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A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell

Erudite, seemingly emotionless, haughty, absolutely unrepentant, and elusive, Macarthur evaded easy analysis. The resulting picture of the killer is seen as if through a proverbial dark glass—and it’s as chilling, in the end, as any Hitchcock film. A superb study of real-life crime and punishment, to say nothing of sociopathy in action. Read more

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It’s Time to Put the ‘True’ Back in True Crime

…As a writer and editor of true crime, I might be more sensitive to these sorts of factual errors than most people. But they are part of a troubling trend. Errors like the one in “Boston Strangler” threaten the integrity of true crime, which as a genre has grappled with whether the stories it tells about crimes are, in fact, true. Read more

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Shadowman: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling

In this exceptional true crime account, Franscell (The Darkest Night) tells the fascinating story of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit’s early days and the very first psychological profile used to catch a killer … Franscell’s portrait of rural Montana will remind many of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the way he weaves together the threads of the different killings is spellbinding. This is a must for Mindhunter fans. Read more

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Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, historian Jonusas debuts with an impressive and deeply unsettling account of the Benders, a family of German immigrants who killed at least 10 people after they settled in Kansas’s Labette County in 1870 … Radiant prose enhances the page-turning narrative. The combination of true crime and a vivid depiction of frontier life earn this a spot on the shelf next to David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Read more

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Nebraska native author’s controversial deep dive into unsolved killing now a Showtime series

By day, native Nebraskan Harry MacLean helps settle conflicts as an arbitration attorney. On nights and weekends, he ruminates over methods and motives of killing. The true-crime author’s book “Once Upon a Time: A True Story of Memory, Murder and the Law” examined a controversial case when a daughter’s playmate went missing. Decades later, the daughter, now an adult, reported a vivid memory: She had watched her own father kill her friend. The 1990 case that sparked a national conversation about repressed memory is now being retold in a new four-part Showtime documentary series. Read more

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The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream

In his latest, journalist and creative nonfiction professor Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream (1852-1892), “a doctor from Canada” and “a new kind of killer, choosing victims at random and killing without remorse.” Read more

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