Showing results by publisher "Beacon Audiobooks" in True Crime

Criminal defense lawyer Lisa Peebles was taken aback by a secretly recorded phone call and police interrogation video that surfaced in a 20-year-old kidnapping case. They held the stench of a cover-up. She recruited an investigative reporter to help unearth the truth and exonerate Gary Thibodeau, the man convicted in the 1994 kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old Heidi Allen.

A fascinating look into dimensions of murder that are often overlooked and undeveloped. Spree killing, in particular, is a crime that researchers have vacillated over in the past two decades or so, most notably when the FBI's 2005 consortium on Serial Homicide seemed to walk back from the concept because of the implications of the term "cooling off period."

Undetected by the FBI for three decades until the turn of the twenty-first century, a handful of elusive, transient long-haul trucker serial killers had been murdering hundreds of sex workers and hitchhikers along major US highways. This was not the first time innocent victims were attacked along major US interstate thoroughfares. Nearly lost to history was a similar pattern of carnage that occurred in the late nineteenth century.

When I was two years old, my mother, Donna Litchfield, was brutally murdered by Stephen Moore. My mother had broken up with Stephen - her boyfriend, at the time - only a day prior to being killed. A jury found Stephen guilty of the stabbing murder and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. Moore was sent to the maximum-security Trenton State Prison.

When detectives respond to a crime scene in Orlando, Florida, during the "summer of hurricanes" in 2004, they find Charlie Brandt hanging from the rafters in the garage of his niece Michelle Jones' home. Inside the house, they find a scene of horror that reminds them of other murders.

Blue Lives Matter is a audiobook that explores the line-of-duty deaths suffered by the law enforcement blue family. This audiobook examines the deaths of eight police officers and one police canine in Los Angeles County. The chapters portray the fallen officers and the canine as true heroes who each made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their community. Co-authors Steve Cooley and Bob Schirn discuss each case in detail.

On the first day of school, 10-year-old Jeffrey and his six-year-old brother, Tyler, climbed out of the school bus at the foot of their driveway, walking into their home, excited about the first day of school. Instantly, their anticipation for the family back-to-school celebration turned to horror as they found their father murdered, stabbed and shot in a laundry room awash with blood. With a rush of adrenaline and terror, Jeffrey hid his younger brother, huddled behind the couch, and called 911 where his mother had worked for years.

Audrey Edmunds was a happily married young mother of two with a baby on the way; the neighborhood soccer mom in a small Wisconsin town providing casual childcare when the unthinkable happened. An infant died in her care at the same time the unknown science of Shaken Baby Syndrome hit the media. Swept up in a media frenzy, Edmunds was accused of killing the child through SBS. She was stripped from her children and husband and sent to prison where she would fight for freedom 13 years before she was finally exonerated.

On the Fringe is a deeply-moving memoir, a reflective and soul-baring account of the author's extraordinary journey as a professional who helped people from dying of AIDS, cholera, and other diseases across the globe. As an anthropologist, Green worked on every inhabited continent, giving the listener an on-the-ground look at how we aid developing nations. Chapters take listeners to one exotic locale after another, describing gypsies in Montenegro, sex workers in Tanzania, disease researchers in Bangladesh, spirit mediums in Africa, and Samaritans in Palestine.

The year was 1982, and people were dying. A faceless murderer struck fear into the hearts of every American. This unknown killer poisoned Tylenol capsules. He then slipped them back onto drugstore shelves. As the body count rose, panic seized the nation. People scrambled to throw away their medicines, paranoia gripped once-peaceful neighborhoods, and cities canceled Halloween. Decades have passed since this tragic event, but the murders remain unsolved to this day.

Armed-encounters expert and police trainer Brian McKenna shares his expertise in a series of gripping stories involving real-life police shootouts. Step into the shoes of police officers who have run toward the sound of gunfire, who have faced attacks by deadly assailants, and who have lived to share the tale. But this book is more than just stories about courageous cops. Each story is followed by McKenna’s expert analysis of its important learning points, especially concerning how and why the officers use force and the legal aspects of self-defense and the defense of others. 

Everyone knows the story of Jerry Sandusky, the serial pedophile, the Monster. But what if that story is wrong? What if the former Penn State football coach and founder of the Second Mile is an innocent man convicted in the midst of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, and memory-warping psychotherapy? The Most Hated Man in America unfolds like a true-crime psychological thriller and is required listening for everyone, from criminologists to sports fans. 

Blood was found at his home in Franklin County, PA. All evidence pointed to one suspect: Scott North, a former employee of Carl’s, a regular attendee of Franklin County courts, and the son of a Chambersburg, PA cop. After burglarizing a tavern, a judge granted him work release, and then another dismissed a recent gun charge. Days later, he ran from his unsupervised worksite and began a crime spree that may have ended with the murder of Carl Wade Ryder.

Frank Richardson, a wealthy merchant who had repented of his wayward past and was determined to make the most of the second chance he was given, was shot dead in his home.