Book picks similar to
Edwin Alonzo Boyd: The Story Of The Notorious Boyd Gang by Brian Vallée
crime-punishment
prisons-panzram-related
shelfari-wishlist
true-crime
Abuse of Power
Lizzie Scott - 2016
The children arrived with a lot of kicking and screaming from the eldest…terrified of the changes going on in his life.One of our jobs as their carers was to minimise change as much as possible until their future was decided by the courts at the final hearing.There was much going on in the background that we were not aware of but would find out in the course of time.Plans were being made by professional people, who should know better and should never take advantage of their position to abuse those who are vulnerable and unable to defend themselves because they are told ‘The law is against you’, when actually what is meant is that they, in their powerful position are against you.We were slowly and blindly heading toward an adult temper tantrum that neither I nor any of the social workers present at the time, had ever witnessed before.A temper tantrum of such intensity that one person changed the course of these children’s lives.It was a truly, truly wicked act of power displayed by one very spiteful egotistical person.
Eye of the Beast: The True Story of Serial Killer James Wood
Terry Adams - 1997
No elaborate rituals. No predetermine victims. Just an instant, uncontrollable urge to kill.On a summer afternoon in 1993, an eleven-year-old girl sets out through her familiar neighborhood to collect payments on her paper route. In one home she meets a harmless-looking stranger. Driven by an unstoppable desire, James Wood will make this route her last.The grisly murder of Jeralee Underwood was the final crime in James Wood's lifetime career of armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and murder. Not until the Underwood case, which brought terror to a close-knit Idaho community, did crime experts begin to piece together a detailed profile of Wood's depraved personality and successfully hunt him down. Unlike other serial killers, Wood acted purely on impulse, to strike out the instincts of a bloodthirsty predator. Based on four years of meticulous researched by the detective who captured Wood, and other forensic experts on the case, this is the true story of how a sociopath is bred-and what it takes to trap him at his own deadly game.With eight pages of startling photos!
Hollywood Private Lives Uncensored
Alan Royle - 2016
Hollywood minus the hype and hokum.
RED-HANDED: 20 Criminal Cases That Shook India
Souvik Bhadra - 2014
As the nation watched on in horror, the police uncovered the body parts of fifteen more children in the same location. These grisly killings were found to have been the handiwork of Surinder Koli, a serial killer who lived in a house nearby.In Red-Handed: 20 Criminal Cases That Shook India, lawyers Souvik Bhadra and Pingal Khan narrate the stories behind some of the most sensational criminal cases to have caught the attention of the country in the last few decades. From the murder of Nitish Katara in a case of ‘honour killing’ to the shooting of Jessica Lal; from the Harshad Mehta scam to the Best Bakery arson of 2002; and, from the horrifying ‘tandoor’ case, in which Naina Sahni was killed and then cremated, to the trial and conviction of Sanjay Dutt under TADA, Red-Handed examines the motives behind these crimes even as it aims to lay bare the inner workings of the Indian judicial system. Additionally, the authors illuminate the crucial role that the media has come to play in judicial matters—it shapes public opinion, and often even investigates cases and delivers justice, much before the judges do.
Butcher
Gary C. King - 2009
The women he picked up never came back...His Methods: Rape and Torture For years, police built a long list of missing prostitutes, women at the edge of society. Some people claimed there was a serial killer. One detective lost his job for saying so. But investigators didn't have a single body...until someone found a skull sawed in half...The Pig Farm MurdersOn land that had made his family millions, on a squalid pig farm near a school, a condo development and a Starbucks, Robert Pickton ran a house of horrors for decades. Friends, neighbors and community leaders came and went, while Pickton committed debauchery, torture, and bloodletting rivaling the worst on record. What he did to his victims was unspeakable. What he did to the bodies was unimaginable. How he got away with it is the most shocking crime of all...
Riding on the Edge: A Motorcycle Outlaw's Tale
John Hall - 2008
Ride with author John Hall into the turbulent world of 1960s bike club culture, from the time he joined an upstart motorcycle club from Dixie, and rose to become Long Island chapter president of the Pagans, a club that the FBI called "the most violent criminal organization in America." Follow him into the Pagan heartland of Pennsylvania where he fell in love, got in a roadhouse brawl over a honky-tonk angel, and eventually went to jail for "takin' care a club business." Now after a career as a journalist and college professor, he returns to the violent days of his youth and smashes up stereotypes like he once smashed up bars, resurrecting long-dead brothers, in a style reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Mark Twain. Hall presents them as they really were: hard living, hard loving, hard drinking, hard fighting rebels, but also hardworking, patriotic, loyal, and lovable characters, and a band of brothers whose outlandish behavior forged an all-American outlaw legend in the tradition of Jesse James, Doc Holliday, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Outlaws yes, but outlaws as American as apple pie.
Banged Up Abroad: Hellhole: Our Fight to Survive South America's Deadliest Jail
James Miles - 2011
That's the only way I can describe Yare. It's a murderous viper's nest of assassins, cut throats and killers.'
When James Miles and his best friend Paul Loseby were caught smuggling ten kilos of cocaine out of Caracas, Venezuela, they couldn't deny their guilt. Young and naive, the lads had thought the one-off drug mule job would be a passport to a better life. But in reality it was a ticket to hell ...They were sentenced to thirty years and flung into the world's deadliest prison system, ending up in the notorious Yare. A place where drugs and weaponry are currency and the rules are: there are no rules.This is the gripping true-life story of how two men endured untold savagery in the most appalling conditions. It's about what it's like to witness murder and rape every day, fearing you'll be next. How it feels to join a dangerous Latino gang and eat dead rats in order to survive. And, what you do when you're at the centre of a riot between thousands of men with machine guns.As seen on Channel 5's
Banged Up Abroad
, this is the most shocking prison story ever told and an inspiring account of human endurance.
Breaking the Code: A True Story by a Hells Angel President and the Cop Who Pursued Him
Pat Matter - 2014
An honest, hard-working cop. Both of their lives on totally different paths until their worlds collide..."With no holds barred, Omodt and Matter ripback the curtain of seedy reality and toss you headlongintothecomplex relationships of biker gangs and the cops whose job it is to pursue them. The writing is graphic, truthful, revealing and explores both sides of the law-the right side, and the wrong side-with equal detail. For lovers of true crime writing this is a must-read." - Mark Reps, author, Sheriff Zeb Hanks crime series"The story of an adversarial relationship that turned into one of the most unlikely, remarkable friendships I've ever been exposed to. And, as written by the two protagonists, BREAKING THE CODE is told in the most authentic voice you'll ever read. Beyond the true crime audience, this is a story filled with so much humanity it must be experienced by all readers." - Ali Selim, writer and director of the award-winning film, Sweet Land"Up until BREAKING THE CODE I knew Pat Matter to be a formidable but fair motorcycle drag racer and a competent professional as leader of Minneapolis Custom Cycle. This book fills in the blanks about the other 'dark' side of his life as a Hells Angel-a must-read to get the whole story." - George B. Smith, Executive Chairman and CEO of S&S Motor Company, Viola, WI"BREAKING THE CODE takes you on a real-life crime adventure ... a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Hells Angels, and what it took to take down one of their most prominent leaders." - Tom Chorske, retired NHL player and commentator for FSN Sports
In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System
Frank Kane - 2006
In desperation, he agreed to smuggle cocaine out of Venezuela. Almost inevitably, he and his girlfriend, Sam, were caught.The price they paid was a ten-year sentence in the hell of the overcrowded Venezuelan prison system, notorious for official corruption and abuse, and rife with weapons and gangs. At one point, Frank was held in the remote El Dorado prison, better known for being the one-time home of Henri Charrière, or Papillon. He witnessed countless murders as gang leaders fought for power, and he had to become as ruthless as his fellow inmates in order to survive. In an attempt to dull the reality of the horrendous conditions, he succumbed to drugs.After enduring years of systematic beatings by the guards and attempts on his life by inmates, Frank suffered more than one breakdown. He lost over four stone and was riddled with disease, but somehow he found the strength within himself to survive and was eventually released in 2004 after serving over seven years of his sentence. During the long walk back from hell, Frank decided to tell his story.
Murders of Merseyside
Tom Slemen - 2011
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.
Insanity: My Mad Life
Charles Bronson - 2003
Renowned for serial hostage taking and his rooftop sieges, he is a legend in his own lifetime. Yet behind the crime and the craziness, there is a great deal more to Charlie. He is a man of great warmth and humor; a man of great artistic talent who exhibits his drawings around the country; and a man with an overpowering urge not to let the system get him down. Insanity is a look into the mind of a true individual—a wild, inspired, single-minded, fascinating man, oppressed not only by the workings of his singular mind, but also by the system that confines him.
Without Honour: The True Story of the Shafia Family and the Kingston Canal Murders
Rob Tripp - 2012
A father, mother and son convicted of murder. The shocking truth about the “ honourless crime” that stunned a nation.On the morning of June 30, 2009, police in a small eastern Ontario city made a ghastly discovery: four females dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal. Sisters Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, floated serenely inside the car, seemingly the victims of a terrible accident. That morning, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba and their son, Hamed, arrived at the Kingston police station to report the four missing. In a sweeping covert investigation that spanned three continents, police uncovered layers of lies in the Shafias’ story and they developed a horrifying theory: Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona had been the victims of a meticulously plotted family murder � Canada’ s first mass honour killing.In Without Honour, award-winning journalist Rob Tripp draws on three years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews to make sense of a senseless crime in a way no other writer could. His unprecedented access tells a story beyond anything the jury heard: a story about a patriarch who fled war and strife in Afghanistan but who did not leave behind his devotion to repressive tradition. Tripp was the first journalist on the scene as the news broke and the only reporter to attend every day of court sessions, through to the convictions of Shafia, Tooba and Hamed on four counts each of first-degree murder, fuelled by what Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger called a “ twisted notion of honour.” In this gripping and compassionate account, Tripp reveals the heartbreaking and stunning truth about the desperate lives of four women who died in the pursuit of freedom.
Redrum The Innocent: From Wrongful Conviction to Stunning Exoneration
Kirk Makin - 1992
Gambino: The Rise: A Novel Based on the True Story
James Pierre - 2015
The Department of Justice’s endeavors to capture him on video surveillance likewise came up empty, because he rarely left his modest row house at 2230 Ocean Pkwy., in Brooklyn, New York. He was silent and reclusive to a fault. And by the time the public got their first look at him in 1970 (following an arrest on a trumped-up charge that was never prosecuted) he was already the most powerful mafia boss in the country, controlling a crew of 800 mafiosi, who oversaw nearly 50 criminal and legitimate businesses, which netted his crime family over $1 billion in annual revenue. Yet few even knew his name, let alone his story. Now, for the first time ever, the true story of Carlo Gambino is told in full, gory detail. Gambino: The Rise, A Novel Based on a True Story, unveils the intricate machinations of Gambino’s ascent, from poor, immigrant stowaway, to billionaire boss of America’s most deadly and elite crime family. On this journey, we meet such celebrity hoods as Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, Al “Scarface” Capone, Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese, and Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia… all of whom became pawns on Gambino’s Machiavellian chess set. Gambino’s story is a rags to riches tail of the bloodiest kind, which explores the dichotomies of family, wealth, and power within the mafia environment. With its careful scrutiny of mob business and brutality, Gambino: The Rise will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Mario Puzo’s timeless classic, The Godfather. But this is to be expected, especially when Puzo’s fictional crime patriarch, Vito Corleone, was based on none other than Carlo Gambino. Gambino: The Rise is a historical novel for the ages that will leave readers shell-shocked with every flip of the page, until its earth-shattering and climactic end.