Similar Transactions: A True Story


S.R. Reynolds - 2015
    Twenty years later S. R. Reynolds connects the dots and finds herself caught up in a real-life drama. Justice can come in many forms.  When the girl went missing in 1987, Reynolds, then a clinical social worker, warned the DA and police that the case was being mishandled. Michelle's classmates and her mother were unanimous in saying she had no reason to run away. A decade later, after having moved from Knoxville, Tennessee to another state, Reynolds learns from a cold case TV program that Michelle’s skeletal remains had been found two years after she went missing.Through a synchronistic meet-up with her former professor, famed forensic anthropologist Dr. William (Bill) Bass, who had been interviewed on the TV program and who is the founder of the University of Tennessee's Body Farm, Reynolds's curiosity suddenly becomes a commitment when Bass offers to send her his files. It begins a saga in which she travels extensively to seek out and meet with surviving victims, the murdered girl’s mother, and former police and FBI investigators who worked on the case after the girl’s remains had been found. As Reynolds presses neglected pieces of the puzzle into place, she unearths a string of brutal kidnappings and rapes across the South, crimes that span decades. A picture forms and patterns appear. All evidence points to one man: convicted sex offender Larry Lee Smith. But Larry Lee is about to be released from a Georgia prison where he is serving time for a related crime—a similar transaction. We find that prison means nothing more to Larry Lee than waiting until he can repeat his actions.During the seven years of pursuing this case, Reynolds joins with the former victims and the mother to form The Band of Sisters to seek Justice for Michelle's murder. As a result, the police department reopens the long cold-case of Michelle Anderson’s murder. A savvy prosecutor enters the scene as they join together in this true life saga. Similar Transactions is the recipient of the eLit Gold Award for True Crime, IAN True Crime Book of the Year, and is among the top five books named The Best of Everything Nonfiction by author, critic, and screenwriter Emilio Corsetti III.

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery


Robert Kolker - 2013
    Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.

Stronger


Jeff Bauman - 2014
    When he realized he couldn't, he asked for a pad and paper and wrote down seven words: Saw the guy. Looked right at me, setting off one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history.Just thirty hours before, Jeff had been at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon cheering on his girlfriend, Erin, when the first bomb went off at his feet. As he was rushed to the hospital, he realized he was severely injured and that he might die, but he didn't know that a photograph of him in a wheelchair was circulating throughout the world, making him the human face of the Boston Marathon bombing victims, or that what he'd seen would give the Boston police their most important breakthrough.In Stronger, Jeff describes the chaos and terror of the bombing itself and the ongoing FBI investigation in which he was a key witness. He takes us inside his grueling rehabilitation, and discusses his attempt to reconcile the world's admiration with his own guilt and frustration. . Brave, compassionate, and emotionally compelling, Jeff Bauman's story is not just his, but ours as well.

Baby Be Mine


Diane Fanning - 2006
    Naming the child Abigail, the couple brought her to their local pastor. Miles away, police were investigating the brutal murder of a pregnant woman...THE HORROR OF MURDERTwenty-three year old Bobbie Jo Stinnett was found by her mother, lying in a pool of blood, looking as if her stomach "had exploded." Investigators soon determined: Someone had strangled Bobbie Jo to death—and then cut her fetus from her womb...THE WOMAN ACCUSED OF KILLING FOR AN UNBORN CHILD...In late 2004, two women met in a dog-breeding internet chat room. When Elizabeth Montgomery came face to face with eight-months-pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett, prosecutors claim she already had a plan. Investigators knew that Bobbie Jo had fought desperately for her life—and that her fetus, alive or dead, was gone. Investigators scrambled after a killer. An "Amber Alert" went out for an hours-old infant. And this horrifying case was about to shock neighbors and a nation: of a woman accused of murdering for a baby...

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice


Bill BrowderBill Browder - 2014
    It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

Crack House


Harry Keeble - 2008
    By the end of the decade Britain's inner cities were in the midst of a crack epidemic. Narrated by the leader of the Harginey Drugs Squad, 'Crack House' describes a series of breathtaking raids as well as arrests, beatings, stabbings and shootings.

Thirty Years Of Silence


Elise McGhee - 2012
    

The Crime of the Century


Dennis L. Breo - 1993
    He broke in as his helpless victims slept, bound them one by one, and then stabbed, assaulted, and strangled all eight in a sadistic sexual frenzy. By morning only one young nurse had miraculously survived. The barbarity of the attack shocked a nation and opened a new chapter in the history of American crime: mass murder. Here is the never-before-told story of Richard Speck by the prosecutor who put him in prison for life."In the Crime of the Century," William J. Martin has teamed up with Dennis L. Breo to re-create the blood-soaked night that made American criminal history, offerning fascinating behind-the-scenes descriptions of Speck, his innocent victims, the desperate manhunt and massive investigation, and the trial that led to Speck's successful conviction. In 1991 Richard Speck died of a heart attack in prison, but the horror of his crime still haunts the conscience of a nation.

Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO On the Feds' Hit-List


Howard Root - 2016
    Fifteen years later, his Minnesota company had created over 500 American jobs and developed more than 50 new medical devices that saved and improved lives. But in 2011, the federal government threatened to destroy his company and put Howard behind bars for years. Why? Federal prosecutors had been sold a bill of goods – a tall tale peddled by a money-hungry ex-employee out for revenge. All over one device. A device that never harmed a single patient and made up less than 1% of the company s sales. The investigation revealed the charges to be baseless, but the scalp-hunting prosecutors didn't back off. Instead they dug in – threatening witnesses, misleading grand juries, and strategically leaking secret documents. Whatever it took to pressure a headline-grabbing settlement. Howard Root stood up to the shakedown. Five years, 121 attorneys and $25 million in legal fees later, his life's work and freedom rested in the hands of 12 strangers in a San Antonio jury room. Would Howard and his company be vindicated by the verdict, or had he made the biggest mistake of his life by challenging the federal government? Cardiac Arrest is the eye-opening true story of life on the Feds' hit-list, told from the desk of a CEO who decided to fight back. Follow Howard from the boardroom to the courtroom, as he tells the inside story of the case that sparked outrage in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and triggered a congressional investigation.

A Love To Die For


Patricia Springer - 2000
    Suddenly, Christa turned on Colleen, accusing her of flirting with her boyfriend. Then, the words turned to shocking blows. An enraged Christa used a box knife to cut her rival's throat and a mini meat cleaver to inflict more havoc. Half-naked, Colleen crawled through her own blood begging for her life. In the middle of the hour-long assault, a satanic symbol was carved in the dying girl's chest. And when Christa was finally done, she took a piece of Colleen's skull as a macabre souvenir. What were the dark forces that drove angelic faced Christa to commit such a savage murder and become the youngest woman ever to be put on Death Row? In this shocking expose of a case that stunned the nation, Patricia Springer takes us through a horrifying crime scene and into the heart and mind of a murderess who killed for love-and would die for it, too.

Life in Strangeways - From Riots to Redemption, My 32 Years Behind Bars


Alan Lord - 2015
    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.

Stalemate: A Shocking True Story of Child Abduction and Murder


John Philpin - 1997
    For 10 years, Bindner has stayed one step ahead of the law; at every turn, he has challenged the police and FBI to make their case. Featuring the suspect's own words, "Stalemate" takes us into the complex realm of forensic investigation, bringing readers face-to-face with a man who may be playing a deadly game and winning.

A Stranger Killed Katy: The True Story of Katherine Hawelka, Her Murder on a New York Campus, and How Her Family Fought Back


William D. LaRue - 2021
    On the dimly lit path beside the university's ice hockey arena, a stranger emerged from the darkness. The brutal sexual assault and strangulation that followed rocked the campus and the local community to its core.When Katy was declared brain-dead three days later, her family's nightmare had only just begun.Terry Connelly soon learned details about her daughter's death that would make her blood boil. From the bungling campus guards who could have stopped the murder, to mistakes by others that allowed the killer to wander the streets committing violence, Katy's mother became certain of one thing: The criminal justice system only meant justice for the criminals.A STRANGER KILLED KATY is the true story of a life cut tragically short, and of the fight by a grieving mother and others more than 30 years later to ensure that a killer would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

From Crime to Crime: Harold Shipman to Operation Midland - 17 cases that shocked the world


Richard Henriques - 2020
    

Fatal Passions


Adrian Vincent - 2016
     In trunks, under floorboards, in remote ravines — even in their own beds — the bodies of those for whom their lovers’ passion proved fatal have been found, and often through the stench of decay. One ingenious killer boiled down his wife’s remains in a vat at his sausage factory. Another throttled and incinerated a perfect stranger in order to stage his own death and thus escape the charge of bigamy. Then there were the lesbian schoolgirls who bludgeoned to death the mother of one of them with a brick in a stocking. Her crime: she had tried to keep them apart. Whilst one woman kept her lover in a secret attic for years until he shot her husband dead. A dark narrative, Adrian Vincent expertly brings together some of the world’s most notorious killer. In sixteen fascinating case histories, Fatal Passions tells the true stories of those who have literally loved someone to death. Praise for Adrian Vincent ‘A skilfully written account’ – Kirkus Reviews. Adrian Vincent worked in Fleet Street for twenty-seven years, becoming managing editor of IPC’s educational magazines. He is the author of many books on art and antiques, novels and true crime.