These books focus on real cases, real people, and real consequences—examining crime with empathy for victims, respect for those who serve, and a commitment to understanding what actually happened.
The true crime history the tourist brochures leave out!
Las Vegas did not begin with neon. It began with dust, heat, money, hunger, and men willing to settle a problem with a gun.
Before the megaresorts, before the showgirls, before the boxing matches, magic acts, celebrity residencies, and billion-dollar casinos, there were mining camps, saloons, railroad workers, ranchers, gamblers, gunmen, bootleggers, mobsters, and killers. As the city grew, the violence grew with it.
In Vegas! Neon Lights and Body Bags, Bob Cyphers traces the darker history of Las Vegas year by year, following the murders, disappearances, cold cases, casino disasters, mob hits, desert body dumps, serial killers, celebrity crimes, and infamous tragedies that shaped the city behind the lights.
From frontier hangings to Bugsy Siegel, from the murder of Tupac Shakur to the Route 91 Harvest massacre, from hotel rooms and cab stands to lonely desert roads, this is Las Vegas as most visitors never see it.
The Strip shines bright. The desert keeps the record.
They begin with attention. Flattery. Trust. A favor. A secret. A boundary crossed so quietly that it hardly feels like a boundary at all.
After nearly three decades in law enforcement investigating narcotics, major crimes, human trafficking, and crimes against children, retired detective Tye Holand has seen how skilled predators identify vulnerability, manufacture trust, isolate their targets, and turn uncertainty into control.
Red Flag Ready teaches everyone how to recognize those tactics before manipulation becomes exploitation.
Built around three pillars of vigilance, Awareness, Confidence, and Preparation, this practical guide shows readers how to:
recognize grooming, boundary testing, secrecy, isolation, and manufactured urgency
trust their instincts without living in suspicion or fear
establish clear boundaries and say no without apology
recognize warning signs in dating, friendships, online relationships, and everyday situations
prepare for emergencies before panic takes over
help a friend who may be in danger
speak up and seek trusted help when something has already gone wrong
This is not a book about becoming afraid of strangers or assuming danger is everywhere. It is about becoming harder to deceive, harder to isolate, harder to intimidate, and better prepared to act when something does not feel right.
Because vigilance is not fear.
It is knowing what you're seeing, trusting yourself enough to respond, and being prepared before the moment comes.
See the warning signs. Trust your instincts. Live Red Flag Ready.
On Labor Day weekend, 1956, a six-week-old baby vanished from her carriage inside a crowded Sears department store in Hamden, Connecticut. Five days later, three boys fishing at Lake Whitney found her—sealed in a potato sack, weighted down with a rock.
For nearly seventy years, the disappearance and subsequent discovery of baby Cynthia Ruotolo has remained one of Connecticut’s most haunting unsolved crimes. Investigators had several leads, but one stood out—a mysterious woman in a blue dress, seen in the Sears parking lot that afternoon. Composite sketches were drawn. Files were opened and reopened. The woman was never found.
James Peinkofer was investigating a different Connecticut case—the shaken-baby killings of nurse Virginia Jaspers—when he came across the Ruotolo file and noticed something the original investigation missed: This wasn’t the family’s first infant death. It wasn’t their second, either.
Drawing on autopsy reports, forensic analysis, and firsthand interviews with surviving family members, Peinkofer reconstructs the case from the inside out—and lays out a methodical, evidence-driven argument for what really happened and why investigators were looking for the wrong woman from the very beginning.
The Woman in Blue is a cold case reopened by someone who knows exactly what to look for in the silences of an old autopsy report—and a sober reckoning with how many “accidents” get filed away because no one asked the right question at the right time.
Dead Girls Do Talk releases on September 22, 2026. Order yours today!
Before their words became evidence, they were simply trying to understand their own lives.
They wrote in diaries and journals. They saved letters, emails, text messages, calendars, and private notes. They documented relationships, fears, unwanted attention, escalating control, and ordinary moments they never imagined would one day be examined by detectives or presented to a jury.
In Dead Girls Do Talk, investigative journalist and true crime author LaDonna Humphrey examines cases in which women’s own words survived the violence committed against them and changed what investigators, families, and courts understood.
Fifteen-year-old Candice Parchment recorded an attempted sexual assault she was too frightened to report. A mother’s private diary helped reopen the suspicious death of Robin Gilbert after twenty-one years. Julie Jensen left behind a letter she hoped would never be needed. Susan Powell’s voice survived across journals, emails, videos, calendars, and the scattered records of an ordinary life. And at the center of Humphrey’s investigation is nineteen-year-old Melissa Witt, whose diary may still contain vital context surrounding her unsolved 1994 murder.
Drawing on nearly a decade of investigative work, interviews, police records, court documents, academic research, and victims’ personal writings, Humphrey reveals why evidence often begins long before the crime scene. These private records do not replace forensic science or prove guilt on their own. They preserve relationships, behavioral patterns, warnings, and changes that hindsight might otherwise distort or erase.
Dead Girls Do Talk refuses to reduce murdered and missing women to bodies, headlines, or supporting characters in stories about the men who harmed them. It restores the person before the mystery and asks us to recognize a devastating truth:
These women were not waiting to be heard after they died. They were asking to be heard while they were still alive.
When Anne Levey trusted a priest to help her troubled twelve-year-old son, she thought her prayers had been answered. She didn't know that Father Gerald Ridsdale—a predator who had already offended before—was using her faith against her. Paul was sent to live with his abuser in the Mortlake presbytery, where he was raped almost daily for close to a year. It would be decades before Paul found the words for what happened to him, and decades more before the Catholic Church admitted what it had always known: that Ridsdale was one of the most prolific pedophiles in Australian history, protected, reassigned, and shielded by leaders who chose the institution over its children.
On February 18, 2025, Ridsdale died in prison at ninety, still unrepentant, his last known reply to a question about his victims: "Hundreds." For Paul, the call that it was finally over brought relief—and a fresh wave of the trauma that has never fully left him. But Ridsdale's death didn't end the story. As the Church now fights survivors in court and quietly shuffles billion-dollar assets into subsidiaries it claims not to control, Paul is still telling the truth about what was done to him and to how many others. The Boy in the Presbytery is Paul Levey's account of survival, silence, and the refusal to let either the man or the institution that protected him have the last word.
Paul Levey’s life wasn’t always a nightmare. In his early years, he was the beloved son to Geoff, an Australian Army soldier, and Anne, a staunch Catholic. Paul attended public primary school in Melbourne but as a good Catholic himself, he regularly attended religious education classes. Later in life, he followed in his father’s footsteps, serving in the army. He married in his twenties, but quickly divorced due to his alcohol abuse—he had been using alcohol and drugs from a young age. Paul became a man whose every thought was haunted by the demons of his past. He kept his troubles to himself, telling no one, not even his closest friends or family. That is until the day his life changed forever and he became “the boy in the presbytery.”
The year that Paul’s living nightmare would begin was 1980. He was 12 years old when his mother’s friend, a nun, introduced the family to Gerald Ridsdale. Risdale was a Catholic priest who was studying at the National Pastoral Institute in Melbourne. Paul’s parents were going through some marriage troubles at the time. Gerald became a regular visitor at the Levey home. He was always offering to help Paul’s parents. Sister Genevieve, the nun who had introduced Gerald to the family, mentioned he and his brother Peter Ridsdale were going camping at White Cliffs in New South Wales. The two regularly went there to fossick for opals. Sister Genevieve thought it might be a good idea for Anne and Paul to go. There would be other children there for Paul to play with and it would be a good chance for Anne to clear her head.
Paul remembers enjoying the first part of the trip. He quickly discovered that it was quite easy to find opals that had been left by miners in years gone by. “They would peg out an area and you would find a lot of opals,” Paul said. “The miners only took the white ones. They left the blue, red, and green ones behind.” Paul said camping at White Cliffs was a dream for young boys with a keen sense of adventure. “It was like nothing we had ever seen…. Opal mines as far as you could see. It looked like the moon.” At night Ridsdale would take the boys out shooting rabbits—another source of excitement for Paul, who had never used a gun before. Peter’s son Kevin (not his real name) and another of Ridsdale’s nephews, Edward (not his real name), along with a few other boys, were also on the trip. The boys would often be alone with both brothers. Paul and the other boys were told to call Gerald “Gerry.” It was one of the many tactics he would use to try to convince Paul and other he was their friend.
Anne, who was taught from a young age that priests were messengers of God, was happy that her son, who was beginning to play up at school, had such a positive influence in his life with Ridsdale.
The camping site didn’t have a shower block. That was in town a short distance away. Peter would offer to take the boys to town with him so that they could shower. This was fine with Paul. The boys had become mates and they would shower without incident. However, as Ridsdale built trust with the other adults, he started to offer to take one of the boys to town with him to “grab some bread and milk.” He would slyly add that the boy could shower while they were there, and he would take the other boys in later to do the same. No one batted an eyelid. Why would they? This was a man of God, someone who would help steer the boys onto the right path in life. He had dedicated his life to the church, had sacrificed other pursuits in order to teach the word of the Lord.
On one of these trips to town, Paul discovered that Ridsdale had an evil plan. He accompanied him to the shower block. And that’s when Paul’s world was turned upside down. “When we got to the shower block we undressed and got into the shower[s]” separately, Paul said. He could hear Ridsdale saying “make sure you wash properly and wash your hair.” A short time later Ridsdale came into Paul’s shower. That’s when his descent into hell began. Paul was shocked and confused. Ridsdale placated Paul, telling him not to tell anyone about what had happened. Paul didn’t know what to do. Ridsdale was a priest. Paul had been taught to look up to him, to listen to him and follow his guidance. On top of that, such matters were not something that “good Catholics” spoke about—ever. Sex was a word never uttered. Masturbation was considered a sin. Lust was viewed as weakness. Paul did as he was told. He kept his mouth shut.
When he got back to camp Paul thought he would be able to escape Ridsdale’s abuse for a time at least. But Ridsdale’s brother announced he was taking the other boys into town to shower. When they left, Ridsdale made Paul sit on his knee and fondled him. “That was the end of the excitement at being on the trip,” Paul said. He recalled that Ridsdale always tried to find an excuse to take the boys to shower one at a time. He also tried to take the boys shooting alone. “I would hope he wouldn’t pick me but my turn would come,” Paul said. “He would then abuse you in the car.” Paul believes he was molested by the priest five to six times while at White Cliffs in New South Wales. In later years Ridsdale purchased a dugout at the campsite and built a makeshift place to stay. “It was just another place to sexually abuse children, including his own nephews,” Paul said. In a small win for Paul and other victims, when Ridsdale was jailed locals took the law into their own hands and destroyed the sex den.
Years later, a victim known as BAF told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about being abused by Ridsdale at White Cliffs. The commission heard allegations of sexual abuse in a range of institutions, including the Catholic Church. BAF said that he was forced to sleep in the same bed as Ridsdale at White Cliffs when he was 16. BAF said Ridsdale started touching him on his arms and legs and then his genitals. “I asked him to stop, but he would not…. He made me masturbate him and forced me to give him oral sex. I was crying and emotionally upset and wanted him to stop. He apologised and he said he would not do it again. The following night, similar events occurred.” Shockingly, Ridsdale sent BAF a card. “I depend on you more than anything or anyone else for support,” he wrote. For BAF, this was not just a one-time thing. Ridsdale began to reach out to BAF on a regular basis, alluding that it was helping him resist the urge to abuse others. “That weekly phone call and a card in the mail gives me the energy to keep going ‘straight,’” he wrote. Ridsdale said he didn’t know how much BAF had “guessed” about him but concluded he wanted to open up to him.
In 1927, a married railroad official and a woman caught in a forbidden relationship were found brutally murdered on a lonely road outside Birmingham, Alabama.
The killings of Auburn Moore and Ruby Thornton became known as the Tryst Murders, a sensational case filled with sex, scandal, fear, rumor, and public outrage.
But the story did not end with the murders.
As newspapers fed the frenzy and investigators chased conflicting theories, the case moved through the machinery of Jim Crow Alabama, where race, class, police power, political pressure, and public morality all shaped the search for someone to blame. At the center of what followed was Horace DeVaughn, the man whose conviction would lead him to Yellow Mama, Alabama’s newly built electric chair.
In The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery, S. Thorne Harper looks beyond the headlines to examine the crime, the investigation, the shifting evidence, the press coverage, and the larger world that made the case possible. This is not a fast, flashy true crime retelling. It is a careful, deeply researched account of a double murder, a questionable prosecution, and a state eager to prove the power of its new instrument of death.
The result is a true crime history about more than who pulled the trigger. It is about how a violent event becomes an official story, and what that story can hide.
Praise for The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery
“It would be accurate to say S. Thorne ‘Sam’ Harper has written a beautiful, well-researched book about Alabama’s first execution in the electric chair known as Yellow Mama. It would also be accurate to say he has, through the little known case of Horace DeVaughn, captured in dramatic detail the state’s century long love affair with death. I am, frankly, jealous.”
— John Archibald, author of Shaking the Gates of Hell and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize
When she was a little girl, a stranger used the one thing he shouldn’t have known—her father’s love of fishing—to nearly walk her out of a crowded Oklahoma bowling alley.
Her father’s scream stopped him in time. He was never caught.
Forty years later, LaDonna Humphrey—now a cold-case investigator who has spent her career searching for other people’s missing daughters—turns that same skill on her own case. She releases a composite sketch. She reopens court records. She finds men who almost fit and watches hope collapse each time a date or a location doesn’t line up.
What starts as a search for one man becomes something larger: a map of how many ordinary men moved quietly through the same small towns and how many families never got the answer she’s still chasing.
The Man at Hilltop Lanes doesn’t end with an arrest. It ends with a harder, truer question: what do you do with a story that refuses to close?
Part memoir, part cold-case file, told by a woman who has spent her life on both sides of that question.
The Man at Hilltop Lanes releases on July 17, 2026. Order yours today!
Some stories disappear long before they are ever solved.
A missing woman becomes a faded headline. A murdered girl becomes a file stored in a box somewhere inside a courthouse basement. Families learn to live between hope and grief while communities slowly stop asking questions. Over time, silence settles in where outrage once existed.
The Lost Girls of Arkansas confronts that silence head-on.
In this powerful investigative work, award-winning author, journalist, and victims’ advocate LaDonna Humphrey examines missing persons cases and unsolved murders that continue to haunt Arkansas decades later. Through deeply researched storytelling, firsthand investigative work, and a victim-centered approach, Humphrey explores the lives behind the cases — not as statistics or sensational headlines, but as daughters, sisters, mothers, and human beings whose stories deserve far more attention than they received.
Set against the backdrop of rural highways, isolated communities, river towns, and dense Arkansas forests, the book traces the lingering impact of unresolved violence across generations. It examines how poverty, addiction, indifference, institutional failure, media disparities, and social stigma often shaped which victims received urgency and which were quietly forgotten. In many cases, the investigations stalled long before the pain did.
Rather than glorifying violence, The Lost Girls of Arkansas focuses on the emotional and societal aftermath when justice never comes. Families fracture beneath unanswered questions. Witnesses carry secrets for decades. Entire communities adapt to fear, rumor, and uncertainty while predators sometimes remain hidden in plain sight.
Humphrey brings both investigative rigor and emotional depth to these cases, challenging readers to look beyond the surface of true crime and confront the broader realities surrounding unsolved violence in overlooked places. The result is a haunting and deeply human examination of memory, loss, justice, and the enduring fight to make sure victims are not erased by time.
LaDonna Humphrey is an award-winning author, investigative journalist, filmmaker, and nationally recognized advocate for victims of crime. She is the co-founder of All the Lost Girls and host of investigative podcasts focused on missing persons, cold cases, and justice reform. Her work has earned recognition for its ethical approach, relentless research, and commitment to giving voice to victims and families too often ignored.
Every name matters. Every story counts. Some cases should never be forgotten. LaDonna Humphrey is currently working on additional investigative volumes including The Lost Girls of Alaska, The Lost Girls of Oklahoma, and The Lost Girls of Washington. To suggest a case, share information, or learn more about her investigative work, visit LaDonnaHumphrey.com.
4.5from 11 readers
Chapter One — The Name in the File: Dana Stidham
The first time I encountered Dana Stidham’s name, it did not come to me through a headline, a memorial post, or a grieving family’s plea for renewed attention, but through the quiet interior of a homicide file, where names are often reduced to investigative reference points and human lives are compressed into typed lines and procedural summaries. I had been seated for hours with the Melissa Witt investigative materials spread across the table in front of me, moving slowly through reports, timelines, lab findings, and comparative analyses, when I turned a page and noticed another victim listed as part of a prior cross-case review. The notation was brief and clinical, indicating that investigators had once examined whether a connection existed between Melissa’s murder and the disappearance and homicide of a young woman from Northwest Arkansas, and the conclusion beside the notation stated that no evidentiary link had been established and that the comparison had been closed. (More on Melissa Witt in Chapter Eight)
Even so, experience has taught me that names discovered in the margins of major case files are rarely insignificant, because investigators do not make cross-case comparisons casually, and when two murdered young women appear within the same analytical frame, even temporarily, it reveals the kinds of patterns and offender possibilities detectives were weighing at the time. Comparative elimination does not erase tragedy; it simply clarifies that there are multiple unresolved harms instead of one, and it leaves you with the uneasy awareness that while the cases may not connect to each other, the violence still connects to the same landscape. I wrote Dana’s name down in my notebook before I finished reading the page, not because I believed the cases were linked — the file was clear that they were not — but because I have learned that closed leads do not cancel open grief, and separate cases still deserve to be held with the same seriousness, the same refusal to let them dissolve into the background.
At that moment, Dana Stidham was simply another unsolved Arkansas victim whose story required careful, factual reconstruction, but advocacy work has a way of narrowing distance between research and reality, and what begins as a name on paper can become something far more personal without warning. In the months that followed, through nonprofit and service circles where advocacy, recovery work, and community leadership often overlap, I developed a friendship with Sammy Laney, a woman whose compassion and steady commitment to helping others was evident long before I knew anything about her family history. Our connection formed through shared mission rather than shared tragedy, which made what I later learned feel less like coincidence and more like convergence, because when I discovered that Sammy is Dana Stidham’s first cousin, the emotional distance between file notation and human loss collapsed in an instant. The case I had first encountered as an investigative cross-reference became something closer and heavier, and the realization did not feel incidental; it felt directional, as though the work itself had circled back and placed Dana’s name in front of me again, not as a footnote, but as a responsibility.
Dana Lanell Stidham was eighteen years old in the summer of 1989, newly graduated from Gravette High School and standing at that hopeful threshold where young adulthood begins to take shape through plans, applications, and practical next steps. She had been accepted to Northwest Arkansas Community College and was moving forward with the steady, grounded energy that those close to her described as characteristic of her nature. At the time, she was living in Centerton with her brother Larry and her cousin Kristy Smith, while still maintaining close and frequent visits with her parents, Lawrence and Georgia, in Hiwasse, reflecting the kind of tightly woven family structure where independence grows without severing connection.
On July 25, 1989, she spent part of the day at her parents’ home, helping with ordinary responsibilities and moving through the familiar rhythm of a summer afternoon. Her father was feeling ill, and she agreed to run a short grocery errand for him — a small act of care, a routine favor, the kind of trip no one remembers twice under normal circumstances. She left the house at approximately 2:45 in the afternoon for what should have been a quick four-mile drive to the Phillips grocery store in Bella Vista, and store register records later confirmed that she completed her purchase at 3:17 p.m., creating a timestamp that stands as the final verified marker of her movements while alive. A receipt found later inside her vehicle preserved that moment with indifferent precision, ink on paper marking the end of the known timeline.
Witnesses reported that she spoke briefly with an older man near the store entrance area, an interaction that did not raise alarm at the time and appeared ordinary to those who observed it. There was no recorded sign of distress, no visible struggle, nothing to distinguish that moment from thousands of other brief public exchanges that occur every day in grocery store doorways and parking lots, and that ordinariness is part of what makes it so unsettling to revisit. Somewhere between that completed purchase and the expected return home, her day — and her life — was violently interrupted.
Concern grew quickly when she failed to return within a reasonable timeframe, because Dana was known for her reliability and for communicating even small delays, and her unexplained absence did not fit her character. By that evening, her brother reached out for help, and a family friend who was also a sergeant with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office began the early response process, gathering descriptions and initiating a countywide alert so that patrol officers would be watching for her vehicle. Those first hours in a missing person case can be decisive, but they are also frequently marked by uncertainty, and Dana’s case began with urgency but very little actionable information, which is one of the cruelest combinations a family can endure.
The following morning brought the first major development when her gray 1984 Dodge Omni was located along Highway 71 near Wellington Road in Bella Vista, positioned on the shoulder in the southbound lane with a flat left rear tire, unlocked, with the keys still in the ignition. Inside, investigators found the grocery receipt confirming the previous afternoon’s purchase time. Detectives surveying the scene were immediately troubled by directional inconsistency, because both Dana and her parents lived in the opposite direction from where the car had been left, suggesting that something — or someone — had altered her route after she exited the store parking lot, and the totality of the scene suggested interruption rather than a voluntary stop.
A Bella Vista officer later reported that during the previous night, before the vehicle had been linked to a missing young woman, he had observed a pickup truck stopped behind the Omni with a man positioned near the rear tire, appearing to examine something mechanical. At the time, the observation did not trigger alarm, but in hindsight it became one of the most haunting near-intersections in the timeline, representing a moment when proximity to the offender may have occurred without recognition, a moment that reads like a warning nobody knew how to hear.
As investigators retraced Dana’s likely route, some of her personal belongings were discovered scattered along nearby roads, findings that suggested deliberate disposal rather than accidental loss, and shifted the working theory firmly toward abduction. Search efforts expanded to include law enforcement personnel, volunteers, friends, and community members who combed surrounding areas hoping to locate either Dana herself or additional trace evidence. Detectives conducted interviews across her known social and relational circles, including former romantic partners, verifying alibis and reconstructing movements, following standard elimination protocols while pursuing every viable lead, because in the early stage of an investigation the goal is not to confirm a single theory but to remove every false one until only the truth remains.
Nearly two months later, in mid-September, a hunter discovered skeletal remains in a wooded area of Bella Vista near a dry creek bed, but the discovery was not immediately reported, adding delay to an already devastating development. Investigators responded to the scene and began careful recovery procedures, and the remains were sent to the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Little Rock, where dental comparison confirmed Dana’s identity. The case was formally ruled a homicide, and because of the condition of the remains and the passage of time, officials did not publicly release the specific physiological cause of death, preserving forensic details for investigative integrity. Evidence at the scene included materials indicating restraint, including duct tape and lengths of tied twine, reinforcing the conclusion of criminal violence.
Dana was born in March 1971 and would now be in her fifties, a reality that forces the mind to imagine the decades she never experienced — the career she might have built, the relationships she might have formed, the ordinary milestones that were stolen before they could occur. Her disappearance and murder shocked her community, and the grief that followed settled deeply into the lives of those who loved her. Over the decades since, many central figures connected to the early investigation and family circle have passed away, including her parents and several original investigators, yet the case itself has not been closed. Cold case units continue to review the file, reassess evidence, and seek new leads through modern methods, maintaining its status as open and active.
What remains most striking is how memory has endured even where answers have not, because classmates, relatives, and family friends still speak of Dana not as a case but as a person — kind, dependable, warm-hearted — and they continue efforts to keep her name visible so that time does not succeed where violence failed in erasing her. Community advocates and relatives maintain awareness efforts so that population growth and generational turnover do not bury the story under unfamiliarity, and the passage of thirty-five years has changed the landscape but not the obligation.
When I think back to the moment I first saw Dana Stidham’s name in the Witt case file — a brief comparative entry concluding no connection — I understand now that while the crimes are not linked by offender, they are linked by duty, because every unsolved murder of a young woman (or of anyone) creates the same unfinished demand for truth. Discovering that my friend Sammy Laney is Dana Stidham’s first cousin did not alter the investigative facts, but it removed any remaining emotional distance, and with that nearness came certainty that telling Dana’s story fully, factually, and without dilution is not optional work. It is necessary .
