In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on the "The Dating Game," one of America's most popular television shows at the time. Handsome, successful, and romantic, he was embraced by the audience--and chosen as the winner by the beautiful bachelorette. Ten years before his TV appearance, Rodney was charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of an eight-year-old girl. In the decades that followed, he would be accused of seven murders--and,...

In October 2002, Susan Polk, a housewife and mother of three, was arrested for the murder of her husband, Felix. The arrest in her sleepy northern California town kicked off what would become one of the most captivating murder trials in recent memory, as police, local attorneys, and the national media sought to unravel the complex web of events that sent this seemingly devoted housewife over the edge.

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On a fall afternoon in 1983, in an upscale Dallas suburb, Rozanne Gailiunas was found stripped, bound to her bed, and shot through the skull. Her four-year-old son has been napping peacefully in the next room when she was killed. Rozanne's husband, Dr. Peter Gailiunas--and her lover, Larry Aylor--immediately fell under suspicion. Until a surprise informant identified the mastermind behind the murder as Aylor's own wife, Joy--a woman so driven by jealousy...

NYC journalist Ethan Brown investigates the tragic end of Zackery Bowen, a young charismatic soldier from New Orleans, in this moving and mesmerizing account of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and no-safety-net America. Among the newsworthy elements in the book is Brown's discovery that this tragedy--like so many others--could have been avoided if the military had simply not failed this soldier.

In the summer of 1957, a young Holmes County farmer was gunned down in cold blood. There was little to distinguish this slaying from hundreds of others throughout the United States that year except for one detail: Paul Coblentz was Amish. A committed pacifist, Coblentz would not raise a hand against his killers. As sensational crimes often do, the "Amish murder" opened a window into the private lives of the young man, his family and his community--a...

Reporter James Renner investigates the kidnapping and murder of eleven-year-old Amy Mihaljevic in Northeast Ohio, 1989, revealing new clues about key suspects and sharing his own theory of what really happened to the young girl.

In 1900, Margaret Hossack, the wife of a prominent Iowa farmer, was arrested for bludgeoning her husband to death with an ax while their children slept upstairs. The community was outraged: How could a woman commit such an act of violence? Firsthand accounts describe the victim, John Hossack, as a cruel and unstable man. Perhaps Margaret Hossack was acting out of fear. Or perhaps the story she told was true-that an intruder broke into the house, killed...

Elizabeth Lochtefeld was a glowing, charismatic and driven woman who'd built a million-dollar fortune in Manhattan before settling into a new life in one of America's most elite resort communities. She'd planned to dedicate the rest of her life to charity-and to marry and finally start a family of her own. When Lochtefeld met thrity-seven year-old Tim Toolan-- a tall, strapping, handsome, and Columbia graduate and Wall Street ace who'd made it to...

The horrific 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn shocked the citizens of Philadelphia. Plucked from her own front yard, Barbara Jean was found dead less than two and a half hours later in a cardboard TV box dragged to a nearby street curb. After months of investigation with no strong leads, the case went cold. Four years later it was reopened, and Walter Ogrod, a young man with autism spectrum disorder who had lived across the street

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Now a classic of true crime, Victim is a compelling and tragic look at how lives can be changed forever by a random act of violence. During an armed robbery, several hostages were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Victim focuses on the members of one family - including a mother who died after the attack and a son who was left barely alive - as they fought for his survival and struggled to rebuild their lives. Victim was the first...