You certainly wouldn't give her your baby. But in the late nineteenth century, that's exactly what a lot of women did. Why? Because in an era when having a child out of wedlock was so severely frowned upon, Amelia Dyer took advantage of this. She advertised in the press offering to "adopt" unwanted babies, charged the poor grief-stricken mums GBP 10 for the privilege, took the wee babes off their hands - and then drowned them in the River Thames. Pocketing the cash, she strangled her victims with white tape, then wrapped their bodies either in brown parcel paper or in a carpet bag, to be recovered only weeks - or months - later. As well as relating the story, the authors explore the circumstances that enabled such crimes to be committed. Unregulated "adoption" was a widely acknowledged problem. The Child Protection Act did not yet exist. In Mrs Dyer's case, though, such shameless profiteering did not, ultimately, go unpunished: the police finally located Mrs Dyer, kept her under surveillance and then mounted a "sting" operation, using a young woman to pose as a potential customer. Amelia Dyer was arrested when she opened her front door to find two policemen on her doorstep. Finally confessing, she said, "You'll know all mine by the tape around their necks." She was hanged in 1896.

    The author had unparalleled cooperation of police investigators and practitioners alike to present this heavily researched, informational account.

    The case sparked national outrage when the New York Times revealed that dozens of witnesses had seen or heard the attacks on Kitty Genovese and her struggle to reach safety but had failed to come to her aid—or even call police until after the killer had fled. This book cuts through misinformation and conjecture to present a definitive portrait of the crime, the aftermath, and the people. Based on six years of research, Catherine Pelonero’s book presents the facts from the police reports, archival material, court documents, and first-hand interviews. Pelonero offers a personal look at Kitty Genovese, an ambitious young woman viciously struck down in the prime of her life; Winston Moseley, the killer who led a double life as a responsible family man by day and a deadly predator by night; the consequences for a community condemned; and others touched by the tragedy.Beyond just a true crime story, the book embodies much larger themes: the phenomenon of bystander inaction, the evolution of a serial killer, and the fears and injustices spawned by the stark prejudices of an era, many of which linger to this day.

    Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950's. She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so. Instead, she courageously faced the death penalty for a crime she hadn't committed, orphaning her children.Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel's story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.

    It contains accounts by Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 200 people in a career lasting 43 years.

    By the end of the night, only four of them were alive. The fifth had been tortured and mutilated nearly beyond recognition. Her name was Shanda Sharer; her age--twelve. When the people of Madison, Indiana heard that a brutal murder had been committed in their midst, they were stunned. Then the story became even more bizarre. The four accused murderers were all girls under the age of eighteen: Melinda Loveless, Laurie Tackett, Hope Rippey, and Toni Lawrence. Veteran true crime journalist Aphrodite Jones reveals the shocking truth behind the most savage crime in Indiana history--A tragic story of twisted love and insane jealousy, teen lesbianism, and the sadistic ritual killing of a young Innocent girl.

    This is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and ... a dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody... the main thing I learned is that "reality is always plural and mutable." — From the Preface

    At the age of eighteen, after one too many run-ins with the cops for drug possession, he left his upper-middle-class home in Princeton, New Jersey, for a stint at a rehab facility in Riverside, California. Instead of getting clean, he spent his year there shooting crystal meth and living as a petty criminal among not-so-petty ones until a near psychotic episode (among other things) convinced him to clean up.In stark prose infused with heartbreaking insight, wicked humor, and complete veracity, Salant provides graphic descriptions of life on crystal meth -- the incredible sex drive, the paranoia, the cravings. He details the slang, the scams, and the psychoses, and weaves them into a narrative that is breathtakingly honest and authentic. Salant grapples with his attraction to the thuggish life, eschewing easy answers -- his parents, both therapists, were loving and supportive, and his family's subtle dysfunctions typical of almost any American family.Exploring the allure and effects of the least understood drug of our time, "Leaving Dirty Jersey" is that rarity among memoirs -- a compulsively readable, superbly told story that is shocking precisely because it could happen to almost anyone.

    P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms. Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as "The New York Times Magazine," "Esquire," and "Harper's Bazaar." His first book, "Breaking Open the Head," was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna. But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living. A result not just of study but also of participation, "2012" tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.