12 True Crime Books Based on Horrifying Stalking Cases

When writer and scholar Kate Brennan met the charismatic Paul, she wasn’t looking for a relationship, but Paul was determined to win her over. It wasn’t until moving in together that Kate discovered just how much of that determination was rooted in obsession and control, and she ended their relationship.

Their breakup only escalated Paul’s unbalanced psyche and he utilized his intensive resources to interfere with Kate’s work, track her movements, break into her home, and continue to harass Kate even after the release of In His Sights, a harrowing read of a victim’s personal torment at the hands of her stalker.

In a case of love gone wrong, Monique Faison married her high school sweetheart and had his child despite their tumultuous relationship, and eventually fled her husband’s abuse with her children.

On the run from an already dangerous man, Monique began receiving serious threats as her husband continued to stalk her despite protection injunctions, police warnings, and even arrests. 

One fateful morning, Monique is kidnapped in front of her children and taken hostage by her husband on a horrifying car ride that left Monique’s brutalized body abandoned in the woods. The only way she escaped? Playing dead.

In the age of social media, many of us are familiar with the horrors of Internet stalking, but, as the FBI will attest, no case is quite as infamous as Susan Fensten’s online search for family gone horribly, terrifyingly wrong. Posting on a genealogy message board connects Fensten with a sociopath posing as Fensten’s distant cousins, who slowly reveals a twisted criminal history.

Before she knows it, Fensten is the target of IRL threats ranging anywhere from kidnapping to murder, rape, torture, and cannibalism from multiple online predators, including convicted sex offenders.

This book is a journal of madness that will have you questioning just what kind of world the Internet hides.

This collection of true crime online stalking cases features killers who found their victims online.

In an age where anyone can pretend to be anything on the web, Internet stalkers run rampant, and unsuspected users are constantly falling victim, but some more fatally than others. There truly is no way to guarantee that someone is who they say they are, and many predators even delight in the long-term process of gaining their victim’s trust.

Christopher Berry-Dee’s Online Killers is a guide to the mindset and warning signs of online stalkers created by examining the cases of multiple victims and analyzing their experiences. 

When Michigan newscaster Diane Newton King was shot outside of her house in 1991, the police assumed that she was killed by the stalker that had first made contact a few weeks before her death.

The stalker had been leaving her messages at work and sent a threatening note in the style of a ransom note, with letters cut from newspapers and magazines strung together. But the investigation quickly began to point to another suspect, one much closer to Newton King, and the authorities are forced to question if her stalker ever existed at all.

In Eye of the Beholder, Cauffiel investigates whether the messages left were part of an elaborate scheme to send the police on a wild goose chase after the nonexistent stalker while Newton King’s real killer walked free.

In 1993, everyone around Kay Weden seemed to be a target. Her only son was almost killed when a shot was fired through their house in North Carolina, and her mother was murdered by an unknown suspect soon after.

At the time, Weden was dating a handsome Swede, Viktor Gunnarsson, seeking political asylum in the U.S. after assassinating the Swedish Prime Minister, and he had suddenly disappeared without a trace. Rattled by the events, Weden turned to her ex-fiancé, a police officer with investigative experience.

But when Viktor’s body is found in the Appalachian Mountains, the case becomes even more complicated. Written by the local sheriff’s detective who investigated the case, First Degree Rage is a twisted story of stalking, assault, and murder.

In 1970s Alaska, oil boom money was drawing all sorts of characters to the city of Anchorage.

Among them were con men, prostitutes, pimps, and other figures making a living on the outskirts of society. Robert Hansen, however, was a hardworking businessman, husband, and father respected by the community. That is, until he was convicted for the rape and murder of more than 30 combined victims.

For 12 years, women were stalked, abducted, dropped in the Alaskan wilderness, and hunted like prey by Hansen. The man was a human predator, and his depravity took the lives of many women left on the edges of Anchorage society.

In 1968, Tonya Tarasoff and Prosenjit Poddar met for the first time at a dance at Berkeley. Prosenjit, an Indian graduate student studying at Berkeley at the time, came from an entirely different culture of social expectations than that of an American college campus.

This may be why he initially misunderstands the friendship he has with Tonya. When he’s rejected, Prosenjit becomes increasingly obsessive, giving his psychiatrist, Larry Moore, reason to believe that Tonya’s life was in danger. But he kept silent.

The captivating case resulted in a landmark California Supreme Court ruling that allowed therapists to violate patient confidentiality when lives were in danger. But it was too late to save Tonya Tarasoff.

Overkill is the story of high school student Laurie Show and the friendship that led to her murder.

Laurie was a dedicated student and loyal friend, so it was no surprise that she befriended a classmate who was struggling after a traumatic breakup with his pregnant girlfriend, Michelle Lambert.

But it wasn’t long until Laurie became the subject of jealous obsession and stalking that led to a brutal- and fatal- attack that killed Laurie in her own bedroom.

With lie after lie sending the investigation spiraling out of control, the community was desperate for closure, but on whether or not they got it, the jury’s still out.

In the spring of 1980, teacher Mary Stauffer and her daughter, Beth, were scheduling an international mission trip when Mary’s former student, Ming Sen Shiue, finally decided to act after fifteen years of obsessing over his high school math teacher.

Using court documents, audio and video transcriptions, interviews, and thousands of personal sexual fantasy scripts written by Shiue himself, Stalking Mary illustrates the real story of Mary and Beth Stauffer’s kidnapping, and the murder of an innocent child, Jason Wilkman, with the expert analysis of author Eileen Bridgeman Biernat’s experience as a psychologist.

In this harrowing account of the events preceding Kristin Lardner’s death, her father, George Lardner, pieces together a series of Washington Post articles that he wrote about his daughter and her killer.

George Lardner emphasizes that his daughter took every precaution, and even reported suspicious and concerning behavior to the proper authorities, and was murdered anyway.

Written with the potent rage of a parent grieving what was stolen from them, and the love of a father for his daughter, The Stalking of Kristin traces the details of Kristin Lardner’s life, death, and the person who killed her.

If these truly chilling cases have piqued your interest in just what drives a person to this behavior,  this comprehensive collection of research, interviews with psychologists, police, and victims themselves will seek to answer the question of why stalkers stalk. Gallagher looks to the source of such extreme obsession and why stalking is more common than ever. Celebrities are not the only one’s falling victim to the irrational behavior of fans, more and more people living mundane and seemingly ordinary lives are becoming the subject of crazed harassment by someone they’ve never met, and Gallagher desires to know why. He examines multiple real stalking cases and speaks one-on-one with the professionals involved to learn what really causes the obsessive- and often dangerous- behavior.