True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History

STOLEN LIVES—Rod Kackley

They hunted together. They killed together. And for years, no one stopped them. For years, Gerald and Charlene Gallego traveled the highways of California and Nevada, searching for their next victims. They didn’t look like killers. He was quiet, calculating, and obsessed with control. She was young, vulnerable—and willing to do whatever it took to survive. Together, they abducted, tortured, and murdered young women, leaving behind a trail of fear that stretched across state lines. But behind the headlines was something even more disturbing. Charlene wasn’t just a witness. She was part of it. And Gerald wasn’t just a predator. He was building something far darker—a life fueled by domination, manipulation, and violence. As investigators closed in, the truth began to unravel: A pattern of calculated abductions. A partnership built on fear and dependency. A series of crimes that went unchecked for far too long. Stolen Lives: The Gallego Murders takes you inside the interrogation rooms, the courtroom, and the minds of two people bound together by something far more dangerous than love. This is a story of survival. Of manipulation. And the moment the killing finally stopped. A chilling true story of control, survival, and the deadly bond between two killers. STOLEN LIVES: The Gallego Murders—A Shocking True Crime Story—Rod Kackley

KILLING THE LIEUTENANT—Lt. Raul J. Diaz and Sean Oliver

The infamy of Miami's cocaine wars of the 1970's and 80's is forever etched into the darkest chapters of U.S. history, and Lt. Raul Diaz was on the frontlines for all of it. The decorated and controversial law enforcement figure identified the shifting tide in the Magic City when law enforcement lost their grip on crime as a new breed of criminal flooded South Florida to ply their billion-dollar trade. In a deadly exclamation mark, Colombian cocaine godmother Griselda Blanco and her assassins swept through the city with a bloody and ruthless ambition that left countless dead bodies along the way. Lt. Diaz organized and spearheaded the multi-agency task force CENTAC-26 to combat Blanco and the cartels. Raul came to the US at age thirteen accompanied by only his younger brother and overcame insurmountable odds after finally finding law enforcement as his calling. He never did things the traditional way, and that wasn’t a popular position in the regulated world of police work. His successes came at a costly price, both professionally and personally, putting him in the crosshairs of those with an axe to grind, shockingly on both sides of law enforcement. The man profiled in books, documentaries, and the Netflix series Griselda is here to share the story previously told by others—now, finally told by the one man who knows the truth behind every kilo, kidnapping, and corpse. KILLING THE LIEUTENANT: Fighting Miami's Cocaine Wars, Hunting Griselda Blanco, and My Fight To Stay Alive—Lt. Raul J. Diaz and Sean Oliver

THE FAMILY MAN—James Lasdun

An immersive account of a seemingly loving father's transformation into a "family annihilator." In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. By then, the story had become headline news across the country, with its revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its center. Having covered the case for The New Yorker, where his article became the magazine’s most read story of the year, the acclaimed novelist James Lasdun brings his long-standing interest in the darker drives of the human psyche to an investigation into the serial embezzlements, fatal boat crash, and other events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle. “Justice may have been served,” Lasdun writes in the preface to The Family Man, "but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up." Having traveled extensively in the Lowcountry, Lasdun draws on original interviews (including with Murdaugh’s notorious "Cousin Eddie"), transcripts of phone calls Murdaugh made from prison, the literature of criminal psychology, and the murder trial itself. Deeply researched, sharply written, and with the page-turning intensity of a Southern gothic novel, The Family Man constructs a masterful portrait of Murdaugh and the mind-boggling crimes that wreaked havoc on his community. THE FAMILY MAN: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh—James Lasdun

BROKEN PLEA—Christopher Whitcomb

Was there more than one killer? Had the crime scene been cleaned and sanitized before the police arrived? Was furniture staged to throw off detectives? In one of the most extraordinary true crime stories ever published, Broken Plea questions what really happened in the house on King Road—and the results of that investigation will astound you. In the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, four lives were lost in a brutal crime in Moscow, Idaho—and a nation demanded answers. When a suspect accepted a plea bargain, the story seemed settled. Justice, many believed, had been served. Broken Plea challenges that assumption.Drawing on court records, investigative timelines, witness statements, and apparently overlooked inconsistencies, this meticulously researched exposé examines how a rush to judgment may have shaped one of the most closely watched murder cases in recent memory. As the official narrative hardened, critical leads went unexplored, contradictory evidence was minimized, and alternative explanations faded from view. This book does not claim certainty where none exists. Instead, it asks the questions that were never fully pursued: What happens when pressure to close a case outweighs the search for truth? What evidence may have been sidelined, and why? And what are the consequences when a plea doesn’t end scrutiny but invites it? Clear-eyed, unsparing, and deeply unsettling, Broken Plea reopens the case—and invites people to look again at what justice demands when the truth remains unresolved. BROKEN PLEA: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders-Chris Whitcomb

THE TRIAL OF ARTHUR J. SHAWCROSS—Michael Benson

In 1990, Monroe County’s daytime television viewing habits were disrupted by a TV first: the live broadcast of The People v. Arthur J. Shawcross. Never before had home viewers anywhere been given access to gavel-to-gavel coverage of a sordid murder trial. The show lasted eleven weeks, September to December. Viewers that normally followed daytime dramas or game shows were instead focused on the trial of a serial-killer who’d confessed to killing ten women in Monroe County, and one more in Wayne County, but whose lawyers claimed he was insane and not responsible for his actions. Fans of courtroom dramas like Perry Mason, now saw the real thing, sometimes lazy in its pacing, but raw and unfiltered in its subjects and language. The show ran on cable station WGRC (Greater Rochester Cable) and was set in teak-paneled Courtroom 206 of the Monroe County Public Safety Building, which had been equipped and wired as a TV studio. A few watched the first day’s broadcast, were repulsed and changed the channel. Most viewers however were fascinated and watched for the rest of the fall. The show’s villain obviously was Shawcross, yet he put no work into his role. . Throughout, he sat at the defense table motionless and silent, staring at his shoes. The hero was Assistant District Attorney Charles Siragusa, who led the prosecution. By the trial’s third week, Siragusa was receiving fan mail and baked cookies from “groupies.” Not every witness fared well under the lights. One defense witness, a forensic psychiatrist on the stand for many days, while trying to convince the jury of Shawcross’s insanity, drew unwanted laughter and was eventually satirized by morning radio shows because of her rambling answers and disorganized demeanor. For several weeks, videotapes were shown in the courtroom (and on Channel 5) of the defendant supposedly under hypnosis, describing horrific acts that went well beyond what we’d ever heard discussed in our own homes: necrophilia, cannibalism, atrocities in Vietnam, cruel incestuous abuse. Shawcross claimed in falsetto that his mother took over his brain when he killed, much like Alfred Hitchcock’s twisted villain Norman Bates in the movie Psycho. The prosecution’s star witness was forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz. He, too, had extensively examined Shawcross, but not under hypnosis. He concluded that Shawcross was faking his mental illness, that he was not psychotic but rather a malingering psychopathic, not crazy just extraordinarily mean. “He is an anti-social. He lacks moral scruples and any sense of empathy,” Dr. Dietz testified. Viewers were horrified to learn that Shawcross as a young man had killed two children near Watertown, N.Y., ten-year-old Jack Owen Blake, murdered on May 7, 1972, and eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill, killed May 7, 1972. For those crimes, Shawcross served only 15 years in prison and was released into Rochester in 1987 to kill again. THE TRIAL OF ARTHUR J. SHAWCROSS: And Other Stories of Rochester Murders—Michael Benson