

True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers
Dan Zupansky
Every week host Dan Zupansky will interview the true crime authors that have written about the most shocking killers of all time.
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 14, 2020 • 1h 33min
THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG-Annie McCormick
THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG: The True Story of One of New Jersey’s Most Notorious Murder for Hire Plots is the true story of the murder of April Kauffman, a beloved and vivacious local radio personality and veterans’ advocate who was found shot to death in the bedroom of her home in Linwood, the affluent town just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, in May of 2012. In the months leading up to her death, she had uncovered a tangled web of deceit surrounding her husband. She feared he was trying to kill her and that he may harm her family.Her daughter, Kim Pack, never doubted her stepfather Dr. James Kauffman was responsible somehow. Reporter Annie McCormick met Kim Pack on the first anniversary of Kim’s mother’s murder. Over the next five years, McCormick tracked the case even as few clues emerged. She continued to gather information, sorting through gossip, rumors and facts to uncover the doctor’s web of lies. Dr. Kauffman shunned the media and his stepdaughter, moving on with his life in the very same town. Meanwhile, investigators uncovered how the doctor worked with the outlaw motorcycle gang, the Pagans, to run a prescription pill mill out of his New Jersey Office. More illegal deeds would catch the attention of The FBI and DEA. The twists and turns of Dr. Kauffman’s lies and schemes would leave Kim Pack, her tight-knit New Jersey community, and even investigators shocked.The murder case, which has received national attention, was the subject of a 20/20 episode on ABC in the spring of 2018. In THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG, McCormick details the twists and turns in the investigation that dragged on for years until investigators caught an unexpected break that sparked a string of arrests including the arrest of the doctor and several former members of The Pagans. Nearly six years later, authorities charged her husband, Dr. James Kauffman, with her murder. In 2018, a jury convicted a former leader of the Pagans Motorcycle Club with helping to carry out the murder. McCormick includes never before seen or heard details from the investigation through her years of covering the case and she documents the relentless search for justice by April’s family, friends, and her daughter. THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG: The True Story of One of New Jersey's Most Notorious Murder For Hire Plots-Annie McCormick Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

May 5, 2020 • 1h 3min
JOHN WAYNE GACY: HUNTING A PREDATOR-John Borowski
On December 21, 1978, John Wayne Gacy was arrested. Upon an initial search of the crawlspace beneath his ranch house in Norwood Park Township, Illinois, the authorities discovered the remains of several bodies. Eventually, the skeletal remains of 29 young men were unearthed on Gacy’s property. Another 4 bodies were pulled from the river where Gacy dumped them off the Smith Bridge in Channahon, Illinois, bringing the body count to 33 total. In 1978 Gacy held the title of America’s most prolific serial killer. For the first time in print, John Wayne Gacy: Hunting A Predator contains the police and other legal files covering the pursuit, arrest, and confession of Gacy. JOHN WAYNE GACY HUNTING A PREDATOR: The Pursuit, Arrest, And Confession-John Borowski Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

May 2, 2020 • 1h 33min
MAYBE YOU DIE-Nancy Lee
Nina, a new graduate from fashion design in college, gladly accepts the offer to have her palm read as a graduation gift. Smiling, the palm reader tells Nina that she has a long lifeline, as she traces it on her hand. As soon as the words are uttered, the palm reader’s facial expression turns to one of fear. In broken English, she whispers, “Break – very bad break in middle of life. Maybe you die.”Nina does come close to death at age thirty-four when she and her family are involved in a serious auto accident. She assumes she has successfully cheated the death that the palm reader prophesied. Unfortunately, the sinister and tragic break in the lifeline and its deliverer are yet to be revealed. MAYBE YOU DIE: The True Story of a Couple Living the All-American Nightmare-Nancy Lee Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Apr 29, 2020 • 1h 29min
LOSING JON-David Parrish
David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that nineteen-year-old Jon Bowie’s body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school’s baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon’s body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy. Soon, David would learn of a brutal incident at a local motel where Jon and his brother had been severely beaten by police officers, the charges filed against those officers, and the months of harassment and intimidation Jon and his brother endured. Few in the utopian community of Columbia, Maryland, believed Jon could commit such a final act. Like many others, David wondered how a fateful night of teens blowing off steam could lead to such a tragic end. As law enforcement failed to find answers and seemed intent on preventing the truth from surfacing, David uncovered a system of cover-ups that could only lead to one conclusion—Jon’s death was an act of murder. LOSING JON: A Teen's Tragic Death, A Police Cover-up, A Community's Fight For Justice-David Parrish Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Apr 24, 2020 • 59min
A TANGLED WEB-Leslie Rule
It was a bleak November in 2012 when Cari Lea Farver vanished from Omaha, Nebraska. Cari, thirty-seven, was a devoted mother, reliable employee, and loyal friend—not the type to shirk responsibilities, abandon her son, and run off on an adventure while her dying father took his last breaths. Yet, the many texts from her phone indicated she had done just that.It appeared that Cari had dumped her new boyfriend, quit her job, and relinquished custody of her son to her mother—all by text. While Cari’s boyfriend, Dave Kroupa, and her supervisor were bewildered by her abrupt disappearance, they accepted the texts at face value. Her mother, Nancy Raney, however, was alarmed and reported Cari missing. Police were skeptical of her claims that a cyber impostor had commandeered her daughter’s phone and online identity.While Nancy was afraid for Cari, Dave Kroupa was growing afraid of her, for he believed Cari was stalking him. Never seen or heard, the stalker was aware of his every move and seemed obsessed with his casual girlfriend, Shanna “Liz” Golyar, often calling her “a fat whore” in the twelve thousand emails and texts he received in a disturbing three-year deluge.How did the stalker know Dave’s phone numbers immediately after he changed them, the names of his lady friends, even what he wore as he watched TV? He and Liz reported death threats, vandalism, and burglaries, but the stalker remained at large. The threats were vicious, vile and often obscene, sent mostly via text and always in Cari’s name. There was some truth in the messages, but all of them contained one big lie. The culprit was not Cari, but had killed and planned to kill again.With mesmerizing detail and compelling narrative skill, Leslie Rule tracks every step of the heart-pounding path to long-awaited justice—from a sociopath’s twisted past to the deadly deception and the high-tech forensics that condemned the killer to prison. A TANGLED WEB: A Cyberstalker, a Deadly Obsession, and the Twisted Path to Justice-Leslie Rule Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Apr 14, 2020 • 1h 29min
FIRST DEGREE RAGE-Paula May
Terrifying things are happening to Kay Weden, a forty-something single mom and high school teacher in Salisbury, North Carolina. Despite having no known enemies, Kay’s home, car, and peace of mind are under attack throughout 1993. Most chilling of all are the senseless attacks on her only son and the shot fired in the night through a wall of her house, which narrowly misses his head as he sleeps.Kay’s new love interest is the charming Viktor Gunnarsson. He’s a handsome Swede who left his home country to seek political asylum in the U.S. after being charged with the 1986 assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister Palme. Viktor was briefly held in custody but subsequently released due to a lack of evidence.The romantic connection between Kay and Viktor is immediate and intense until Viktor disappears without warning, leaving Kay baffled and sad. Kay leans on her loving, elderly mother, Catherine Miller, for solace until Catherine is brutally murdered inside her home by an unknown intruder.With nowhere else to turn, Kay reconnects with her ex-fiancé L.C. Underwood, a seasoned police officer, particularly adept at criminal investigations. L.C. assures Kay he will get to the bottom of the incessant and tormenting occurrences.When Viktor’s nude body is found two hours away in the snowy Appalachian Mountains, local Sheriff’s Detective Paula May is assigned to investigate his murder. What follows is an intense, hair-raising investigation that will shock you from the bitterly cold beginning to the unthinkable end. FIRST DEGREE RAGE: The True Story of 'The Assassin, An Obsession, and Murder-Paula May Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Apr 11, 2020 • 1h 36min
KILLER FICTION-Sondra London
At a high school dance in 1964, 17 year-old Sondra London met a bright, handsome, well mannered Catholic boy, 18 year-old Gerard John Schaefer. They hung out all the time and soon fell in love. But after a year, as young lovers will, they went their separate ways. She thought she'd never see him again.Then in 1972 came the screaming headlines: “6 Dead, 28 May Be,” and the ghoulish stories about the smiling cop turned sadistic killer and corpse-loving fiend, hoarding mementos of his mutilated victims, and writing it all up in feverish prose. Absolutely unbelievable! She was appalled that crimes like this could be committed by anyone, much less someone she had known intimately. Remember, those were the days before the term “serial killer” existed, before Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer so irrevocably showed us what it meant. In those days, Schaefer’s type of crime was not only unnamed, it was unheard-of.Between March and July of 1989, Schaefer sent her the stories included in two sections of Killer Fiction, “Whores” and “Starke Stories.” Selections from the stories and drawings used as evidence in his 1973 murder trial are included in the section, “Actual Fantasies.” A limited edition of the volume comprising these three sections was copyrighted and published in June of 1989.“I’m not writing non-fiction,” explained the literary madman. “It’s killer fiction: a new genre, where the writer takes violence as an artistic medium and instead of glorifying it, makes the reader see it as the cruel and horrid act it is in reality. I don’t represent violence as good or bad, merely as it is. I let the reader conclude that violence is a socially negative force, not to be revelled in.” Thus he expounded his grim postmodern aesthetic.The truth about his crimes did not matter to her as much as the chance to take a look into his deranged mind. Somehow she managed to overcome her revulsion to his sexually violent obsessions enough to continue documenting them. His sexism, his racism, his fury at every living being in the world, including himself… his boasts of rape, sodomy, murder, even necrophilia… these she managed to tolerate by reminding herself that this was important data.And so she decided to set aside her own personal distaste for the ugliness of the work, and focus on presenting it in all its twisted glory and leave it to the audience to tell her what it was. KILLER FICTION: Stories That Convicted the Ex-Cop of Murder-Sondra London Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Apr 3, 2020 • 1h 31min
THE TRUE STORY OF THE 1966 HENDERSONVILLE TRIPLE MURDERS-Terrance Ryerson Neal
The story raced across the news wires in 1966. Residents jumped in their cars and drove to Lake Summit to see the gruesome crime scene. On a late, hot July summer night in 1966, in a small North Carolina mountain town, the days-old bodies of two local men were found on a hillside overlooking a lake south of town. Nearby was a woman's body, a tire jack shoved into her genitals. Author Terrance Ryerson Neal discovered the crime in 2014, forty-eight years after it happened, and still unsolved. Now, the truth. Finally. THE TRUE STORY OF THE 1966 HENDERSONVILLE TRIPLE MURDERS: Volume 1: The Confessions 1966-1968-Terrance Ryerson Neal Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Mar 26, 2020 • 1h 28min
STEPHEN AND JOYCE SINGULAR TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE
Stephen Singular is the author of 25 non-fiction books, many of them about high-profile criminal cases. His first book in 1987 was Talked to Death: The Life & Murder of Alan Berg, which became the basis for the 1989 Oliver Stone film, “Talk Radio", and set the tone for his journalistic career. Since 1991, Denver native Joyce Jacques Singular has partnered with Stephen on eight of the true-crime books. The 1995 study of the O.J. Simpson case, Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hysteria surrounding these murders and explored the racial underpinnings of the case. In their 1999 book, Presumed Guilty: An Investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of ography, they conducted a similar probe for the infamous child killing in Boulder, Colorado. In 2015, The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth and in 2016 Shadow on the Mountain: Nancy Pfister, Dr. William Styler, and the Murder of Aspen’s Golden Girl. The Singulars have an intense interest in the psychological aspects of murder, which has shaped their work together as forensic journalists. A number of their books have focused on the intersection of religion and violence, including their 2006 book, Unholy Messenger: The Life & Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer; and The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and The Battle over Abortion. Also their books include A Killing in the Family; Sweet Evil and Charmed to Death. Anyone You Want Me to Be, the story of the Internet’s first known serial killer, was co-authored with John Douglas. And in 2006, When Men Become Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult Of Fear, And The Women Who Fought Back. Stephen and Joyce are currently working on an anthology about national and international cult leaders to be published in the summer, 2020. STEPHEN AND JOYCE SINGULAR TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE. Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com

Mar 23, 2020 • 1h 13min
THE "SUPREME GENTLEMAN" KILLER-Brian Whitney
Elliot Rodger considered himself to be intelligent, refined, handsome, fashionable and charming. He spent years trying to be cool so women would like him. He thought if he just wore expensive and fashionable clothing, had a better car, or if he were rich, then women would throw themselves at him. In fact, he thought himself to be “The Supreme Gentleman.”Yet, women paid no attention to him. His only conclusion was that they were genetically flawed, and because of this they ignored him and threw themselves at men who were ignorant, savage brutes. In his mind, his lack of success with women had ruined his life. He began to psychologically deteriorate.Rodger decided to get revenge. He spent months planning his “Day of Retribution,” an act where he would kill as many attractive women, and the type of men that they were drawn to, as he could in a savage attack. Then he acted on his plan, killing 6 people and wounding numerous others in what became known as the Isla Vista Massacre. The story does not end with Rodger however, as numerous other incels have since committed copycat attacks.The “Supreme Gentleman” Killer by Brian Whitney is the story of Elliot Rodger and how he turned from a nice, quiet polite young man to the first self-identified incel (involuntarily celibate) killer. THE "SUPREME GENTLEMAN" KILLER: The True Story of an Incel Mass Murderer-Brian Whitney Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com