50 States of True Crime

New York

Robert Kolker, “Lost Girls”

“In mid-December 2010, the Suffolk County police discovered the bodies of four women, each wrapped in burlap, on a desolate, bramble-covered stretch of sand called Gilgo Beach. It was a gothic whodunit for the internet age, replete with prostitutes, drugs, family dysfunction, investigative incompetence, not to mention a strange, insular beach community and, of course, the websites of Craigslist and Backpage, where the women had advertised for customers.”

North Carolina

Jerry Bledsoe, “Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder”

“When a wealthy mother and daughter were gunned down gangland-style at their Louisville, Ky., home in 1984 with no obvious motive, a detective predicted: ‘That family has a dark cloud in it somewhere. Find that cloud and you’ve found your killer.’ It was not until 10 months later, in the wake of a seemingly unrelated triple murder in Winston-Salem, N.C., that the dark cloud emerged.”

North Dakota

Robert Dodge, “Prairie Murders: The True Story of Three Murders and the Loss of Innocence in a Small North Dakota Town”

Homicides are rare in North Dakota, so when three people from the same small town were killed, everyone in the state paid attention.

Ohio

Daniel Keyes, “The Minds of Billy Mulligan”

In 1977, “in a period of eight days, two women, one a nurse, the other an optometry student, had been kidnapped, compelled under threat of death to cash checks at various suburban banks, robbed and raped.” The man arrested for the crimes, William Stanley Milligan, “became the first person in this country’s history to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds of a psychiatric diagnosis of ‘multiple personality.’”

Oklahoma

David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”

“Grann’s book, about how dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s were shot, poisoned or blown to bits by rapacious whites who coveted the oil under their land, is close to impeccable. It’s confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet.”

Oregon

Terri Jentz, “Strange Piece of Paradise”

In 1977, Jentz and a fellow college student, on a 4,200-mile bike journey, were attacked by an ax-wielding stranger: “Understatement is the quiet power that fuels Jentz’s writing, and our rage as we read it. Here is a woman viewing the aftermath of her attempted killing through the smeary haze of her own blood.”