In 1974, two men vanished without a trace under suspicious circumstances, shocking the people of Iceland, where serious crime is almost non-existent. More than a year later there seemed to be a breakthrough when a small-time crook named Erla Bolladottir described a dream to police that they interpreted as a sign of trauma related to the mens disappearance. After lengthy interrogations, investigations and courtroom dramas, Erla and five acquaintances confessed to killing both men and were ...

New York Times Bestseller: The "astonishing" true crime story of a notorious black widow who preyed on her husband and daughter and faked her own death ( The Washington Post Book World ).Pretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and moth...

In 1909, a bathtub drowning became one of the most famous and bizarre criminal cases in American history.On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of twenty-four-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub—dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind.But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. An...

A stunning exposé of prostitution in Canada, where a criminal syndicate traffics young women across the country, selling their bodies and murdering them at will.Annie Mae Wilson was nineteen years old on the night she died. After five years working the streets of Nova Scotia, she had found a new pimp and cut ties with supermarket bag boy Bruno, who had called himself her man. Bruno was furious and demanded to be compensated. When Annie Mae refused, he lost his tempe...

Shares with readers America’s first and most infamous serial killer and his diabolical killing spree during the 1893 World’s Fair in ChicagoThe first comprehensive book following the life and career of H. H. HolmesA fascinating true story about a dark moment in Chicago’s historyH. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil uncovers not only the true story of Holmes but also how the legend evolved. It uses hundreds of primary source...

The New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Texas Institute of Letters's Carr P. Collins AwardOne of Book Riot's Best Books of the YearIn nineteenth-century Austin, Texas, a ruthless murderer terrorized the city in what would soon become a story more shocking than any fiction.In the late 1800s, just as Austin was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a ...

Behind Her Softly Sexy FacadeGun Barrel City, Texas. Police searching for missing Fire Department Captain Jimmy Don Beets dug inside a wishing well in the neatly-tended garden of his wife, 48-year-old Betty Lou Beets. Not only did they find his body, but that of Betty Lou's fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker. Each had been shot in the head and buried in a sleeping bag. It wasn't long before investigators unearthed the terrible truth.

They called it Satan’s Circus—a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was a place where everyone from the chorus girls to the beat cops was on the take and where bad boys became wicked men; a place where an upstanding young policeman such as Charley Becker could become the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a shield.Murder was so common in the vice district that few people...

They shot them down like rabbits . . .September 30, 1919. The United States teetered on the edge of a racial civil war. During the previous three months, racial fighting had erupted in twenty-five cities. And deep in the Arkansas Delta, black sharecroppers were meeting in a humble wooden church, forming a union and making plans to sue their white landowners, who for years had cheated them out of their fair share of the cotton crop. A car pulled up outside the church . . .Wha...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! THIS NEW AND UPDATED EDITION FINALLY PROVES THE SHOCKING IDENTITY OF THE BLACK DAHLIA KILLER—AND THE POLICE CORRUPTION THAT CONCEALED IT FOR SO LONGIn 1947, the brutal, sadistic murder of a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Short led to the largest manhunt in LA history. The killer teased and taunted the police and public for weeks, but his identity stayed a mystery, and the murder remained the most tantalizing unsolved case of the ...

"I love Skip Hollandsworth. I love his extraordinary stories, I love his rabid curiosity, and I love that as a writer, he personifies toeing the line between horror, humor, and absurdity. I am inspired by every single character he has introduced us to. "—Laura DernA superb collection of true-crime stories—written by Texas Monthly’s legendary feature writer Skip Hollandsworth—that reminds us why America is perennially obsessed with the genre.

" Lonesome Dove meets Where the Crawdads Sing" in this "gripping saga about a perilous time in our nation's history and a woman who survived it against all odds" (Patricia Wood, author of Lottery, shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction)."I could not stop reading." —Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times–bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean, the inaugural choice of Oprah's Book Club