I have the first two John Douglas books, The Last Victim, Careless Whispers, and Zodiac.

Can anyone give me some other recommendations? Thanks in advance.

Hmm. I always recommend Zodiac and you were bright enough to have read that already so...

How about:
Westies - Irish mob in NYC
Murder Machine - an NYC italian faction (Westies & this make good companions)
In Cold Blood - I always liked this
Fatal Vision & Fatal Justice - good companion pieces
Graysmith (author of Zodiac) also wrote The Sleeping Lady: The Trailside Murders Above the Golden Gate. Not as good as Zodiac, but okay. He also did a Zodiac follow-up called Zodiac unmkasked which I haven't gotten around to reading.

Thanks. I'll probably look for the Zodiac follow-up. I'm not through reading the Zodiac book yet. I bought it at a used bookstore and it was an early printing. I wondered if anything had been added since it first came out, but I guess that's what the follow-up book is about.

Helter Skelter and Edward Gein.

The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic
by Flora Rheta Schreiber

This book was difficult to get over. Very depressing.

Oh, I almost forgot:

The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry

It's about the Son Of Sam killings, and it is fascinating, and will likely make you never want to set foot outside of your house again.

Thanks for all the great suggestions. I forgot to list that I had read Helter Skelter already. That was a good book.

Cool Joe - it's been years for me, maybe I'll revisit it soon. Ed Gein, if you don't know, was the inspiration for Norman Bates... his is a truly grisly story. The book I mentioned was written by the case presiding judge, Judge Robert H. Gollmar. I think that book may be out of print, but it can probably be had cheap at either eBay or www.alibris.com. If you strike out there, there is Deviant by Harold Schechter. It was pretty good too, but it was real interesting reading the story from a persective of one so close to the case. Can't find many sources more familiar with a case than the presiding judge, and especially in this case, as Eddie didn't have any relatives or close friends.

Check it out... that Eddie was one trippy mofo.

The books on Ronald Defeo, Jr were interesting. In case you don't recognize the name, he was the one responsible for The Amityville Horror - or, to be more apt, the seed that started it all. Without him, there'd be no setting.

Ronald Defeo, Jr, age 23, murdered his mother, father, two brothers and two sisters on November 13, 1974 in the now infamous Amityville house in Long Island, New York. He and his defense attorney, William Weber, tried to blame evil spirits for the deed, and this blatant attempt at an insanity plea gave birth to The Amityville Horror.

There are three books on the subject: Murder in Amityville by Hans Holzer, High Hopes (written by the prosecutor, Mr. Sullivan), and The Night The Defeo's Died: Reinvestigating The Amityville Murders by Ric Osuna.

These books are based on true events, although we will never know certain truths associated with the case - such as if Ronnie acted alone, or why the neighbors never heard loud rifle reports at 3 a.m. Ronnie has been lying about the events of that night since his incarceration, and he still insists his sister Dawn (who he later slain) had a hand in the murders.

I recommend Black Mass. Its the true story of the Irish mob in Massachusetts and how they came into power with the help of the FBI.

Well, I recommend Frank Abagnale's Catch Me If You Can. The book is really dated - he talks about "babes" and "threads" waaayyyy too much - but the book is so much better than the DiCaprio film.

Admittedly, some of the finer points of check fraud Abagnale mentions in the book would make for boring cinema. But it's not until you read the book that you realize the guy was a freakin' genius - not just some cute boy in adults clothes (as DiCaprio depicted).

True Crime: An American Anthology by Harold Schechter
This book features articles of infamous cases by well-known writers.

True Crime: The Infamous Villains of Modern History and their Hideous Crimes by Martin Fido & David Southwell
Reads like newspaper articles in chronological order.

Both books are companion pieces of one another, essentially. The latter book has short-yet-sweet synopsis of the crime, but an expanded article might appear in the former.

I'm reading a book right now called Sudden Terror by Larry Crompton. Not particularly well written, but the case (California's never caught East Area Rapist/Original Nightstalker) is definitely creepy and fascinating enough to carry you through.

I've read tons of books about western outlaws (e.g. Jesse James, Billy the Kid), western lawmen (Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman), Depression-era bandits (John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde), Depression-era lawmen (J. Edgar Hoover, Melvin Purvis) and organized crime figures (Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel), etc. There are so many good books about these subjects.

My favorites:
"Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life," by Robert Utley
"And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight," by Paula Mitchell Marks
"Public Enemies," by Bryan Burrough, about John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, J. Edgar Hoover and Melvin Purvis, among others
"The Dillinger Days," by John Toland
"We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Times of Bugsy Siegel," by Dean Jennings
"Kill the Dutchman: The Story of Dutch Schultz," by Paul Sann
"The Valachi Papers," by Peter Maas, about Joe Valachi, who squealed on the New York mob and told its whole story in the 1960s.

Nine years between posts in a thread. New record?

Here are few true crime books that I really liked
Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness and Multiple Murder by Jerry Bledsoe
Mob Killer by Anthony DeStefano
Pure Murder by Corey Mitchell

I seem to be the board "resurrecter" of threads. Oh well.

Murderers Sane and Mad by Miriam Allen DeFord is a good reference book of obscure and not-so-obscure murderers of the 20th Century. Includes a chapter on Leopold & Loeb.

After years and years of being disappointed by books written about Al Capone, I finally came across one thats both readable (great writing style) and informative:

"Get Capone" by Jonathan Eig

As a physician, I highly recommend Blind Eye by James B Stewart, which is an amazing true story of a medical student at Ohio State named Michael Swango who became a doctor and left a trail of dead patients everywhere he went, and of a system that kept protecting him at the expense of his victims. One of the strangest serial killer stories I've ever read. It's a great book.

I'm familiar with the Michael Swango story. As a physician, is it your experience that hospital administrators ignore the complaints of nurses about doctors? And that bad doctors are quietly passed around in a game of hot potato?

I'm actually on a hospital's Performance Improvement board. We discuss cases where doctors appear to fail to meet accepted standards. I assure you we take these occurrences very seriously and while we always give the physicians a large benefit of the doubt and allow them to respond, we never sweep things under the rug. If a nurse reported a serious deviation from routine patient care, there would be a full investigation.

With Swango, part of the problem was, I think, this was before the nationwide physician reporting databank. It's hard to get information sometimes from one state's Medical Board to the other. Now that's not an issue for someone who was "dinged" since the info would be readily available to all. In addition, another problem with Swango is that he moved from more desirable jobs to lesser, starting in Chicago, moving to South Dakota and eventually to Africa; more trickle-down than Hot Potato. When you're going to an area where doctors are scarce, I assume you might be less diligent in your background checks when you finally have an interested, qualified candidate. But either way, things are different now than in the late 80s, so I'd like to think that a serial-killing doctor wouldn't get new positions any more; at least ones as sloppy about it as Swango.

Didn't want to start a new thread but was wondering if there were any books on true crime in Detroit specifically? Kinda along the lines of dealing w/ the city's decline and increase of drug, crime etc.

Yes, I liked that book quite a bit. I truly hope this character is caught eventually.

As for other T.C. books, I would have lots of recommendations but all my T.C. books are at the cottage and I can't remember all the titles of the best ones. Probably the best one I have read is "Honour Thy Mother" by Rick Boychuk, but it's long out of print.

A few others:

-The Time Life series of true crime books (9 hardcovers) is excellent, if you can find it at a decent price.
-"Son" by Jack Olsen is superb. "Salt of the Earth" by Olsen is also very good.
-"Victim" by Gary Kinder
-"Shallow Grave in Trinity County" by Harry Farrell
-"Torso: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run a True Story" by Steven Nickel

I remembered two more of my favourites: "Indecent Exposure" by David McClintick, and the mammoth, amazingly well-researched tome on SIDS, "The Death of Innocents", by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan.

I remember when the Michael Swango case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries. I will try checking out the book on him at some point.