Book picks similar to
Murder In Spokane by Mark Fuhrman
true-crime
non-fiction
nonfiction
crime
Sutton
J.R. Moehringer - 2012
If they weren't failing outright, causing countless Americans to lose their jobs and homes, they were being propped up with emergency bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to win the girl of his dreams.So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Over three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.But the public rooted for Sutton. He never fired a shot, after all, and his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name.Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton blazing back to life. In Moehringer's retelling, it was more than poverty or rage at society that drove Sutton. It was one unforgettable woman. In all Sutton's crimes and confinements, his first love (and first accomplice) was never far from his thoughts. And when Sutton finally walked free - a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969 - he immediately set out to find her.Poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love that is forever timeless.(overview via Barnes and Noble)
Charles Manson: The Man Who Murdered the Sixties
David J. Krajicek - 2019
Freshly paroled, he stumbled into San Francisco in 1967 just as thousands of impressionable young people were streaming into town for the Summer of Love.Posing as a musician-come-guru-come-Christ-figure, Manson built a commune cult of hippies, consisting mainly of troubled young women. But what made this group set out on the four-week killing spree that claimed seven lives? Former Journalism Professor, David J. Krajicek, seeks to discover just that.
Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree
Dennis McDougal - 1991
This book offers a glimpse into the dark mind of a living monster. "To open this book is to open a peephole into hell."--Associated Press. Photographs.
The Missing Girls: A Shocking True Story of Abduction and Murder
Linda O'Neal - 2006
As a shocked community came together and police began a frantic search, another tragedy was just about to take place.Miranda Gaddis was Ashley's best friend. Just two months after Ashley's disappearance, Miranda was on her way to school when she, too, was abducted. Nobody knew the scandalous, unspeakable secret that the two girls shared…except for one man who lived just one block away.The police and FBI managed to overlook the girls' neighbor whose daughter was a friend of Miranda and Ashley's—and who had a catalog of sexual-assault allegations behind him. Author Linda O'Neal was a private investigator intimately involved in this shocking case. Now, she and her co-authors—also participants in the case—tell the chilling story of one town's devastating loss…and how the murderer was finally found.
No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine
Brooks Brown - 2002
It was the worst single act of murder at a school in U.S. history. Few people knew Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris better than Brooks Brown. Brown and Klebold were best friends in grade school, and years later, at Columbine, Brown was privy to some of Harris and Klebolds darkest fantasies and most troubling revelations After the shootings, Brown was even accused by the police of having been in on the massacre simply because he had been friends with the killers.Now, for the first time, Brown, with journalist Rob Merritt, gets to tell his full version of the story. He describes the warning signs that were missed or ignored, and the evidence that was kept hidden from the public after the murders. He takes on those who say that rock music or video games caused Klebold and Harris to kill their classmates and explores what it might have been that pushed these two young men, from supposedly stable families, to harbor such violent and apocalyptic dreams.Shocking as well as inspirational and insightful, No Easy Answers is an authentic wake-up call for all the psychologists, authorities, parents, and law enforcement personnel who have attempted to understand the murders at Columbine High School. As the title suggests, the book offers no easy answers, but instead presents the unvarnished facts about growing up as an alienated teenager in America today.Brooks Brown graduated from Columbine High School in 1999; this is his first book. Most recently, Brooks worked and consulted on Michael Moores latest documentary called Bowling for Columbine. He lives in Littleton, Colorado. Rob Merritt graduated from the University of Iowa School of Journalism in 1998 and currently works as a newspaper writer in Marshalltown, Iowa.
The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: An American Nightmare
Don Davis - 1991
They heard the power saw buzzing in the dead of night but neighbors never imagined the horrors happening right next door.The hot sultry night of July 22, 1991 was one the tenants of the Oxford Apartments would never forget. A panic stcricken young man--a pair of handcuffs still dangling from his wrists--ran out of Apartment 213 and told police an incredible tale of terror.Shaking with fear, he led officers back to his captor's lair, where they made the gruesome discovery. Inside were the body parts of at least fifteen men--including torsos stuffed into a barrel, severed heads in a refrigerator, and skulls boiled clean and stashed in a filing cabinet. Tacked to the freezer were Poloroid photographs of mutilated corpses.When investigators arrested 31-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer, they realized they had stumbled onto a "real-life Hannibal Lecter"--a sadistic murderer who told them he had saved a human heart "to eat later". What could turn a handsome, former tennis player, the son of middle-class parents, into a perverse serial killer whose unthinkable acts shocked the nation?The Jeffrey Dahmer Story takes you into Jeffrey Dahmer's twisted world of bizarre sexual encounters, mutilation and cannibalism--in one of history's most appalling true crime cases.With 8 pages of chilling photographs.
Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
Sarah Weinman - 2020
With podcasts like My Favorite Murder and In the Dark, bestsellers like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Furious Hours, and TV hits like American Crime Story and Wild Wild Country, the cultural appetite for stories of real people doing terrible things is insatiable.Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today. Michelle Dean’s “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick” went viral when it first published and is the basis for the TV show The Act and Pamela Colloff’s “The Reckoning,” is the gold standard for forensic journalism. There are 13 pieces in all and as a collection, they showcase writing about true crime across the broadest possible spectrum, while also reflecting what makes crime stories so transfixing and irresistible to the modern reader.
Hell Hath No Fury: A True Story of Wealth and Passion, Love and Envy, and a Woman Driven to the Ultimate Revenge
Bryna Taubman - 1992
But when Betty discovered Dan's hidden life, the façade of LaJolla's golden couple was shattered. What followed was a vicious five-year battle that finally ended in a shocking double-murder.A Harvard Law School graduate, Dan manipulated the law to strip Betty of everything she loved: her home, her friends - even her children. When she frantically tried to fight back, he had her committed to a mental hospital. His new wife, Linda, even sent the once-beautiful Betty wrinkle cream ads and weight loss pamphlets.Consumed by hatred and thoughts of revenge, Betty's rage exploded on the night of November 5, 1989. Before the sun rose the next day, Dan Broderick and his gorgeous new wife were dead - their bullet-riddled bodies wrapped in the blood-soaked sheets of their bed.
First Degree Rage
Paula May - 2020
The key suspect is a police officer in NC. It is written by Paula May, who was the lead detective in the case.
My Story
Elizabeth Smart - 2013
She has created a foundation to help prevent crimes against children and is a frequent public speaker. In 2012, she married Matthew Gilmour, whom she met doing mission work in Paris for her church, in a fairy tale wedding that made the cover of People magazine.
Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office
John Temple - 2005
Ed Strimlan is a doctor who never got to practice medicine. Instead he discovers how people died. Mike Chichwak is a stolid ex-paramedic, respected around the office for his compassion and doggedness. Tiffani Hunt is twenty-one, a single mother who questions whether she wants to spend her nights around dead bodies.All three deputy coroners share one trait: a compulsive curiosity. A good thing too because any observation at a death scene can prove meaningful. A bag of groceries standing on a kitchen counter, the milk turning sour. A broken lamp lying on the carpet of an otherwise tidy living room. When they approach a corpse, the investigators consider everything. Is the victim face-up or down? How stiff are the limbs? Are the hands dirty or clean? By the time they bag the body and load it into the coroner's wagon, Tiffani, Ed, and Mike have often unearthed intimate details that are unknown even to the victim's family and friends.The intrigues of investigating death help make up for the bad parts of the job. There are plenty of burdens--grief-stricken families, decomposed bodies, tangled local politics, and gore. And maybe worst of all is the ever-present reminder of mortality and human frailness.Deadhouse also chronicles the evolution of forensic medicine, from early rituals performed over corpses found dead to the controversial advent of modern forensic pathology. It explains how pathologists "read" bullet wounds and lacerations, how someone dies from a drug overdose or a motorcycle crash or a drowning, and how investigators uncover the clues that lead to the truth.
Karla: A Pact with the Devil
Stephen Williams - 2003
Part memoir, part woman-in-prison story, part prognostication, part political expose, in Karla, Williams lets Karla and the key players speak for themselves. What they have to say is surprising, horrifying and enlightening. Karla: A Pact with the Devil also asks and answers two essential questions: Who is Karla Homolka and how did she come to have a future? Given the fact she is out among us enjoying that future right now makes those answers essential information today. Karla: A Pact with the Devil is, as, one reviewer put it “almost unique in our literature. It is an extraordinary act of the imagination brought to bear on the facts.” (Includes pictures from the original Canadian print edition) Karla: A Pact with the Devil has not been previously available in the United States."People want me in max so my life with be hard but it really isn't. There are absolutely no responsibilities here. Everything is provided. We can spend the day sleeping, sun-tanning or doing whatever we want all day every day."- Karla Homolka in a letter to author Stephen Williams"Well, they say 'never say never' and they're right," Karla wrote in her startling first letter to Stephen Williams. "Never in a million years did I think I would ever write a letter to someone from the media, let alone you who has condemned me so harshly."Thus began one of the most controversial correspondences in criminal history.Karla picks up where Williams' first book on the case, Invisible Darkness, left her, painting her nails in her cell in solitary confinement in the gothic tower of Kingston's Prison for Women. After testifying against her ex-husband in 1995, Karla's life in prison was soon going to take a very different, dramatic turn.
To the Bridge
Nancy Rommelmann - 2018
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
Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave
Deanne Stillman - 2001
One girl was about to turn sixteen, the other twenty-one.Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she explores not only the murders and the families involved but a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. In haunting, vivid prose, she creates a farreaching story of America itself, carrying us into the empty white heart of the Mojave, as we meet and come to know the modern nomads who turn to the West for salvation only to be devoured by its false promise.