The best and most recent true crime books

Sondra London Author Of The Making of a Serial Killer
By Sondra London

Who am I?

I am a  true-crime author. Most recently, I have released a pair of related books: The Making of a Serial Killer: 2d Ed, by Danny Rolling as told to myself; and Danny Rolling Serial Killer: Interviews. Before that, I published Good Little Soldiers: A Memoir of True Horror. Coauthored with Dianne Fitzpatrick, it relates her tale of murder & mind control under the US Army MK Ultra program. Earlier, I wrote True Vampires, an encyclopedic compendium of bloody crimes, and Knockin' on Joe: Voices from Death Row. I also collaborated with serial killer GJ Schaefer on Killer Fiction, a volume of psychopathic musings he wrote for me.

I wrote...

The Making of a Serial Killer

By Sondra London, Danny Harold Rolling

Book cover of The Making of a Serial Killer

What is my book about?

The man convicted of the vicious murders of five college students in Gainesville, Florida, discusses his motivations and actions in committing the crimes, reflects on what made him into a killer, and his struggle to come to terms with what he did.

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The Books I Picked & Why

The Gospel of Blood: The crimes and trial of the Vampire of Paris in his own words

By Nico Claux

Book cover of The Gospel of Blood: The crimes and trial of the Vampire of Paris in his own words

Why this book?

At long last the Vampire of Paris crawls from his crypt, a living legend emblazoned with magical sigils and muttering dire imprecations for 666 searing pages. A world-renowned artist and bold aesthete of the macabre, Nico Claux holds a Japanese cannibal as his role model and calls Satan his homeboy. This reclusive genius goes beyond the pale only to reveal himself as a regular bloke, albeit one with a taste for torture and blasphemy. Meant to be read in the darkest night!

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Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

By Tom O'Neill, Dan Piepenbring

Book cover of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

Why this book?

A journalist's twenty-year obsession with the Manson murders leads to shocking new conspiracy theories about the FBI’s involvement in this fascinating re-evaluation of one of the most infamous cases in American history. Twenty years ago, reporting for a routine magazine piece about the infamous Manson murders, journalist Tom O’Neill didn’t expect to find anything new. But the discovery of horrifying new evidence kick-started an obsession and his life's work. What had he unearthed and what did it mean: why was there surveillance by intelligence agents? Why did the police make these particular mistakes and why did Tom's greatest ally in this fight turn into his biggest foe?

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Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

By Stephen Kinzer

Book cover of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

Why this book?

The bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and ’60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s

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A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

By Lisa Pease

Book cover of A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

Why this book?

In A Lie Too Big to Fail, longtime Kennedy researcher (of both JFK and RFK) Lisa Pease lays out, in meticulous detail, how witnesses with evidence of conspiracy were silenced by the Los Angeles Police Department; how evidence was deliberately altered and, in some instances, destroyed; and how the justice system and the media failed to present the truth of the case to the public. Pease reveals how the trial was essentially a sham, and how the prosecution did not dare to follow where the evidence led.

A Lie Too Big to Fail asserts the idea that a government can never investigate itself in a crime of this magnitude. Was the convicted Sirhan Sirhan a willing participant? Or was he a mind-controlled assassin? It has fallen to independent researchers like Pease to lay out the evidence in a clear and concise manner, allowing readers to form their theories about this event. Pease places the history of this event in the context of the era and provides shocking overlaps between other high-profile murders and attempted murders of the time. Lisa Pease goes further than anyone else in proving who likely planned the assassination, who the assassination team members were, and why Kennedy was deemed such a threat that he had to be taken out before he became President of the United States.

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Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

By Wendy S. Painting

Book cover of Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

Why this book?

Presenting startling new biographical details about Timothy McVeigh and exposing stark contradictions and errors contained in previous depictions of the "All-American Terrorist," this book traces McVeigh's life from childhood to the Army, throughout the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the period after his 1995 arrest until his 2001 execution. McVeigh's life, as Dr. Wendy Painting describes it, offers a backdrop for her discussion of not only several intimate and previously unknown details about him, but a number of episodes and circumstances in American History as well. In Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups.

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