WINNER: American Book Fest Award for True Crime: Non-Fiction! Maybe the youngest son of a violent criminal named Hoggy Thompson was born a beast. Maybe rage was beaten into him. One thing was certain, by the time he reached manhood, Jerry Thompson was a savage killer. He had no conscience about rape, child molestation, or thrashing a dozen men in a prison fight. Once he got his hands on a gun, any target would do. He didn't leave … [Read more...]
Author Larry Sells Debates The Death Penalty
If you offend someone, you might talk it over and come to a point of forgiveness. If you steal someone’s money, it can be repaid. If you take or destroy property, there may be a way to make restitution. Violence is another matter. Wounds can heal but trauma lingers. You cannot un-rape a person and you cannot un-do an injury. Certainly, you cannot return a life that’s been taken. Our justice system staggers beneath the weight of crimes that can … [Read more...]
Margie Porter On What She Has Learned From Writing True Crime
My grandson, a college student, asked if I gain any special insights from writing about crime. He raised the age-old question, “Can people be born evil? Can life events force them to become that way?” There are no clear-cut, scientific answers, of course, but it is interesting to ponder how we become the people we are. We have all experienced our share of trauma, but if hunger, poverty, and mistreatment made people evil, wouldn’t the residents … [Read more...]
THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS Reveals Serial Killers’ Connection to 50-Year-Old Double Murder Cold Case
In “The Garden State Parkway Murders,” true crime writer and attorney Christian Barth dives into the harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the parkway in the early hours of May 30, 1969. Among the numerous suspects Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living … [Read more...]
HOW NOW, BUTTERFLY? A Mother’s Struggle After Her Son Murders Her 4-Year-Old Daughter
Losing a young daughter to murder is the worst nightmare that a mother could possibly imagine, but what if the killer was her son? Charity Lee was thrust into this unimaginable situation when her 13-year-old son Paris murdered her beloved 4-year-old daughter, Ella. Charity goes through intense grief at the loss of her daughter, while at the same time trying to understand why her son would have done something as horrific as this, and how she … [Read more...]
Christian Barth
I never set out to become a writer. When I graduated from college I was a directionless and unmarketable young man with a political science degree. Fresh off two stage productions, for a brief time I entertained delusional fantasies of moving to Hollywood and becoming an actor, but for the next two years what theatrical aspirations I’d secretly harbored were subsumed by the ebb and flow of what we do before we discover what we want to do with the … [Read more...]
Charity Lee
Charity Lee is the daughter of a murdered father, daughter of an acquitted mother, mother of a murdered daughter, and mother of a murderer... In 1980, her father was murdered in the family home. Her mother was subsequently charged with, tried for, and acquitted of, murder-for-hire in his death. During her youth and young adulthood, she coped with mental health and addiction issues, experienced the birth of two children, Paris and … [Read more...]
Ori Spado Reminisces On His Time In Hollywood
As usual, I awoke thinking. I think constantly and often think of myself as The Thinker by Rodin, actually I had a statue of it on my desk for many years until my arrest and I do not know what happened to it after that. I guess everyone loses almost everything when they are arrested and do time. I actually think about everything I do. I think every job or scam out completely, and I always put myself in the other person’s place to think what … [Read more...]
SURVIVAL Photo Gallery
Photos from Vinnie Curto and Dennis Griffin's new book SURVIVAL … [Read more...]
New From Bestselling Author Michael Fleeman MISSING … AND PRESUMED DEAD
On a cold Southern night in 2013 under a full moon, 20-year-old Heather Elvis parked her car at a boat ramp along the Intracoastal Waterway and was never seen again. The disappearance of the beautiful, vivacious hostess at a popular Myrtle Beach, South Carolina restaurant made international headlines and triggered a sweeping high-stakes investigation that exposed a twisted web of deception, betrayal, sexual … [Read more...]
Join our email list