Who killed the Black Dahlia? In this eye-opening shocker, an award-winning producer, true-crime researcher, and Hollywood insider finally solves the greatest - and most gruesome - murder mystery of the twentieth century just before its 80th anniversary.

In January 1947, the bisected body of Elizabeth Short, completely drained of blood, was discovered in an undeveloped lot in Los Angeles. Its gruesome mutilations led to a firestorm of publicity, city-wide panic, and an unprecedented number of investigative paths led by the LAPD—all dead ends. The Black Dahlia murder remained an unsolved mystery for over seventy years.

Six years earlier and sixteen hundred miles away, another woman’s life had ended in a similarly horrific manner. Leila Welsh was an ambitious, educated, popular, and socially connected beauty. Though raised modestly on a prairie farm, she was heiress to her Kansas City family’s status and wealth. On a winter morning in 1941, Leila’s butchered body was found in her bedroom bearing the marks of unspeakable trauma.

One victim faded into obscurity. The other became notorious. Both had in common a killer whose sadistic mind was a labyrinth of dark secrets.

Eli Frankel reveals for the first time a key fact about the Black Dahlia crime scene, never before shared with the public, that leads inexorably to the stunning identification of a criminal who was at the same time amateurish and fiendish, skilled and lucky, sophisticated and brutish. Drawing on newly discovered documents, law enforcement files, interviews with the last surviving participants, the victims’ own letters, trial transcripts, military records, and more, this epic true-crime saga puts together the missing pieces of a legendary puzzle.

In Sisters in Death, the Black Dahlia cold case is finally closed.

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Criminal profiling—the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us—holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its histor

Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students—including the future Unabomber—by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted—to devastating effects.

With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

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Customers know Brown's Chicken for its crispy buttermilk fried chicken and flaky biscuits. The Illinois-based franchise has a reputation for delicious but simple comfort food. But through no fault of its own, the words "Brown's Chicken" are also synonymous with one fateful night in January of 1993.

“A Real Hometown” is the trite but apt motto of Palatine, Illinois, a quaint middle-class suburb west of Chicago. On a snowy Friday evening, the staff and owners of the city’s local Brown’s Chicken franchise were closing up when two final customers arrived just past 9 p.m. As the night drew on and the employees hadn’t returned home, the families of the owners and workers began to worry, prompting police to investigate. When they entered the dark building, police were shocked to find seven bodies stacked in the restaurant’s freezer and fridge. The killers, of course, were long gone. In the months that followed, the horrendous story rocked Chicagoland and the case remained unsolved for nine years.

The Brown’s Chicken massacre is one of the most infamous cases in Illinois history, yet it is often misremembered. In Something Big, Patrick Wohl gives a new account of the story, taking readers behind the scenes and sharing the perspective of the people who lived it.

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A few years ago, Brian Wedemeyer, an elementary school principal in rural Arizona, is watching a documentary about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman when a question suddenly pops into his head. He expects to get a quick answer on his cell phone, but it is nowhere to be found. A former journalist, Wedemeyer does not give up. However, as he painstakingly searches through court transcripts from both criminal and civil trials, he uncovers some unbelievable stories on the other side of O.J.'s MOON. These stories are unknown to most followers of the biggest murder case in America's history because public attention is often fixated on the bright side of the moon -- whether or not O.J. did it. You know, the usual ... gloves, DNA, 911 calls and Mark Fuhrman. However, as Wedemeyer will soon learn, there is plenty more to talk about on the flip side of the "Mezzaluna," which stands for crescent moon in Italian.

Wedemeyer is the only person outside of law enforcement to interview Tom Lang, Nicole's neighbor from down the street. Prior to his death in 2021, legendary attorney F. Lee Bailey describes Lang as the "most compelling witness" of the O.J. Simpson murder trial -- but, for some reason, never takes the stand. Lang, a highly successful general contractor tasked with helping rebuild Los Angeles after an earthquake, is a very credible witness who was standing on the corner of Bundy Drive and Dorothy Street just minutes before the murders take place. In this book, Lang reveals, first-hand, exactly what he saw that night, and what does not happen afterward.

Wedemeyer also goes beyond one of many conspiracy theories to figure out exactly what happened to Michael Nigg, a former Mezzaluna waiter who knew Goldman and even hooked him up with a job at the restaurant. Nigg, who left Mezzaluna for a job at a popular Beverly Hills nightclub, is shot to death by thieves on Sept. 8, 1995 while on a date with his girlfriend. Michael's case receives very little media attention over the years and remains unsolved to this day. Wedemeyer is hoping somebody out there knows something, and that justice for Michael will eventually prevail.

This is not a book about O.J.'s guilt or innocence, although some of its details might sway your opinion one way or another. Instead, follow Wedemeyer in his primitive spaceship to the flip side of the O.J. moon, where some very intriguing stories are just now becoming unearthed.

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The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America isn’t your typical road trip companion. This darkly fascinating guide is quirky and unconventional and takes readers on a darkly humorous journey through the United States, exploring notorious locations linked to infamous serial killers. From the shadowy forests of the Pacific Northwest to the sun-bleached basements of suburbia, each stop offers true crime devotees an unsettling glimpse into the macabre.

Designed like a 1960s-style travel guide, this campy book offers a coast-to-coast tour, showcasing select spots and delving into the twisted histories of the perpetrators. Blending history, psychology, and a hint of gallows humor, this book is part travel guide, part true crime encyclopedia, and fully addictive.

Whether you’re planning a dark tourism pilgrimage or just indulging your morbid curiosity from the safety of your couch, The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America will take you closer to the truth—and the horror—than you ever thought possible.

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The vast majority of Hondurans would have never dared to set foot in Nueva Suyapa, a mountainside barrio that was under the thumb of a gang whose bravado and cruelty were the stuff of legend. But that is precisely where Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, chose to raise their families. Kurt and Carlos were best friends who had committed their lives to helping the poor, and when they accepted that nobody else—not the police, not the prosecutors, not the NGOs—was ever going to protect their neighbors from the incessant violence they suffered, they decided to take matters into their own hands.

In magnetic prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two do-gooders became quasi-vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles, not just with this one gang, but also with forces far more dangerous, including a notorious tycoon who commanded about a thousand armed men and a police force whose wickedness defied credulity. Kurt and Carlos would eventually get catapulted from obscurity to being famous power players who had access to the backrooms where legislators, ambassadors, and presidents pulled strings. Their efforts made some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth safer and arguably improved a profoundly corrupt government. But they were forced to compromise their principles in order to make all that happen, and furthermore, they acquired a large number of outraged critics and precipitated some heartbreaking collateral damage.

A remarkable and dangerous feat of reportage, Bear Witness shows what happens when altruism, faith, and an obsession with justice are pushed to the extreme.

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When Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office in November 1998 with a woman's body part in his jacket pocket, the 36-year-old truck driver wasn’t a suspect in any crime. After a lengthy investigation spanning four California counties and a sensational trial, he was convicted of the torture and murder of four women. His first victim, whom he dismembered, would remain unidentified for 25 years.

While serving honorably in the Marine Corps, Ford had learned life-saving techniques that gave him structure and purpose. But a severe head injury worsened pre-existing emotional problems, rendering him unable to suppress his dark sexual impulses. Knowing he would kill again, he enlisted his brother’s help to turn himself in.

Award-winning investigative journalist Caitlin Rother drew on previously sealed testimony and interviewed key players in the case, including Ford's brother and father, to write this intimate and psychologically resonant narrative. Extensively updated with the inside details of how Ford’s first victim was recently identified through DNA testing and forensic genealogy, this classic true crime story continues to haunt us.

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