Book picks similar to
Jack the Ripper, The Works of Francis Thompson by Richard Patterson
jack-the-ripper
true-crime
adult-nonfiction
non-fiction
The Strange Case Of Dr. H.H. Holmes
John Borowski - 2005
H.H. Holmes" contains three fully illustrated, unabridged primary source books, plus Holmes' published confession as originally documented shortly before his execution. For the first time in over a century, these materials are again available - and all in one book. HOLMES' OWN STORY by Herman W. Mudgett - 1895 In this autobiography, Holmes recounts his childhood years, and life's trials and tribulations. THE HOLMES-PITEZEL CASE by Detective Frank Geyer - 1896 Included are rare court transcripts, expert witness testimony, and in-depth criminal and legal detection methods utilized in the trial against Holmes. THE HOLMES CASTLE by Robert Corbitt - 1895 Robert Corbitt entered the Holmes "castle" when the investigation into the horrors first began. Learn what made Corbitt believe that Holmes was innocent. THE CONFESSION OF H.H. HOLMES - 1896 Holmes gives the media what they want...a confession. UNABRIDGED - ILLUSTRATED
The Killing of Emma Gross
Damien Seaman - 2011
A prostitute is found dead in a cheap hotel room, brutally murdered. But her death is soon forgotten as the city's police hunt a maniac attacking innocent women and children. A killer the press has dubbed the Düsseldorf Ripper.Detective Thomas Klein's career is going nowhere until he gets a tip-off leading to the Ripper's arrest. But the killer's confession to the hooker's murder is full of holes, and Klein soon comes to believe this is one murder the killer didn't commit. Motivated by spite, ambition, or maybe even a long-buried sense of justice, finding out who really killed Emma Gross becomes Klein's obsession.Particularly when the evidence begins to point closer to home…
Killing for You: A Brave Soldier, a Beautiful Dancer, and a Shocking Double Murder
Keith Elliot Greenberg - 2017
A KILLER PLOT Twenty-six-year-old actor Daniel Wozniak was unemployed, facing eviction, and deep in debt for his upcoming wedding. So he devised a diabolical plan: He asked his neighbor Sam Herr, a young war veteran, to help him move some things into the attic of an empty theater. There, Wozniak shot Herr twice in the head before taking his ATM card and cell phone. Hours later,Wozniak performed on stage with his fiancée in a local production of the musical Nine, convinced that he had gotten away with murder… A DRAMATIC LAST ACT Wozniak dismembered his victim’s body and hid the pieces. Then he lured Herr’s college friend Juri “Julie” Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment and shot her twice in the head. The police immediately declared Herr a prime suspect—just as Wozniak had planned. But when Herr was declared missing, and his ATM withdrawals led authorities to Wozniak at his bachelor party, the actor was forced to play the role of a lifetime in a shocking murder investigation that would be his greatest—and final—performance… Includes 8 pages of photos
The Good-Bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair
Diana Britt Franklin - 2006
When the State of Ohio strapped its first woman into the electric chair, Hahn gained a place in the annals of crime as the nation's first female serial killer to be executed in the chair.Told here for the first time in riveting detail is Anna Marie's gripping story, an almost unbelievable tale of multiple murders, deceit, and greed.Born in Bavaria in 1906, Anna Marie brought shame to her pious family when, as a teenager, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Oscar. She was shipped off to America in 1929 where she initially lived with elderly relatives in Cincinnati. A year later she married Philip Hahn, a Western Union telegrapher, with whom she bought a new house and opened a delicatessen/bakery.Pressed economically by the Great Depression, the ever-resourceful Anna Marie found other ways to get the money to support her passionate pasttime--betting on horses. She tried burning down the house, then the deli, for the insurance; and she tried killing her husband, also for the insurance. Then she took to befriending the neighborhood elderly, latching on to their life savings before feeding them arsenic with deadly results.For weeks her Cincinnati trial for "the greatest mass murder in the history of the country" was a front-page sensation across the nation. A thousand or more curiosity seekers came daily to the courthouse to try to get just a glimpse of her. Nearly 100 witnesses gave damning testimony against her, and the jury's guilty verdict put her on the path to the electric chair. Finally, after a year, all appeals were exhausted, and Anna Marie, age 32, was executed on December 7, 1938, at the state penitentiary in Columbus.True crime buffs, historians, legal professionals, and others seeking an extraordinary story will find The Goodbye Door a compelling addition to true crime literature.
The Suicide Bride: A mystery of tragedy and family secrets in Edwardian Sydney
Tanya Bretherton - 2019
He also left behind mysteries that might never be solved. Sociologist Dr Tanya Bretherton traces the brutal story of Ellie, one of many suicide brides in turn-of-the-century Sydney; of her husband, Alicks, and his family; and their three orphaned sons, adrift in the world.From the author of the acclaimed THE SUITCASE BABY - shortlisted for the 2018 Ned Kelly Award, Danger Prize and Waverley Library 'Nib' Award - comes another riveting true-crime case from Australia's dark past. THE SUICIDE BRIDE is a masterful exploration of criminality, insanity, violence and bloody family ties in bleak, post-Victorian Sydney.
**Includes an extract from THE SUITCASE BABY**
White Devil: The True Story of the First White Asian Crime Boss
Bob Halloran - 2015
Willis, according to prosecutors, was “the kingpin, organizer and leader of a vast conspiracy,” all within the legendarily insular and vicious Chinese mafia.It started when John Willis was 16 years old . . . his life seemed hopeless. His father had abandoned his family years earlier, his older brother had just died of a heart attack, and his mother was dying. John was alone, sleeping on the floor of his deceased brother’s home. Desperate, John reached out to Woping, a young Chinese man Willis had rescued from a bar fight weeks before. Woping literally picks him up off the street, taking him home to live among his own brothers and sisters. Soon, Willis is accompanying Woping to meet his Chinese mobster friends, and starts working for them. Journalist Bob Halloran tells the tale of John Willis, aka White Devil, the only white man to ever rise through the ranks in the Chinese mafia. Willis began as an enforcer, riding around with other gang members to “encourage” people to pay their debts. He soon graduated to even more dangerous work as a full-fledged gang member, barely escaping with his life on several occasions.As a white man navigating an otherwise exclusively Asian world, Willis was at first an interesting anomaly, but his ruthless devotion to his adopted culture eventually led to him emerging as a leader. He organized his own gang of co-conspirators and began an extremely lucrative criminal venture selling tens of thousands of oxycodone pills. A year-long FBI investigation brought him down, and John pleaded guilty to save the love of his life from prosecution. He has no regrets.White Devil explores the workings of the Chinese mafia, and he speaks frankly about his relationships with other gang members, the crimes he committed, and why he’ll never rat out any of his brothers to the cops.Told to Halloran from Willis’s prison cell, White Devil is a shocking portrait of a man who was allowed access into a secret world, and who is paying the price for his hardened life.
They Walk Among Us: New True Crime Cases from the No. 1 Podcast
Benjamin Fitton - 2019
We see them every day. We trust them implicitly. But what about the British army sergeant who sabotaged his wife’s parachute? Or the lodger who took his landlady on a picnic from which she never returned? From dentists to PAs, these normal-seeming people were quietly wrecking lives, and nobody suspected a thing.In this first book from the addictive award-winning podcast They Walk Among Us, Benjamin and Rosanna serve up small-town stories in gripping detail. They’ve hooked millions of listeners with their intricate and disturbing cases, and now they dig into ten more tales, to provide an unforgettably sinister true-crime experience, scarily close to home. It could happen to you.
A Killer's Confession: And a mother's fight to bring her daughter, Becky Godden-Edwards', murderer to trial
Karen Edwards - 2019
On what would have been my daughter's 29th birthday, Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher knocked on the door and told me my beautiful Becky was dead. Found buried in a shallow grave in a remote field, Becky had been brutally murdered.'When Becky Godden-Edwards was killed, her mother Karen awoke to a world where the truth was never guaranteed; where taxi driver Christopher Halliwell got away with murder and the police officer who found her daughter was punished instead. This is Karen's story. Despite unimaginable tragedy, her love for her daughter has been unbreakable: from her despair through Becky's troubled teenage years, to the agonising eight years when Becky was missing, and then the dramatic story of how a killer's confession led to a terrible discovery. The one constant has been Karen's determination to fight for Becky, tirelessly campaigning for the truth about what happened to be heard and for Halliwell to face the consequences of his evil actions.
*The murders of Becky Godden-Edwards and Sian O'Callaghan will soon be the focus of major new ITV series A Confession starring Martin Freeman as Stephen Fulcher and Imelda Staunton as Karen Edwards*
Murder City: The Untold Story of Canada's Serial Killer Capital, 1959-1984
Michael Arntfield - 2015
In its coming to inherit the unwanted distinction of being the serial killer capital of not just Canada—but apparently also the world during this dark age in the city’s sordid history— the crimes seen in London over this quarter-century period remain unparalleled and for the most part unsolved. From the earliest documented case of homicidal copycatting in Canada, to the fact that at any given time up to six serial killers were operating at once in the deceivingly serene “Forest City,” London was once a place that on the surface presented a veneer of normality when beneath that surface dark things would whisper and stir. Through it all, a lone detective would go on to spend the rest of his life fighting against impossible odds to protect the city against a tidal wave of violence that few ever saw coming, and which to this day even fewer choose to remember. With his death in 2011, he took these demons to his grave with him but with a twist—a time capsule hidden in his basement, and which he intended to one day be opened. Contained inside: a secret cache of his diaries, reports, photographs, and hunches that might allow a new generation of sleuths to pick up where he left off, carry on his fight, and ultimately bring the killers to justice—killers that in many cases are still out there. Murder City is an explosive book over fifty years in the making, and is the history of London, Ontario as never told before. Stranger than fiction, tragic, ironic, horrifying, yet also inspiring, this is the true story of one city under siege, and a book that marks a game changer for the true crime genre.
The Wolf Trial
Neil Mackay - 2016
A society still trapped in a medieval mindset, the townsfolk clamour for the killer to be tried as a werewolf. If their demands are met his blameless wife and children will also be executed in the most barbaric way imaginable as agents of Satan and creatures contaminated by wolf blood.
His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae
Graeme Macrae Burnet - 2015
A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country's finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.--back cover
Murder in Battle Creek: The Mysterious Death of Daisy Zick (True Crime)
Blaine Lee Pardoe - 2013
No fewer than three witnessescaught a glimpse of the killer, yet today, it remainsone of Michigan’s most sensational unsolved crimes. The act of puresavagery rocked not only the community but also the Kellogg Company, where sheworked. Here, Blaine Pardoe artfully takes the reader into this true crime thriller. Utilizing long-sealed policefiles and interviews with the surviving investigators,the true story of the investigation can finally be told. Who were thekey suspects? What evidence does the police still have on this five-decades-oldcold case? Just how close did this murder come to being solved? Is the killerstill alive? These questions and more are masterfully brought to the forefrontfor true crime fans and armchair detectives.
Hunting Killers
Mark Williams-Thomas - 2019
I've been in the presence of people who have killed; I've been in rooms where people have been killed. I've seen the unspeakable things human beings are capable of. None of that puts me off my aim; I want to see those people caught, convicted and sent to jail.Mark Williams-Thomas is a former police detective and multi-award-winning investigative journalist. He has been at the centre of some of the most high-profile investigations of recent years involving killers and paedophiles.In this gripping and unflinching book, Mark reveals how he has pieced together these complex cases. Through tireless research and perseverance, Mark takes us on a journey of discovery gathering and pursuing new evidence, earning the trust of silent witnesses and sharing the personal toll this extraordinary job takes on him.Mark's story is a relentless and inspiring one; it is the story of a life dedicated to justice.
I, a Squealer: The Insider's Account of the "Pied Piper of Tucson" Murders
Richard Bruns - 2018
The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and The Righteous Brothers filled the airwaves. Television shows like "The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriett" and "The Andy Griffith Show" mirrored the innocence of life in the dusty city of Tucson, Az. But the sunbaked desert surrounding Tucson was hiding a sinister secret. A psychopath names Charles Schmid, later nicknamed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" by Life Magazine, would steal that innocence away, along with the lives of three beautiful teenage girls.In this firsthand account written in 1967, Richard Bruns shares the evolution of his friendship with Schmid, the details of getting involved way in over his head, and how he finally summoned the courage to blow the whistle to end the deadly rampage that shocked the nation and changed the city of Tucson forever.
Mary Ann Cotton: The West Auckland Borgia
Martin Connolly - 2012