She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives.In their own words, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.

     A star athlete with a winning smile, Pernell Jefferson had no trouble attracting women. But beneath his immaculate exterior lurked a beast that left nothing but battered women and broken dreams in his path. Addicted to steroids and nearly destitute after walking away from a football career with the Cleveland Browns, Pernell set his sights obsessively on Jeannie Butkowski. Calling her at every hour of the day, showing up to her home unannounced, and battering her when she turned her attention toward other men, Pernell made Jeannie a prisoner of her own home and her own mind. After Jeannie’s sudden disappearance, the Butkowski family and Jeannie’s friends could name the man responsible. But police, despite subsequently discovering Jeannie’s charred remains in a small Virginia town, refused to question the man most likely linked to the brutal crime. Deadly Goals explores the devastating details of Pernell Jefferson’s past, the disturbing nature of his crimes, and the impassioned cries for justice from Jeannie’s family at a pace so compelling that True Crime fans won’t be able to set down this must-read from seasoned author Wilt Browning.

    Here, in this book, he reveals the grim secrets of the 'Bangkok Hilton's' death row, where hundreds have perished.

    She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who was protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface.Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful, page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.

    He was drawn to trouble like water to a sponge.After experiencing a troubled childhood during which Alan was in and out of children's homes - after being put into care at the tender age of eighteen months old - Alan was a teenager in 1981 when he was sentenced to life in prison for murder during a robbery that had gone badly wrong. He served thirty-two years in various prisons throughout the United Kingdom. This book tells the truth of what goes on behind prison walls and exposes the level of inhumane treatment and brutality that Alan had to endure throughout his thirty-two year journey, during which he never stopped standing up for human rights.Fighting against the degrading prison system of the late twentieth century, Alan helped change the historical humiliating slop out and weekly shower that hundreds of thousands of prisoners had to adhere to throughout the centuries. The battle came at a cost though as it meant more time behind bars, time spent mainly in the segregation unit.Powerfully detailing the way prisoners are treated on a daily basis, Life in Strangeways is a gripping tale that will change the perception of Alan Lord: convicted murderer and riot leader.

    In this awesome follow-up to the hugely successful Hard Bastards and Hard Bastards 2, Kate Kray, who was married to Ronnie Kray, gets the answers to questions nobody else would dare to ask. We learn the truth about what drives some of these characters to live on the edge of the law, whether it be a matter of gaining respect or striving for survival.

    All of that was accomplished. It was remarkable.” - John Divel, Ocean City Police Department The Garden State Parkway Murders: A Cold Case Mystery is the first and only historical account of the unsolved murders of college friends Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry, who were stabbed to death in the woods alongside the Garden State Parkway near Ocean City, New Jersey on Memorial Day 1969. The discovery of the wealthy coeds three days after their slayings, as reported by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, touches off one of the largest manhunts in New Jersey since the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Over the next ten years the New Jersey State Police, Atlantic County (N.J.) Prosecutor’s Office, and FBI question thousands of people, tracking leads as far as San Francisco in search of the killer. Among the suspects are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living within an hour’s drive from the murders at the time they occurred, resided next to one another for a time on Florida’s Death Row, and indirectly confessed to the murders before being executed. The Garden State Parkway Murders tracks the author’s decade-long obsession with seeking justice for Davis and Perry. Presented with all the information surrounding these brutal murders, including a discussion of recent technological advancements in DNA and FBI serial killer profiling, the reader is asked to consider, why hasn’t this cold case been solved?

    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.

    The shocking true story of a marriage that spiraled into the most forbidden acts a man and woman could commit, and of a husband who began a campaign of intimidation against his wife that ended in murder.

    His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves “the Emmett Till generation” launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till’s lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.But what actually happened to Emmett Till—not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till’s innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed. this book provides fresh insight into the way race has informed and deformed our democratic institutions.

    The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to retaliate after a largely black jury could not reach a verdict in a trial involving a black man accused of the murder of a white man. The two Klansmen found nineteen-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch in a racially-mixed residential neighborhood.Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death—the first time in nearly a century that the state of Alabama had found a white man guilty of killing a black man. On behalf of Michael’s grieving mother, Morris Dees, the legendary civil rights lawyer and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.Based on countless interviews and extensive archival research, The Lynching brings to life two dramatic trials, during which the Alabama Klan's motives and philosophy were exposed for the evil they represent. In addition to telling a gripping and consequential story, Laurence Leamer chronicles the KKK and its activities in the second half the twentieth century, and illuminates its lingering effect on race relations in America today.

    Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.

    We’re going to make you a new life.’ From petty shoplifter to gangland empress.From frightened runaway to proud mother.From drug dealer to probation worker.Janice Nix lived a life of crime. Groomed to work as a shoplifter in London’s West End, she entered a glamorous underworld of beautiful possessions – and drugs. As she rose to the top of her criminal empire, Janice achieved the money and status her family had never had. But one day, it had to come tumbling down.Several prison stretches later, Janice was reformed – and inspired to join the probation service. Using everything she learned in her years on the streets, she’s devoted her life to ensure girls like her don’t make the same mistakes.This is her story.

    The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching — a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.

    In this compelling study of true crime, Liverpool's most popular author Tom Slemen recounts some of the most intriguing and baffling murders of Merseyside such as:• The baffling case of the Victorian canned corpse• The magistrate's beautiful granddaughter who was killed by a crazed admirer• The condemned man who was hanged twice• Frederick Deeming - the Rainhill psychopath who wiped out his own family and danced on their grave with his next victim• The bizarre link between a South Seas cult and the housewife who was stabbed fourteen times in her Knotty Ash home by a killer who struck under the cover of a fog• The unsolved case of the superintendent and his son who died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances - in a police station• The enigmatic murder of Julia Wallace - and a very credible solution• The only assassination of a British prime minister - by a Liverpool businessman Plus many more fascinating murder cases.This fascinating book is a must for all readers of true crime in general and Liverpudlians and Merseysiders in particular.