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[juvenal]

Most of the recommendations here are 20th C. true crimes, but no mention of the Lindbergh case?  Leopold and Loeb?

How about Stanford White?

Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age, Michael Mooney

Or roll back to the 19th C. and take a whack at one of the most famous true crimes of all?

A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight, Victoria Lincoln
(and many other books)

Or to another country?

A Crime of Passion, Stanley Loomis  (Paris!  Aristocrats!)

[beccalynn2010]

I always liked Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  It is quirky, it is true crime, but also a portrait of Savannah in the 1970s and 1980s as a character. 

I also enjoyed Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case (http://www.amazon.com/Honor-Killing-Clarence-Darrows-Spectacular/dp/0143036637/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1311347175&sr=8-12).  The book looks at events surrounding a case where Darrow ended up defending a group of people who had killed a young Hawaiian man accused (probably falsely) of raping a navy wife and socialite.  Its an odd turn for Darrow who had done cases that went against what these people had done, but he had been wiped out in the crash of 1929 and desperately needed the money.

[pathogen]

Speaking of Joe McGinniss, Cruel Doubt. My favorite true crime.

[mickeymantle]

I would second The Onion Field and Fatal Vision.  I met someone involved with the latter case.  Jeffrey MacDonald, the doctor in question, is still alive and claiming his innocence, so the story will not end anytime soon.  There is an interesting book The Journalist and the Murderer, written about MacDonald's suing McGinness for misrepresentation(!).