12 Disturbing True Crime Stories of Murder and Mayhem

Volume 27 of the True Crime Case Histories Series

This series can be listened to in any order.

The people in these twelve cases didn't see it coming. A husband walking the dog at dawn. A boy sent away to be saved. A man opening a package addressed to him by name. Each trusted something ordinary, and each was destroyed by it.

A sampling of the stories includes:

No Fire, No Food: A desperate Phoenix family paid nearly $14,000 to send their troubled sixteen-year-old into the Utah backcountry, believing a wilderness program would straighten him out. Twenty days later he weighed 108 pounds, and the journal he left behind recorded every one of them.

The Grieving Widow: A Dallas technology director was shot seven times on his own block while walking the dog with his wife. She wept through the interviews and led the fundraisers, and detectives eventually pulled fourteen thousand messages that explained exactly why.

The Gum Ruse: A twenty-one-year-old mother in Everett, Washington answered a knock at her door in the summer of 1980. The trivial request that brought the stranger onto her porch would go unsolved for decades.

Chaplain Rich: A farm in the Ohio hill country advertised for a caretaker: room, board, and a fresh start. The men who answered were the ones the recession had already stripped of everything, which was precisely the point.

Plus eight more shocking stories, including a Polish immigrant buried alive in a Yorkshire wood, a distinguished English pathologist killed by a parcel he was expected to open, two Oklahoma teenagers who vanished from a burning trailer, and an Idaho paralegal whose affair with her boss ended in a parking lot shooting no one could agree on.

Each case has been reconstructed through extensive research of court documents, police files, forensic reports, and firsthand testimony, for an unflinching look at crimes that shattered families and communities.