Voices of True Crime

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Age 14: Orphan

Age 15: Inmate

Age 16: Outlaw

Age 17: Killer

In 1870s New Mexico, the territory is at a crossroads. The indigenous population is being driven out—and driven down—by the white settlers migrating west after the Civil War. The center of power isn’t the governor but rather the Santa Fe Ring, a group of wealthy politicians, businessman, and landowners who exercise power through organized crime, theft, graft, and murder. Their main source of income is a mercantile store in Lincoln known as the House.

After escaping jail, William Bonney—a.k.a. Billy the Kid—is a seventeen-year-old orphan who’s been on the run for the better part of two years. All he wants is to belong—to find a place he can call home and people he can call family.

He’d have been better off alone.

Billy falls in with a gang of ruthless rustlers and murderers who work as muscle for the House. But when Billy crosses one of the members, the gang sets out to kill him.

Billy narrowly escapes, finding refuge under the tutelage of John Tunstall, an English immigrant new to the territory who has his sights set on opening a business in Lincoln—and he’s intent on competing directly with the House. But when Tunstall is murdered, any positive effect the mentor had on Billy is eradicated, leaving the Kid with only one thing on his mind …

Revenge.

From orphan to outlaw to killer, this is the untold story behind the legend of Billy the Kid.

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Life as a New York City police officer is nothing like what you see on television. Of course, it can be fast-paced and action-packed. But unlike the soy boys you see running around with fake guns on the silver screen, NYPD cops are responsible for their actions. Crash a car, lose a prisoner, or get mouthy with the wrong supervisor, and there will be consequences.

The penalties are severe and designed to make you think twice before stepping out of line. Suspension to the loss of vacation days, you can also find yourself working in another borough. The NYPD is well stocked with an army of bureaucratic sycophants who do the department’s bidding. After a while, you realize you’re a cog in a machine that views you as disposable. A hero one day, a goat the next; you can never train enough for a job that can kill you.

Lazy coworkers, combative criminals, and a close call with an HIV infection can make you think twice about your career choice. To survive in this chaotic environment, you have to be able to laugh in the line of duty.

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Examining murder from an insider’s perspective, Matt Murphy—a former senior deputy district attorney and current ABC News Legal Analyst—discusses cases from his career, how they strained his personal life, and how he found peace seeking justice for victims and their families.

Part taxonomy of murder, part prosecutor’s handbook, and part personal memoir, The Book of Murder goes through a dozen cases and his recollections of his twenty-six years in the Orange County DA’s office (seventeen in the Homicide Unit). Refreshingly honest about the toll such work takes on one’s private life, Murphy weaves his personal narrative throughout his casework in a way that humanizes the people entrusted with the duty of seeking justice on behalf of the public. As he does so, he lays bare the decision-making a prosecutor goes through in building a case to ensure justice is met while telling captivating tale after captivating tale of the world’s worst crime.

See how a prosecutor looks at—and lives with—the very worst crime. The insider’s perspective that Murphy gives on the notorious cases of Skylar Deleon, Rodney Alcala, “Dirty John” Meehan, and many others is a vital read for true-crime fans everywhere

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Former homicide detective and star of Investigation Discovery, Joe Kenda follows his authentic and fascinating debut novel with First Do No Harm, another addictive tale of crime and punishment as only he can tell it.

A string of overdoses in Colorado Springs has Detectives Joe Kenda and Lee Wilson on the lookout for a bad batch of heroin that has been cut with a drug they’ve never seen before.

Meanwhile, at Springs General Hospital, Dr. Blair Moreland—the notoriously unpleasant head anesthesiologist—has found a way to feed his deepening addiction to the very same powerful new drug: Fentanyl.

But when Dr. Moreland starts supplying the dangerous painkiller to dealer Lula Lopez—planning to manufacture the drug himself—he angers a Mexican crime syndicate and sets into motion a cycle of death and violence that threatens to engulf the entire city.

Detectives Kenda and Wilson must track down the source of this killer heroin before anyone else can overdose—and stop Moreland before he can escape the long arm of the law.

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Halloween was less than a week away, and the decorative ghouls and witches, grinning pumpkins and scythe-wielding zombies that stalked the shadows of Lewiston’s imagination wilted as the sun rose higher behind the eight majestic spires of the iconic Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church on Bartlett Street. If those 170-foot-high spires were to ever disappear, Lewiston would be as unrecognizable as Paris without the Eiffel Tower.

Two miles north at Just-In-Time Recreation Center on Mollison Way, the close-knit staff would be making sure the pinsetter machines on each of its 34 bowling lanes were working properly, food was prepped and beer kegs primed for the influx of league participants later in the day, and rental shoes and bowling balls were cleaned and ready to go.

Four miles south of them, the equally tight-knit staff at Schemengees Bar & Grille on Lincoln St. would be setting up for the lunchtime crowd, and readying the pool tables and cornhole lanes for a busy night of league play. It’s not an easy name to pronounce, but that didn’t matter to its many dedicated regulars who gathered there after work for a fun time out with friends.

No one could know during that ordinary October day that the pulse of daily life in Lewiston and the area would be on life support just an hour after sunset that very evening. No one, that is, except the man who would be responsible for making sure of that.

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On the morning of May 16, 1922, a young man's body was found on a desolate road in Westchester County. The victim was penniless ex-sailor Clarence Peters. Walter Ward, the handsome scion of the family that owned the largest chain of bread factories in the country, confessed to the crime as an act of self-defense against a violent gang of "shadow men," blackmailers who extorted their victims' moral weaknesses. From the start, one question defined the investigation: What scandalous secret could lead Ward to murder?

For sixteen months, the media fueled a firestorm of speculation. Unscrupulous criminal attorneys, fame-seeking chorus girls, con artists, and misogynistic millionaires harnessed the power of the press to shape public perception. New York governor and future presidential candidate Al Smith and editor of the Daily News Joseph Medill Patterson leveraged the investigation to further professional ambitions. Famous figures like Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and F. Scott Fitzgerald weighed in. As the bereaved working-class Peters family sought to bring the callous Ward to justice, America watched enraptured.

Capturing the extraordinary twists and turns of the case, Shadow Men conjures the excess and contradictions of the Jazz Age and reveals the true-crime origins of the media-led voyeurism that reverberates through contemporary life. It's a story of privilege and power that lays bare the social inequity that continues to influence our system of justice.

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Jeff German, a veteran Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter, was no stranger to controversy or the danger of his work. For more than four decades, he wrote stories relentlessly confronting the mob, corrupt politicians, and greedy bureaucrats. As a result, he was often threatened—enough that he and his friend and fellow investigative reporter, Arthur Kane, sometimes joked about reporting on these threats if they were ever acted upon.

Then, in the spring of 2022, German received a tip about abuses at a little-known county office. His subsequent investigation unearthed a scandalous, sexually incriminating video of a rising politician. The resulting stories in the Review-Journal ended the man’s political aspirations.

Less than six months later, on September 3, German’s lifeless body was discovered outside his home with multiple stab wounds. His dedicated newsroom colleagues, including Kane, vowed to find the killer. In doing so, they exposed the true depths of corruption and malice in Sin City.

Meanwhile, the police struggled to identify a suspect until they released a photo of the suspect's vehicle to the media. That tip led them to none other than the small-time politician, who was subsequently arrested and now faces life in prison, pending the outcome of his trial in August 2024.

In THE LAST STORY, Kane delivers an intense narrative of courage, betrayal, and the unrelenting quest for justice.

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