The best Ted Bundy books

Killing Women is the true story of East Lansing serial killer Don Miller.  The criminal justice major from Michigan State University terrorized the mid-Michigan area in the late ‘70s and was only caught after raping a fourteen-year-old girl and trying to kill her and her thirteen-year-old brother.

Miller was given a plea deal in exchange for the locations of his victims’ bodies, and to this day, he only remains in prison for possessing a garrote in his prison dorm. In 2031, Miller will have served his time and be released into an unsuspecting population. In the words of Dr. Frank Ochberg, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at MSU, “Read it to brace for the day when Don Miller will return.”

When I was about 9 years old my grandma told me about a murder committed by someone that she knew. In 2014 I found an account of the crime and was horrified to read that the man that they hanged, Andrew Bagley, was not the person that grandma had named as the murderer.

After devoting a double centre-page spread to the book, the Nottingham Post wrote: “In her fascinating first book, the author argues that Bagley was innocent. She examines the evidence in forensic detail, asks questions that should have been asked at the trial, exposes a scandalous cover-up at the London appeal court, and in the final chapters, points an accusing finger at the person she believes was the real murderer.”

North Carolina's Triangle region is known for its universities, research facilities, and politics, but even in such a prosperous, diverse, modern environment, crime helps define the edges. These cases cover several decades of murder, fraud and betrayal. Read about the nation's largest prison escape and a couple of North Carolina's poisoners. From a civil rights-era clash of Old South and New and a suspected Cold War spy to new-tech sleuths and tales of diligent as well as discredited investigators, these stories will keep you entertained and aghast at the dark side of daily life. Writer Cathy Pickens brings a mystery writer’s eye to the region’s true crime. 

Haunted family trees, chilling photo insights, and twisted psychopaths fill the pages of my bone-chilling thriller. Spanning generations, the story follows the people (and psychopaths) surrounding young Joshua. Everyone is terrified of Joshua. No one understands his mind as he drowns cats, dissects squirrels, and burn dogs instead of playing with Legos. His mother struggles to cover it up. The Senator watches with amusement.

Where does this innocent-looking child come from and how does he control so many people? Where is he headed? Partially based on a true story, young Joshua is the ultimate evil.

JT Hunter began researching serial killer Israel Keyes in 2014. He spent the next two years interviewing witnesses, reviewing police files, studying videotaped interrogations of Keyes, and visiting the sites where Keyes committed his crimes. He also obtained the transcript of an interrogation of Keyes that federal authorities tried to keep secret.

Although not as well known to the public as past killers such as Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer chronicled in these pages was just as calculating, cruel, and cunning. This is the first detailed account of Israel Keyes and his terrible crimes, a monster who was arguably the most methodical killer in the modern age.

Decades before the term “serial killer” was coined, H.H. Holmes murdered dozens of people in his now-infamous Chicago “Murder Castle.” In his autobiography, Holmes struggled to define himself in the language of the late nineteenth century. As the “first”—or, as he labeled himself, “The Greatest Criminal of the Age”—he had no one to compare himself to, and no ready-made biographical structure to follow. Holmes was thus nearly able to invent himself from scratch. This book minutely inspects how Holmes represented himself in his writings and confessions. Although the legitimacy of Holmes’ accounts have been called into question, his biography mirrors the narrative structure of the true crime genre that emerged decades after his death.

The Power of Ritual in Prehistory is the first book in nearly a century to deal with secret societies in traditional societies from a comparative perspective and the first to deal with secret societies from an archaeological perspective. It documents how secret societies worked, what motivated their organizers. what tactics they used to get what they wanted, and the kinds of material remains that they left in the archaeological record. The painted caves of the Ice Age were probably made and used by secret societies as well as monuments like Stonehenge. Hayden argues that these early secret societies were one of the key means of establishing political control that led to chiefdoms, states, and world religions. The conclusions will be eye-opening for many.