Helen Plum Library

"Juniper Baker had just graduated from high school and was deep in the throes of a summer romance when Cal and Beth Murphy, a childless couple who lived on a neighboring farm, were brutally murdered. When her younger brother became the prime suspect, June's world collapsed and everything she loved that summer fell away. She left, promising never to return to tiny Jericho, Iowa. Until now. Officially, she's back in town to help an ill friend manage...

"It all started when journalist Jillian Lauren asked LAPD Homicide Detective Mitzi Roberts about which case Roberts was most proud of closing. "Samuel Little," Roberts answered. The now 79-year-old Little had murdered approximately 90 women over six decades and repeatedly got away with the murders due to lack of evidence (or jurisdiction); Roberts finally brought him to justice by tying him to the murders of three Los Angeles women. Surprised she...

"An account of the unsolved murder of two women in Shenandoah National Park, by a journalist with unprecedented access to all key elements of the case, and a story that reveals the challenges of wilderness forensics and the failures of our justice system"-- May 1996. Lollie Winans and Julie Williams entered Virginia's Shenandoah National Park for a week-long backcountry camping trip. The couple had met and fallen in love the previous summer while...

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller "Devil in the Grove" comes a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice. In December 1957, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. Journalist Mabel Norris Reese and an inexperienced young lawyer pursue the case, winning unlikely allies and chasing down leads until at long last they begin...

Two true-crime tales relate the stories of a wealthy man buried alive with only forty-eight hours of air, and a grisly shooting high in the Sierra Nevada mountains involving the locals and rich developers Murder beyond the grave: "Stephen Small has it all -- a Ferrari, fancy house, loving wife, and three sons. But the only thing he needs right now is enough air to breathe. Kidnapped, buried in a box, and held for ransom, Stephen has forty-eight hours...

"At Any Cost unravels the twisted story of Rod Covlin, whose unrepentant greed drove him to an unspeakable act of murder and betrayal that rocked New York City. Wealthy, beautiful, and brilliant, Shele Danishefsky had it all. After climbing Wall Street's corporate ladder to the top, she was eager to build a family with her much younger husband, a handsome Ivy League grad named Rod Covlin. But when Rod's hidden vices, from online gambling to rampant...

"The sensational true story of how a bank robber killed a man in a wild shootout, sparking a national debate around gun control and the death penalty. On July 24, 1964, twenty-four-year-old Matthew Kerry Smith disguised himself with a mask and a Beatle wig, hoisted a semi-automatic rifle, then held up a bank in North York, Ontario. The intelligent but troubled son of a businessman and mentally ill mother, Smith was a navy veteran with a young Indigenous...

"A brilliantly researched reinvestigation into the nearly forgotten century-old murder that inspired one of the most seductive mysteries in the history of television and film. In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumours, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox...

"In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local...

The co-hosts of the smash hit true crime podcast Redhanded dissect the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture and even our politics to find out what makes a killer tick