Collection:
True Crime
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by Tobin T. Buhk (Author)With his boyish good looks, Arthur Warren Waite charmed into marriage the daughter of wealthy Grand Rapids business tycoon John E. Peck in 1916. He then wasted no time executing what he believed to be a flawless scheme to hijack his wife's inheritance. The plot went awry when a mysterious telegram set off a sequence of events that ultimately exposed his immoral ambition to poison all other Peck heirs. Follow Waite's fingerprints of indiscretion" around Grand Rapids an...
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by Troy Taylor (Author)Blazing from the West Side, the Great Chicago Fire left nothing but ashy remnants of the developing city, leveling its landscape but certainly not its spirit. While the West Side was home to the infamous O'Leary barn, it was also where news of some of the city's most gruesome and horrific crimes reverberated throughout the state and across the country. Read about the bloody end of Roger The Terrible"? Touhy, who, although he undoubtedly lived up to his name, met an ill-...
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by Robert Wilhelm (Author)Victorian Boston was more than just stately brownstones and elite society that graced neighborhoods like Beacon Hill. As the population grew, the city developed a seedy underbelly just below its surface. Illegal saloons, prostitution and sports gambling challenged the image of the Puritan City. Daughters of the Boston Brahmins posed for nude photographs. The grandson of President John Adams was roped into an elaborate confidence game. Reverend William Downs, a local ...
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by Jim Wise (Author)No suspect was ever indicted or tried for the murder of scalawag politician John W. Chicken" Stephens in a North Carolina courthouse; and the Ku Klux Klan not only rid itself of a troublesome adversary, but also set up a showdown between the state's old guard and the radical regime of Governor William Woods Holden. Follow this little-known tale from the murder, through the "Kirk-Holden War," through the courts and to the finale, when Holden became the United States' first ...
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by Scott Mangold (Author)The DeAutremont brothers were looking for a big score. They brought dynamite, guns and a getaway car. On October 11, 1923, at the summit of the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon, the three young men held up a passenger train, with disastrous consequences. Their rash actions resulted in the tragic deaths of three Southern Pacific trainmen and one U.S. Mail clerk, unleashing a public outcry that still rings through Oregon's history. In this riveting account, rail hi...
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by John DeSantis (Author), Burnell Tolbert (Foreword by)On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families during a spree lasting more than two hours. The violence erupted due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action to create an epic tragedy. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses an...
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by Teresa Nordheim (Author)Seattle harbors a dark and violent history that stretches back to a bloody battle between natives and settlers in 1856. In the early 1900s, Dr. Linda Hazzard stole money from countless patients after starving them to death in her infamous sanitarium. Three robbers opened fire in the notorious Wah Mee gambling club in 1983, killing thirteen people in the state s deadliest mass homicide. Some of America s most notorious serial killers wrought terror in Seattle, includ...
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by Keven McQueen (Author)With an eye for bizarre, macabre detail, Keven McQueen tracks down seventeen true crimes and unsolved mysteries in this rap sheet of historic Hoosier homicides from Indiana's hardscrabble past. This grim collection of tales includes unimaginable incidents like the Indianapolis businessman whose car contained suspicious "hams" and the man who handed his new bride a drink of carbolic acid. It also reveals the tragedy of Gary's beautiful Arlene Draves, killed by her foot...
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by Rory Raven (Author)This scribbled note belonged to Sarah M. Cornell, written the day her body was found hanged in a rural pasture in Tiverton, Rhode Island. An unmarried young woman of limited means, Sarah was four months pregnant, and a married Methodist minister stood accused as the father. Local authorities grew skeptical of Sarah's apparent suicide as Reverend Avery's conduct appeared increasingly suspect, and eventually the extensive evidence of their tortured relationship set off a g...
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by A. Parker Burroughs (Author)In 1907, a young girl was found dead in the Lyric Theatre, leaving behind an unwanted pregnancy and an abusive lover. On an otherwise quiet morning in 1891, a cartful of nitroglycerin exploded. The remains of the driver had to be gathered in a peck basket. The Cannonball Express lived up to its name in 1888, when an open switch caused it to shoot off the track, sending two cars flying. Local journalist A. Parker Burroughs resurrects these and other stories from ...
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by Mark Allen Baker (Author)Covert intelligence played a critical role in the American Revolution. Connecticut produced an extraordinary number of spies on both sides of the conflict, from the infamous traitor and Norwich-born Benedict Arnold to Patriot Nathan Hale, executed by the British for espionage. Spying during the Revolution entailed coded messages, early submarines with the first exploding torpedoes and the penalty of death for those caught in the act. Despite the risk, some spies ev...
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by Tom Hughes (Author)On December 15, 1921, gunshots echoed across Atlanta's famous Peachtree Street moments before a handsome young man darted away from Kaiser's Jewelers. Frank DuPre left in his wake a dead Pinkerton guard and a missing ring. As Christmas shoppers looked on in panic, he raced through the Kimball House Hotel and shot another victim. The brazen events terrified a crime-filled city already on edge. A manhunt captured the nineteen-year-old, unemployed DuPre, who faced a quick c...
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by Beth Brown (Author)Home to many of the nation's original founders and statesmen, Richmond has a history that runs as deep as America itself. Yet within these depths lies something darker. For despite its illustrious reputation, Richmond has a sordid streak. Venture through the city's colorful history of vice, intrigue and subterfuge with author Beth Brown as she traces the scandalous stories that pepper Richmond's past. From colonial founding to the Prohibition era and beyond, Wicked Richm...
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by Rita Y. Shuler (Author)In this intense insider's study of murder in South Carolina, Lt. Rita Y. Shuler leads us through the dark twists and turns of twelve homicide cases that gripped the state during her career as a forensic photographer with South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). Shuler's fascination with the criminal mind began with her exposure as a young girl to a 1953 double-homicide that shocked South Carolina. When she came face to face with the original case records twent...
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by David Meyers (Author), Elise Meyers Walker (Author)Organized crime was born in the back of a fruit store in Marion. Before America saw headlines about the Capone Mob, the Purple Gang and Murder Inc., the specter of the Black Hand terrorized nearly every major city. Fears that the Mafia had reached our shores and infiltrated every Italian immigrant community kept police alert and citizens on edge. It was only a matter of time before these professed Robin Hoods formed a band. And when they d...
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by Jd Chandler (Author), Jb Fisher (Author)In an era when Portland's shipyards thrived, so, too, did corruption. The Red Scare that followed the 1934 Waterfront Strike allowed gangsters to gain control of some of the city's unions. Working in cahoots with high-ranking city officials, criminals like Al Winter and James Elkins gained power and influence, often using goon squads" of union men and hired criminals to enforce their will. Now authors JD Chandler and JB Fisher bring Portland's days o...
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by Richard Zelade (Author)Crime and vice plagued Austin after the Civil War, and Guy Town was a red-light hub with a most curious legacy. Today's pleasure-seeking visitors to the Warehouse District walk on top of Guy Town--the chic neighborhood of today is built on the most decadent and deadly area of the city's past. With the old county courthouse at its core, the district rose from the Colorado River up to Fifth Street and spanned from Congress Avenue to Shoal Creek, infesting Austin's ecle...
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by Patricia M. Salmon (Author)Staten Island saw its share of violence and murder as it transformed from a sleepy community to an urban outer borough. The 1920 discovery of a woman's body by two young boys walking their dog remains unsolved. An inmate at Sailors' Snug Harbor--a retirement home for seamen--shot a preacher in cold blood. Shocking and horrific stories of killers and their victims such as these plague Staten Island's otherwise pleasant past. From the handsome soldier convicted of ...
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by Janice Branch Tracy (Author)For most states, the repeal of prohibition meant a return to a state of legally drunken normalcy, but not so in Mississippi. The Magnolia State went dry over a decade before the nation, leaving bootleggers to establish political and financial holds they were unwilling to lose. For nearly sixty years, bootlegging flourished, and Mississippi became known as the "wettest dry state in the country." Law enforcement tried in vain to control crime that followed each em...
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by Kelly Sullivan Pezza (Author)On a summer day in 1893, little Maggie Sheffield was murdered. Maggie's own father did the unthinkable against a backdrop of laughter and barrel organ music at Rocky Point Amusement Park. The tragedy aroused a strange reaction from the peaceable community of Warwick, Rhode Island. Many seemed to be more concerned for the murderer, Frank Sheffield, than for his young victim. Frank was rumored to be insane or addicted to drugs, and after a trial, he was found not...
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by D. a. Brockett (Author)Early promoters of Colorado s Western Slope would have had settlers believe the area was one of proper behavior and upstanding morality. But this was not the case. Hot tempers led to quick trigger fingers and Main Street shootouts. Drinking, gambling and thieving were popular pursuits, and law breaking of all kinds thrived in this wild land. From Charles Graham, whose jealous rampage in Grand Junction is still talked about today, and the mysterious Friday the thirtee...
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by William J. Craig (Author)Last Rites chronicles one man's dramatic descent into the seedy world of New England mobster Raymond Patriarca and his underboss, Gennaro Jerry" Angiulo. In the early 1980s, Gigi Portalla, a well-liked student, athlete and Revere prom king, transformed into a mafia hit man after discovering that his biological father was "Big Eddy" Marino. Portalla rose through the ranks within the Angiulo organization, joining famous Boston wise guys like Sean Cote, Joseph "J.R." ...
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by Finn J. D. John (Author)Tucked away in the northwestern frontier, Portland offered all the best vices: opium dreams, gambling, cheap prostitutes, and drunken brawling. In its early days, Portland was a combination rough-and-ready logging camp and gritty, hard-punching deep-water port town," and as a young city (established in the late 1840s) it developed an international reputation for lawlessness and violence. In the early 1900s, the British and French governments filed formal complaints ...
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by Greg Kowalski (Author)Hamtramck's population bulged to 56,000 from a mere 3,500 in the early twentieth century, a sixteen-fold increase that created the perfect environment for crime and corruption to flourish. Post-Prohibition, bars sprang up in quick order, until there were at least two hundred within this wide-open town's 2.1 square miles, giving it more bars per capita than any other city in America; even the Dodge brothers served barrels of beer to their workers. Follow local historia...
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by Mark Gribben (Author)In the sweltering summer of 1929, the people of Columbus, Ohio, were enthralled by news of the Ohio State University veterinary professor and Olympic gold medal, winning pistol shooter on trial for the murder of his twenty-four-year-old lover, who was a medical student. Local writer Mark Gribben reveals how Dr. James Howard Snook was captured and interrogated, including his gory confession of Theora Hix's death. During the trial, the details of the illicit love affair ...
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by Wil Elrick (Author)Alabama is a weird and wonderful place with a colorful history steeped in folk tales passed from generation to generation. Mysterious 1989 UFO sightings brought more than 4,000 visitors to the tiny town of Fyffe, population 1,300. Legends of the Alabama White Thang--an elusive, hairy creature with a shrill shriek--persisted in the state for a century. Just outside Huntsville's historic Maple Hill Cemetery lies an eerie playground where the ghosts of departed children are...
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by Cheri L. Farnsworth (Author)Jefferson County, located in New York's beautiful North Country, has a dark and violent past. During the long winter months, it was not the cold that was feared, but the killers. In 1828, Henry Evans committed a crime so brutal that the location in Brownsville is still called "Slaughter Hill." A real-life "Little Red Riding Hood," eleven-year-old Sarah Conklin met someone far worse than a wolf on her way home from school in 1875. And in 1908, Mary Farmer, a beau...
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by Avi Bash (Author)While other cities are credited for birthing and honing the legendary crime figures who inevitably influenced and shaped their susceptible surroundings and culture, Miami is where the Mob, like many American citizens, often turned when seeking vacation, vice, or a new beginning. Dating back to the first quarter of the 20th century, resourceful gangsters from across the nation recognized the profitable business opportunities Miami could provide with its booming population, ...
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by Michael Morgan (Author)Truth lies behind the grim legend of Patty Cannon. In the early nineteenth century, Patty and her gang terrorized the Delmarva Peninsula, kidnapping free African American men, women and children. Using surprise and treachery, Cannon even employed a free African American accomplice to lure her unsuspecting prey. Captives who survived confinement in Patty's cells were sold south. The position of the Cannon home on the shadowy border between Delaware and Maryland allowe...
