True Crime

What does it take to catch a predator who has terrorized southeast England for over fifteen years?

Delroy Grant - dubbed the Night Stalker - was one of the nation's most wanted men, a shocking sex predator. During his seventeen-year reign of fear, he established a clear MO. Target an elderly woman, living alone. Visit them at night. Remove a window pane and slide in. Unscrew the lightbulbs. Cut the power at the electricity meter. Rip out the telephone wires. Tiptoe to the bedroom. Wake the victim by shining a light in their eyes. What followed for his terrified victims was often unspeakable.

When SIO Colin Sutton was drafted into the case, Grant had been at large for over a decade. Stepping up where others had failed, he began the determined, relentless police work that had marked the end for infamous serial killer Levi Bellfield. Case by case, clue by clue.

Night Stalker is the chilling true story of one of the most testing manhunts the Metropolitan Police have ever undertaken. It is a glimpse into the heart of darkness - and into the mind and work of the brilliant detective who brought one of London's most feared monsters to justice.

Fast forward fifty years. Eccentric entrepreneur Michael Arians moves to Oregon, opens a roadhouse, gets elected mayor, and becomes obsessed with the crime. He comes up with a scandalous conspiracy theory and starts to believe that Mary Jane's ghost is haunting his establishment. He also reaches out to the Chicago Tribune for help.

Arians's letter falls on the desk of general assignment reporter Ted Gregory. For the next thirteen years, while he ricochets from story to story and his newspaper is deconstructed around him, Gregory remains beguiled by the case of the teenaged telephone operator Mary Jane and twenty-eight-year-old Navy vet Stanley--and equally fascinated by Arians's seemingly hopeless pursuit of whoever murdered them. Mary Jane's Ghost is the story of these two odysseys.

"Gripping. ... Araujo's accretion of detail has a powerful effect, demonstrating how deeply the culture of violence has seeped into the social fabric of Amazonia -- and how hard it will be to eradicate." -- New York Times Book Review

"A raw account of the critical struggle between law and lawlessness on the world's last great frontier." -- Christian Science Monitor

In the tradition of Killers of the Flower Moon, a haunting murder mystery revealing the human story behind one of the most devastating crimes of our time: the ruthless destruction of the Amazon rain forest--and anyone who stands in the way

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves--all with impunity. The only true opposition came from Rondon's small but robust farmworkers' union, led by the charismatic Dezinho, who fought to put power back into the hands of the people who called the Amazon home. But when Dezinho was assassinated in cold blood, it seemed the farmworkers' struggle had come to a violent and fruitless end.

What no one anticipated was that this event would bring forth an unlikely hero: Dezinho's widow. Against great odds, and at extreme personal risk, Maria Joel, now a single mother of four young children, used her ingenuity and unwavering support from union members to bring her husband's killer to account in court. Her campaign gained unexpected momentum, helping to bring international attention to the dire situation in Rondon, from Brazil's president Lula to international celebrities and civil rights groups.

Maria Joel's fight for justice had far-reaching implications: it unearthed a chilling world of corruption and lawlessness rooted in Brazil's quest to turn the largest rain forest on earth into an economic frontier. As more details came out, it began to look increasingly likely that Dezinho's killer, a reluctant and inexperienced gunman, was just one piece of a larger criminal consortium, with ties leading all the way up to one of the region's most powerful and notorious fazendeiros of all.

Featuring groundbreaking revelations and exclusive interviews, this gripping work of narrative nonfiction is the culmination of journalist Heriberto Araujo's years-long investigation in the heart of the Amazon. Set against the backdrop of appalling deforestation rates and resultant superfires, Masters of the Lost Land vividly reveals the human story behind the loss of--and fierce crusade to protect--one of our greatest resources in the fight against climate change and one of the last wild places on earth.

In March of 2001, Federal prosecutor Mark Devereaux cold-called Rob Holm, the head of security for McDonald's Corporation. Without explanation, Devereaux asked that Holm and several other McDonald's senior executives plan a visit to the Jacksonville, Florida, FBI, and tell no one about their intended destination. It wasn't up for discussion. Upon their arrival, Devereaux watched them closely, looking at body language, checking for tells. To him, they were all potential suspects.

Once they were seated in an unremarkable conference room, sealed away in the hyper-secure FBI building, Devereaux began to lay out a shocking conspiracy, one that ran deep into McDonald's most beloved promotions: the Monopoly game. This is where they began to discover from 1989 to 2001, almost every high-value prize winner was actually illegitimate. But how could this happen and who all was behind it? A rookie FBI agent and a brilliant undercover operation led them to one man who brilliantly crafted a near-infallible nationwide conspiracy for fraud.

Expanded from the wildly popular HBO docuseries with major new interviews, McMillion$ traces this massive crime, the intricate web of lies that bolstered it, and the tireless work of the FBI agents that unraveled it all. It is a story littered with tragedy: families torn apart, betrayals, financial ruin, and one suspicious car crash. Yet, there are bright spots in the hijinks of the FBI agents and their co-conspirators. Ultimately, it is a story of what happens when the American dream goes very wrong.

It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this true-crime book has become a modern classic.

On a snowy winter evening in 1982, twenty-one-year-old Mary Brown accepted a ride from a handsome stranger in the resort town of Breckenridge, Colorado. What followed was a nightmare of unspeakable cruelty. Miraculously, Mary survived her horrific ordeal, but the true depths of her attacker's malevolence were yet to be revealed. For him, the violence had only just begun.

After ten years in prison, Tom Luther was released a far more vicious criminal. Often compared to Ted Bundy, Luther cut a deadly swath from the Rockies to West Virginia, luring a chain of women into the black hole of his murderous vision.

One cop was obsessed with catching this brutal killer--and pinning at least one Colorado murder on him. But as Luther led Detective Scott Richardson through a maze of lies and deception, the stakes began to rise. From the Rockies to West Virginia, young women were coming face to face with a murderous monster raging out of control. And none of them were coming out alive.

In this gripping true crime masterpiece, acclaimed author Steve Jackson recounts the intriguing pursuit and long-awaited conviction of a charismatic, monstrous psychopath. By delving deep into the heart of true evil, Jackson offers valuable lessons on what makes violent predators tick, and what can be done to limit their relentless toll on society.

Criminal profiling--the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological "fingerprints" of the monsters among us--holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society's most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its histor

Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy's execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students--including the future Unabomber--by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern "predictive policing" policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted--to devastating effects.

With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

"Harrowing." --Wall Street Journal - "Riveting." --Seattle Times

A groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that investigates Munchausen by Proxy from the host and creator of the award-winning true crime podcast Nobody Should Believe Me.

No bond is more sacred than that between a mother and child. And no one is more sympathetic than a mother whose child faces a life-threatening illness. But what if the mother is the cause of the illness? What if the sympathy is the point?

Munchausen by proxy (MBP) has fascinated and horrified both professionals and the general public since this disturbing form of child abuse was first identified. But even as the public has been captivated by these tales of abuse and deception, there remains widespread misinformation and confusion about MBP. Are these mothers unfeeling psychopaths, or sick women who need help? And more important, how can we protect the children whose lives are at stake?

The Mother Next Door offers a groundbreaking look at MBP from an unlikely duo: a Seattle novelist whose own family was torn apart by it, and the Texas detective who has worked on more medical child abuse cases than anyone in the nation. Readers ride along on three high-stakes MPB investigations; through riveting reporting and shocking stories from the family members, friends, and doctors caught in the blast zone of these unthinkable acts, a twisted portrait of motherhood and deceit is revealed.

With help from some of the top MBP experts in the world, Dunlop and Weber uncover the complex maze of psychological, systemic, and cultural issues that compound MBP and offer solutions for how we might find our way out.