The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries, livre ebook

Unsolved Crimes, Cold Cases, and Mysterious Stories

“Haunting and heartbreaking, The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries lives up to its title, and is a must-read for true crime aficionados...”—Alex Finlay, author of Every Last Fear and The Night Shift

#1 New Release in Medical Forensic Psychology

This collection of cold cases examines crimes that are dark, scary, mysterious, and still waiting to be solved.

Unsolved crimes, unanswered questions. Crimes are meant to be solved. But what happens when they’re not? For the individuals involved—from the victims and their families to police investigators—this is the most frustrating part of all. For them there’s no resolution, no justice, no tidy boxes in which to pack away all the bits and pieces of a puzzle that finally links together. Instead, they are only left with questions that may never get answered. 

Chilling cold cases & unexplained mysteries.The Best New True Crime Stories examines a fascinating assortment of unsolved murders, unsolved crimes, serial killers, and mysterious stories from around the world, from the past to the contemporary. Like the previous anthologies in The Best New True Crime Stories series, this volume contains all-new and original nonfiction accounts penned by international writers from across the literary spectrum, from true crime and crime fiction to journalism. Contributors include Dean Jobb, Joan Renner, Cathy Pickens, Lindsey Danis, Anya Wassenberg, and many others.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A varied assortment of unsolved crimes and mysterious murders
• Murder cases to solve, told by writers from around the world
• France’s “Valley of Hell” mystery and the story of Austria’s most wanted

If you like books about murder cases or liked The Book of Cold Cases, If You Tell, or Unmasked, you’ll love The Best New True Crime Stories.

Excerpt from “In a Field Outside of Edmonton” by Janel Comeau

It was the afternoon of August 3, 1997, and Kathy King couldn’t find her daughter.

Kathy, a registered social worker, had a regular weekly routine with her twenty-two-year-old daughter Caralyn, who preferred to go by “Cara.” Once a week, the pair would meet up at their usual spot, and Kathy would take her daughter out for a meal before buying her groceries and taking her clothes shopping. Cara had gotten off to a rough start in adulthood, and this was Kathy’s way of making sure her daughter always had the things she needed.

But on this particular day, Cara never turned up.

At first, Kathy didn’t worry. Like many young people her age, Cara struggled with time management and often keeping track of time. This was the late 1990s before there was a cellphone in every hand and an internet connection in every home—it simply wasn’t unusual to be out of contact with loved ones for hours, days, or even weeks on end. Kathy simply assumed their meeting had slipped her daughter’s mind.

But when Cara missed a scheduled court appearance two days later, Kathy began to worry. And when a friend of Cara’s reached out, saying she hadn’t seen or heard from Cara in several days, Kathy knew something was terribly wrong. She spent the next few days tracking down Cara’s friends and acquaintances to see if anyone knew where she was, but no one had heard from her since August 2.

On August 9, Kathy King walked into a police station to report her daughter missing.

To her surprise, police refused to take her report. Cara was a known sex worker who struggled with a cocaine addiction. At the time of her disappearance, she had been staying at a local women’s shelter. The outgoing, happy-go-lucky attitude that made Cara the light of her mother’s life had also led her to take some dangerous risks as a teenager, and she quickly fell in with the wrong crowd. She’d left home at eighteen and had begun working in the sex trade shortly afterward to feed her burgeoning addiction. By age twenty-two, she was bouncing between friends’ couches and beds in local women’s shelters, punctuated with occasional stays in psychiatric facilities to address mental health issues and drug-induced psychotic episodes. Her mother was sometimes able to secure apartments for her, but Cara’s ongoing struggles meant she was quickly evicted and back out on the streets.

To Kathy King, Cara was a beloved daughter experiencing some personal struggles, and her disappearance was an immediate cause for alarm. The police, who were familiar with Cara after arresting her twice for solicitation, did not treat her disappearance with nearly the same urgency. Kathy was told to check hospitals and jail cells, and turned away without a report being filed.

Two days later, Kathy was back. She had done as they asked, but had found no trace of Cara. Once again, however, police turned her away without taking a report. Although it had now been nine days since anyone had seen or spoken with Cara, police still believed there was no cause for concern. Without concrete evidence of foul play, they felt there was no need for the police to be involved.

Desperate, Kathy King began to investigate her daughter’s disappearance on her own. She took to the downtown streets her daughter was known to frequent, passing out homemade missing persons flyers and putting up posters with her daughter’s picture. No one came forward with information about Cara’s whereabouts.

Kathy returned to the police station. On August 23, she was finally given a file number for her daughter’s official missing persons case. She asked the officer who took the report about the next steps police would take in trying to locate her daughter.

“Now we wait for a body to turn up.”

Kathy asked if he was joking.

He wasn’t.

And as it turned out, they didn’t have to wait long.