Need something to read (or watch or listen to) after I’ll Be Gone In the Dark? Here are some recommendations from our true crime- obsessed booksellers Madeleine and Cristin.

LONGFORM

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code (Wired, January 2011) Everyone with an aunt or grandma is familiar with scratch off lottery tickets. This dude got REALLY familiar. So familiar that he figured out how to tell on sight which ones are going to be winners. -C

Dead Wake (NY Mag, January 2018) If I were going to kill someone I’d do it at sea. You know, like how this 22 year old (allegedly?) killed his own mother. -C

The End of Evil by Sarah Marshall (The Believer, February/March 2018) Ted Bundy. Psychopathy. Wonderful. -M

How Terry Kneiss Beat the Price is Right (Esquire, 2011) This isn’t about a crime so much as it’s about the absence of one, and it’s not even so much about that as it is about how you can accomplish all things in life with math and patience. -C

Killing Daniel by Helen Garner (1993, collected in True Stories) On the killing of a little boy, Daniel Valerio, by his mother’s boyfriend. Deep thoughts on our collective responsibility for the evil that happens behind closed doors. I think about this all the time. -M

A Most American Terrorist by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (GQ, August 2017) On the city, culture and family that created Dylann Roof -M

The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox (Rolling Stone, June 2011). Listen, no one wanted Amanda Knox to be guilty more than me. Here’s the article that proved to me she isn’t. -C

New York: Sentimental Journeys by Joan Didion (1991, collected in After Henry) On the Central Park Five, but also one of the best pieces of writing about New York, a place that obsessed over the idea that five black teenagers had raped a woman in the park, when a few blocks away on the UES a white man put a woman’s body out with the trash and it barely made the news. -M

Trouble In Paradise by William Prochnau and Laura Parker (Vanity Fair, January 2008) The descendants of the Bounty mutineers live on a tiny island in the Pacific. The place is rampant with child abuse. So how do you prosecute? -M

The Truck Stop Killer by Vanessa Veselka (GQ, October 2012) On a serial killer who prowled the highways in the 1990s, killing teenage girls, and how Veselka, when she was a hitch-hiking runaway, was almost one of them. -M

TV & MOVIES

American Vandal. Doesn’t meet the “true” qualifier in “true crime,’ included here because it’s basically a YA novel, and a great one at that. Evokes fond memories of Haley Joel Osment’s 2009 snow penis spree. -C

Capturing The Friedmans. A perfect accompaniment to Remembering Satan, they are both stories of the same satanist-child-sex panic so rampant in 80s. -M

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples’ Temple. A friend who knows I’m into cults told me, in very strong words, to watch this documentary only in the daylight. She was correct. -M

The Paradise Lost Trilogy. The story of the boys dubbed the West Memphis Three is absolutely shattering. -C

The Staircase. The circumstances around Kathleen Peterson’s death are bizarre and inscrutable enough that “maybe a bird did it?” is one of the actual running theories as to who is to blame. New episodes coming from Netflix this summer. -C

Tabloid. Super weird story about kidnap and pretty ladies and Mormon sex scandals. -M

BOOKS

The Bling Ring by Nancy Jo Sales. SO much fun. I didn’t know that someone could be both a criminal mastermind and social media idiot and yet, here we are. -C

Columbine by Dave Cullen. My favorite nonfiction book. Feels weird saying that given the subject matter, but Columbine is masterful. And respectful. And painful. And crucial. -C

Ugh. What Cristin said. -M

Evil Angels by John Bryson. Lindy Chamberlain’s baby really was taken by a dingo, and this book was part of what got her out of prison when nobody believed the whole dingo story. -M

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. I once read this aloud to my boyfriend on a road-trip. Weird experience. -M

Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. Fast-paced book about crime and race in Los Angeles. -M

Grown-Up Anger by Daniel Wolff. A massacre of union workers and their children happened in Calumet, Michigan in 1913, and this book takes that massacre and shows how it has resonated through the American labor movement and into the music of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. -M

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. The definitive book on the Manson Murders, better than anything else you could possibly read about the Manson Murders (even though it has a couple of dated 1970isms, that I don’t stand by, I stand by the book in general). -M

Jane & The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson. You have to read both of these books about the murder of Maggie Nelson’s aunt in 1960s, in this order, and immediately. -M

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner. About the trial of a girl who killed her boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother, this is absolutely the most important thing I’ve ever read about what justice means, and I’ve taken to giving it to any lawyers or law-school aspirants. This one was never issued in the US, because publishing is dumb. -M

Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil by John Berendt. Serial’s Shittown v1.0. -C

Murder City by Charles Bowden. About the culture of violence in Ciudad Juarez and the epidemic of murdered women which was the subject of Bolano’s 2666. -M

My Dark Places by James Ellroy. Ellroy investigates his own mother’s murder. Super weird. -M

Naked By The Window by Robert Katz. About the death of performance artist Ana Mendieta, the fact that her husband, the notable artist Carl Andre probably did it, and the New York art scene of the 80s. This one is out of print, but you should track down a second hand copy. -M

Night Games by Anna Krien. Rape, sports and misogyny, I legitimately think this is the most important thing I have personally read about sexual assault and rape. -M

One Of Us by Asne Seierstad. On Anders Breivik and the 2011 massacre in Norway, but also a book about European immigration and the rise of white nationalism. -M

One of Your Own by Carol Ann Lee. On Myra Hindley and the Moors murders, and why, precisely, she was turned into the manifestation of the most evil woman in the world. -M

Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright. Because the early ’80s were a weird, weird time. -M

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick. Because many museums think having visible security is gauche a lot of art theft is the kind of straight up Looney Tunes shit that begs to be reenacted to the Benny Hill theme. -C

The Run of His Life by Jeffrey Toobin. Ohmygodyouguys. Oh, my god, you guys. OH MY GOD, you guys. I think OJ might have actually done it. -C

The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper. About the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004, and the broader issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody. -M

Under The Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Mormons and blood sacrifice and the entire history of America. -M

PODCASTS

74 Seconds. A deep-dive into the murder of Philando Castile by a police officer, this podcast launched right before the trial and then followed it live, which makes listening to it, knowing the outcome, all the more troubling. -M

Astonishing Legends: Amelia Earhart. Recorded before Fred Noonan’s receding hairline was entered into evidence* and presents a compelling case for foul play in this unsolved mystery.

* Really kinda sucks for ol’ Fred that this is the physical characteristic of his seen as a smoking gun. Like I have this one freckle above my lip that people are constantly trying to brush off my face because they think it’s food — if that freckle was proof of, let’s say, a second shooter in the JFK assassination, I’d be pretty bummed. -C

Bowraville. This one is about three children who went missing in the early 90s from an Aboriginal mission, and the white man believed to have killed them, this podcast exposes the absolutely atrocious state of race relations in Australia, and the complicity of the police in letting things continue. -M

DirtCast on Natalie Wood. Christopher Walken’s going to go to his grave knowing how this woman died. The rest of us will probably never find out. -C

Heaven’s Gate. A deeply-felt exploration of the Heaven’s Gate cult from an actual former cult member. -M

In The Dark, Season 1 (Jacob Wetterling). A years-long child abduction case SOLVED. -M

Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo. I wept listening to every single episode of this podcast, which uses the case of a one missing indigenous Canadian girl to investigate generations of trauma and a legacy of mismanagement and mistreatment in Canada, a legacy which frankly applies to every country with afflicted with a colonial history. -M

Serial, Season 1 (Adnan Syed). The original, and one of the best. -M

You Must Remember This: Charles Manson’s Hollywood. Basically the best of what true crime does — using the Manson Murders to illuminate the wider world, in this case Hollywood, the 1960s and the dawn of the 70s in America. -M

BONUS SECTION: R. KELLY IS A FUCKING MONSTER, A CURATED READING LIST

Jim DeRogatis on R. Kelly, including but not limited to:

Timeline: The Life and Career of R. Kelly (WBEZ Chicago, July 2013)

From Aaliyah Marriage to Cult Reporters (Rolling Stone, July 2017)

A forthcoming Hulu documentary about Kelly’s alleged history of abusing and exploiting women based on DeRogatis’ body of work.

Other Journalists on Jim DeRogatis on R. Kelly:

The Lonely Crusade of Jim DeRogatis (Chicago Magazine November 2017)

Pursuing R. Kelly: The Reporter Who Never Gave Up (The New York Times’ Popcast podcast, May 2018)

Slate’s coverage of Day 1 of R. Kelly’s trial for which Josh Levin somehow did not win a Pulitzer despite naming Kelly’s “It Wasn’t Me” legal strategy as “The Shaggy Defense,” which is as great a moment in journalism as one can hope to witness in a lifetime.