Showing results by author "Ron Franscell" in All Categories

A true-crime collection culled from the crime files of the New York Times best-selling series, Notorious USA.

This is a collection of stories pulled from the New York Times best-selling Notorious USA collection edited and curated by NYT best-selling author Gregg Olsen.

On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of their tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea: What if criminals left a psychological trail that would lead us to them?

Casper, Wyoming: 1973. Eleven-year-old Amy Burridge rides with her 18-year-old sister, Becky, to the grocery store. When they finish their shopping, Becky's car gets a flat tire. Two men politely offer them a ride home. Yet they were anything but good Samaritans. The girls would suffer unspeakable crimes at the hands of these men before being thrown from a bridge into the North Platte River. One miraculously survived; the other did not.

Retired to a small Colorado mountain town, former Denver homicide detective Woodrow “Mountain” Bell yearns only to fade away. He has failed in so many ways—as a father, a husband, friend, and cop—he fears he wasted his chance at a meaningful life. When Bell stumbles across a long-forgotten, unsolved child murder, his first impulse is to let it lie—but he can’t. He is drawn into the macabre mystery when he realizes the killer might still be near.

When a world-renowned forensic anthropologist journeys to Winchester, Wyoming, to examine the long-dead remains of a woman who claimed to be Etta Place - the Old West's most mysterious and legendary female outlaw - he's not expecting to find a man's headless corpse in her crypt. The grisly discovery plunges him and Jefferson Morgan - the editor of the weekly Winchester Bullet - into a shadowy and deadly world of satellite-savvy highway pirates, rural meth labs, computer hackers, and old-fashioned corruption.

A dying convict's last request thrusts small-town newspaperman Jefferson Morgan into a deadly maelstrom as he explores a 50-year-old case of child murder - a wound his town still isn't ready to scrape open. Under the heaviest deadline of his life, and amid threats from unexpected foes, Morgan must struggle with his own conscience to tell a story no matter the consequences, dig deep into the town's past, and unveil a killer who's managed to remain hidden in plain sight for almost 50 years.

Louisiana, famous for its Mardi Gras, spicy cuisine, and Dixieland jazz, is also the scene of some of the most notorious crimes in the country. Best-selling authors Ron Franscell and Rebecca Morris write about a sultry Southern beauty who proved to be a deadly hitchhiker; the bloodiest day in New Orleans history captured on live TV; how life for a young woman changed just because she answered a knock at her front door; and a genteel wife and mother who left her husband to die in an alligator-infested bayou.