In the fall of 1999, a twenty-two-year-old woman was discovered naked and bleeding on the streets of a small New Mexico town south of Albuquerque. She was chained to a padlocked metal collar. The tale she told authorties--of being beaten, raped, and tortured with electric shock--was unthinkable. Until she led them to 59-year-old David Ray Parker, his 39-year-old financee Cindy Hendy--and the lakeside trailer they called their "toy box". What the FBI uncovered was unprecedented in the annals of serial crime: restraining devices, elaborate implements of torture, books on human anatomy, medical equipment, scalpels, and a gynecologist's examination table. But these horrors were only part of the shocking story that would unfold in a stunning trial... Cries in the Desert is the true story of "The Toy Box Killer"--a shocking story of torture and murder in the New Mexico desert.
In the fall of 1999, a twenty-two-year-old woman was discovered naked and bleeding on the streets of a small New Mexico town south of Albuquerque. She was chained to a padlocked metal collar. The tale she told authorties--of being beaten, raped, and tortured with electric shock--was unthinkable. Until she led them to 59-year-old David Ray Parker, his 39-year-old financee Cindy Hendy--and the lakeside trailer they called their "toy box". What the FBI uncovered was unprecedented in the annals of serial crime: restraining devices, elaborate implements of torture, books on human anatomy, medical equipment, scalpels, and a gynecologist's examination table. But these horrors were only part of the shocking story that would unfold in a stunning trial... Cries in the Desert is the true story of "The Toy Box Killer"--a shocking story of torture and murder in the New Mexico desert.
What’s scarier than a murderer? Someone with the charisma to compel others to kill for them . . . or to kill themselves. Meet these cult leaders—and get an inside look at their beliefs and how they controlled others. Some cults, led by leaders like Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, are notorious. But others are less well known, such as Shoko Asahara and his doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, who orchestrated the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Or Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, who founded the Order of the Solar Temple, a doomsday cult that led to the death of 51 members by murder or suicide. Then there is Marshall Applewhite, leader of Heaven’s Gate, who, along with 38 followers, killed themselves in the belief that the Hale-Bopp comet signaled the arrival of a spaceship that would transport them to a higher plane of existence. What makes cult leaders so compelling is their often-unfathomable power over their adherents. Why do people kill others or themselves for a questionable set of beliefs? Killer Cults tells the stories behind both famous and unfamiliar cults, and the people behind them. Across a series of profiles, we learn the jaw-dropping truth behind some of the most mystifying and deadly cults, and their leaders, all of whom led their followers down a dark, murderous path.
The #1 New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author Gregg Olsen solves a murder among the Amish and reveals the conspiracy to keep it a secret in a heartbreaking and horrifying true-crime story. In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner’s report: natural causes. Ida’s husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed. What really happened to Ida? The dubious circumstances of the tragic blaze were willfully ignored and Eli’s shifting narratives disregarded. Could Eli’s subsequent cross-country journey of death—including that of his own son—have been prevented if just one person came forward with what they knew about the real Eli Stutzman? The questions haunted Gregg Olsen and Ida’s brother Daniel Gingerich for decades. At Daniel’s urging, Olsen now returns to Amish Country and to Eli’s crimes first exposed in Olsen’s Abandoned Prayers , one of which has remained a mystery until now. With the help of aging witnesses and shocking long-buried letters, Olsen finally uncovers the disturbing truth—about Ida’s murder and the conspiracy of silence and secrets that kept it hidden for forty-five years.