A killer so savage (and so sly) that the brutal frenzy of his crimes makes an unassailable insanity defense - such is the opponent facing Tony Fraser, a young district attorney willing to risk anything, everything, for a sentence of death. Plotted against by court psychiatrists, tormented by vanishing evidence and fugitive witnesses, his own wife a target, Fraser finds himself checkmated by the accused - until he seizes an opportunity to go beyond the letter of the law.

On New Year's Eve, 1939, a horrific triple murder occurred in rural Oklahoma. Within a matter of days, investigators identified several suspects: convicts who had been at a craps game with one of the victims the night before. Also at the craps game was a young black farmer named W. D. Lyons. Political pressure mounted to find a villain. The governor's representative settled on Lyons, who was arrested, tortured into signing a confession, and tried for the murder. The NAACP's new Legal Defense and Education Fund sent its young chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, to take part in the trial.

Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the 20th century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? Now available for the first time in unabridged audio, the gripping story of this famous and haunting crime is brought to life by acclaimed narrator Scott Brick.

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.

This is not a manufactured dialogue from a thriller but the words of attorney Sharon Muse. They came after she survived an attempted kidnapping, rape, and murder at the hands of Hank Morrison, a former client. On April 7, 2006, Muse miraculously escaped from the sociopathic Morrison, only to find that the threat to her life was just beginning. Ineptitude in the justice system threatened to release Morrison and allow him the opportunity to finish the job, which he adamantly pledged to do. Muse would have to fight at every step to ensure her safety.

In the early morning hours of August 29, 1986, Clarkson University sophomore Katy Hawelka - bright, pretty, and full of life - strolled back to her upstate New York campus after a night out. On the dimly lit path beside the university's ice hockey arena, a stranger emerged from the darkness. A Stranger Killed Katy is the true story of a life cut tragically short, and of the fight by a grieving mother and others more than 30 years later to ensure that a killer would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

We all think we are compassionate just like we all think we are honest. But true compassion is not innate. Compassion for others, especially those that we don’t know or understand, must be learned. Our lack of compassion is perhaps most extreme in the exercise of criminal justice, where a person’s entire life, worth, and character are judged through the myopic lens of a single act. But no one, says Robin Steinberg, should be reduced to their worst moment. From the founder and CEO of The Bail Project, The Courage of Compassion unveils how we can reimagine justice through compassion.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Innocent Blood is the true story of Charles Hatcher and his life of crime - a powerful and blood-chilling glimpse into the darkness between sanity and madness. It also chronicles a justice system gone wrong. Throughout his criminal career, Hatcher was able to fool dozens of psychiatrists, who repeatedly failed to identify him as a multiple murderer. Hatcher's astonishing skill was not just in his ability to murder and escape imprisonment. He became an expert at manipulating the criminal justice system.

In November 2001, the body of a young doctor named Andrew Bagby was discovered in Keystone State Park outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania, five bullet wounds in his face, chest, buttocks, and the back of the head. For parents Dave and Kate, the pain was unbearable? But Andrew's murder was only the first in a string of tragic events.

In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.

Lizzie Borden took an axe...or did she? Forget everything you already think you know about this compelling case and discover what did - and what did not - happen in the story of Lizzie Borden! What dark secrets have never been told? What happened in the grim aftermath of the murder trial? Do the spirits of the dead still linger in the house where the Bordens were killed? You’ll find these answers and more and you’ll never look at this chilling story in the same way again!

Nearly a hundred years ago, two wealthy and privileged teenagers—Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—were charged and convicted in a gruesome crime that would lead to the original “Trial of the Century”. Even in Jazz Age Chicago, the murder was uniquely shocking for the motive of the killers: well-to-do Jewish scions, full of promise, had killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it. The trial was made even more sensational by the revelation of a love affair between the defendants and by defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

No crime in history had more eyewitnesses. On November 24, 1963, two days after the killing of President Kennedy, a troubled nightclub owner named Jack Ruby quietly slipped into the Dallas police station and assassinated the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Millions of Americans witnessed the killing on live television, and yet the event would lead to questions for years to come. It also would help to spark the conspiracy theories that have continued to resonate today. Dan Abrams and David Fisher unveil the astonishing details behind the first major trial of the television century.

Statement analysis is the process of analyzing a persons words to see if the person is being truthful or deceptive. There are usually several ways you can phrase a statement. People will word their statement based on all their knowledge. Therefore, their statement may include information they did not intend to share. I Know You Are Lying will show you what to look for in a verbal and written statement to determine if a person is telling the truth. The statement analysis techniques will also show you how to obtain additional information from a statement.

On New Year's Eve, 1939, a horrific triple murder occurred in rural Oklahoma. Within a matter of days, investigators identified several suspects: convicts who had been at a craps game with one of the victims the night before. Also at the craps game was a young black farmer named W. D. Lyons. Political pressure mounted to find a villain. The governor's representative settled on Lyons, who was arrested, tortured into signing a confession, and tried for the murder. The NAACP's new Legal Defense and Education Fund sent its young chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, to take part in the trial.

In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.

In Race Against Time, Mitchell takes listeners on the twisting, pulse-racing road that led to the reopening of four of the most infamous killings from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, decades after the fact. His work played a central role in bringing killers to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, and the Mississippi Burning case. Mitchell reveals how he unearthed secret documents and found long-lost suspects and witnesses, building up evidence strong enough to take on the Klan.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: The country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment.

When 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. "The Boston Boy Fiend" was imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree - the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime - were as relevant in the so-called Age of Innocence as they are today.

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.

At 5:40 a.m. on July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village, a small suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, received a frantic phone call from his neighbor Dr. Sam Sheppard. The news was too terrible to comprehend: Marilyn, Sam's lovely wife, was dead, her face and torso beaten beyond recognition by an unknown assailant who had knocked Sam unconscious and escaped just before dawn. In the adjacent bedroom, Chip, the Sheppards' seven-year-old son, had slept through the entire ordeal. Almost immediately, the police began to suspect Sam Sheppard.

Early on the morning of February 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a Green Beret doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald called the police for help. When the officers arrived at his home they found the bloody and battered bodies of MacDonald's pregnant wife and two young daughters. The word "pig" was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime.

The death of promising young pediatric AIDS researcher Eric Miller stunned the Raleigh, North Carolina, community, largely because of the horrific way he was killed. For months, Eric was slowly tortured as arsenic consumed his body. No one thought that Eric Miller's wife, Ann - an attractive, demure, educated scientist - could be capable of such a horrible crime. No one except for veteran homicide investigator Chris Morgan, a man in the twilight of his career. But from the moment Morgan saw the 30-year-old widow in the police department interview room, he knew he was seeing pure evil.

Ella Broden is living a double life. By day, Ella works as a buttoned-up attorney on some of the city's most grueling cases. By night, she pursues her passion for singing in the darkest clubs of Manhattan. No one knows her secret, not even Charlotte, the younger sister she practically raised. But it seems she's not the only one in the family with something to hide. When Charlotte announces she's sold her first novel, Ella couldn't be more thrilled...until she gets a call that her sister's gone missing.

What went wrong in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial? Former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi dares to lay bare the bungling he perceived in the case. Incriminating evidence was never presented and lapses in strategy left prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden at a disadvantage. These are just a few of the fatal errors that led to a victory for the defense.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

In 1959, Olathe, Kansas was made famous by the murder of the Clutter family and Truman Capote's ground-breaking book on the crime, In Cold Blood. But fewer know that Olathe achieved notoriety again in 1982, when a member of Olathe's growing Evangelical Christian population, a gentle man named David Harmon, was bludgeoned to death while sleeping - the force of the blows crushing his face beyond recognition.

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.