In and out of hospitals since birth, angelic nine-month-old Morgan Reid finally succumbed to what appeared to be sudden infant death syndrome. Morgan's Texas-born mother, Tanya, a nurse and devoted wife, pulled up stakes with her grieving husband, Jim, and moved on. It was the best way to put the past behind them. Until their son, Michael, a boy who by all accounts was terrified of his mother, began showing signs of the same affliction that stole the life of his baby sister....

The decision to publish the book has been very difficult, and taken with heavy hearts... My reason for writing it is simple: to give an account of the truth... Writing this memoir has entailed recording some very personal, intimate and emotional aspects of our lives. Sharing these with strangers does not come easily to me, but if I hadn't done so I would not have felt the book gave as full a picture as it is possible for me to give.

I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don’t even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I’m drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another drink and swig it, trying to forget about the latest case I can’t shake. Crime solving for me is more complex than the challenge of the hunt, or the process of piecing together a scientific puzzle. The thought of good people suffering drives me to the point of obsession.

Two days after Christmas, 2011, Russel Faria returned to his Troy, Missouri, home to find his wife, Betsy, dead, a knife still lodged in her neck. She had been stabbed 55 times in a brutal murder that would set off a chain of events leading to one man's wrongful conviction and imprisonment, another man's death, the revelation of a diabolical scheme, and an astounding miscarriage of justice left unresolved for another 10 years.

When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven-year-old J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow’s case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her.

In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Syed has maintained his innocence, and Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, has always believed him. By 2013, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in hopes of finding a journalist who could shed light on Adnan’s story. In 2014, Koenig's investigation turned into Serial, a Peabody Award-winning podcast with more than 500 million international listeners.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

Ann Rule was working on the biggest story of her career, tracking the trail of victims left by a brutal serial killer. Little did this future best-selling author know that the savage slayer she was hunting was the young man she counted among her closest friends. Everyone's picture of a natural winner, Ted Bundy was a bright, charming, and handsome man with a promising future as an attorney. But on January 24, 1989 Bundy was executed for the murders of three young women - and had confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more women from coast to coast.

In the most extraordinary journey Ann Rule has ever undertaken, America's master of true crime has spent more than two decades researching the story of the Green River Killer, who murdered more than 49 young women. Green River, Running Red is a harrowing account of a modern monster, a killer who walked among us undetected. It is also the story of his quarry -- of who these young women were and who they might have become.

Did Lizzie Borden murder her own father and stepmother? Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence? Who killed JonBenet Ramsey? America's foremost expert on criminal profiling and 25-year FBI veteran John Douglas, along with author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, explores those tantalizing questions and more in this mesmerizing work of detection. With uniquely gripping analysis, the authors reexamine and reinterpret the accepted facts, evidence, and victimology of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime.

He was a model citizen. A hospital volunteer. And one of the most sadistic serial killers of all time. But few people could see the cruel monster beneath the colorful clown makeup that John Gacy wore to entertain children in his Chicago suburb. Few could imagine what lay buried beneath his house of horrors—until a teenage boy disappeared before Christmas in 1978, leading prosecutor Terry Sullivan on the greatest manhunt of his career.

The Search for the Green River Killer is the ultimate authoritative account of the Pacific Northwest killing spree that held a nation spellbound - and continues to horrify and fascinate, spawning dramatizations and documentaries of a demented killer who seemed unstoppable for decades.

In the three decades since April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis, scores of books and articles have questioned whether James Earl Ray, King's killer, acted alone or was part of a larger conspiracy. Now, based on explosive new interviews, confidential files, and previously undisclosed evidence, best-selling author Gerald Posner finally resolves the simple truth of the last great political murder mystery of the 1960s, definitively proving that Ray acted alone.

On Thursday, December 15, 1994, Joann Katrinak and her three-month-old son, Alex, went missing from their Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, home. In what would become Pennsylvania's first use of mitochondrial DNA in a criminal case, Patricia Rorrer - a young mother who had never met either victim - was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. But did the jury make the right decision?

In 2000, Douglas Preston and his family moved to Florence, Italy, fulfilling a long-held dream. They put their children in Italian schools and settled into a 14th century farmhouse in the green hills of Florence, where they devoted themselves to living la dolce vita while Preston wrote his best-selling suspense novels. All that changed when he discovered that the lovely olive grove in front of their house had been the scene of a double-murder.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

This riveting inside story of the intense search for the Salt Lake City teenager who was kidnapped from her bed reveals never-before-told details of the largest investigation in Utah state history. Paced like a thriller, this true account moves between the parallel stories of the searchers and the abductor. Going beyond a mere eyewitness account, the book includes information culled from interviews with more than 150 people involved in the search and investigation, notes from family meetings, and memos from law enforcement officials.

A real-estate lawyer in Connecticut's moneyed seaside communities, Beth Ann Carpenter, 30, had beauty, brains, and success. But she wanted more - namely guardianship of her two-year-old niece, Rebecca, daughter of Beth's estranged sister, Kim.

Before Adam Walsh there were no faces on milk cartons, no Amber Alerts, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, no federal databases of crimes against children, no pedophile registry. His 1981 abduction and murder, unsolved for over a quarter of a century, forever changed America.

Ann Rule, who shared her own nerve-jangling account of unknowingly befriending sadistic sociopath Ted Bundy in The Stranger Beside Me, chronicles other fateful encounters with the hidden predators among us in this riveting collection, fifteenth in the best-selling series drawn from her personal files. First in line is a stunning case that spanned thirty years and took a determined detective to four states - ending, finally, in Alaska - where he unraveled not one but two murders.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.

Praying for a happy ending, friends and family stood by Laci's grieving husband Scott. Four months later, Laci's decomposed body was found in the murky waters of San Francisco Bay. The body of her child had washed ashore about a mile away, after a possible "coffin birth." It was a sad closure to an exhaustive search, and a grim end to a marriage that by all accounts had appeared to be perfect.

It’s a chilling reality that homicide investigators know all too well: The last face most murder victims see is not that of a stranger, but of someone familiar. Whether only an acquaintance or a trusted intimate, such killers share a common trait that triggers the downward spiral toward death for someone close to them: They are masters at hiding who they really are. Their clever masks let them appear safe, kind, and truthful. They are anything but - and almost no one can detect the murderous impulses buried deep in their psyches.

Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.

Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us - and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he has tracked down some of the nation's most brutal murderers. Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for America's most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.

It was the trial that stunned America, the verdict that shocked us all. On July 5, 2011, nearly three years after her initial arrest, Casey Anthony walked away, virtually scot-free, from one of the most sensational murder trials of all time. She'd been accused of killing her daughter, Caylee, but the trial only left behind more questions: Was she actually innocent? What really happened to Caylee? Was this what justice really looked like?

As an exotic dancer at The Great Alaskan Bush Company in Anchorage, Mechele Hughes Linehan knew how to captivate men. Three of them were convinced she was engaged to them. Then one spring morning in 1996, one man, Kent Leppink, was found in the snow, shot in the head....Days before his death, Kent had removed Mechele's name from his million-dollar life insurance policy. He wrote a letter to his family stating that, should he meet foul play, Mechele would likely be among those involved. But she wasn't charged with Kent's death. She married a doctor, moved to Olympia, Washington, and began a new life.

Everyone thinks they know the story of Milly Dowler. Haunting headlines about the missing schoolgirl splashed across front pages. The family's worst fears realised when her body was found months later. The years of waiting for the truth, only to learn that the killer, known to the police, lived just yards from where Milly had vanished. The parents subjected to horrific psychological torture at a trial orchestrated by the murderer.

In this fascinating, in-depth account of the hunt for serial killers, Colin Wilson, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, examines the ways they can be tracked down and caught, from the tried-and-true methods of the early 20th century to the high-tech processes in use today. Wilson examines such areas as psychological profiling, genetic fingerprinting, and the launch of the Behavioral Science Unit. He delves into the importance of fantasy to serial killers, the urge to keep on killing, the desire to become notorious, and murder as an addictive drug.

Over a three-decade span, more than 20 women - many teenagers - died mysteriously in the small towns bordering Interstate 45, a 50-mile stretch of highway running from Houston to Galveston. The victims were strangled, shot, or savagely beaten.