Book picks similar to
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders by Eve Lazarus
non-fiction
true-crime
history
nonfiction
Butterbox Babies: Baby Sales, Baby Deaths. The Scandalous Story of the Ideal Maternity Home
Bette Cahill - 1992
Now, after three years of research and scores of interviews from coast to coast, author Bette Cahill reveals the truth about the Home, its owners, the babies who were born there, and those who died there.It is a truth that will horrify and enrage, for in these pages Cahill charges that the children of unwed mothers born in the Ideal Maternity Home were offered for adoption in a manner that amounted to little more than baby farming for profit. We also learn that most of the natural parents had no knowledge of these practices. The babies placed in new homes were the lucky ones. Was the high infant mortality rate at the Home coincidence, neglect, accident, or economics?Butterbox Babies is a story of greed, hypocrisy, and justice. It is also the moving story of children who survived the Ideal Maternity Home and their search for a past. Bette Cahill traces their lives today as their search leads them from disappointment to rejection and in some cases the joy of reunion with the parents they never knew.
Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter
Arnold Brown - 1991
Reprint.
100 Most Infamous Criminals
Jo Durden-Smith - 2007
The range of crimes is extraordinary, from the bizarre to the horrific, and from the heartbreaking to the ridiculous. The book includes some of history's most infamous criminals and tells in vivid detail the story of the lives they led, the crimes they committed and the destruction and sorrow they left in their wake. From the unsolved horror of Jack the Ripper to the king of the gangsters Al Capone, Ted Bundy to Harold Shipman, each entry is illustrated with fascinating photographs and artwork, and detailed accounts of each terrible crime. 100 Most Infamous Criminals is a gripping and compelling portrait of the darker side of life, and reveals the strange and grisly stories behind the world's most infamous murderers, swindlers and crooks.
Columbine
Dave Cullen - 2009
As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year.What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors.
The Strangler
William Landay - 2007
A city on edge. On street corners, newsboys hawk the shocking headline: KENNEDY IS DEAD. In the city’s underworld, a mob war rages. But what terrifies Bostonians most is the mysterious killer who has already claimed a dozen victims, a murderer whose name is indelibly linked to their city: the Boston Strangler. This is the electrifying backdrop of William Landay’s magnificent new novel, a story of one Irish-American family, a city under siege, and the long shadow cast by the most infamous killer of his day . . . For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. They are simply on different sides of it. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop whose gambling habits—fast women, slow horses—drag him down into the city’s gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer working for an ambitious attorney general, he finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force. And Ricky, the devil-may-care youngest son, floats above the fray as an expert burglar—until the Strangler strikes too close to home.As Joe’s mob debts close in around him . . . and Michael becomes snarled in a murder investigation gone very wrong . . . and Ricky is hunted by both sides of the law, the three brothers—and the women who love them—are forced to take sides. Now each must look deeper into a killer’s murderous rage, into their family’s own lethal secrets, and into the one death that has changed them forever. As William Landay’s complex, compassionate, and terrifying novel builds to a climax, two mysteries will collide—and a shattering truth will be revealed.From the Hardcover edition.
Let This Be Our Secret
Deric Henderson - 2011
The location: a quiet, picturesque seaside town. The scene: two bodies in a car filled with carbon monoxide. Police officer Trevor Buchanan and nurse Lesley Howell have apparently taken their own lives, unable to live with the pain of their spouses’ affair with each other. The adulterous pair — Sunday school teacher Hazel Buchanan and dentist Colin Howell — had met in the local Baptist Church. Following the apparent double–suicide, they continue their affair secretly before both later remarrying. A series of disasters in Howell’s life — the death of his eldest son, massive losses in an investment scam and the revelation that he has been sexually assaulting female patients — lead to him declaring that he is a fraud and a godless man. He tells the elders of his Church that he and Hazel Stewart conspired together to murder their spouses nearly two decades earlier. What follows the dramatic confession are two of the most sensational murder investigations ever seen in Ireland, leading to both Howell’s conviction for murder in December 2010, and Stewart’s in March 2011 — despite her protestations of innocence.
Slow Death
Jim Fielder - 2001
Transcripts of audio and videotapes are featured, as well as over 16 pages of shocking photos.
The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
Lucy Worsley - 2013
And a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of modern England, murder entered our national psyche, and it's been a part of us ever since.The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.
Wilder Intentions: Love, Lies and Murder in North Dakota
C.J. Wynn - 2020
But this time, she didn’t show—and Christopher’s calls went unanswered. The police found what looked like a scene from a horror movie at their home. The backdoor kicked in. A bedroom splattered with blood. And a pregnant young woman violently stabbed to death.Could Christopher have murdered the woman he claimed to love? Or was the crime done by an intruder Angila had feared for weeks? Angila’s womanizing ex-husband, Richie Wilder, Jr., aimed detectives straight toward Christopher. The evidence, however, pointed squarely at Richie.Kindergarten teacher Cynthia Wilder thought her dreams had come true when she married Richie. But while her husband sat behind bars, Cynthia grew lonely. When she shared some disturbing details with a former lover, Cynthia finally revealed the truth behind the sinister plot to kill Angila Wilder. After four years of lies and deceit, the real story would shock a community to its very core …
At Mother's Request: A True Story of Money, Murder and Betrayal
Jonathan Coleman - 1985
A book that unfolds the full and truly astonishing story of how-and why-Frances Schreuder, board member of the New York City Ballet, masterminded a plan requiring her teenage son to kill one of the richest men in Utah-her father (and her son's grandfather), Franklin Bradshaw.
The Onion Field
Joseph Wambaugh - 1973
This is the frighteningly true story of two young cops and two young robbers whose separate destinies fatally cross one March night in a bizarre execution in a deserted Los Angeles field.
Becoming Unbecoming
Una - 2015
Other kids are into punk or ska, but Una is learning to play "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings on the guitar, and she thinks it’s a really good song. There's another song, chanted on the terraces by Leeds United fans. It might not have made it on to Top of the Pops, but the boys all sing it on the walk home from school: "One Yorkshire Ripper . . . There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper . . . One Yorkshire Ri-pper . . ." A serial murderer is at large in West Yorkshire and the police—despite spending more than two million man-hours hunting the killer and interviewing the man himself no less than nine times—are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Unbecoming explores gender violence, blame, shame, and social responsibility. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned. With the benefit of hindsight Una explores her experience, wonders if anything has really changed and challenges a global culture that demands that the victims of violence pay its cost.
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
John Vaillant - 2005
Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.As vividly as John Krakauer puts readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest.
The Conjoined
Jen Sookfong Lee - 2016
In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away.As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of own life.Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.