Spanish Peaks Library District

"In Creekstone, Texas, a small, quiet suburb of Houston, football was king ... and David Temple was a prince. A former high school and college gridiron star-turned-coach, he had a fairy-tale marriage to bright, vivacious Belinda Lucas, a teacher at the local high school who was so warm and popular her colleagues called her "The Sunshine Girl." The fairy tale ended savagely on January 11, 1999, when Belinda's lifeless body was discovered in a closet....

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: there were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon...

The memoir of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped on June 10, 1991 from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe, California, when she was 11 years old. She was held prisoner by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy Garrido. She was held captive by the Garridos for over eighteen years, all the while living in a tent on the Garrido property. During her captivity she gave birth to two children fathered by Garrido. She reappeared...

Documents the efforts of the Vidocq Society, an elite trio of gifted investigators, to solve such notorious cold cases as those of JonBenet Ramsey, the Butcher of Cleveland, and Jack the Ripper, and details their work with the world's top forensic specialists.

He was born in rural Missouri, and it was immediately clear that he was different from the rest. He caught his first criminal when he was just two years old. By his sixth birthday, he had located burglars, rapists, drug dealers, missing children, and murderers—including Utah’s most wanted criminal. Known to friends as JJ, to law enforcement as Michael Serio’s partner, and by captured criminals as “that damned dog,” Jessie Jr. was an exceptionally...

"For the first time, ten years after her abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom, Elizabeth Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake of a brutal crime On June 5, 2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. She was kept chained, dressed in disguise,...

This program is read by the author.
The acclaimed author of American Dirt reveals the devastating effects of a shocking tragedy in this landmark true crime book.
A Rip in Heaven is Jeanine Cummins's story of a night in April 1991 when her two cousins Julie and Robin Kerry, and her brother, Tom, were assaulted on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River just outside of St. Louis.
When, after

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"A gripping tour de force of investigative journalism that takes us deep into the investigation behind one of the most frightening and enigmatic serial killers in modern American history, and into the ranks of a singular American police force: the Anchorage PD Most of us have never heard of Israel Keyes. But he is one of the most ambitious, meticulous serial killers of modern time. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prosecutor...

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave stirred New York City, then the entire country, into panic. The children of Italian immigrants were being kidnapped and dozens of innocent victims gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators' only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. Standing between the American public and the...

Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen murdered his wife and tried to escape London on a ship to America in the early twentieth century. He was caught in part due to the new invention of the wireless by Guglielmo Marconi, which was used on the ship. Larson draws from letters, memoirs, Scotland Yard reports, and other documents in telling the story and filling in its historical context of the Edwardian era.