Drawn from police files, eyewitness accounts, and news reports, these stories introduce extreme criminals in an extreme land. Meet church-going big-game hunter Robert Hanson, who stalked topless dancers for more than a decade, and Robert Stroud, a construction worker who killed a bartender in Juneau, later to become the nationally known "Birdman of Alcatraz."

    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 were so salacious that newspapers could only hint about what really led to the coed's murder and the professor's ultimate punishment. For the first time, read the full account of this astonishing story, from scandalous beginning to tragic end.

    It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century. Although Holmes is just as famous now as he was in 1895, this deep analysis of contemporary materials makes clear how much of the previously known story came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and lies invented by Holmes himself.

    Within days he had confessed to fifteen gruesome murders over a period of four years. His victims, all young homosexual men, had never been reported missing. Brian Masters, with Nilsen's full cooperation, has produced a unique study of a serial killer's mind, revealing the disturbing psychology of a mass murderer.

    What's even more shocking was when an upstanding resident stood accused of the assaults. This was not just any man, but a pillar of the community; a decorated military pilot who had flown Canadian Forces VIP aircraft for dignitaries such as the Queen of England, Prince Philip, the Governor-General and Prime Minister of Canada. This is the story of serial killer Russell Williams, the elite pilot of Canada’s Air Force One, and the innocent victims he murdered. Unlike other serial killers, Williams seemed very unaffected about his crimes and leading two different lives. Alan R. Warren describes the secret life including the abductions, rape, and murders that were unleashed on an unsuspecting community. Included are letters written to the victims by Williams and descriptions of the assaults and rapes as seen on videos and photos taken by Williams during the attacks.

    Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.Embarking on a seven-year quest for the truth, Rommelmann traced the roots of Amanda’s fury and desperation through thousands of pages of records, withheld documents, meetings with lawyers and convicts, and interviews with friends and family who felt shocked, confused, and emotionally swindled by a woman whose entire life was now defined by an unspeakable crime. At the heart of that crime: a tempestuous marriage, a family on the fast track to self-destruction, and a myriad of secrets and lies as dark and turbulent as the Willamette River. “In To the Bridge, Nancy Rommelmann takes what many consider the most unforgivable of crimes—a mother set on murdering her own children—and delivers something thoughtful and provocative: a deeply reported, sensitively told, all-too-relevant tragedy of addiction and codependency, toxic masculinity, and capricious justice. You won’t be able to look away—nor should any of us.” —Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery “How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable? So asks one of the characters in this clear-eyed investigation into something we all turn away from. To the Bridge is a tour de force of both journalism and compassion, in the lineage of such masterpieces as In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. Word by word, sentence by sentence, Rommelmann’s writing is that good. And so is her heart.” —Nick Flynn, PEN/Martha Albrand Award–winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

    A unique, horrifying self-portrait of one of the most savage sex killers in history.This updated edition contains a new foreword by Robert Keppel, president of the Institute for Forensics.

    . .- Martha Wise, Medina's not-so-merry widow, who poisoned a dozen relatives with arsenic--including her own husband, mother, brother, niece, and nephews--because she enjoyed attending funerals;- The legendary Torso Murders, which baffled Cleveland safety directory Eliot Ness, two Cuyahoga County coroners, and the entire Cleveland police force as they tried in vain to catch the perpetrator--whom newspapers dubbed the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run";- The unspeakably horrible Collinwood School Fire of 1908, in which 172 schoolchildren perished in panic because of obstructed fire exits;- Hammer-wielding Velma West, a big-city girl of Cleveland's Jazz Age driven to murder her small-town husband by the slow pace of life of Painesville--and her own obsession with another woman;- The Flats lumber fire of 1914, which leveled Cleveland's industrial Flats, melted bridges, and very nearly set the entire city ablaze;- The enduring mystery of ten-year-old Beverly Potts, whose puzzling disappearance from west-side Halloran Park in 1951 launched Cleveland's greatest manhunt;And many other local heroes and villains in these compelling tales of mayhem, melancholy, and mystery.

    'The Boston Stranglers' investigates Albert De Salvo's confession to the 11 brutal murders he didn't commit and exposes the real killers.

    At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as "The Killer of Little Shepherds," terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years--until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era's most renowned criminologist. The two men--intelligent and bold--typified the Belle Epoque, a period of immense scientific achievement and fascination with science's promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition. With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher's infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal profiling, as Fourquet painstakingly collects eyewitness accounts and constructs a map of Vacher's crimes. We follow the tense and exciting events leading to the murderer's arrest. And we witness the twists and turns of the trial, celebrated in its day. In an attempt to disprove Vacher's defense by reason of insanity, Fourquet recruits Lacassagne, who in the previous decades had revolutionized criminal science by refining the use of blood-spatter evidence, systematizing the autopsy, and doing groundbreaking research in psychology. Lacassagne's efforts lead to a gripping courtroom denouement. "The Killer of Little Shepherds" is an important contribution to the history of criminal justice, impressively researched and thrillingly told.

    Was her killer a raging psychotic, or as timid as she was?In a charred house a partially clothed woman is found in her bed with a pornographic magazine and a mirror. Did she die in the fire -- or at a sex killer's hands?Before it was immortalized in The Silence of the Lambs, the FBI Behavioral Science Profiling Unit was pioneered by Russell Vorpagel. Now the legendary profiler takes you into the most intriguing cases of his career -- actual cases of serial killings, sex crimes, celebrity murders, and hostage takings. Showing how profiling turns the chaos and blood of a crime scene into a psychological snapshot of a suspect -- his age, his personality, even the model car he drives -- Vorpagel illuminates the twisted minds of the most vicious criminals of our time. From the vampire murderer Richard Trenton Case -- who consumed the blood of his victims -- to Vorpagel's own duel with an assassin on the island of St. Croix, Profiles in Murder is the chilling real-life story of the human monsters who share our streets -- and the men and women who hunt them down.

    It could be anywhere in North America—the Okanagan in B.C., the Niagara orchards of Ontario. In this case it happens to be the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. But on one hill, South Mountain, lives the a clan of impoverished, inbred hillbillies, ignored or shunned by the people in the valley below for two hundred years. Few have much schooling, most are unemployed, and they keep almost entirely to themselves. Two solitudes side by side, until one day in January 1984, Sandra Golder, aged thirteen, burst into tears in class. When her teacher took her out into the hall to ask her why she was crying, a gruesome story of incest and sexual abuse began to emerge. Within hours the story had spread to the principal, a social worker, and finally the police. Within weeks a full-fledged scandal had been unleashed on the valley: sixteen adults—men and women—from the Mountain were charged with hundreds of allegations of incest and sexual abuse of children as young as five. It gradually became clear that this had been going on for generations, a cycle endlessly repeated. This book tells the amazing story not only of the court cases that followed, but the way the valley community reacted. Dark secrets weren't the exclusive property of the Golers: the townspeople had their own, including the fact that some of them had known about the abuse for decades and done nothing about it.

    After years of struggle to reach this point, they finally felt their future held promise. But on April 23, 2006, their bodies were discovered in their basement, covered in savage stab wounds. Upstairs, Jacob lay dead on his bed, his toys spattered with blood.Investigators worried for JR’s safety, but unknown to them, the pretty honour roll student had been developing a disturbing alter ego online. Runaway Devil professed a fondness for a darker world of death metal music, the goth subculture, and a love for Jeremy Steinke, a twenty-three-year-old high-school dropout who lived in a rundown trailer park. Soon, shocking evidence in JR’s school locker — printed here for the first time — led police to believe the girl was a suspect in her family’s murders.The case horrified parents everywhere. Journalists Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose have been covering it from the beginning, and in Runaway Devil, they reveal what really happened: the unlikely young love, the teenage rebellion, a troubling world of adolescent drifters, and a small community torn apart by an unthinkable crime.A modern cautionary tale, Runaway Devil is also a chilling portrait of an approval-seeking man smitten with a manipulative young girl — who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

    Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family. The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful and aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child "princess" and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?

    The brutal murder of two teenage girls on the last day of Nora Cunningham's junior year in high school throws Nora into turmoil. Her certainties, friendships, religion, her prudence, her resolve to find a boyfriend taller than she is - are shaken or cast off altogether. Most people in Elmgrove, Maryland, share the comforting conviction that Buddy Novak, who had every reason to want his ex-girlfriend dead, is responsible for the killings. Nora agrees at first, then begins to doubt Buddy's guilt, and finally comes to believe him innocent - the lone dissenting voice in Elmgrove.Told from several different perspectives, including that of the murderer, Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls is a suspenseful page-turner with a powerful human drama at its core.