The East Area Rapist would break into middle-class homes in respectable neighborhoods in the dark of night, tie up his victims and tell them over and over they were going to die.

Only he didn’t kill anyone-not at first. 

The East Area Rapist got his start in the summer of 1976 in Sacramento County and raped 30 women between June 1976 and July 1978. He moved on to Contra Costa County in October 1978, then continued south to Santa Barbara and Orange counties (where he was known as the Night Stalker, named before his crimes were linked to those up north). Psychiatrists helping the task force talked with imprisoned sex offenders, who said EAR was looking for an excuse to kill, not just to rape. They were right.

Crompton was working in the crime lab in Contra Costa County doing crime scene investigations when EAR arrived  in late 1979. After EAR’s third attack, a task force of local police agencies, the DA’s office and the crime lab was formed and Crompton was appointed to it.

The first murder was a double homicide in Santa Barbara County in December 1979. His attacks continued until, after another double homicide in 1981, the East Area Rapist vanished for five years. He reappeared for another double homicide in May 1986.

Crompton had retired but In May 2000, he got a call from a criminologist in Contra Costa County who was working with DNA and the EAR files. Crompton gave him the names of three rape victims, and by July it was confirmed that the same man was behind them. Further DNA worked proved in March 2001 that six of the 1o murders then attributed to EAR were by the same person. And in April 2002, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office flew Crompton down to help with the investigation.

The East Area Rapist, Original Night Stalker has yet to be arrested. SUDDEN TERROR-Larry Crompton

Not since the Green River Killer had the Pacific Northwest been terrorized by so savage a serial killer. By day, Robert Lee Yates, Jr., 48 was a respected father of five, a skilled helicopter pilot who served in Desert Storm and the National Guard, and a man no one suspected of a deadly hidden life. By night he prowled the streets where prostitutes gathered, gaining their trust before betraying them with a bullet to the head. On August 26, 1997, the half-naked body of 16-year-old street prostitute Jennifer Joseph was found in an empty lot in Spokane, Washington. The same day, the decomposed corpse of prostitute Heather Hernandez, 20, was discovered in a wheat field. Both women had been shot point blank in the head. By the day after Christmas, four more women were added to the mounting death toll. All were found with plastic grocery bags tied over their heads - the gruesome signature of a killer who had sexually violated each one of them after snuffing out their lives. Spokane's elite Homicide Task Force's intense investigation turned up only one common link: a white Corvette driven by a frequent customer of Spokane's prostitutes. Investigators found a button from Jennifer Joseph's blouse and multiple blood stains in a vehicle recently sold by Yates Jr. On October 18, 2000, Yates pled guilty to 13 murders and was sentenced to 408 years. Sentenced for two similar murders in Washington's Pierce County, Yates is now on death row, awaiting execution. BODY COUNT-RE-RELEASE-Burl Barer

Shawn Griffith spent over 23 years in various Florida prisons for an armed robbery he committed in 1992 at the age of 21. He has just recently been conditionally released from prison. He documents in elaborate and exacting detail what is wrong with the corrections system in the U. S and provides a host of solutions about how to improve it and save the taxpayers millions of dollars, while making our streets safer at the same time.

"Facing the U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong" is written by someone from inside "the belly of the beast," who knows from years of personal experience what works and what doesn't. Ironically, most prisons today are not set up to rehabilitate prisoners but to do the opposite --simply to warehouse ever-increasing numbers of them until their eventual release with little or no practical training to succeed on the outside. Shawn advocates that the real purpose of prison, in addition to punishment, should be to enable the 90 percent who will eventually be released to cope on the outside and not return to prison within the first three years, as now just under half of all released prisoners do.

Shawn shows how tough-on-crime politicians, supported by guard unions and private prison corporations, have a vested interest in keeping the recidivism rate high. Instead of fostering in-prison drug rehab, job training, impulse control, and close family ties, prisons continually slash these critical programs to hire more guards and build more prisons. In California, 70 percent of the prison budget goes to pay the 31,000 guards it employs and only 5 percent to vocational programs to reduce recidivism. Until taxpayers grasp how counterproductive this approach truly is in providing public safety, there will be no chance for meaningful prison reform. FACING THE U.S. PRISON PROBLEM 2.3 MILLION STRONG-Shawn Griffith

Victoria Redstall is a glamorous model, actress, filmmaker, and investigative journalist who has spent years visiting high-security prisons and interviewing sadistic killers like Gary Ray Bowles and Keith Hunter Jesperson, "The Happy Face Killer." These hardened killers have opened up to her in a way that they would never do to psychiatrists, prosecutors, or other authority figures, and have revealed terrifying chapters of their lives that might otherwise have stayed hidden forever. In this chilling book she shares every detail and insight, bringing the reader up close and very personal with some of the most dangerous and disturbed serial killers that the world has ever seen. SERIAL KILLERS UP CLOSE AND VERY PERSONAL:-MY DEATH ROW INTERVIEWS WITH THE MOST DANGEROUS MEN ON THE PLANET-Victoria Redstall

Anthony J. LaRette Jr., had been on a ten-year-long path of violence, murder, and rape.

Everyone knew Mickey, with her stellar grades and driving ambition, would eventually follow her older brother’s path and become the only other family member to graduate from university. Though separated by twelve years, Mickey and Dennis had always felt a common bond. On July 25, 1980, at 11:10 a.m., LaRette parked his car in a corner grocery store lot in the small town of St. Charles, Missouri, and followed Mickey into her apartment. When the savagery was over, he thought he had left the girl dead on the kitchen floor. But despite a gash across her throat that nearly decapitated her and two deep knife wounds to her heart, she somehow ran naked across the street to a neighbor’s house, where she died on their front porch. Her final desperate attempt to live provided a key to capturing her killer. 

For nine years, LaRette sat uncooperative on death row in Potosi, Missouri, until he was introduced to a young deputy, Patricia Juhl, from Florida. After that first meeting, the killer promised to cooperate on other murders and rapes in which he was implicated, but insisted on being interviewed by Juhl. So began a six-year odyssey as Juhl made numerous trips from Florida  to Missouri in order to interview LaRette. The investigation eventually led to LaRette’s confession to thirty murders and rapes in eleven states. The serial killer carried a portrait of Juhl into his holding cell and awaited his execution. THE GIRL THAT HAD NO ENEMIES AND THE MAN WHO HATED WOMEN-Dennis Fleming

Gary Michael Hilton once sold his movie idea to Hollywood. The straight-to-video Deadly Run was about a man who captures women only to set them free on his very private and secluded Georgia land so that he can hunt and kill them.

In 2007 (at least, that's the earliest investigators have been able to prove), he brought Hollywood to life when he began using state parks as his own personal hunting grounds.

Convicted of murder and sentenced to death-it would seem the case was not closed. Rosen was commissioned by the Atlanta Journal Constitution to write a front page piece for their Sunday section on the real time-line of Meredith Emerson's murder which is covered in his book Trails of Death. Rosen was denied information and now realizes the timeline in the book is wrong. Emerson should probably still be alive. The truth never came out and Rosen is pursuing the story. TRAILS OF DEATH UPDATE-Fred Rosen.

Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute, shot, killed, and robbed seven men in remote Florida locations. Arrested in 1991, Wuornos insisted she had acted in self-defense, but the jury condemned her to death and she was executed in 2002.

An abused runaway who turned to prostitution to survive, Wuornos has become iconic of vengeful women who lash out at the nearest target. She has also become a touchstone for women’s, prostitutes' and prisoners’ rights advocates. Her story became the basis for the 2003 movie Monster, for which Charlize Theron won an Academy Award. 

Dear Dawn is Wuornos’s autobiography culled from her ten-year death row correspondence with beloved childhood friend Dawn Botkins. Authorized for publication by Wuornos and edited under the guidance of Botkins, the letters not only offer Wuornos’s riveting reflections on the murders, legal battles, and media coverage, but go further, revealing her fears and obsessions, her humor and empathy, and her gradual disintegration as her execution approached. DEAR DAWN-Daphne Gottlieb

In the horrifying annals of American crime, infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and Berkowitz are writ large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and hypnotized by their monstrous, murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who’s gotten ink for spilling blood, there’s a bevy of all-but-forgotten homicidal fiends studding the bloody margins of U.S. history. 

Spurred by profit, passion, paranoia, or perverse pleasure, these killers—the Witch of Staten Island, the Smutty Nose Butcher, the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell, and many others—span three centuries and a host of harrowing murder methods.

These demonic denizens may be long gone to the gallows—but this insidiously irresistible slice of gothic Americana will ensure that they’ll no longer be forgotten. PSYCHO U.S.A.-Harold Schecter

In late October 2009, Cleveland Police detectives arrived at the home of Anthony Sowell, an ex-Marine and registered sex offender—to arrest him on week-old rape charges.

But this was no ordinary house, nor would it be a routine arrest.

For even though Sowell was not at home, officers knew immediately something was horribly wrong. After initially finding two rotting corpses inside the home, their investigation would lead them to discover the bodies of eleven women.

This is the shocking account of Sowell’s legacy of depravity and cold-blooded murder. His mannered and well-spoken veneer masked a monster who felt no mercy for those he butchered. His twisted existence spent among the decaying bodies of his victims and how he picked his victims from the fringes of society—lost souls with criminal records or drug habits that would make them less likely to arouse alarm if they simply disappeared.

But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be avenged…

NOBODY'S WOMEN-THE CRIMES AND VICTIMS OF ANTHONY SOWELL, THE CLEVELAND SERIAL KILLER-Steve Miller

There are more than 60 serial murderers in Canadian history. For too long awareness of serial murder in Canada has been confined to West Coast child killer Clifford Olson and the "Schoolgirl Murderers" Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, along with one of the most prolific serial kllers in history Robert Pickton. Unlike America, Canada has been viewed as a nation untouched by the shadow of serial murder. 

Then came Colonel Russell Williams and his bizarre homicides and serial home invasions, which were sensational news worldwide on the Internet, television and in newspapers and magazines.

The reason for Canada's serial killer blackout is clear: until now such information has never been compiled and presented in a single concise work. Cold North Killers is a wake-up call. This detailed and haunting account of Canada's worst monsters analyzes their crimes, childhoods, and inevitable downfalls. COLD NORTH KILLERS-CANADIAN SERIAL MURDERS-Lee Mellor