Collection:
True Crime
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by Stephanie Hoover (Author)Politics in Kelayres turned deadly on November 5, 1934. When Republican boss Big Joe" Bruno sensed his grip on Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region slipping away with the night's election, he and a few family members opened fire on a peaceful Democratic parade passing Bruno's home. The carnage was shocking--five men gunned down and nearly two dozen other victims wounded but alive. Convicted and sentenced to the Schuylkill County Prison, Bruno quickly escaped, alle...
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by Matthew R. Linderoth (Author)North Jersey Shore towns such as Long Branch, Ocean Grove, Red Bank and Atlantic Highlands began as quiet retreats for pious New Yorkers wishing to escape the vice and crime of the city. However, with the passage of Prohibition in 1919, the region became a haven for criminals who began smuggling liquor through the serene seaside. Speakeasies sprang up on virtually every corner, as gangsters like Vito Genovese, Charles Luciano and Meyer Lansky ruled this brutal ...
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by Susan M. Guy (Author)Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging have been going on in Steubenville for well over one hundred years. Its Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurrence. Law enforcement seemed to turn a blind eye, and cries of political corruption were heard in the state capital. This scenario replayed itself over and over ...
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by A. J. Schenkman (Author), Elizabeth Werlau (Author)In 1870, the New York Herald" proclaimed that Ulster County was New York's "Ulcer County" due to its lawlessness and crime. The columnist supported his claim by citing that in only six months, "it has been the scene of no less than four cold blooded and brutal murders, six suicides and four elopements." Hannah Markle--the bane of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union--ran a Kingston saloon where murder and violence were served alongside t...
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by Brian Allison (Author)Nashville is known for its bold, progressive flair, but few are aware of the city s malevolent past. A rowdy red-light district called Smoky Row spawned several fatal episodes. A murderous temptress with a penchant for poison once strolled the city streets. Legends range from Andrew Jackson s bar fight with Senator Thomas Hart Benton to the macabre 1938 Marrowbone Creek cabin murders. In 1938, a state penitentiary fugitive escape triggered a tragic gunfight. Author Br...
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by Jim Hall (Author), Claudine L. Ferrell (Introduction by)In 1932, a black man was found hanging on Rattlesnake Mountain in Fauquier County. A mob set fire to his body. Officials identified the remains as Shedrick Thompson, wanted for the abduction and rape of a local white woman. Some claimed Thompson killed himself--the final act of a desperate fugitive. But residents knew better, calling the tragedy a lynching--the last one known in Virginia. Author Jim Hall takes an in-depth look at the ...
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by Bruce Orr (Author)In 1819, a young man outwitted death at the hands of John and Lavinia Fisher and sparked the hunt for Charleston's most notorious serial killers. Former homicide investigator Bruce Orr follows the story of the Fishers, from the initial police raid on their Six Mile Inn with its reportedly grisly cellar to the murderous couple's incarceration and execution at the squalid Old City Jail. Yet there still may be more sinister deeds left unpunished, an overzealous sheriff, corr...
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by Tobin Gilman (Author)On the morning of May 27, 1896, the peaceful township of Campbell awoke to shocking news. Six people were brutally murdered at the home of Colonel Richard P. McGlincy, one of the town's most respected citizens. The suspect, James Dunham--the colonel's son-in-law--fled the scene and disappeared into the hills of Mount Hamilton overlooking Santa Clara County. This heinous crime triggered a massive, nationwide manhunt while investigators pieced together the details. Autho...
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by Dave Shampine (Author), Raymond O. Polett (Foreword by), Paul Ewasko (Introduction by)It was the summer of 1968, and she had been driving for days. Irene Izak, a young French teacher from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was headed toward a new job and the promise of a new life in Quebec. She never reached the border that early June morning. Savagely bludgeoned, her face and head pummeled with rocks, Irene's body was discovered in a ravine by a state trooper patrolling Route 81 in Jefferson County,...
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by Blaine L. Pardoe (Author), David B. Schock (Foreword by)On a bitterly cold morning in January 1963, Daisy Zick was brutally murdered in her Battle Creek home. No fewer than three witnesses caught a glimpse of the killer, yet today, it remains one of Michigan's most sensational unsolved crimes. The act of pure savagery rocked not only the community but also the Kellogg Company, where she worked. Here, Blaine Pardoe artfully takes the reader into this true crime thriller. Utilizing long-seal...
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by Fiona Young-Brown (Author)Despite its illustrious beginnings as the "Athens of the west," Lexington has always had a darker side lurking just beneath its glossy sheen. It didn't take long for the first intellectual hub west of the Alleghenies to quickly morph into a city with the same scandalous inclinations as neighboring Louisville and Cincinnati. Filled with tales of infamous duels, cheating congressmen, and much more, Wicked Lexington offers the first collection the city's rowdy and ru...
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by Diane Ham (Author), Lynne Menz (Author)The Town of Mendon and the Village of Honeoye Falls are today quiet western New York suburbs, but they weren't always so idyllic. In years past, the village was a center of commerce, manufacturing and railroads, and by the mid-nineteenth century, this prosperity brought with it an element of mayhem. Horse stealing was commonplace. Saloons and taverns were abundant. Street scuffles and barroom brawls were regular, especially on Saturday nights, after t...
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by Sheila O'Hare (Author), Alphild Dick (Author)The Mile-High City was never above fatal bar brawls, poison plots or any of the other transgressions history would like to ignore. From the moment it sprang from the frontier, Denver was a hotbed of violent money disputes, acts of criminal insanity and every manner of wickedness associated with street and saloon life. Men posed as women while committing crimes, and murderous madams left trails of scarred girls and ruined lives. Some sordid tales...
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by Laurel Watson (Author)Far from the rest of civilization, but with plenty of money and booze close at hand, Steamboat Springs and the surrounding towns of Oak Creek, Yampa, Hayden and Craig were filled with shady characters with even shadier pasts. Many of the saloonkeepers in these areas opened multiple enterprises, allowing the various soiled doves" of the region to move from town to town and bar to bar every few months to keep business fresh or to escape entanglements that had gone sour....
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by Jane Eppinga (Author)World War II came to Arizona via two significant avenues: prisoner-of-war camps and military training bases. Notorious for its prisoners' attempted escape through the Faustball Tunnel, Papago POW Camp also had a dark reputation of violence among its prisoners. An unfortunate casualty was Werner Drechsler, who supplied German secrets to U.S. Navy authorities after his capture in 1943. Nazis held there labeled him a traitor and hanged him from a bathroom rafter. Controve...
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by Shawn M. Herron (Author)On a bitterly cold day in December 1909, eight-year-old Alma Kellner simply disappeared from the altar of St. John's Church in Louisville. Her body was found months later near the site of the church, and news of the murder rocked the city. The manhunt for the suspect took Louisville police Captain John Carney eleven thousand miles across the country, and even to South America, to return the killer to justice. Author Shawn M. Herron details the fascinating story of a...
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by Alex Garel-Frantzen (Author)Al Capone. The Untouchables. The Valentine's Day massacre. You may think you know everything about the Roaring Twenties in the Windy City, but in the early twentieth century, the harsh environment of the Maxwell Street ghetto produced a proliferation of Jewish gangsters involved in everything from labor racketeering to white slavery. Their illegal activity offended their own community's value system and sparked rifts between Reform and Orthodox Jews. It also ign...
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by Andrew K. Amelinckx (Author)The Hudson Valley is drenched in history, culture and blood. In the fall of 1893, Lizzie Halliday left a trail of bodies in her wake, slaughtering two strangers and her husband before stabbing a nurse to death at the asylum housing her. A Jazz Age politician, tired of fighting with his overbearing wife, murdered her and buried the body under the front porch. In 1882, a cantankerous old miner, dubbed the "Austerlitz Cannibal" by the press, chopped up his partner ...
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by Jesse Pollack (Author), Mark Moran (Author)As Springfield residents decorated for Halloween in September 1972, the crime rate in the quiet, affluent township was at its lowest in years. That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the local woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police coverup ran rampant, and the case went unsol...
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by Jack Sanders (Author)Ridgefield is no stranger to life s shadier characters. The history of this idyllic community includes cunning crooks, suburban embezzlers, bungling burglars and wandering scallywags. In 1894, a group of bank robbers literally blew it in a heist at the Saving Bank the explosion attracted witnesses to see the gang miss out on a grand haul of fifty dollars. Half a decade later, in 1940, a skeleton whose origins still befuddle experts was unearthed in a tree nursery. This...
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by Paul J. Hoffman (Author)Dubbed the "Athens of the Prairie" for its array of stunning modern architecture, Columbus still endured its share of unsavory citizens, crime-ridden neighborhoods and tales of woe. Many residents avoided the infamous slums of Smoky Row and Death Valley, while others gave in to the allure of Lillian "Todie" Tull's famed house of ill repute on North Jackson Street. Two different father-and-son hoodlum partnerships, the McKinneys and the Bells, terrorized the area in ...
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by David Ferland (Author)The first courts handled crimes like lying, idleness and card playing with punishments that ranged from fines to public whipping to death by hanging. Constables kept order until Portsmouth's first police officer took up the shield in 1800. But no force could keep all crime at bay. The court sentenced the beautiful, educated Ruth Blay to hanging on shaky evidence that she might have killed her baby. Business magnate Frank Jones played corrupt politics, succumbed to ext...
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by Tobin T. Buhk (Author)The spring of 1903 proved disastrous for the Murphy family. On April 22, the infant Ruth Murphy died in her crib. Within an hour, her mother, Gertrude, experienced a violent spasm before she, too, died. Ten days later, John Murphy followed his wife and child to the grave after suffering from a crippling convulsion. While neighbors whispered about a curse and physicians feared a contagious disease, Kalkaska County sheriff John W. Creighton and prosecuting attorney Erne...
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by Jeremy W. Gray (Author)A reign of terror swept the streets of Birmingham in the 1920s. Criminals armed with small axes attacked immigrant merchants and interracial couples, leaving dozens dead or injured over the course of four years. Desperate for answers, police accepted clues from a Ouija board, while citizens clamored for gun permits for protection. The city's Italian immigrants formed their own association as protection against the Black Hand, an organized band of brutal criminals. Ev...
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by Elizabeth Randall (Author)The murder of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley is notorious more than four decades after it occurred. The only eyewitness said a man attacked Lindsley with a machete in broad daylight on the front steps of her white mansion. Gossip swirled that neighbor Frances Bemis knew who killed Lindsley and would notify authorities. Bemis was later murdered on her nightly walk. Police arrested only one suspect for Lindsley s murder, which remains unsolved to this day. Author Elizabet...
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by Patricia M. Salmon (Author)The excitement and vibrancy of big-city thrills take a deadly turn when they hit Staten Island. Edward Reinhardt murdered his wife and rolled her body in a barrel down a busy thoroughfare. A known bootlegger--and suspected police informant--was found shot three times in a Packard on South Beach, sparking one of the island's greatest mysteries. In 1843, the bodies of a mother and daughter were discovered in a Christmas Day fire; a family member would stand trial t...
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by Paul Kirkman (Author)Whether seen as a common criminal or Robin Hood with a six-shooter, the Missouri outlaw left an indelible mark on American culture. In the nineteenth century, Missouri was known as the "Outlaw State" and offered a list of lawbreakers like Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson, Belle Starr and Cole Younger. These notorious criminals became folk legends in countless books, movies and television shows. Author Paul Kirkman traces the succession of Missouri's first few generati...
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by T. Felder Dorn (Author)Jennie May Walker Burleson was envied for having everything a woman of her time could want--the privileged upbringing, the dazzling good looks, the dashing war hero husband. She was admired for demonstrating that a woman could want more, from the front of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession to the bottom of a Mesoamerican archaeological dig. But as she stood over the body of her husband's second wife, gun in hand, society's envy and admiration quickly hardened into pi...
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by Eric Ferrara (Author), Arthur Nash (Foreword by)During the early twentieth century, Sicilian and Southern Italian immigrants poured into New York City. Looking to escape poverty and persecution at home, they soon discovered that certain criminal enterprises followed them to America. Before any codes of honor were established in the New World, violent bosses wreaked havoc on their communities in their quest to rule the underworld. It took several decades for the Mafia to mature into a conte...
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by Joseph Earl Dabney (Author)Originally published in 1974, Mountain Spirits "traces the history of whiskey making from its origins in Ulster, Ireland, through its arrival in the United States in the great waves of mostly Scotch-Irish settlers who traveled the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road into the Southern Appalachians, making illicit corn "likker" part of the southern way of life. Colorful interviews and stories relate the experiences and methods of the independent moonshiners who plied the...
