Showing results by author "R. Barri Flowers" in All Categories

Spanning murder cases from the beginning of the 20th century to today, this is a must-hear for fans of true crime and will also be compelling to mystery and thriller listeners. The contributors include Harold Schechter, Katherine Ramsland, Carol Anne Davis, Burl Barer, and other leading writers in this genre. Each of the 17 contributors draws on his or her own strengths, backgrounds, interests, and research skills to describe, in a vivid narrative, not only the facts of each notorious case but also the terrible emotions and macabre circumstances surrounding the crimes.

Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan arrived at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked, to pick up her paycheck. The next day, Mary’s bloody, battered, and bruised dead body was found in the basement of the pencil factory, the victim of foul play. The Jewish-American factory superintendent Leo Frank was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder in a controversial trial. Frank himself became the victim of a lynch mob, when they broke him out of prison and hung him from a tree.

In the late 1970s, a serial killer prowled the campus of Michigan State University, terrorizing students and faculty alike. Donald Miller was a graduate of MSU's renowned School of Criminal Justice, but somehow went awry and turned into a monster, targeting pretty coeds for sexual assault and murder. Miller's victims included his ex-fiancée. Only after the killer was brought to justice could the campus return to normal, as a place for education and enjoyment. Donald Miller's path from promising criminal justice grad to deadly criminal is chronicled in this riveting short.

A marriage made in hell.... Barely five feet tall, sweet and innocent looking, Charlene Gallego used all of her charms to beguile pretty teenage girls and young women into the back of a van, where her lethal husband, Gerald, lay waiting. A killer couple bound together by secrets, lies, and sex slave fantasies... Married multiple times and still in his early 30s, Gerald Gallego found the perfect companion in Charlene. Over a grisly period of twenty-six months, their bloody and brutal rampage of kidnapping, rape, and murder spanned three states and claimed 11 lives.

Prostitution in the Digital Age: Selling Sex From the Suite to the Street explores the sex trade in modern times. For those without direct experience with the seamy, real-life world of prostitution, it can be easy to accept the glamorized depictions of the sex-for-sale industry as it is often portrayed in fiction and Hollywood or sensationalized in the media. In reality, the business of sexual exploitation such as prostitution, sex trafficking, pornography, and sex tourism is far from attractive and, in many instances, can be dangerous, if not deadly.

The gripping tale chronicles the lives of Britain's most infamous husband and wife serial killers couple. Over the course of two decades, Fred and Rosemary West murdered more than a dozen young females. Most of the murders were sexually motivated and took place at the couple's house of horrors on 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, in South West England. Only when the killers were brought to justice did their murderous reign of rape, torture, bondage, and terror come to an end.

In this absorbing tale of a sports legend, infidelity, jealousy, money, and murder, former NFL and college star quarterback Steve McNair and his attractive young lover Sahel Kazemi embark on a dangerous affair in Nashville that leaves both dead.

Leonard Lake and Charles Ng left their dark mark on society as two of America's worst and most appalling serial killers. Between 1984 and 1985, the unlikely homicidal pair perpetrated their sex-motivated crimes at a secluded cabin and adjacent custom-made bunker of horrors in an unincorporated area in Calaveras County, California, where they brought abducted victims, sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered, often videotaping their heinous crimes for their sick pleasure.

It is 1980, and college roommates Jessica, Tammy, Kelly, and Gabriella, fresh off of receiving their MBAs from Michigan State University, spread across the globe and embark on their new lives, loves, and careers while experiencing the ups and downs, hopes and dreams, twists and turns, and success and failure that life brings.

To discover why a fellow DEA agent was murdered, Dex Adair is undercover at Kauai’s most beautiful resort. And when its owner, Katrina Sizemore, receives threatening letters, Dex wonders if her husband’s recent death could be connected. But uncovering an insidious conspiracy together means Dex and Katrina must put their fragile trust—and irresistible passion—on one deadly line …

The Runaway Rabbit Named Robbie is a fun children's adventure story about a rabbit who, along with his pet frog, Pepper, decide to run away from home. Children will enjoy the charming tale of Robbie Rabbit and his various encounters in the forest as he and Pepper find themselves lost on their journey.

In the wee hours of the morning on November 13, 1974, shots rang out in the upscale home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, a village within the town of Babylon. The house belonged to forty-three year old Ronald DeFeo, Sr. and his forty-two year old wife, Louise, who lived there with their five children, ranging in age for nine to twenty-three. The DeFeos and four of their children were shot to death, execution style, while in bed.

One case that stood out to Flowers for its sheer brutality as well as shocking aftermath was that of Karla Faye Tucker and Daniel Garrett, who used a pickaxe to hack to death two people. It began in the wee hours of June 13, 1983, in Houston, Texas, as lovers Tucker and Garrett broke into the apartment of Jerry Lynn Dean. By the time the couple left, Dean and his companion, Deborah Thornton, were dead following a vicious attack with a pickaxe and hammer.

When sixteen-year-old Paige Preston and her mother relocated to Dead Lake, Michigan, they were unaware that a seventeen-year-old previous resident of their house had killed himself by jumping off a cliff into the lake six months earlier. But was it really suicide? Noah Snyder is a ghost. At least he thinks so. Only he's not sure how he died. He recruits the cute Paige to help him get to the bottom of the mystery so he can move on.

Private investigator Eddie Naku is hired by attractive divorcee Kathryn Higuchi on Maui to investigate the murder of her sister, Suzette Higuchi Bordeau, wife of a well-known criminal defense attorney. She was gunned down in a shopping center in the Upcountry region of Pukalani. What seems like a routine case for the ex-police detective turns into a complex murder mystery as Naku uncovers a web of lies, deceit, arms trafficking, infidelity, seduction, betrayal, and more murders as he tries to solve a deadly crime.

On Tuesday, May 9, 1893, seven-year-old Emma Werner was the victim of a brutal and lethal attack in Chicago, Illinois. The dreadful murder came at the start of the city's much ballyhooed 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair. It coincided with the heinous crimes of ruthless serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett, who went by the name H.H. Holmes and built a hotel called the World's Fair Hotel to house and profit from the Fair visitors needing a place to stay.

Taylor Holland, forty-six, is a professor of women's studies at Michigan State University. She has been married for nearly twenty years to a criminology professor, Paul Holland, and has a nineteen-year-old daughter, Audra, attending Oxford University. After ignoring the underlying tensions in her marriage, they come into greater focus when Taylor receives a phone call from a hot new reality television series that reunites old lovers, called Forever Sweethearts. She is invited to appear on the show with her first love and college sweetheart, Vaughn Mitchell.

Honolulu fashion designer Kiyoshi Yoshida had just gone through the worst year of her life after losing her twin brother and husband, costing Kiyoshi nearly everything she held most dear. In what still gave Kiyoshi chills in disbelief, her brother Sergio Matsuko, one time dedicated and decorated homicide detective for the Honolulu Police Department, had stunned nearly everyone who knew him by being identified as the Aloha Black Scarf Killer.

Mass Murder in the Sky: The Bombing of Flight 629 is a 7,063 word historical true crime piece about mass killer, Jack Gilbert Graham. It tells the shocking story of hatred, revenge, mass murder, terrorism, and a bizarre dynamite bomb Christmas gift that brought a plane down in the Colorado sky more than half a century ago, killing all forty-four passengers and crew, and the intense investigation that resulted in bringing the killer to justice and paying the ultimate price for his brutal crimes.

Three years ago, Miami defense attorney Grace Gaynor was the victim of a violent sexual assault in which she killed her attacker. She has been undergoing therapy to deal with the trauma. When her therapist Doctor Austin Winchester, whom she had begun to develop feelings for, is arrested and charged with the violent murder of her friend Kara Pedrosa, Grace reluctantly takes on his case for her law firm of Kendall, Francois, and Larosa.