The thought of leaving the shopping centre without him was crushing. I knew that walking away from the place where he had gone missing, without any idea where he now was, meant that things were really bad. James had been right by my side and then he was gone forever.' On 12th February 1993, Denise Fergus' life changed forever. As she was running errands at New Strand Shopping Centre, she let go of her two-year-old son's hand for a few seconds to take out her purse. Denise never saw her son again. For the first time since that moment 25 years ago, Denise tells her extraordinary story in this heart-wrenching book, an unflinching account of that terrible day. What if she had never taken James shopping? What if she had turned right coming out of the butcher's, instead of left? Denise's initial hope after seeing her son on CCTV with other children quickly turned to devastation when, two days later, James' body was found. His death reverberated around the world and his killers became the youngest ever convicted murderers in UK legal history. Four minutes is all it took for them to lead James away from his mother to his death. Denise took up a tortuous legal battle for James, and it was her astonishing strength and love for her son that ultimately helped to change the way the law treats victims of crime. This is a mother's tale, of finding a way through the despair to remember the happiness and wonderful memories that James brought his family. Above all, Denise doesn't want her son to be remembered as a murdered child, and with this beautifully written book, she does just that.

    He didn’t do it alone. Surrounding himself with a rogues gallery of contract killers, fixers, and enforcers, he built one of the richest, most powerful crime empires in modern history. Who were these men? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano takes you inside Gotti’s inner circle to reveal the dark hearts and violent deeds of the most remorseless and cold-blooded characters in organized crime. Men so vicious even the other Mafia families were terrified of them. Meet Gotti’s Boys …   * Charles Carneglia: the ruthless junkyard dog who allegedly disposed of bodies for the mob—by dissolving them in acid then displaying their jewels.   * Gene Gotti: the younger Gotti brother who ran a multimillion-dollar drug smuggling ring—enraging his bosses in the Gambino family.   * Angelo “Quack-Quack” Ruggiero: the loose-lipped contract killer who was wire-tapped by the FBI—and dared to insult Gotti behind his back.   * Tony “Roach” Rampino: the hardcore stoner who looked like a cockroach—and used his gangly arms and horror-mask face to frighten his enemies.   * Salvatore Gravano: the Gambino underboss who helped John Gotti execute Gambino mob boss Paul Castellano—then sang like a canary to take Gotti down.   Rounding out this nefarious group were the likes of Frank “Franky D” DeCicco, Vincent “Little Vinny” Artuso, and Joe “The German” Watts, a man who wasn’t a Mafiosi but had all of the power and prestige of one in John Gotti’s slaughterhouse crew. Gotti’s Boys is a killer line-up of the crime-hardened mob soldiers who killed at their ruthless leader’s merciless bidding—brought to vivid life by the prize-winning chronicler of the American mob.

    Behind a facade of Midwestern normalcy, Dennis Rader hid a life of bloodlust, sadism, and murder beyond imagining.The upstanding family man, Scout leader, and church board president was well liked and trusted by his Wichita community.Kansans -- and all of America -- would never recover from the truth: He was BTK, the madman who bound, tortured, and killed ten victims over the course of three decades.Drawing on extensive interviews, including exclusive access to Rader's pastor and congregation, bestselling author Stephen Singular chronicles the horrific crimes, the investigation, the capture, and confession of BTK -- and, more deeply than any other account, reveals how his 2005 arrest shattered and challenged those in a circle of faith who thought they knew him best.

    Harold Shipman • Son of Sam • The Columbine Killers • The Yorkshire Ripper • Ted Bundy • Charles Starkweather • The Boston Strangler Serial Killers & Mass Murderers takes you into the minds of the criminals who committed the world's most notorious and horrifying crimes. Each of the sadistic murderers profiled here was once known simply as someone's neighbor, co-worker or child. What turned them into killers? In one chilling chapter after another, this book profiles a terrifying succession of homicidal maniacs and asks the question, "What makes them tick?" "The refrigerator contained meat, including a human heart, in plastic bags. There were three human heads in the freezer. Two more skulls were found in a pot on the stove. Another pot contained male genital organs and severed heads, and there were the remains of three male torsos in the trash."

    A knee to the groin, a thumb to an eye, all was fair as long as a Donnelly prevailed." "Hit first, talk later," she told her boys. This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: crime biography. The gruesome saga of the Black Donnellys has been heavily mythologized. A thick layer of rumour, legend, and hearsay has built up around the facts of the case. But one thing is clear. No one who reads this book will ever forget the murderous events that occurred near the town of Lucan, Ontario in the 1870s.

    She'll take you searching for bodies of loved ones - through woodlands, along hedgerows, field-edges, and through plantations - solving time since death, and disposal of remains, from ditches to living rooms. She will give you glimpses of her own history: her loves, her losses, and the narrow little valley in Wales where she first woke up to the wonders of the natural world. Pat will show you how her work with a microscope reveals tell-tale traces of the world around us, and how these have taken suspects of the darkest criminal activities to court.From flowers, fungi, tree trunks to car pedals, walking boots, carpets, and corpses' hair, Traces is a unique book on life, death, and one's indelible link with nature.

    One was memorialized in Truman Capote’s classic novel, In Cold Blood. The other was all but forgotten. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith confessed to the first: the November 15, 1959 murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas. Despite remarkable coincidences between the two crimes, they denied committing the second: the December 19 murder of a family of four in Osprey, Florida. Over half a century later, a determined Florida detective undertakes exceptional efforts to try to bring closure to the long-cold case.

    Now the award-winning journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent tells the complete story of Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed, hedonistic world in which they lived and died, culled from interviews with over 400 people, and details from thousands of pages of police reports.In chilling detail, Maureen Orth reveals how Andrew Cunanan met his superstar victim...why police and the FBI repeatedly failed to catch Cunanan...why other victims' families stonewalled the investigation...controversial findings of the Versace autopsy report, and more. Here is a late-century odyssey that races across America from California's wealthy gay underworld to modest midwestern homes of families mourning their slaughtered sons to the celebration of decadence that is Versace's South Beach. It is at once a landmark work of investigative journalism and a riveting account of a sociopath, his savage crimes, and the mysteries he left along the way.

    Much has been written about the Christie killings and the fate of Timothy Evans who was executed for murders Christie later confessed to the story still provokes strong feeling and speculation. However, most the books on the case have been compiled without the benefit of all the sources that are open to researchers, and they tend to focus on Evans in an attempt to clear him of guilt. In addition, many simply repeat what has been said before. Therefore, a painstaking, scholarly reassessment of the evidence - and of Christies life - is overdue, and that is what Jonathan Oates provides in this gripping biography of a serial killer.

    In any story featuring Sutcliffe, however, his victims are incidental, often reduced to a tableau of nameless faces. But each woman was much more than the manner of her death, and in Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter, Carol Ann Lee tells, for the first time, the stories of those women who came into Sutcliffe's murderous orbit, restoring their individuality to them and giving a voice to their families, including the twenty-three children whom he left motherless.Based on previously unpublished material and fresh, first-hand interviews the book examines the Yorkshire Ripper story from a new perspective: focusing on the women and putting the reader in a similar position to those who lived through that time. The killer, although we know his identity, remains a shadowy figure throughout, present only as the perpetrator of the attacks. By talking to survivors and their families, and to the families of the murdered women, Carol Ann Lee gets to the core truths of their lives and experiences, not only at the hands of Sutcliffe but also with the Yorkshire Police and their crass and ham-fisted handling of the case, where the women were put into two categories: prostitutes and non-prostitutes. In this book they are, simply, women, and all have moving backstories.The grim reality is that not enough has changed within society to make the angle this book takes on the Yorkshire Ripper case a purely historical one. Recent news stories have shown that women and girls who come forward to report serious crimes of a sexual nature are often judged as harshly - and often more so - than the men who have wronged them. The Rochdale sex abuse scandal, the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and the US President's deplorable comments about women are vivid reminders that those in positions of power regard women as second class citizens. At the same time, the discussions arising from these recent stories, and much of the reporting, show that women are judged today as much on their preferences, habits and appearance as they were at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper attacks. The son of Wilma McCann, Sutcliffe's first known murder victim, told the author, 'We still have a very long way to go' and in that regard he is correct.Hard-hitting and wholly unique in approach, this timely book sheds new light on a case that still grips the nation.

    Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply, and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments. It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multi-national, with armies of hitmen and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices. Their intelligence systems flushed out turncoats and traitors, and they ruthlessly exterminated their enemies. Yet Chandler, an HM Customs investigator fluent in Spanish, knew he could only succeed by recruiting local informants, and went out into the field to find them. Within four years he had a network of fifty agents buried deep inside the trafficking organisations. The result was unprecedented. Their intel led to the arrest of hundreds of narcos and to the seizure of 300 tonnes of drugs, worth a staggering $3 billion. Chandler's web disrupted the Bogotá mafia, who controlled the main airport and boasted they could put anything on a plane, from drugs to bombs; penetrated the go-fast crews who raced coke-laden speedboats to the transit station of Jamaica; dismantled the 'rip-on' teams who smuggled through the coastal ports; and identified the so-called motherships, the largest method of bulk transit ever discovered. He faced appalling risks. Treacherous stool pigeons worked for both sides, and some of his Colombian law-enforcement colleagues were abducted, tortured and killed. Chandler too faced a grave threat when the crime lords learned he was responsible for a string of interdictions. Yet he persisted, driven to continue with the greatest series of sustained seizures ever made, until he finally burned out and his tour of duty came to an end. Two of his best sources were subsequently murdered, and his bosses dropped the entire overseas informant programme, with dire consequences. Narco Wars is an unflinching story of danger fear and stress, and of the tradecraft and unsung heroism of the agents and their handlers.

    Barbara had everything she'd ever wanted: five beautiful children, a home, her faith, and a husband named Eli. But while Barbara was happy to live as the Amish have for centuries - without modern conveniences, Eli was tempted by technology: cell phones, the Internet, and sexting. Online he called himself "Amish Stud" and found no shortage of "English" women looking for love and sex. Twice he left Barbara and their children, was shunned, begged for forgiveness, and had been welcomed back to the church.Barb Raber was raised Amish, but is now a Conservative Mennonite. She drove Eli to appointments in her car, and she gave him what he wanted when he wanted: a cell phone, a laptop, rides to his favorite fishing and hunting places, and, most importantly, sex. When Eli starts asking people to kill his wife for him, Barb offers to help. One night, just after Eli had hitched a ride with a group of men to go fishing in the hours before dawn, Barb Raber entered the Weaver house and shot Barbara Weaver in the chest at close range.It was only the third murder in hundreds of years of Amish life in America, and it fell to Edna Boyle, a young assistant prosecutor to seek justice for Barbara Weaver.

    This is the Popular Reference edition of the fully-illustrated eBook, ASIN: B008L0PR18.Among the thirty-four cases covered are: Pamela Smart, a volunteer at a high school drug awareness program, who urged her fifteen-year-old lover and his friends to kill her husband; Nancy Kissel, an expat American in Hong Kong, who served her investment banker husband a strawberry milkshake laced with drugs, then clubbed him to death with a statue; and Celeste Beard, whose husband was disemboweled by her lesbian lover.

    In September 1970, two boys met in the playground on their first day at secondary school in North London. They formed what would be described at the Old Bailey thirty years later as ‘a unique and wicked bond’. Between 1982 and 1986, striking near lonely railway stations in London and the Home Counties, their partnership took them from rape to murder. Three police forces pooled their resources to catch them in the biggest criminal manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper Enquiry.A Dangerous Place is the first full-length account of the crimes of John Duffy and David Mulcahy. Told by the son of one of the police officers who led the enquiry, exhaustively researched and with unprecedented access, this is the story of two of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century and the times they operated in. It is the story of the women who died at their hands. It is the story of the women who survived them, and who had the courage to ensure justice was done. And it is the story of a father, told by a son.

    But Philip Markoff, the handsome, clean-cut, twenty-two-year-old med student who hired Brisman on Craigslist, had different plans. On April 14, 2009, guests notified management of a woman screaming on the twentieth floor, and Brisman was found in a pool of blood, with several bullet wounds to her torso and…plastic restraints around her wrist.Hotel surveillance video captured Markoff’s image, and an additional tip helped police connect him to attacks on several other women, including a prostitute who was tied up at a Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island, both of which bear a striking similarity to the Brisman murder.A skillful blend of hard journalism and fascinating yet chilling true-crime narrative, this headline-making story will appeal to fans of Ann Rule.