SPEED KILLS: He built the fastest boats -- for royalty, the rich, spies, smugglers, Feds and a former U.S. President. Then came six shots. THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH BOOK 1: It was the crime of the decade -- and the perpetrator may have been the most notorious serial killer in history BOOK 2: 30 years after he was reported as dead, could the Walshes' little boy, Adam, actually be alive?

Now on Netflix, #5 most watched movie on the site in its first week: Speed Kills, the movie adaptation, screen-credited as based on the book Speed Kills, by Arthur J. Harris John Travolta plays Ben Aronoff, a fictionalized Don Aronow. Everybody liked and loved Don Aronow. He was powerboating's favorite, best-known, and most flamboyant racer and boat builder, the brilliant creator and designer of the famous Cigarette go-fast boats that broke speed records on the water. In everything he did, he consistently pushed the limits, always at full throttle, testing himself. In ocean races, in the worst of conditions, he was at his best. A competitor described him: "We'd be taking a terrible pounding and I'd be almost beaten down to my knees when Don would come alongside and grin from ear to ear, then take off. God, he was so demoralizing." That was what won him two world championships. It also carried over to his reputation of being not only a ladies' man, but whose girlfriends were often married. Don was the living sales pitch for his boats - he sold magic. For the price, you could be more than you could ever imagine yourself as. You could be Don Aronow. Who bought from him? Well-off businessmen in middle age crisis - and the CIA and the Israeli Mossad - kings, presidents-for-life - and George Bush. If you're thinking James Bond, so was he - he named one of his winning boats 007. He was also Miami incarnate - everything great and dark and impenetrable and fascinating about the place. He was Bond - except he played on both sides of the law. You probably never would have known about Cigarettes had dope smugglers not preferred them. Nobody could catch them in them. Then came the Reagan-era Drug War, and Bush got Don a high-publicity federal contract to build patrol boats that were faster than those he'd sold to the smugglers. They were named Blue Thunder. The Miami Herald wrote: The man who designed the roaring Cigarette speedboats, favorite vehicle of oceangoing drug smugglers, has built a better boat, one that will snuff the Cigarettes. Watch out dopers. A crack of Blue Thunder, faster than a shiver, stable as a platform, is about to become the state of the salt-watery art on the side of the law. What did the smugglers think? Because then Don quietly and bizarrely sold his company with the contract to the biggest pot smuggler on the East Coast, Ben Kramer. It was a quintessential Miami moment - maybe the Miami moment of all time. Why did he do that? At the time, the public didn't know what he did. Years later, NBC News broke the story. Said Tom Brokaw: By the time drug agents on the trail put it all together, the Kramers and the government were already partners. That's right, the boats the Customs Service uses to catch drug smugglers were built for Customs by convicted drug dealers who used laundered drug money to buy the boat company. And you thought you'd heard everything. Actually, the feds had found out and made Aronow undo the sale. But a year later a grand jury was poised to indict Kramer, and subpoenaed Don to testify. The day before he would have, he was murdered in broad daylight. Nobody saw the shots - but they heard them, and then the high-pitched whine of his shiny white Mercedes sports coupe, the gas pedal floored by his dead foot - full throttle. And they saw the shooter's black Lincoln Town Car get away. Somebody was afraid of what he was going to say. The cops concluded it was Kramer - and everyone who thought that was right. But actually, Kramer seemed the least affected by what Don probably would have testified to - and his absence didn't stop two grand juries from indicting Kramer, and two trial juries from convicting him. Were the waters deeper than that?

This Investigative True Crime Sampler by Arthur Jay Harris includes cliffhanger samples from his books Flowers for Mrs. Luskin, Speed Kills, Until Proven Innocent, and The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh.

A Millionaire Has An Affair. His Wife Throws Him Out. She Gets The Mansion, The Business, The Cash. His Parents' Business. His Parents' Cash. She Gets Shot And Doesn't Know It. The Bullet Disappears. He Goes To Prison. His Parents Flee The Country. He Weds The Other Woman Behind Bars. Has There Ever Been A Case Like This? --The Miami Herald, Tropic Magazine FLOWERS FOR MRS. LUSKIN begins with a flower delivery to the best house in the best part of Hollywood, Florida. Inside, Marie Luskin was cautious; her husband Paul used to send her flowers but those days had ended more than a year before when she filed for divorce. She thought it was safe to open the door just enough to accept the pot of azaleas. She was wrong. The delivery was a ruse; the man pointed a gun at her and demanded her money and jewelry. When he left, she fell to the floor, bloodied, thinking he'd hit her with the gun. Over 40 years, Paul's family had built a business called Luskin's from one store in Baltimore into a chain of consumer electronics stores in Florida. Coming of age, Paul was taking it over, to run. He'd already made his first million, and he and Marie were living a life their friends admired. But between them all was not well. Then Paul's high school girlfriend moved to town with her husband, and sparks rekindled. When Marie discovered it she threw Paul out of the house. For a moment it looked like they would reunite. She asked Paul to move back in at the end of the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest sale day of the year. But that was a ruse, too. That day at the store, her attorneys served him the divorce. Marie's attorneys were aggressive. Accusing Paul's parents of shielding his assets, they asked the judge for everything he--and his parents--had. A year later, it looked like Marie would get it all. The divorce was overwhelming and compound stress. Three times Marie had him arrested for not paying his very high support payments exactly on time; the judge had frozen his assets, and his dad had asked him to leave his high-paying job because he couldn't concentrate both on it and the divorce. Marie's attorneys wanted Paul's mom to testify for days about the business's finances, but because she had a blood clot that stress could loosen and become lethal, Paul's family asked them to lay off her. They refused. Not long after came the flower delivery. The Feds indicted Paul for attempted murder-for-hire. They told the jury: A Luskin's employee called his brother in Baltimore who was a mob guy, who got someone to come to Hollywood to kill Marie. Although she thought the gunman hit her with the gun, he really shot her--his bullet grazed her head. Paul was convicted and sentenced to prison for 35 years. In prison, Paul married his high school girlfriend. To me, they protested so insistently that there was no murder-for-hire that it seemed something was truly wrong. I eventually found there had been a murder plot--but the real question was, who had asked the Luskin's employee to call his brother in Baltimore? Testimony said "Mr. Luskin" ordered the murder; the prosecutor naturally assumed that meant Paul. But there was a better case that "Mr. Luskin" was Paul's dad. As a result of his son's divorce he lost his whole business, owed Marie $11 million he didn't have and was facing jail for contempt of court for not paying her, and so had to leave the country. At the story's turning point, "Mr. Luskin" had to choose between two untenable outcomes: the death of the elder Mrs. Luskin or the younger. But prosecutors also were forced to make a tragic choice. Without certainty of which "Mr. Luskin" it was, did they choose the wrong one?

Three years into the investigation of a horrific homicide case, a suburban home invasion murder of a wife and mother and point-blank shootings of her infant, husband, and father-in-law, the prosecutor slowly realizes that he and the police have been totally wrong about one of his capital murder defendants and reverses course. A former New York City cop whose exploits inspired TV's Kojak has come out of retirement to solve a baffling murder mystery. Super-sleuth Thomas Cavanagh, 79, cleared the prime suspect in the case -- and fingered the real suspect. Cavanagh was sunning himself by the pool at his Florida home when his son Brian, a prosecutor in Fort Lauderdale, called. "Dad, I have a problem with this case," Brian said. "What should I do?" --Globe Magazine UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT begins with a night 911 call from a woman gasping her last breaths. When police arrived at the house they found her dead, stabbed, and her husband, infant, and father-in-law all shot point-blank. They would survive. Minutes later, a man also called 911, a gunman had released him from a robbery at the same house. He said he knew of no violence before he left. Yet he was the only one who the gunman hadn't tried to kill. Police instantly suspected him. That night and long after, police tried to shake the man, Chuck Panoyan, who insisted he didn't know who the gunman was. Police guessed right. A tip led them to the gunman, and that led to a cross-country trip Panoyan took to see him. Both were arrested, and prosecutor Brian Cavanagh won a death penalty indictment against them both. But in pretrial, Panoyan's attorneys unraveled Cavanagh's case against their client. No longer certain Panoyan was guilty, Cavanagh reached No Man's Land: his choice was to let the jury sort it out, or admit he was wrong about Panoyan for now three years. Cavanagh's dad Tom was a retired NYPD lieutenant who'd had a double murder he couldn't solve, then at another precinct a suspect confessed. Tom recognized it had been coerced and quietly asked his detectives if they could prove it wrong. When they did, the case became famous for police integrity. A TV movie and series renamed Tom's character: Kojak. Years later, son Brian was at a similar turning point, but Panoyan wouldn't open up to him. Who was the only one could make Panoyan comfortable enough to talk? The old man, the real-life Kojak, Tom Cavanagh.

Disputing the police, investigative author and journalist Arthur Jay Harris shows why the 1981 kidnapper and murderer of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, is serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Discover the definitive book on the Menendez case—and the primary source material for NBC's Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. A successful entertainment executive making $2 million a year. His former beauty queen wife. Their two sons on the fast track to success. But it was all a façade. The Menendez saga has captivated the American public since 1989. The killing of José and Kitty Menendez on a quiet Sunday evening in Beverly Hills didn't make the cover of People magazine until the arrest of their sons seven months later, and the case developed an intense cult following. When the first Menendez trial began in July 1993, the public was convinced that Lyle and Erik were a pair of greedy rich kids who had killed loving, devoted parents. But the real story remained buried beneath years of dark secrets. Until now. Journalist Robert Rand, who originally reported on the case for the Miami Herald and Playboy, has followed the Menendez murders from the beginning and has continued investigating and interviewing key sources for 28 years. Rand is the only reporter who covered the original investigation as well as both trials. With unparalleled access to the Menendez family and their history, including interviews with both brothers before and after their arrest, Rand has uncovered extraordinary details that certainly would have changed the fate of the brothers' first-degree murder conviction and sentencing to life without parole. In The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menedez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation, Rand shares these intimate, never-before-revealed findings, including a deeply disturbing history of child abuse and sexual molestation in the Menendez family going back generations, and the shocking admission O.J. Simpson made to one of the Menendez brothers when they were inmates at the L.A. County Men's Central Jail.

The Outlaws Motorcycle Club's story is told here for the first time, by criminal underworld author and former infiltrator Alex Caine. They are the original biker gang, and their sixty years of war with the Hells Angels is the stuff of legend. Right down to their signature logo (a skull known as "Charlie"), the McCook Outlaws Motorcycle Club, formed in 1935, defined the look and sensibility of the twentieth-century biker. In the 1950s, a rising gang of toughs in California threatened to steal their thunder. But, recognizing an opportunity for expansion, the Outlaws reached out. The nascent Hells Angels sent them home to Chicago, beaten, humiliated and forever bent on the Angels' destruction. Sixty years and thousands of maimed and murdered later, the Hells Angels are a dominant criminal empire. The Outlaws, loosely allied with the number-two club in the biker universe, the Bandidos, sit contentedly as the number-three power, though they rule in places like the UK, the Great Lakes, Florida and the US Midwest. Less concerned with making money than the Angels, they continue to define the vicious biker character like few of their peers. Working undercover, Alex Caine witnessed the buffering of the big clubs' US turfs in a Bandidos-mediated truce between the Outlaws and Angels in the 1980s. But like every deal between bikers, that one soured, and a storm of unimaginable violence and scope is brewing. The alliance is expanding and determined to unseat the Angels for once and for all.

The 1981 murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, is one of the most shocking crime stories of the era. But why has there never been a "Trial of the Century" for it? Not for lack of suspects ... In fact, it's never been clearly established that the child who was found and officially identified as Adam -- was really him. After twenty years of following the case, including a deep investigation into the now-public record files of the police in Hollywood, Florida, and the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office, investigative author Arthur Jay Harris now has the definitive proof:All of the essential evidence and documentation, regularly collected and kept in every other case involving a found and initially unidentified body, which would forensically prove an identification -- is stunningly missing from the files of the Adam Walsh case. A report of an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirms it: It's not there. What is missing includes:There is no signed autopsy report, although an autopsy was performed; there are no photos of the autopsy; there is no forensic dental report, although the identification was made only by teeth; and there are no X-rays of the teeth of the found child, nor of Adam, from his dentist. As a prominent Miami forensic dentist told Harris, and other forensic dentists said as well, without a dental X-ray comparison he wouldn't be able to testify in court affirming the ID. That is how you make dental IDs, he said. And without a clear identification of the victim as Adam Walsh, a murder case against any defendant would fail. Why is all this evidence missing? Why is this case different from all other similar cases? Does this explain why the murder case of Adam Walsh has never come to trial -- and never will?Someone got away with the most heinous of murders -- and you might think, did more, afterwards. But was the child in fact Adam Walsh?Adam was missing two weeks when a child's brutally severed head was found in a remote roadside canal 125 miles away from the Hollywood shopping mall where Adam's mother said she'd left him alone in the toy department for just five minutes. None of the rest of the body was ever found. That child was quickly identified as Adam. The Walsh parents were not present at the morgue. But as Harris shows with photo comparisons, including public record police photos, it is very unlikely that the found child is actually Adam. The child is much more likely some other child, never properly identified, its parents never told. In a close-up of his famous "Missing" photo, Adam clearly and endearingly has neither top front tooth. John Walsh, in his book Tears of Rage, wrote that the photo was taken about a week before he disappeared. Adam's best friend said he last saw him a week or two before he disappeared and he still had neither top front tooth. Adam was gone two weeks when the child was found; the medical examiner who did the autopsy told the newspapers he thought the child may have been dead for all of that time. But a police photo of the found child clearly shows a buck tooth -- a top left adult central incisor. It was in "almost all the way," said a forensic anthropologist who for police took his own photos of the found child's skull. Could a child have grown in a top front tooth in anywhere close to only that little amount of time? Pediatric dentists say no. There is much, much more to the likely misidentification -- and the police's closing of the case on a likely wrong suspect. Harris has already presented much of the earlier part of the story on ABC Primetime, in The Miami Herald, and elsewhere. Now, read the full story that's been kept from public view until ...

On the dusty streets of post-war Tel Aviv, a crafty killer roams free... Israel, 1949 - Private detective Adam Lapid knows how it feels to lose everything. His whole family died in Auschwitz. He barely survived. Now he spends his nights haunted by nightmares and his days solving cases the police won't handle. Hired to find a missing boy, Adam thinks the case is hopeless. But he can't turn down a mother searching for her only child. What Adam doesn't realize is that this case will soon put him in mortal danger. For at the root of the mystery lies a double murder that has stayed unsolved for ten long years. Adam must untangle a web of lies and betrayal to get to the truth. And he'd better watch his back because some of the suspects are willing to kill to keep their dark secrets buried.