Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace


Michael Morton - 2014
    He lost his wife, his son, and his freedom. This is the story of how Michael Morton finally got justice—and a second chance at life.On August 13, 1986, just one day after his thirty-second birthday, Michael Morton went to work at his usual time. By the end of the day, his wife Christine had been savagely bludgeoned to death in the couple’s bed—and the Williamson County Sherriff’s office in Texas wasted no time in pinning her murder on Michael, despite an absolute lack of physical evidence. Michael was swiftly sentenced to life in prison for a crime he had not committed.He mourned his wife from a prison cell. He lost all contact with their son. Life, as he knew it, was over.It would take twenty-five years—and thousands of hours of effort on the part of Michael’s lawyers, including the team at the New York-based Innocence Project—before DNA evidence was brought to light that would ultimately set Michael free. The evidence had been collected only days after the murder—but was never investigated.Drawing on his recollections, court transcripts, and more than one thousand pages of personal journals he wrote in prison, Michael recounts the hidden police reports about an unidentified van parked near his house that were never pursued; the treasure trove of evidence, including a bandana with the killer’s DNA on it, that was never introduced in court; the call from a neighboring county reporting the attempted use of his wife’s credit card (a message that was received, recorded, and never returned by local police); and ultimately, how he battled his way through the darkness to become a free man once again.Getting Life is an extraordinary story of unfathomable tragedy, grave injustice, and the strength and courage it takes to find forgiveness.

My Days in the Underworld: Rise of the Bangalore Mafia


Agni Sreedhar - 2013
    He studied law in Bangalore and was intent on entering the Indian Civil Service when circumstances forced him to turn to crime. Starting from the early 1980s, Sreedhar found himself entrenched in the bitter gang wars that shaped the contours of modern Bangalore. This book is an intimate, first-person account of the two decades he spent in the world of crime. But My Days in the Underworld isn't just a tale of murder and blood. It is a study of a system that runs parallel to the world ordinary people inhabit; a lateral universe, one with its own police force and laws, one where the criminal justice system has all but failed. This is a story of a city as seen through the personal histories of politicians who ruled Karnataka, men like Gundu Rao, Ramakrishna Hegde, Bangarappa and Deve Gowda, as well as those who were responsible for shaping Bangalore's underworld: Dawood Ibrahim, Chhota Rajan, Sharad Shetty, Kotwal Ramchandra, Jayaraj and Muthappa Ra

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century


Paula Uruburu - 2008
    Women wanted to be her. Men just wanted her. When her life of fantasy became all too real, and her jealous millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw, killed her lover, celebrity architect Stanford White, builder of the Washington Square Arch and much of New York City, she found herself at the center of the Crime of the Century, and the popular courtroom drama that followed, a scandal that signaled the beginning of a national obsession with youth, beauty, celebrity, and sex.The story of Evelyn Nesbit is one of glamour, money, romance, sex, madness, and murder, and Paula Uruburu weaves all of these elements into an elegant narrativethat reads like the best fiction - only it's all true. American Eve goes far beyond just literary biography; it paints a picture of America as it crossed from the Victorian era into the modern, foreshadowing so much of our contemporary culture today.

True Stories from the Morgue. Stories from a Forensic Counsellor


John Merrick - 2017
    What’s it like to work in a morgue? This book describes, first hand, coping with mutilated or decomposed bodies and the carnage of large-scale disasters like the Bali bombings. Equally as traumatic, the suicides, accidental drownings, car accidents and murders. But forensic counsellors do much more, witnessing autopsies, attending crime scenes and coronial enquiries. It’s all in a day’s work. Find out what it’s like behind the scenes. Those working at the morgue come face to face with death on a daily basis, and forensic counsellors like John have to find the compassion and kindness to ease the grief of those left behind.