Murder Is A Family Affair


Donalie Beltran - 2013
    More than one.Some stories just have to be told and so it is with the Tuxhorn family. Murder Is A Family Affair follows August Tuxhorn to America in the mid 1850s where Charles was born in Illinois. The boy grew up with a beautiful face and a stone heart. Evil set in motion by his grandfather and then his father, Charles carries on the family’s violent temper and disregard for human life. Did he inherit these traits shared by others? More important, did he pass them on? Follow their lives and watch the carnage they leave behind. The lives lost or destroyed in their wake.Has the evil in this family been buried with them?Or is it just the beginning?

The Demon Next Door


Bryan Burrough - 2019
    One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer who had raped and mutilated six women, murdering three of them. Yet the town had denied all early signs of the radical evil that was growing within Corwin. What had led the local media to ignore his early rapes? Why had the local Presbyterian Church tried to shield him from prison? Why had local law enforcement been unable to solve and prosecute his murders as they continued? Burrough is widely admired as a master storyteller, and this chilling tale raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare. This title contains mature themes, including physical and sexual violence, that some listeners may find unsettling.

House of Evil


John Dean - 2008
    What began as a temporary childcare arrangement between Sylvia Likens's parents and Gertrude Baniszewski turned into a crime that would haunt cops, prosecutors, and a community for decades to come…When police found Sylvia's emaciated body, with a chilling message carved into her flesh, they knew that she had suffered tremendously before her death. Soon they would learn how many others—including some of Baniszewski's own children—participated in Sylvia's murder, and just how much torture had been inflicted in one HOUSE OF EVIL

More Hollywood Murders and Scandals: Tinsel Town After Dark, More Famous Celebrity Murders, Scandals and Crimes (Murder, Scandals and Mayhem Book 2)


Mike Riley - 2014
    It adds to the collection of the most famous and infamous Hollywood scandals and celebrity murders from the early beginnings of Hollywood right up to today.From Thomas Ince to Tupac Shakur and George Reeves to Natalie Wood, the stories will capture your imagination as they describe the backstories of the major characters, the circumstances of the celebrity crimes and the results of the investigations.Included are the famous murders of: The mysterious death of Paul Bern, husband of Jean Harlow The shocking death of Jayne Mansfield The loss of Sal Mineo Dorothy Stratten's senseless death and More. Included is a description of changes in the film industry, from the earliest film displayed in New York City to the films of today that provide entertainment and escapism for moviegoers around the world.Many of your questions about these Hollywood crimes and scandals will be answered and you will be amazed at all the facts and theories contained in this book associated with these incredible events. Click BUY to get your copy of More Hollywood Murders and Scandals: Tinsel Town After Dark NOW.

The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases


Michael Capuzzo - 2008
    Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter decided one day over lunch that something had to be done, and pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. The three men invited the greatest collection of forensic investigators ever assembled, drawn from five continents, to the Downtown Club in Philadelphia to begin an audacious quest: to bring the coldest killers in the world to an accounting. Named for the first modern detective, the Parisian eugène François Vidocq-the flamboyant Napoleonic real-life sleuth who inspired Sherlock Holmes-the Vidocq Society meets monthly in its secretive chambers to solve a cold murder over a gourmet lunch. The Murder Room draws the reader into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless killers of a millionaire's son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy. Acclaimed bestselling author Michael Capuzzo's brilliant storytelling brings true crime to life more realistically and vividly than it has ever been portrayed before. It is a world of dazzlingly bright forensic science; true evil as old as the Bible and dark as the pages of Dostoevsky; and a group of flawed, passionate men and women, inspired by their own wounded hearts to make a stand for truth, goodness, and justice in a world gone mad.

No Stone Unturned: The True Story of the World's Premier Forensic Investigators


Steve Jackson - 2002
    A hiker brutally murdered, then thrown off a cliff in a remote mountain range. A devious killer who hid his wife's body under a thick cement patio. For investigators, the story is often the same: they know a murder took place, they may even know who did it. But without key evidence, pursuing a conviction is nearly impossible. That's when they call NecroSearch International. Necrosearch boasts a brain trust of the nation's top scientists, specialists, and behaviourists who use the latest technology and techniques to help solve "unsolvable" crimes, no matter how decayed the corpse, no matter how cleverly the killer has hidden the victim's body. Now, for the first time ever, readers are taken on a fascinating, often-shocking journey into a realm of crime investigation of which few people are aware. Necrosearch's most challenging cases are described, step-by-step, as these modern-day Sherlock Holmes's detect bodies and evidence thought irretrievable, and testify in court to bring cold-blooded killers to justice.

Vintage True Crime Stories Vol I: An Illustrated Anthology of Forgotten Cases of Murder & Mayhem


Frank Dalton O'Sullivan - 2018
    The cold-blooded killers of today are the same as they were long ago.  To prove this theory, consider the case summaries below that are featured in this book, Vintage True Crime Stories, Volume I.Summary of Chapter One: Twenty years before the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., there was the Marie Smith case of 1910. Her killer was German, spoke with a thick German accent, and his last name was even similar to Hauptmann’s. Both men were entrapped by scientific advancements that were landmarks for future cases. And, in the end, both men were executed in the same electric chair.Summary of Chapter Two: Like a scene in a 21st Century action movie, two hitmen on a motorcycle roar down a Rhode Island road late at night. At the designated location, they stop beside the chauffeur driven automobile of a wealthy doctor who was accompanied by his mistress that night. At nearly point blank range, the assassins emptied their pistols at the two figures in the backseat. They ignored the driver and sped away, disappearing into the darkness. The events of that night lead to a one-of-a-kind murder trial with an outcome that reinforced the duality of American justice for the next one-hundred years.Chapter 7 Summary: (No one has made a movie about this next case, but they should.) During the late hours of January 10, 1895, two burglars break into the parsonage of Rev. William Hinshaw and his wife Thurza. A fight breaks out; Thurza is shot in the head and dies on the steps to the back door. Bravely, William puts up a good fight despite being shot once and stabbed many times. Instead of finishing him off, the two men thought better of it and disappeared down a snow-covered lane.Neighbors, friends, and newspaper editors declare Rev. William Hinshaw a hero. One needed only to look at his many wounds to see that that he battled it out with the two robbers—the ones who never left footprints on the snow covered lanes of Belleville, Indiana.Chapter 11 Summary: On January 1, 1914, the small cabin of a local photographer burns to the ground. Inside, they find his body. Three days later, it happens again. Autopsies prove the men were killed before the fires were set. The evidence leads investigators to an elderly Civil War veteran with a dark past filled with dead bodies. These four stories were recently discovered in one of the rarest true crime books known to exist, Enemies of the Underworld: Embracing Sixty-Eight Stories by America's foremost Detectives, by Frank Dalton O’Sullivan.His 700-page tome is a combination manual for new detectives, and true crime book featuring true stories co-authored by senior detectives and police chiefs from across the United States. Self-published in 1917, the book sold for five-dollars, the 2018 equivalent of $108--which might explain why it's nearly impossible to find a copy of it today.With this artifact, Historical Crime Detective Publishing saw it as the perfect foundation to structure a new anthology series simply titled: Vintage True Crime Stories: An Illustrated Anthology of Forgotten Cases of Murder & Mayhem.Volume I contains fifteen stories from O’Sullivan’s book, while the remaining five chapters were selected from Fifty Years a Detective by Thomas Furlong, published in 1912.Mixed in with these twenty stories are sixty-five images, fifty-two footnotes, a dozen epilogues, and ten annotations.

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.

The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer


Anthony Bruno - 1993
    Using guns, knives, poison, ice picks, tire irons, baseball bats, and bombs, the family man from New Jersey killed for fun, for money, to cover up his own crimes, and to satisfy his inner rage. Law enforcement officials knew all about Kuklinski and had a list of his victims, but couldn’t get near him—until undercover agent Dominick Polifrone posed as a mobster and began a deadly game of cat and mouse. In this harrowing true-crime account, Anthony Bruno delves into the mind of a cold-blooded killer, chronicling the Iceman’s grisly crimes and probing the bizarre dynamics of Agent Polifrone’s dangerous liaison with him. For as Polifrone carefully built up a case against Kuklinksi, he knew he was running out of time—because the Iceman was planning to kill him too.

My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers


Helen Morrison - 2004
    Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

Prison Time


Shaun Attwood - 2014
    After being attacked by a 20-stone California biker in for stabbing a girlfriend, Shaun writes about the prisoners who befriend, protect and inspire him. They include T-Bone, a massive African American ex-Marine who risks his life saving vulnerable inmates from rape, and Two Tonys, an old-school Mafia murderer who left the corpses of his rivals from Tucson to Alaska. They teach Shaun how to turn incarceration to his advantage, and to learn from his mistakes.Resigned to living alongside violent, mentally-ill, and drug-addicted inmates, Shaun immerses himself in psychology and philosophy to try to make sense of his past behaviour, and begins applying what he learns as he adapts to prison life. Encouraged by Two Tonys to explore fiction as well, Shaun reads over a thousand books which, with support from brilliant psychotherapist Dr. O, speed along his personal development. As his ability to deflect daily threats improves, Shaun begins to look forward to his release with optimism and a new love waiting for him. Yet the words of Aristotle from one of Shaun’s books will prove prophetic: 'We cannot learn without pain'.

The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer


Robert D. Keppel - 1989
    Now, read the true story of one man's attempt to get inside the mind of the Green River Killer July 15, 1982: a woman's strangled body was found, caught on the pilings of Washington state's Green River. Before long, the "Green River Killer" would be suspected in at least forty-nine more homicides, with no end in sight. Then the authorities received an unbelievable letter from the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy -- then on Florida's death row -- offering to help catch the Green River Killer. But he would only talk to one man: Robert Keppel, the former homicide detective who had helped track Bundy's cross-county killing spree. Now these conversations are revealed, in which Bundy speculates about the motive and methods of the Green River Killer -- and reveals his own twisted secrets as well. Now, as never before, we look into the face of evil...and into the heart of a killer.

American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century


Maureen Callahan - 2019
    John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most people have never heard of Israel Keyes, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in modern history. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prosecutor as "a force of pure evil," Keyes was a predator who struck all over the United States. He buried "kill kits"--cash, weapons, and body-disposal tools--in remote locations across the country. Over the course of fourteen years, Keyes would fly to a city, rent a car, and drive thousands of miles in order to use his kits. He would break into a stranger's house, abduct his victims in broad daylight, and kill and dispose of them in mere hours. And then he would return home to Alaska, resuming life as a quiet, reliable construction worker devoted to his only daughter.When journalist Maureen Callahan first heard about Israel Keyes in 2012, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade. And so began a project that consumed her for the next several years--uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keyes, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keyes to exist. A killer who left a path of monstrous, randomly committed crimes in his wake--many of which remain unsolved to this day.American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.

Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers


Michael Connelly - 2004
    In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce.And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet. Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.The cops --The call --The open territory --Crossing the line --Cops accused --Death squad --Killed by a kid --The killers --Killer on the run --Dark disguise --The stalker --America's most wanted --Wife killer --The gang that couldn't shoot straight --Evil until he dies --The cases --Nameless grave --Double life --Death of an heiress --Hollywood homicide --The family --High time --Lying in wait --Trunk music --Open-unsolved

A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald


Errol Morris - 2012
    The word “pig” was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime.So began one of the most notorious and mysterious murder cases of the twentieth century. Jeffrey MacDonald was finally convicted in 1979 and remains in prison today. Since then a number of bestselling books—including Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer—and a blockbuster television miniseries have told their versions of the MacDonald case and what it all means.Errol Morris has been investigating the MacDonald case for over twenty years. A Wilderness of Error is the culmination of his efforts. It is a shocking book, because it shows us that almost everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable, and crucial elements of the case against MacDonald simply are not true. It is a masterful reinvention of the true-crime thriller, a book that pierces the haze of myth surrounding these murders with the sort of brilliant light that can only be produced by years of dogged and careful investigation and hard, lucid thinking. By this book’s end, we know several things: that there are two very different narratives we can create about what happened at 544 Castle Drive, and that the one that led to the conviction and imprisonment for life of this man for butchering his wife and two young daughters is almost certainly wrong.  Along the way Morris poses bracing questions about the nature of proof, criminal justice, and the media, showing us how MacDonald has been condemned, not only to prison, but to the stories that have been created around him. In this profoundly original meditation on truth and justice, Errol Morris reopens one of America’s most famous cases and forces us to confront the unimaginable. Morris has spent his career unsettling our complacent assumptions that we know what we’re looking at, that the stories we tell ourselves are true. This book is his finest and most important achievement to date.