True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

KILLER IN THE HOUSE—Kathryn Canavan

A meticulously researched page-turner about one of the Philadelphia suburbs’ most shocking 20th-century crimes. A gunman broke into Jack and Peggy Abt’s house moments after the last family member left for the day. He took a seat next to the upright piano in the living room and waited silently for 11 hours. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t watch television.People expect things to go bump in the night, but, in 1976, most adults never fretted a stranger would invade the sanctity of their home in the middle of the day. Six people walked through the kitchen door one by one that afternoon, all expecting nothing more than a Friday night fish fry. The killer leaped out from behind the living room wall over and over and over and over and over and over again. He fired at them at a distance of less than 18 inches, the width of a dining room chair. After each murder, he dragged the body to the basement. Then, to maintain the element of surprise, he sped back upstairs to tidy up for his next unsuspecting victim.This first-person story from a news reporter who was on the scene 90 minutes after the killer slipped away is built from autopsy reports, prison records, IQ tests, trial transcripts, the killer’s own eidetic confession, interviews with witnesses in 1976 and in the 2020s, and the author’s experiences covering the case from the first night to the stunning courtroom moment when the announcement of six death penalties was met with loud cheers.With that research, it was possible to reconstruct the six murders, minute by minute. Tension builds as the six innocent victims turn the kitchen doorknob at 3:30, 4:15, 4:40, 5:15, 6:10 and at 6:30. Readers know their fates, but they didn’t. KILLER IN THE HOUSE: Ten Days of Terror in a Pennsylvania Suburb—Kathryn Canavan

FEAR AND FURY—Heather Ann Thompson

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans.Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history. FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage—Heather Ann Thompson

IN PUBLIC RECORD—Michael Kelly

September 1990. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, teenage honors student Lisa Lee Pruett vanishes into the night. A boy calls 911 when she does not arrive for a secret late-night meet-up. Police soon find her nearby, stabbed to death and left exposed.Lisa had just passed an important test and earned her driver’s license. She was a Girl Scout, athlete, musician, and lover of poetry. Then her life was cut short.Investigators quickly focused on a troubled young man who lived a few blocks away. His name leaked, the media swarmed, and the case became a spectacle. Two years later, he was indicted on controversial testimony, tried under national attention, and ultimately acquitted. His life never recovered.Decades later, the murder remains unsolved.Now a former police officer, Michael Kelly, reopens the trail, determined to separate rumor from evidence and find the truth, if it is still there to be found. IN PUBLIC RECORD: A Journey to the Truth about a Murder and Trial—Michael Kelly

THE THAMES TORSO MURDERS— Suzanne Huntington

The latter part of the Victorian era bore witness to a series of unexplained female dismemberment cases that plagued London for a period of thirty years. All the cases remain unsolved and only two women were ever identified. Today, the circumstances surrounding these deaths have largely become a footnote in history, dwarfed in attention by their much larger cousin, Jack the Ripper.In this, Suzanne Huntington’s groundbreaking exploration of the subject, we see the first in-depth analysis into all the cases, where 150 years of assumption and misinformation is stripped back and the evidence re-examined, allowing the reader to comprehend not only the complexity of the cases themselves but also the background and context of the investigations. THE THAMES TORSO MURDERS: Fact or Fiction—Suzanne Huntington

WHERE MURDER LIES—Burl Barer and Frank C. Girardot Jr.

The murder of a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher in 2004 never made the evening news, yet within hours arrests were made, charges filed, and a speedy conviction sent to prison Jimmy Kitlas, an incredibly shy, special needs teenager with no criminal history whatsoever.20 years after the murder, a woman named Kelley Leigh asked Burl Barer and Frank C. Girardot to investigate. She believed that the case’s rapid resolution concealed a deeper, more troubling narrative—one marked by deception, manipulation, dishonesty, and a profound disregard for truth and justice.She was right. Of the last three people to see the victim alive, only one had both the motive and the opportunity to strangle him to death, and it wasn’t Jimmy Kitlas.What begins with a dead body on the bed leads to a bizarre scheme to steal a fortune in gold, a plot to smuggle MDMA, and an incredible joint effort by the American Mafia and the Russian Mob to defraud the United States Government out of billions of dollars. WHERE MURDER LIES: Death and Deception in West Hollywood—Burl Barer and Frank C. Giradot Jr.