Favorite True Crime Books – part 1
The Peyton-Allan Files by Phil Stanford : Two teenagers, making out one night in a car on the edge of town ― slaughtered by person or persons unknown. No physical evidence to speak of. No known motive. For all the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office knows, there’s a psychotic killer roaming the hills west of town. Until they arrest someone for the murders of Larry Peyton and Beverly Allan, no one will rest easy. The Peyton-Allan Files is the story of the savage double-murder that changed life forever in the deceptively peaceful town of Portland, Oregon. A true-life murder mystery, guaranteed to keep you turning pages till the last guilty party has been brought to justice ― or maybe just framed. Because one way or another, this case has got to be solved.
House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying by John Dean : In the heart of Indianapolis in the mid 1960’s, through a twist of fate and fortune, a pretty young girl came to live with a thirty-seven-year-old mother and her seven children. What began as a temporary childcare arrangement between Sylvia Likens’s parents and Gertrude Baniszewski turned into a crime that would haunt cops, prosecutors, and a community for decades to come…
When police found Sylvia’s emaciated body, with a chilling message carved into her flesh, they knew that she had suffered tremendously before her death. Soon they would learn how many others―including some of Baniszewski’s own children―participated in Sylvia’s murder, and just how much torture had been inflicted in one house of evil.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote : On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
Bind, Torture, Kill : The Inside Story of BTK by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, Hurst Lavigne and L. Kelly: For thirty-one years, a monster terrorized the residents of Wichita, Kansas. A bloodthirsty serial killer, self-named “BTK”—for “bind them, torture them, kill them”—he slaughtered men, women, and children alike, eluding the police for decades while bragging of his grisly exploits to the media. The nation was shocked when the fiend who was finally apprehended turned out to be Dennis Rader—a friendly neighbor … a devoted husband … a helpful Boy Scout dad … the respected president of his church.
Written by four award-winning crime reporters who covered the story for more than twenty years,Bind, Torture, Kill is the most intimate and complete account of the BTK nightmare told by the people who were there from the beginning. With newly released documents, evidence, and information—and with the full cooperation, for the very first time, of the Wichita Police Department’s BTK Task Force—the authors have put all the pieces of the grisly puzzle into place, thanks to their unparalleled access to the families of the killer and his victims.
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn: In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially mixed, and he was a leader in the early civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California, where he got involved in electoral politics and became a prominent Bay Area leader. But underneath the surface lurked a terrible darkness.
In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his early days as an idealistic minister to a secret life of extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing, before the fateful decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.
Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is “the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it…The result is a disturbing portrait of evil—and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’s malign charisma”
Nothing Is Strange with You: The Life and Crimes of Gordon Stewart Northcott by James Jeffrey Paul: A young man kidnaps his own nephew and makes him his servant and sex slave. He abducts young boys, has his way with them, and, if they know too much, kills them. He forces his nephew to participate in his crimes and to consign these little victims, sometimes still living, to their graves.
His father is afraid of his own son. His son mocks and abuses him, falsely accuses him of incest and child abuseand still he supports his son.
His mother loves her boy and will do anything to help himeven commit murder.
The Gordon Stewart Northcott casea part of which is fictionalized in the major new Clint Eastwood film CHANGELING, starring Angelina Jolieis still, eight decades later, one of the most nightmarish in American criminal annals. This booknearly two decades in the research and writingtells the whole story for the first time.
Fred & Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors by Howard Sounes: During their long relationship, the Wests murdered a series of young women, burying the remains of nine victims under their home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, including those of their daughter. What was left of Fred West’s eight-year-old stepdaughter was dug up from under the Wests’ previous Gloucester home; his first wife and nanny were buried in open country. Most victims had been decapitated and dismembered, their remains showing signs of sexual torture. These twelve are just the ones police found when the Wests were arrested in 1994. There may be more whose bones have not been located …
Howard Sounes broke the first major story about the Wests as a journalist, and covered the murder trial of Rosemary West, before writing Fred & Rose, the definitive account of this infamous case. Beginning with Fred’s and Rose’s bizarre childhoods, Sounes charts their lives and crimes in forensic detail, creating a fascinating and truly frightening account of a marriage soaked in blood.
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson: In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves “the Emmett Till generation” launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till’s lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.
But what actually happened to Emmett Till—not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till “unfolds like a movie” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till’s innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed. “Jolting and powerful” (The Washington Post), the book “provides fresh insight into the way race has informed and deformed our democratic institutions” (Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Carry Me Home) and “calls us to the cause of justice today” (Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina NAACP).
In Broad Daylight by Harry N. MacLean: Ken Rex McElroy terrorized the residents of several counties in northwestern Missouri for a score of years. He raped young girls and brutalized them after they went to live with him or even married him; he shot at least two men; he stole cattle and hogs, and burned down the houses of some who interfered with his criminal activities. Thanks to the expert efforts of his lawyer and the pro-defendant bias of state laws, he served no more than a few days in jail, the author shows. In 1981, sentenced for the shooting of a popular grocer and free on bail, he was killed by the men of Skidmore, the center of his felonies; they closed ranks against all attempts to identify those who had pulled the triggers. Written by a first-time author, this is an engrossing, credible examination of the way vigilante action can take over when the law appears to be powerless. BOMC and QPBC alternates.
Killer Clown by Terry Sullivan: 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 teenaged boy disappeared before Christmas in 1978, leading prosecutor Terry Sullivan on the greatest manhunt of his career.
Reconstructing the investigation–from records of violence in Gacy’s past, to the gruesome discovery of 29 corpses of abused boys in Gacy’s crawlspace and four others found in the nearby river–Sullivan’s shocking eyewitness account takes you where few true crime books ever go: inside the heart of a serial murder investigation and trial.
Inside Alcatraz: My Time on the Rock by Jim Quillen: Jim Quillen, AZ586 – a runaway, problem child and petty thief – was jailed several times before his twentieth birthday. In August 1942, after escaping from San Quentin, he was arrested on the run and sentenced to forty-five years in prison, and later transferred to Alcatraz.
This is the true story of life inside America’s most notorious prison – from terrifying times in solitary confinement to daily encounters with ‘the Birdman’, and what really happened during the desperate and deadly 1946 escape attempt.
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn: Forget everything you think you know about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Previous books and films, including the brilliant 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, have emphasized the supposed glamour of America’s most notorious criminal couple, thus contributing to ongoing mythology. The real story is completely different — and far more fascinating.
