Crime Memoir

From honour killings and cannibalism to corporate espionage and cultish conspiracies, the hosts of India’s most popular true crime podcast, The Desi Crime Podcast, bring you twenty chilling cases from across South Asia – including two never aired before. Join Aishwarya and Aryaan as they uncover hidden details of infamous cases that grabbed headlines around the world – and those that did not.

Explore the controversial and gripping narrative in Why I Killed Gandhi?, (story behind Mahatma Gandhi's assassination), by Nathuram Godse. This thought-provoking account delves into the mind of the man who assassinated one of the world's most iconic leaders. Understand the ideological conflicts and personal convictions that led to this tragic event. This book provides a unique perspective on a pivotal moment in history, challenging listeners to reflect on the complexities of political and moral beliefs.

David Headley, the American Pakistani also known as Daood Gilani, lived a double life. One day he would stroll through Central Park in his tailored Armani suit as a true New Yorker, and the next he would browse in the bazaar in Lahore wearing traditional Pakistani clothes. One day he would drink champagne at the most extravagant clubs; on another he would prostrate himself in prayer in remote Pakistan and pledge fidelity to Allah.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

The executioner has no remorse. He is the man who strikes the fear of his boss in everybody’s heart. While he has no criminal empire of his own, his barbaric bio-sketch could fill several police case diaries. Those who live by the bullet die by the bullet - almost every last man of them. But in their short reign of terror, they leave a trail of devastation in their wake. In this no-holds-barred book, undercover reporter Gabriel Khan, backed by years of behind-the-scenes work, provides an insight into the lives of 12 of the most vicious and fearless hitmen of Mumbai.

In August 2009, a 39-year-old policewoman went missing in Tamil Nadu. A month later, her heavily decomposed body was discovered in a drain by a graveyard. She had been brutally violated and killed. As the investigation started, the police detected a pattern in more than a dozen unsolved rape-and-murder cases with mutilated bodies of women turning up in graveyards, drains and empty fields along the highways. It didn’t take the police too long to find out that the perpetrator was a trucker named M Jaishankar.

Through his jail diary, a real Bhagat Singh emerges—one who is without the hat or a gun, one who had an acute scholarly mind and a robust socialist persona.

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

The Spy with No Name is the unbelievable true story of Erwin van Haarlem, a Cold War secret agent whose stolen identity broke the heart of an innocent woman - who thought she'd found her long-lost son. In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem, 52, finally tracked down the son she had abandoned as a baby, during the Second World War. She was delighted that he had grown into a charming Dutch waiter in London. But Erwin van Haarlem was actually a dangerous Communist spy who had stolen her son's identity to uncover British and American military secrets.

In 1961, 25-year-old Herbert Jay Stern, fresh from reserve duty, stood in his green army uniform in a New York County courtroom to be sworn in as an attorney. He could only guess what his life as a prosecuting lawyer would be. A dozen years later, in the wake of the national scandal of Watergate, Stern, draped in black robes now, would take the oath of office as a federal judge. In the years between, the idealistic young Stern would sharpen his skills in the realities of the criminal courts of New York City, to emerge as the lead trial attorney for the Justice Department....

Whether venturing into a blood-spattered farm in Texas, down a lonely mountain road in Alabama, or into the deceptively sunny Ohio suburbs, acclaimed mystery writer Craig Rice lends her hard-boiled style and a wicked irony to this gallery of real-life murders. A saintly middle-aged widow bludgeoned to death in her New Jersey home; the headless torsos of two women found floating in the Lake of the Ozarks; a New Year’s fire in Pennsylvania set to cover the traces of a more ghastly crime; a traveling evangelist on a divine mission blown to bits in Berkeley....

Best-selling author Bryan Burrough recently made a shocking discovery: The small town of Temple, Texas, where he had grown up, had harbored a dark secret. One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer. In this chilling tale, Burrough raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare.

Lloyd Constantine began his career in legal services, representing impoverished clients in civil rights and constitutional cases. Decades later, he would make headlines for representing retailers and consumers against a cartel that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of commerce in America: competition. A man who thrives on competition himself, Constantine now gives us the insider's story on the biggest antitrust lawsuit in history - a case that pitted his small firm against financial-industry giants Visa and MasterCard, along with Clifford-Chance, the largest law firm in the world.

Death Served Cold is a painstakingly researched collection of true, blood-curdling accounts of gruesome murders committed by India’s most dangerous women over the last three decades. These stories explore the dark recesses of the female psyche and challenge popular stereotypes by revealing shocking excesses of sadism and aggression rarely associated with women.

It’s the $10 million heist you’ve never heard of. In a matter of months, dozens of truckloads disappeared from American highways. But what were they carrying? Nuts. Marc Fennell takes you into a rabbit hole of crime syndicates, stolen identities and private investigators that will change the way you think about food forever. Eighty per cent of the world’s almonds are grown in the heart of California, but this journey will take you to Italy, the Spanish coast, deep under the earth and even into space.

Over 13 months in 1976­-1977, four children were abducted in the Detroit suburbs, each of them held for days before their still-warm bodies were dumped in the snow near public roadsides. The Oakland County Child Murders spawned panic across southeast Michigan, triggering the most extensive manhunt in US history. Yet after less than two years, the task force created to find the killer was shut down without naming a suspect.

Emily Craig has been a witness to history, helping to seek justice for thousands of murder victims, both famous and unknown. It’s a personal story that you won’t soon forget. Emily first became intrigued by forensics work when, as a respected medical illustrator, she was called in by the local police to create a model of a murder victim’s face. Her fascination with that case led to a dramatic midlife career change: She would go back to school to become a forensic anthropologist - and one of the most respected and best-known “bone hunters” in the nation.

It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden. Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

In Handsome Devil, acclaimed journalist Jeff Maysh brings to life one of the 20th century's most unforgettable public enemies, "Count" Victor Lustig, a dashing criminal mastermind and counterfeiter whose fake banknotes threatened to topple America's economy. Written in staggering detail and culminating in a desperate manhunt led by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Handsome Devil reveals the real man behind the myth: a genius who applied his talents to crime.