On January 7, 1994, residents of the Berkshire Hills woke up to a typical snowy winter day in the majestic woods of Western Massachusetts. The quaint New England towns, the idyllic scenery and the people who lived there could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

For 20 years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie - redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge. 

On the day after Thanksgiving in 1969, Betsy Aardsma, a 22-year-old graduate student in English at Penn State University, was stabbed to death in the stacks of Pattee Library at the university's main campus in the small town of State College. For more than 40 years, her murder went unsolved. Aardsma was smart, pretty and kind, and the Pennsylvania State Police could not figure out why anyone would want to kill her.

On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of 24-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub - dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind. But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. And Ocey's own mother and two aunts were far from the sorrowful caretakers they appeared to be.

Best friends Daryl Barber and James Boucher were responsible, and their parents trusted them to spend Spring Break at Daytona Beach unchaperoned. When the boys missed their agreed-upon daily check-ins, their parents were disappointed. When they failed to come home on their planned return date, their parents were terrified. They could not have known that their innocent sons would encounter two violent men on the Florida coast. They could not have imagined the torture their children would endure before their bodies turned up four months later in a Florida swamp.

The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and “mysterious” deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school’s management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

If you thought you knew the story of The Teacher's Pet, get ready to be shocked. Hedley Thomas takes you behind the scenes with a blow-by-blow account of one of the most intriguing and enduring murder mysteries of our time - the crime, the podcast investigation, the sexual exploitation of teenage students, the courtroom drama - and how justice was finally delivered.

On February 24, 1986, 29-year-old newlywed Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in the home she shared with her husband, John. The crime scene suggested a ferocious struggle, and police initially assumed it was a burglary gone awry. Before her death, Sherri had confided to her parents that an ex-girlfriend of John’s, a Los Angeles police officer, had threatened her. The Rasmussens urged the LAPD to investigate the ex-girlfriend, but the original detectives pursued only burglary suspects, and the case went cold.

In the early morning of October 18, 1986, Cherie Wier’s life collapses when her teenage son takes the life of her beloved husband. For years, Cherie grapples with events preceding and following the crime, struggling to overcome the consuming grief she suffers from her loss and the difficulty she faces as she attempts to forgive her son. The courtroom accounts of gruesome details and the shocking testimonies from experts only add to Cherie’s yearning to make sense of the crime. She is tormented, wanting to know why the tragedy happened, and if there was anything she could have done.

On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that two of its most beloved professors had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims to their murderer or murderers. A few weeks later, across the river, in the town of Chelsea, Vermont, police cars were spotted in front of the house of a high school senior. Soon, the town discovered the incomprehensible reality that two of Chelsea's brightest and most popular sons, were now fugitives, wanted for the murders.

The summer of 1983 was like no other in Joliet, Ill., a hard-working, rough-and-tough blue-collar industrial city an hour’s drive southwest of Chicago. During one of the hottest summers on record, the citizens of Joliet, were terrorized by an elusive serial-killing madman.

This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and audiences of both fiction and true-crime nonfiction. It's the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, and wrote her out of the will.

In April 1997, pretty, 22-year-old Jacine Gielinski stopped her car at a red light in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She had no idea that the two young men looking at her from the car next to hers would in that moment decide she would be their target for unspeakable horrors.

Weaver and fiber artist Edith “Pen” Meyer knew her friend Sandy Merritt’s relationship with a married man was wrong. She had even urged Sandy to take out a restraining order against Kenneth Carpenter. Which was why her call to Sandy on February 23, 2005, seemed to come from out of the blue. During it, she told Sandy to drop the restraining order and get back together with Ken. Pen was never seen again. One man stood to gain from Pen’s disappearance: Ken Carpenter. But evidence was bleak: no blood, no DNA, no body. Until detectives found notes hidden....

All Diane Bertalan really knew of her new husband, John, was that he was a widower, he lavished her with gifts, and he preferred to keep his past a secret. What she didn't know was that the FBI had been watching him for years. In the fall of 2000, she found out why - it was a crime that had been haunting authorities for decades. They called it the mystery of the Lady in the Box.