True Crime Reader

I had no idea that a monster hid behind his perfect mask, but my normally affectionate dog, Toby, instantly sensed the danger - standing in front of me was a serial killer, a sadist whose days and nights were consumed by murderous obsession.

An arsenic poisoning sends a small New England church into turmoil in April 2003.

Too much fun wasn't a problem for good-looking Brent Wilson "Wil" Hicks and his athletic girlfriend, Alex Santini. In a case that has drawn comparisons to the infamous Bonnie and Clyde, the couple robbed $500,000 from a half dozen banks then lived the high life on the lam.

There was no distress call, no warning. The airliner and its 115 passengers and crew simply vanished. Get the story behind the detective work that solved the mystery.

Unsolved Murders Murder Mystery For Adults 33 short stories that will have you on the edge of your seat. Unravel the Mysteries of Unsolved Murders In the annals of history, countless murders lie unsolved, shrouded in secrecy, each one an irresistible riddle awaiting your keen intellect. From the ancient assassination of Julius Caesar to the modern-day murder of Tupac Shakur, these unsolved murders have held humanity in their thrall. Embark on a Journey into the Shadows Prepare for a quest into the depths of the inexplicable as you immerse yourself in unsolved murders that have confounded ...

It was just another normal Southern California day for Gayane Indzheyan in the spring of 2004, when she happened to glance up and notice a man peering at her from the crowded parking lot. He stared at her with a strange intensity until their eyes met, and then he was gone.

Real-life thrillers, mysteries, and tales of cold-blooded murder from the Reader's Digest archives.

"Excuse me, sir, can I help you?" Mike Gibbs asked as a heavyset man with a duffel bag stepped into the driver's well of his 45-foot-long shuttle bus. "You're not allowed down here while the bus is moving." The man responded by leveling a .38-caliber revolver at the driver's right temple. "We're robbing the bus," he said quietly.

At the crest of a hill in Kansas City, Missouri, in the old stone house on Grandview Road where he had been born, Donin Wright and his girlfriend, Janet Clark, held loaded rifles. Wright regularly patrolled his property with a gun slung on his hip, but today's plan called for something more extreme.

The 1967 kidnapping of 10-year-old Kenneth Young loomed as one of the few unsolved major kidnaping cases in the FBI's history. His ransom of $250,000 was the second-largest payoff in the annals of the bureau's cases at the time. Yet more than 30 months had passed without a clue being found to the criminal's identity.

Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men conned their way into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and pulled off a stunning robbery: They took a dozen works by such master artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet, which have never been recovered.

Robert Durst was once on top of the world. At age 35, he was the first-in-line heir to one of New York's greatest real-estate fortunes. But by the new millennium, Durst's future was looking anything but promising after he became the target of a police investigation in connection with three grisly murders.

It was dangerous enough being an honest prosecutor in Mexico. But "Pepe" Patino had spent more than a year working closely with the US DEA, investigating a vicious drug syndicate run by two notorious brothers that was pumping cocaine into America, murdering their rivals, and routinely torturing and killing informers.

Helen Dean was enjoying a smooth recovery from surgery at a New Jersey hospital in August 1993 when a thin, sharp-featured male nurse entered her room and told her son, Larry, to leave. When Larry returned a few minutes later, Helen angrily announced, "He stuck me!" Larry thought that was odd, as his mother wasn't scheduled to receive any medications. Strange, too, was the location of the shot - on her inner thigh, where it was very hard to see.

It was a profound "Aha!" moment for Karen Lodrick: She suddenly realized how she knew the vaguely familiar looking woman in jeans and Gucci glasses, carrying a brown suede coat and a Prada purse, standing beside her at a local Starbucks. Karen's ID had been stolen five months earlier. Her bank account had been emptied, and her life sent reeling out of control. The suede coat was the same one she'd seen in the bank surveillance tape, worn by the woman who'd stolen Karen's ID.

Three years ago, a little painting caused big trouble for undercover agent Bob Wittman. Here, for the first time, he tells all.

His abductors forced him to a lying position in the box, placed a lid on top, jammed in four lengths of 3/4-inch plastic pipe for breathing tubes, and started shoveling in dirt to fill the hole. To cover their handiwork, they scattered some worn-out tires over the burial site. Then they drove away.

Tammi Smith was at the register of a Cincinnati convenience store, holding a copy of The Shelbyville News, on a seemingly ordinary day in 2005 when a stocky man in a long-sleeved white shirt and jeans burst through the front door with a gun in his hand. "Everybody get out, or I'm going to kill you!" he shouted, marking the start of what would be a 20-hour hostage ordeal for the mother of five children and two stepchildren.

To the amazement of those who knew Sally Mercer only as a vital, healthy housewife, the cause of her 1968 death was ruled as polio. Forty years later, new evidence may finally solve the mystery.

Justin Barber said that he and his wife, April, were tipsy and amorous, having celebrated their third wedding anniversary with dinner and cocktails, as they strolled along the water's edge in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 17, 2002. That's when a strange man approached the couple in an attempted robbery that left April dead, according to Justin's testimony. But when police looked deeper into the case, the details didn't add up.