Fiction