True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers

By Dan Zupansky -

What's True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers about?

Every week host Dan Zupansky will interview the true crime authors that have written about the most shocking killers of all time.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3269715/advertisement

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WHILE IDAHO SLEPT-J. Reuben...

10.02.2023

Just after 4:00 am on November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were viciously stabbed to death in an off-campus house. The killings would shake the small blue-collar college town of Moscow, Idaho, dominate mainstream news coverage, and become ...

True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers episodes:

10.02.2023 WHILE IDAHO SLEPT-J. Reuben Appelman Just after 4:00 am on November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were viciously stabbed to death in an off-campus house. The killings would shake the small blue-collar college town of Moscow, Idaho, dominate mainstream news coverage, and become ...
09.25.2023 RUSSIAN CANNIBALS-Nico Claux Almost one third of Russian serial killers have committed cannibalism during their murder spree, but not much is known about their crimes outside of the Federation.This book follows the stories of 13 cannibals from the Motherland: Alexander Spesivtsev “The Siberian ...
09.25.2023 Listen Now: 48 Hours One of television's most popular true-crime series is now adapted for your ears with the “48 Hours” podcast. Every week, award-winning CBS News correspondents investigate the most intriguing crime and justice cases. Here’s a preview of a new “48 Hours” ...
09.20.2023 Listen Now-Even The Rich: Viva Selena! Selena Quintanilla was a force of nature. But when a loyal friend betrayed her, she met a fate she never deserved. Even the Rich is a podcast from Wondery that tells you the stories of the crazy lives of the ...
09.18.2023 MURDER OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR-John Tommasi Greed, arrogance and lust led Robert Anderson to kill his wife of nearly twenty years. He was a pillar of the community. He owned four Service Master franchises, he was a Kiwanis member and former President, and a former teacher ...
09.11.2023 MARY & BILL: An Ohio Cold Case-Justin Glanville In 1970, Mary Petry and Bill Sproat, two university students in love, were murdered in a Columbus, Ohio apartment. The crime was so brutal it drew comparisons to the Manson murders of the previous year. The case has never been ...
09.05.2023 I AM ABIGAIL-Jamie Collins and Abigail Alvarado My name is Abigail Alvarado. When I was nine, Child Protective Services removed me and my siblings from my mother’s home—a known crack house—due to neglect. After an extended stay at a children’s shelter in San Antonio, Texas, we were ...
09.04.2023 I AM A KILLER-Danny Tipping and Ned Parker What goes through the mind of a killer when they commit murder? Based on the massively successful Netflix documentary series of the same name, this book features ten of the most compelling cases from the first two series and is ...
08.28.2023 GRIM PARADISE-Rod Sadler When widow Frances Lacey was murdered in July 1960 on Mackinac Island, only a few meager clues were found by police, and the case soon turned cold. But more than sixty years later, will those same clues finally solve the ...
08.21.2023 THE COMBAT ZONE-Jan Brogan At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the ...
08.14.2023 DEER CREEK DRIVE-Beverly Lowry The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously ...
08.14.2023 THE CRATER LAKE MURDERS-Monty Orrick When two General Motors executives drove into Crater Lake National Park in July 1952, no one could predict they would be dead within an hour—not even their killers. It was a crime of opportunity, a botched robbery during the middle ...
08.07.2023 MURDER BY THE BATHHOUSE DOOR-John Tommasi They watched the 1996 movie Scream over and over again. One of the boys was truly infatuated with the movie and wanted to be part of it. He along with two friends, lured two teenage girls to a local park ...
07.31.2023 BOSTON TABLOID-Don Stradley The disappearance of a twenty-one-year-old woman from a Massachusetts suburb became one of the most discussed crimes of the twentieth century. The discussion intensified when the public learned that she worked as a prostitute in Boston's notorious red-light district, the ...
07.24.2023 SMALL JUSTICE-Jim Ridings Stephen B. Small died in one of the most horrific ways a person can die -- being buried alive. He was one of the richest men in Kankakee, Illinois, in 1987, which made him the target of a desperate cocaine ...
07.18.2023 BAD HENRY-Ron Chepsiuk Henry Louis Wallace terrorized Charlotte, North Carolina, from May 1992 to March 1994.Wallace preyed on lower economic class Black women between 17 and 35 years old. He knew most of his victims, some through his job at Taco Bell, and ...
07.17.2023 BEHOLD THE MONSTER-Jillian Lauren Jillian Lauren had no idea what she was getting into when she wrote her first letter to prolific serial killer Samuel Little. All she knew was her research had led her to believe he was good for far more murders ...
07.17.2023 Listen Now: Suspect "Five Shots in the Dark" Leon Benson spent 24 years in an Indiana state prison for the 1998 murder of a young man named Kasey Schoen. His conviction hinged on the testimony of two eyewitnesses – but what if their memories turned out to be ...
07.10.2023 JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME-David B. Savitz A 19-year-old accused of killing his parents is diagnosed with an unusual psychiatric disorder and spends a torturous six years in the Colorado judicial and mental health systems before his case experiences an unexpected end. “Just in the Nick of ...
07.03.2023 LAST CHILD SEEN-Maureen Boyle On an unseasonably warm winter evening in Pennsylvania, 15-year-old Patty Desmond sneaked out through the basement of her house. She had a history of running away, and that, combined with an argument with her mother, gave police reason to suspect ...
06.26.2023 LITTLE, CRAZY CHILDREN-James Renner In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett, a poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend, when she was viciously stabbed ...
06.19.2023 COAL COUNTRY KILLING-Steve Jackson Coal Country Killing: A Culture, A Union, And The Murders That Changed It All, revolves around the cold-blooded 1969 assassination of United Mineworkers of America “reform candidate” Jock Yablonski, and murder of his wife and daughter in their Pennsylvania farmhouse. ...
06.13.2023 THE MAN WITH THE KILLER SMILE-Mitchel P. Roth On a cold, windy December night in 1926, hell was unleashed on a tenant farm near Farwell, the last Texas town before the New Mexico border. Prone to the bottle and fits of rage, the burly man with the smiling ...
06.12.2023 BLOOD ON THE TRACKS-Rod Kackley Discover the dark side of human nature with Blood on the Tracks.This true crime book takes you on a journey through the most heinous murder cases in history, including unsolved mysteries that will leave you wondering.Each story is expertly researched ...
06.05.2023 AMERICAN AUTOPSY-Dr. Michael Baden Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in U.S. history, from the government’s 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael ...
05.29.2023 WHITE SMOKE-Patrick Strudwick When the body of a young, gay, Black man, Gemmel Moore, was pulled out of the West Hollywood apartment of Ed Buck-a white, millionaire donor to the Democratic Party-the coroner called it an accidental overdose. The police didn’t arrest Buck. ...
05.23.2023 THE DELPHI MURDERS-Nic Edwards On February 13, 2017, two Indiana teenagers, Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, went for a walk in the woods near the abandoned Monon High Bridge. They never returned home. Their bodies were discovered on Valentine's Day morning, sparking ...
05.22.2023 INTRODUCING AMERICAN SCANDAL: The "Kids For Cash" Kickback Scheme In the early 2000s, residents of northeastern Pennsylvania started to notice an alarming trend – children were being sent away to jail in high numbers, and for crimes so mild they might normally result in a grounding. The FBI began ...
05.16.2023 DETAILS ARE UNPRINTABLE-Allan Levine The narrative of Details Are Unprintable primarily unfolds over a seven-month period from October 1943 to April 1944—from the moment the body of twenty-two-year old Patricia Burton Lonergan is discovered in the bedroom of her New York City Beekman Hill ...
05.15.2023 INTRODUCING: MORBID It’s all a lighthearted nightmare on the MORBID podcast. Hosted by Alaina Urquhart and Ash Kelley, Morbid is a full dose of true crime with a splash of comedy. Join us all month long as we celebrate 5 years of ...
05.08.2023 DEADLY CALIFORNIA-David Kulczyk David Kulczyk’s eighth book, Deadly California is another tome of off the wall murders, accidents and robberies gone wrong that have happened in California. With true crime tales stretching from 1912 to 1964, occurring in the San Francisco Bay Area, ...
05.01.2023 TREMORS IN THE BLOOD-Amit Katwala Late one evening in the summer of 1922, Henry Wilkens burst through the doors of the emergency room covered in his wife’s blood. But was he a grieving husband, or a ruthless killer who conspired with bandits to have her ...
04.24.2023 PRECIOUS FEW CLUES-Marla Bernard On an unseasonably warm April evening in 2001, the headless body of a tiny girl was found discarded in a makeshift dump site in the woods on the southeast side of Kansas City, Missouri.One long night turned into four long ...
04.17.2023 KORESH-Stephan Talty No other event in the last fifty years is shrouded in myth like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Today, we remember this moment for the 76 people, including 20 children, who died in the fire; ...
04.10.2023 THE CIGAR-Frank Dimatteo and Michael Benson From real-life "Mafia Survivor" Frank Dimatteo, the gripping account of the life and crimes of the most feared mafia boss of all time: Carmine “Lilo” Galante, the prime mover behind the legendary French Connection.The brutal and blood-stained true story of ...
04.03.2023 SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN-Alex Mar On a spring afternoon in 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a fifteen-year-old girl kills an elderly woman in a violent home invasion. In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and ...
03.28.2023 UNEXPECTED-Chris Thomas Chris Thomas is not yet thirty years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the ...
03.21.2023 DEATH BY TALONS-Tiddy Smith On December 9, 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her Durham, NC home. Her scalp was laced with deep incisions, and her blood was strewn from outside to inside the house.The sinister truth ...
03.14.2023 JonBenet's SECRET SANTA, MY MURDERER-M'Linda Kula M'Linda Kula is very familiar with this SECRET SANTA and the many links that tie him to JonBenet Ramsey. Each link is carefully explained within this book, to lead from one connection to the next between JonBenet and the SECRET ...
03.13.2023 THE ANGEL MAKERS-Patti McCracken The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other—a 1920s midwife who may have been the century’s most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men.The horror occurred in a ...
03.06.2023 SICARIUS: Sondra London From his cell on Death Row in Florida, confessed serial killer Danny Rolling started writing and illustrating this novel about the Daggerman Sicarius in 1999, seven years before his 2006 execution for the five murders he committed in 1990.Drawing on ...
02.27.2023 LOU AND JONBENET-John Wesley Anderson On Christmas Night 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. A ransom note was found in the home, but it was hours before her father, John, found her body in the basement. She had ...
02.20.2023 ERIE'S BACKYARD STRANGLER-Justin Dombrowski On a cold morning in December 1960, 60-year-old Laura Mutch was found strangled behind a house in downtown Erie....At a time when the Gem City was at its peak, including a triumphant run for the coveted 'All-American City' award, the ...
02.14.2023 THE BEST NEW TRUE CRIME STORIES: Crimes of Famous and Infamous Criminals-Mitzi Szereto Actors, musicians, TV personalities, and other public figures in the spotlight aren’t always who they appear to be. You might be surprised by just how many have led nefarious, double lives, and have become infamous criminals!Power, status, and a rich ...
02.08.2023 THE REAL-LIFE MURDER CLUBS-Nicola Stow What happens when ordinary people, in real-life murder clubs, set out to investigate crimes, both recent and cold cases?The Netflix hit Don’t F**k with Cats was based on the 2012 Montreal murder of thirty-three-year-old Lin Jun by his porn-star boyfriend, ...
02.06.2023 THE KILLING SPREE-Anita Paddock John Edward Swindler never learned to read or write and instead became a bona fide criminal at the age of fifteen. His crimes quickly advanced from car theft to arson. At three hundred pounds, with long, fuzzy red hair and ...
01.30.2023 BUTCHER'S WORK-Harold Schechter A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who ...
01.24.2023 TRIAL LAWYER-Richard Zitrin Internationally known legal ethics professor Richard Zitrin's work as a trial lawyer placed him on the front lines of fighting systemic racism, pervasive elitism, and injustice against individuals in the legal system. In Trial Lawyer, he shares details of the ...
01.23.2023 Wondery Presents: Frozen Head Hosted by Ash Kelley and Alaina Urquhart from the hit show Morbid.When 90-year-old Laurence Pilgeram drops dead on the sidewalk outside his condo, you might think that’s the end of his story. But, really, it’s just the beginning. Because Laurence ...
01.17.2023 NEVER FORGIVE, NEVER FORGET-Rod Kackley No body means no crime, which makes this the perfect murder.Doug Stewart even has an ironclad alibi. He's been seen hundreds of miles away when his lovely wife, Venus, vanishes. What better plan could any murderer hope for?But Doug's forgotten ...

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