True Crime Memoir

Their names echo through true crime history like dark legends: John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac Killer, Richard Ramirez, Aileen Wuornos, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and the Golden State Killer. Their infamous deeds have been exhaustively chronicled across every medium imaginable. But beyond these household names lies a shadow world of equally chilling cases that rarely make headlines or streaming television documentaries.

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.

Zwölf Jahre nach einem Doppelmord gilt der Fall Czerny als abgeschlossen. Doch als Melanie und Raphaela beginnen, den Fall öffentlich neu aufzurollen, bröckelt die offizielle Version. Ein übersehenes Alibi. Ermittlungsfehler. Schweigen an entscheidenden Stellen. Was als Podcast-Recherche startet, wird zur Gefahr – für die Wahrheit und für die Frauen, die sie aussprechen.

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.

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.

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.

Prepare to dive into 84 unforgettable true crime stories that zip through seven decades of murder and mayhem. From the roaring '20s to the gritty '90s, this is your ticket to a crime tour that’s more thrilling than a haunted roller coaster. Some of these cases might ring a bell, while others will be fresh horrors you’ve never encountered. And some mysteries are still as cold as the killer's heart. This collection is like a time machine that stops at every dark alley of history's most horrific crimes.

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....

Sunday Times best-selling author Christopher Berry-Dee is back with a companion volume that delves even deeper into the savage world of psychopaths and their hideous crimes. This time, however, he combines sections on killers whom he has known, interviewed or corresponded with, with studies of psychopathic serial killers from the past, including Peter Kürten, the 'Düsseldorf Monster'; John Christie, responsible for the killings at 10 Rillington Place; and Neville Heath, a ladykiller in every sense of the word.

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.

Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternative version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads can grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may realize that the most courageous show of strength is not the determined use of force. It's knowing when and how to ask for help.

In Chase Darkness with Me, you’ll ride shotgun as journalist Billy Jensen identifies the Halloween Mask Murderer, finds a missing girl in the California Redwoods, and investigates the only other murder in New York City on 9/11. You’ll hear intimate details of the hunts for two of the most terrifying serial killers in history: his friend Michelle’s pursuit of the Golden State Killer which is chronicled in I’ll Be Gone In The Dark which Billy helped finish after Michelle’s passing, and his own quest to find the murderer of the Allenstown 4 family.

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.

Drug Lord, a firsthand account of drug dealing, murder, and corruption, tells of drug kingpin Pablo Acosta, who smuggled up to 20 tons of cocaine each year into the United States before treachery brought about his downfall and grisly death.

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 comedian Barry Rothbart was growing up in Queens in the 90s, there were two things he knew for sure… his father, Allan, was his best friend and he was also Jon Bon Jovi’s manager. But then everything changed in 1997, when Barry’s dad got arrested and admitted that he actually worked for the Italian mafia, running the largest bookmaking operation in the United States.

A legal analyst for NPR, NBC, and CNN, delves into the facts surrounding what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in US history”: the case of Robert Hanssen—a Russian spy who was embedded in the FBI for two decades.

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.

In CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys, Patrick Nolan fearlessly investigates the CIA’s involvement in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy - why the brothers needed to die and how rogue intelligence agents orchestrated history’s most infamous conspiracy. Nolan furthers the research of leading scholars who agree that there remain serious unanswered questions regarding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

Grace Metalious, born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, came from humble beginnings. A former mill worker, mother of three, and school principal’s wife, she would shock the nation in 1956 with the publication of Peyton Place, her first novel about a murder in a small town. Quickly becoming the best-selling book of its time, the sexually charged book spawned sequels, two Hollywood movies, and a long-running television series on ABC starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal.