The shocking true crime story of one of the most bizarre mass murders ever recorded—and the girl who escaped with her life.In the fall of 2010, in the all-American town of Apple Valley, Ohio, four people disappeared without a trace: Stephanie Sprang; her friend, Tina Maynard; and Tina’s two children, thirteen-year-old Sarah and eleven-year-old Kody. Investigators began scouring the area, yet despite an extensive search, no signs of the missing people were discovere...

The shocking true crime story of one of the most bizarre mass murders ever recorded—and the girl who escaped with her life.In the fall of 2010, in the all-American town of Apple Valley, Ohio, four people disappeared without a trace: Stephanie Sprang; her friend, Tina Maynard; and Tina’s two children, thirteen-year-old Sarah and eleven-year-old Kody. Investigators began scouring the area, yet despite an extensive search, no signs of the missing people were discovered.On the ...

In the fall of 2010, in the all-American town of Apple Valley, Ohio, four people disappeared without a trace: Stephanie Sprang; her friend, Tina Maynard; and Tina's two children, thirteen-year-old Sarah and eleven-year-old Kody. Investigators began scouring the area, yet despite an extensive search, no signs of the missing people were discovered.On the fourth day of the search, evidence trickled in about neighborhood "weirdo" Matthew Hoffman. A police SWAT team raided his home and ...

The fatal nightOn a warm Florida evening, Karen Gregory saw a familiar face at her door. What the beautiful young woman could not know was that she was staring into the eyes of her killer—a savage monster who would rape her, stab her to death, and leave her battered body on the floor outside the bedroom.The desperate searchDetectives frantically sifting through the evidence were tormented by one disturbing question after another: Wh...

Josef Fritzl was a 73-year-old retired engineer in Austria. He seemed to be living a normal life with his wife, Rosemarie, and their family—though one daughter, Elisabeth, had decades earlier been "lost" to a religious cult. Throughout the years, three of Elisabeth's children mysteriously appeared on the Fritzls' doorstep; Josef and Rosemarie raised them as their own. But only Josef knew the truth about Elisabeth's disappearance . . .For twenty-seven years, Josef had imprisoned and...

An Abusive MotherRaised in the suburb of Riverside, California, twenty-year-old college student Jason Bautista endured for years his emotionally disturbed mother's verbal and psychological abuse. She even locked him out of the house, tied him up with electrical cord, and on one occasion, gave him a beating that sent him to the emergency room.A Son's RevengeOn the night of January 14, 2003, Jason strangled his mother. To keep authori...

On September 28, 2000, former Indiana state trooper David Camm made a frantic call to his former colleagues in the state troopers office: He had just walked into his garage and found lying on the floor the bodies of his thirty-five-year-old wife, Kim, and their two children, Brad and Jill, ages seven and five.Three days later, things got worse when police arrested David Camm for the triple murder. Soon new stories started emerging about mistresses and violent bursts of temper. And ...

Grand Junction, Colorado, 2001: When Michael Blagg’s adoring wife, Jennifer, and his six year-old-daughter, Abby, disappeared from their home, Michael led the charge to find them, even going so far as to make a nationwide appeal on Good Morning America for information. But seven months later, investigators found Jennifer’s remains in a Mesa County landfill, and things took a darker turn....Jennifer had been shot in the head, investigators discovered, and Abby was nowhere t...

June 26, 2010. A Pennsylvania state trooper witnesses a car speeding and crashing into trees. Stopping to help, he finds that the driver, Michael Ballard, is alive—and drenched in blood. When asked what happened, the man answers, "I just killed everybody."Not far from the accident, police make a gruesome discovery. In the home of Michael's ex-girlfriend, Denise Mehri, they find four bodies that had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife: Denise, on the kitchen floor; her grandfather,...

The true-crime story of Edwin Snelgrove, an American serial killer who wanted to out-kill Ted Bundy, from the New York Times bestselling author.In September 2001, Carmen Rodriguez, a beautiful thirty-two-year-old Hartford mother of four, went missing. At first police were stymied . . . until a killer's crucial mistake led investigators down a long, dark road of cold, calculated murder . . .In 1987, single mother Mary Ellen Renard was strangled, rep...

Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California—the home of an imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces, and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home, and police officers responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered.By Their Father's Hand is a chilling true story...

“Anything by Phelps is always an eye-opening experience.” —Suspense MagazineSheila Davalloo was young, attractive, and successful. When she started a new job at a cutting-edge research lab in Stamford, Connecticut, she met the man of her dreams. Nelson Sessler had no idea how violently Sheila would react when he began seeing a co-worker, Anna Lisa Raymundo. Sheila eliminated her rival in a bloody knife attack—and then turned her rage on another victim she saw as an obstacl...