
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
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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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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Twelve from Hell
- The Ultimate True Crime Case Collection
- By: Ryan Green
- Narrated by: Ernie Sprance, Steve White
- Length: 37 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This Ultimate True Crime Case Collection contains disturbing accounts of some of the most brutal and bizarre true crime stories in history. Often told from the killer’s perspective, Green’s riveting narratives draw the listener into the real-life horror experienced by the victims with all the elements of a classic thriller. This collection includes the stories of Harold Shipman, Fred and Rose West, the Kurim case, the Mockingbird Hill massacre, the Truro Murders, Herb Baumeister, Katherine Knight, Henry Lee Lucas, and Nannie Doss.
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HeLLa GooD Listening!
- By SisterSeven on 10-22-22
By: Ryan Green
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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 Cold Case Foundation
- How a Team of Experts Solves Murders and Missing Persons Cases
- By: Thomas McHoes, Gregory M. Cooper
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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When Gregory M. Cooper, former head of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, founded the Cold Case Foundation in 2013, he had high expectations, but couldn't anticipate the level of response. What started with just a half-dozen or so retired FBI agents and homicide detectives has ballooned to more than 150 women and men who volunteer their time to help families of deceased or missing loved ones bring closure to cases that have gone "cold."
By: Thomas McHoes, and others
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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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Wink Wink Nudge Nudge
- Sexual Exploits and Secrets from Inside a Sugar Daddy Website
- By: Brook Urick
- Narrated by: Brook Urick
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Fall into the sugaring underworld with Brook, who worked behind the scenes at notorious sugar daddy website SeekingArrangement while trying her own luck as a sugar baby. Part coming of age memoir and part exposé with a twist of grim dating advice, Brook’s story parallels her unusual relationship history with her ascension working for a pseudo-dating website designed to protect predatory men.
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Sugar Babies From the 1st person POV
- By Pete A Turner on 12-19-24
By: Brook Urick
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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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The Scientist and the Serial Killer
- The Search for Houston's Lost Boys
- By: Lise Olsen
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
By: Lise Olsen
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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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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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You'll Never Believe Me
- A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist
- By: Kari Ferrell
- Narrated by: Kari Ferrell
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Before Anna Delvey, before the Tinder Swindler, there was Kari Ferrell. Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with questions of self-worth and identity as one of the few Asian Americans in her insulated community, leading her to run with the “bad crowd” in an effort to fit in. Soon, stealing from superstores turned into picking up men (and picking their pockets), and before she knew it, Kari had graduated from petty theft to Utah’s most wanted list. Though Kari was able to escape the Southwest, she couldn’t outrun her new moniker: the Hipster Grifter.
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Very interested and perfect the way she didn’t do too long in one area
- By Amazon Customer on 03-31-25
By: Kari Ferrell
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Eden Undone
- A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
- By: Abbott Kahler
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise.
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Abslutely enchanting
- By SBL on 10-15-24
By: Abbott Kahler
What listeners say about The Serial Killer’s Apprentice
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MightySkunkGrrl
- 01-30-25
Renner Rules!
I loved it! Excellent cases read by the author. Glad the updates were included. Hopefully more of these will be updated in the future.
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- Brit
- 12-19-24
Another great listen from Renner
Interesting collection of cold case overviews. For those who’ve followed many of these cases, the updates are especially intriguing. Always glad to see James Renner putting out quality true crime content for those of us who find living in a messy, chaotic world easier to process when we can solve the unresolved.
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