
The Serial Killer’s Apprentice
And Other True Stories of Cleveland’s Most Intriguing Unsolved Crimes
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Narrated by:
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James Renner
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By:
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James Renner
About this listen
Investigative reporter James Renner reopens cold cases that have baffled Clevelanders for years, including:
● Murder—Beverly Jarosz, just sixteen years old, felt a dark foreboding in the months before she was stabbed to death in her quiet Garfield Heights home. It all started with an anonymous gift.
● Stolen Identity—Joseph Newton Chandler was not who he claimed to be. Some think he was the Zodiac killer; others say he was D. B. Cooper, or even Jim Morrison.
● Suicide or murder?—Joseph Kupchik hid gambling problems from friends and family until he was found at the bottom of a nine-story parking deck in downtown Cleveland—with multiple stab wounds.
● Heist—In 1969, Lakewood bank employee Ted Conrad nabbed $215,000 from the vault one day after his twentieth birthday. The FBI still shows up at his high school reunions.
● Controversy—Jeffrey Krotine was thrice tried for the grisly 2003 murder of his wife and ultimately acquitted, to the frustration of prosecutors, detectives, and jurors.
These stories venture into dark alleys and strip clubs, as well as suburbs and small towns, where some of the region's most horrendous crimes have occurred.
©2008 James Renner (P)2024 Tantor MediaListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston police department dismissed them as runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.
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Uncovering evidence with determination
- By RoxB on 05-22-25
By: Lise Olsen
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Raised by a Serial Killer
- Discovering the Truth About My Father
- By: April Balascio
- Narrated by: April Balascio
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the “Sweetheart Murders” cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father’s dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective and the rest is infamous true crime history. In her unflinching memoir, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals, and silent fear.
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Good story, narration is elementary
- By AMarie on 12-19-24
By: April Balascio
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Home of the Happy
- A Murder on the Cajun Prairie
- By: Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
- Narrated by: Christine Lakin
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A compelling blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author’s investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades
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wow! what an interesting story
- By M.C. McGraw on 05-16-25
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The Great Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: James Renner
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Jack Felter, a history teacher, returns home to bucolic Franklin Mills, Ohio, to care for his father, a retired pilot who suffers from dementia and is quickly losing his memory. Jack would love to forget about Franklin Mills and about Sam, the girl he fell in love with, who ran off with his best friend, Tony. Except Tony has gone missing. Soon Jack is pulled into the search for Tony, but the only one who seems to know anything is Tony's last patient, a paranoid boy named Cole.
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This book literally changed my life.
- By Nash Brown on 10-06-17
By: James Renner
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A Hunger to Kill
- A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective, and the Quest for a Confession That Changed a Small Town Forever
- By: Kim Mager, Lisa Pulitzer - contributor
- Narrated by: Jennifer Blom
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On September 13, 2016, in the small town of Ashland, Ohio, emergency dispatchers received a 911 call from a terrified woman who claimed to be kidnapped. The man holding her hostage was Shawn Grate, a serial killer whom the press later dubbed “The Ladykiller.” A key to his conviction and death sentence were Grate’s extensive recorded confessions—all extracted by one woman: Detective Kim Mager.
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Turned into a sermon.
- By Victor Naranjo on 01-29-25
By: Kim Mager, and others
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A Family Secret
- My Shocking True Story of Surviving a Childhood in Hell
- By: Maureen Wood
- Narrated by: Rachel Atkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.
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Bravery in Spades
- By Mama of Roses on 03-22-21
By: Maureen Wood
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Obsessed
- A Survivor's Quest to Find the Lost Boys of New England
- By: David McGrath
- Narrated by: Dean Michaels
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tranquil towns of New England during the 1970s, a sinister mystery unfolded when several boys vanished without a trace, and the community’s peace was shattered. One boy’s body was found years later, but what happened to the others remained a mystery. In 2013, author David McGrath, a former host on the Law Enforcement Today Network and an investigator with a relentless drive for justice, watched a documentary about the missing boys.
By: David McGrath
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The Man from Primrose Lane
- By: James Renner
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.
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Good read, despite, not because of sci fi twist
- By Lulu W. on 07-18-12
By: James Renner
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The Sinners All Bow
- Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River.
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Wonderful storytelling!
- By Stephen Cronin on 05-26-25
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The Mother Next Door
- Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy
- By: Andrea Dunlop, Mike Weber
- Narrated by: Andrea Dunlop
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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No bond is more sacred than the one between a mother and child. And no figure is more sympathetic than a mother whose child faces a life-threatening illness. But what if the mother is the reason for the illness? What if the sympathy is the point? With help from some of the top MBP experts in the world, Dunlop and Weber uncover the complex maze of psychological, systemic, and cultural issues that compound MBP and offer solutions for how we might find our way out.
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Important and Fascinating Book
- By Anonymous User on 05-20-25
By: Andrea Dunlop, and others
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While Idaho Slept
- The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students
- By: J. Reuben Appelman
- Narrated by: Gary Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of the acclaimed true-crime memoir, The Kill Jar, tells the inside story of the “University of Idaho Murders,” offering a memorable, thoughtful dive into our societal fascination with true crime, the media’s seeming blood-frenzy, and the future of homicide investigations, while cultivating an intimate look into the minds and hearts of the victims and their suspected killer alike.
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The absolute details of the facts , great read...
- By Rachael on 01-25-24
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True Crime Case Histories: Massive 15-Book Collection
- 176 Disturbing True Crime Stories
- By: Jason Neal
- Narrated by: Simon de Deney, Timothy G. Little, Steven Rostance
- Length: 65 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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disappointed
- By linda on 03-13-25
By: Jason Neal
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What the Dead Know
- Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
- By: Barbara Butcher
- Narrated by: Barbara Butcher
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides.
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Didn’t Want The Book To End
- By Becky Sullivan on 06-29-23
By: Barbara Butcher
Renner Rules!
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Another great listen from Renner
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