True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

The District Attorney began his opening statement with, "If you don't know what hell is like, you're about to find out." In 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris went on a rape and killing rampage. The pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, sledgehammers, and ice picks they used on their victims became their calling card and moniker: The Toolbox Killers. They were soon apprehended and convicted for their atrocities, but for decades, refused to reveal the location of their victims' bodies. More than two decades later, criminologist Laura Brand had the opportunity to interview this sadistic pair as they sat behind bars, probing the depths of their depravity right up to the days of their deaths. Over this relentless six-year period, Bittaker finally gave Brand what he had withheld from law enforcement and families alike: the precise locations of two victims' remains. Brand's investigation tore open sealed police reports, court transcripts, and witness accounts, and unearthed brutal and shocking new findings: undisclosed victims, forgotten evidence, and chilling new insights that resurrected this nightmare in unimaginable ways. God's Not Here, Only Devils is told through a powerful blend of narratives: the voices of Bittaker himself, his victims, traumatized witnesses, the tenacious lead detective, and the hardened District Attorney.. A visceral retelling of the horrors that unfolded and the legacy of terror the Toolbox Killers left behind.GOD'S NOT HERE, ONLY DEVILS: Revelations From The Toolbox Killers—Laura Brand

A meticulously researched page-turner about one of the Philadelphia suburbs’ most shocking 20th-century crimes. A gunman broke into Jack and Peggy Abt’s house moments after the last family member left for the day. He took a seat next to the upright piano in the living room and waited silently for 11 hours. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t watch television.People expect things to go bump in the night, but, in 1976, most adults never fretted a stranger would invade the sanctity of their home in the middle of the day. Six people walked through the kitchen door one by one that afternoon, all expecting nothing more than a Friday night fish fry. The killer leaped out from behind the living room wall over and over and over and over and over and over again. He fired at them at a distance of less than 18 inches, the width of a dining room chair. After each murder, he dragged the body to the basement. Then, to maintain the element of surprise, he sped back upstairs to tidy up for his next unsuspecting victim.This first-person story from a news reporter who was on the scene 90 minutes after the killer slipped away is built from autopsy reports, prison records, IQ tests, trial transcripts, the killer’s own eidetic confession, interviews with witnesses in 1976 and in the 2020s, and the author’s experiences covering the case from the first night to the stunning courtroom moment when the announcement of six death penalties was met with loud cheers.With that research, it was possible to reconstruct the six murders, minute by minute. Tension builds as the six innocent victims turn the kitchen doorknob at 3:30, 4:15, 4:40, 5:15, 6:10 and at 6:30. Readers know their fates, but they didn’t. KILLER IN THE HOUSE: Ten Days of Terror in a Pennsylvania Suburb—Kathryn Canavan

September 1990. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, teenage honors student Lisa Lee Pruett vanishes into the night. A boy calls 911 when she does not arrive for a secret late-night meet-up. Police soon find her nearby, stabbed to death and left exposed.Lisa had just passed an important test and earned her driver’s license. She was a Girl Scout, athlete, musician, and lover of poetry. Then her life was cut short.Investigators quickly focused on a troubled young man who lived a few blocks away. His name leaked, the media swarmed, and the case became a spectacle. Two years later, he was indicted on controversial testimony, tried under national attention, and ultimately acquitted. His life never recovered.Decades later, the murder remains unsolved.Now a former police officer, Michael Kelly, reopens the trail, determined to separate rumor from evidence and find the truth, if it is still there to be found. IN PUBLIC RECORD: A Journey to the Truth of a Murder and Trial—Michael Kelly

The murder of a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher in 2004 never made the evening news, yet within hours arrests were made, charges filed, and a speedy conviction sent to prison Jimmy Kitlas, an incredibly shy, special needs teenager with no criminal history whatsoever.20 years after the murder, a woman named Kelley Leigh asked Burl Barer and Frank C. Girardot to investigate. She believed that the case’s rapid resolution concealed a deeper, more troubling narrative—one marked by deception, manipulation, dishonesty, and a profound disregard for truth and justice.She was right. Of the last three people to see the victim alive, only one had both the motive and the opportunity to strangle him to death, and it wasn’t Jimmy Kitlas.What begins with a dead body on the bed leads to a bizarre scheme to steal a fortune in gold, a plot to smuggle MDMA, and an incredible joint effort by the American Mafia and the Russian Mob to defraud the United States Government out of billions of dollars. WHERE MURDER LIES: Death and Deception in West Hollywood—Burl Barer and Frank C. Giradot Jr.

THE 911 CALL THAT OPENED HELL'S DOOR. ONE CONFESSION. A LIFETIME OF TERROR.The 911 call was harrowing."I accidentally killed someone. Please!" the man said, his voice rising."Who?""My stepmom. My name is Ian Anselmo. Sue-Ellen Anselmo, she's in the car with me. My dad is going to kill me. I guess I strangled her. I don't remember doing it. I remember the argument."The call disintegrated quickly, with the 20-year-old howling and sobbing so pitifully that the dispatcher could not understand what he was saying, except that he was calling from a cemetery.The graveyard had its own lurid past as the site of a murderous teen vampire cult initiation 20 years earlier, now it was a bloody crime scene, and would later become the site of the pregnant woman's burial, more family violence, and the removal of her body.The call was just the beginning. Investigators would discover a family cult stained with allegations of sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, brain-washing, and total patriarchal control.It would end in an insanity defense, with Ian's lawyer calling the family atmosphere "crazy," and pitting psychiatrists and psychologists against each other, revealing questionable practices, motives and techniques by those experts.Frank Stanfield, a 50-year newspaperman, covered the incredible case from the very beginning. MURDER IN THE GRAVEYARD: A Family Cult Tragedy—Frank Stanfield