Showing results by publisher "audible originals" in True Crime

In early 2018, Larry Nassar, the former doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, was sentenced to serve out the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to a variety of sex crimes. New York Times best-selling author Mary Pilon and Carla Correa chronicle the scandal from its inception, tracking the institutions that Nassar hid behind, the athletic culture that he benefited from, and the women who eventually brought him to justice.

On Christmas Eve, 2017, Tess Henry was found dead in a dumpster in Las Vegas. Tess was a 28-year-old new mother, a former honor roll student, and a high school basketball player from suburban Roanoke, Virginia, a place ravaged by the national opioid crisis. The New York Times best-selling author Beth Macy chronicled Tess and her mom, Patricia, through Tess' harrowing, years-long battle to recover from heroin addiction in her award-winning book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America.

In this poignant and deeply personal audio experience, host Maria Luisa Tucker investigates the disappearance of her own father, and uses the many theories that emerge to explore what it means to be a family today.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

The close knit community in San Miguel de Allende Mexico was plagued by a string of sophisticated kidnappings for nearly a decade. When the police finally made an arrest the townspeople were shocked by who was accused of masterminding the criminal enterprise. It's everyone's favorite neighbor and a pillar of the community, Ramon Guerra. Except Ramon isn't who he says he is.

Between 1993 and 1998, eight women went missing from an area around Dublin that became known as the ‘Vanishing Triangle’. Was there a link? Speculation abounded. There were whispers of a serial killer, responsible for some, if not all, of these cases. But nobody was ever brought to justice. Twenty years later, the brutal murder of Jastine Valdez disturbs crime novelist Claire McGowan into action.

In a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, the shooter, Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others. The attack was the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in US history and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. But there’s a story you haven’t heard. The FBI had a secret history with the shooter and his father. To obscure that history, the FBI pushed a false story that the media dutifully carried—that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who had chosen to target Pulse and planned the attack for weeks.

On a March night in 2000, two deputy sheriffs serving a warrant were shot in Atlanta, Georgia. One was severely wounded while the other would die a day later. The shooting kicked off a large manhunt in search of the alleged cop killer. Four days later in Alabama, authorities found their man—Jamil Al-Amin. He was a Muslim leader with the title of Imam in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta. He was also the man formerly known as H. Rap Brown. He was a charismatic Black radical in the late '60s.

A Secret Service agent and a hacker-turned-informant join forces to take down a global cybercriminal ring, back when there were barely laws in place to prohibit what the cyber criminals were up to. It’s the early 2000s. The Internet is still a novelty. Twitter, Facebook, and Apple’s iPhones have yet to be invented. Terms like “cyberterrorism” and “ransomware” are not yet part of the mainstream lexicon. But the information superhighway already presents an attractive route for criminals—one with infinite lanes. While his colleagues were still focused on crimes committed IRL (in real life), Steve Ward, a Special Agent with the United States Secret Service, talks his superiors into letting him embark on an unprecedented covert operation designed to discover and stop shadowy operations made possible by the Internet. Steve’s not making much headway when through a lucky break he finds himself partnered with an unlikely ally: a 20-something, Miami-born hacker named Albert Gonzalez. Albert turns informant after he’s popped for a slew of infractions that include computer crimes and possession of ecstasy and cocaine. The two prove to be radically successful in a colossal sting operation—to everyone’s surprise, including their own. But success doesn’t remain sweet. When Albert is accused of spearheading the biggest theft of credit card data at that time, he turns on Steve, attempting to implicate him in criminal malfeasance. Veteran technology journalist and Fortune writer Michal Lev-Ram, tells the gripping story of Operation Firewall, giving a rare look into the murky world of hackers and the heroes who try to catch them. Told through the eyes of Steve, other Secret Service agents, analysts, prosecutors, and former hackers and their families, Operation Firewall takes listeners through the twists and turns of this historic investigation. But Operation Firewall is much more than a tale about good versus evil—duking it out in the cyber-world. It is also the story of a friendship between two men, the partnership that unfolds, and later implodes, with high-stakes consequences.

From podcasts and documentaries to online forums, true crime is booming. But as one Audible editor and self-professed crime obsessive observes, the genre is being pulled in new and different directions along with a changing social landscape. She wanted to know: Can we ethically engage in true crime as real concerns surface around the crimes, victims, and systemic issues that directly impact the humans we are hearing about?

Gloria Burtzlaff feared for her life one day back in April of 1991 when her abusive husband, Larry, drunk and violent, slapped her, hit her, and began pelting her with glasses. After he tried to drown her in a tub, she got the family shotgun and confronted him in his underwear. “Larry, I’m going to kill you,” she declared. Defense lawyers would later claim he lifted a glass as if to say, “Have at it, sister.” Have at It, Sister is a true-crime tale about Gloria, a South Dakota woman who shot her abusive husband and was put on trial in a precedent-setting case.

The case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficianados. A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America’s Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness.

Here is a glittering true-crime tale unlike any you have ever encountered. Glittering because the take involved rubies, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires. The thieves were two men from Yonkers, Dominick Latella and Pete Salerno, who hit the East Coast mansions of the wealthy enclaves of Westchester and Palm Beach. Over 20 years they became known as the most successful jewel thieves in American history...until one bleak night when they got careless.

In 2019, veteran journalist Mark Seal began investigating the suspicious death of music mogul Peter Ikin. Just 32 days before he was found dead in his Paris hotel room, Ikin had married a handsome, debonair Frenchman named Alexandre, who would claim to be entitled to his late husband’s fortune. As Seal dug into the case, he had no idea that tracing the incredible life of Alexandre Despallieres would take him from Paris to London to Beverly Hills, and unspool a web of intricate plots and deceptions.

Black girls and women disappear every day, but not without a trace. Join actress and activist Erika Alexander in a neo-noir, true crime drama as she searches for Tamika Huston, a 24-year-old Black woman from Spartanburg, SC who went missing in 2004. Her case became a rallying cry for other missing Black women in America and led to a growing demand to expose a system that ignores missing girls and women of color.

Some people amass artwork. For others, it's stamps. But why would you want to collect the possessions of a serial killer?

Whenever a tragic event happens, our first thoughts are with the victims, their families, and even with the motives driving the perpetrators. But what happens after the police tape comes down? Damned Spot revisits the places where painful memories of death and destruction still linger, and explores what a building and, ultimately, a community needs in order to heal.

Just before the small-time bootlegger Max Gerlach died, he tried to reveal his secret: he was the inspiration for the mysterious Jay Gatsby. It’s a nice story, but was he telling the truth? Veteran reporter Joe Nocera and producer Poppy Damon investigate this century-old literary mystery and uncover untold secrets about the Great American Novel.

Coerced confessions. Fabricated evidence. Arresting and prosecuting the innocent. While attention has rightfully been focused recently on police brutality in the street, the abuse of power in that context is only the tip of the iceberg. The problems are systemic. They spread beyond abuse in the street and pervade the entire criminal justice system.

Hold Fast is the uncompromising story of Backpage.com, the world’s most scandalous website, and the rise and fall of alternative weekly newspapers nationwide.