television franchise, and explores the real-life crimes that inspired them. She also looks into the authenticity of the forensic investigations recreated for the dramatizations, and the painstaking real-life forensic process employed in every one of the actual cases?from notorious mass-murderer Richard Speck, to the massacre of Buddhist monks in an Arizona Temple, to a baffling case of apparent spontaneous combustion.

    This volume is comprised of the years 1900 through 1959, and includes all of the best known cases of the period, as well as many more lesser-known murders, all presented in a compelling chronological narrative that takes the reader on a grisly journey through the blood-soaked avenues of early twentieth century crime. Featuring: The Peasenhall Murder. The Seal Chart Murder. The Atlanta Ripper. The Villisca Axe Murders. The Axeman of New Orleans. The Green Bicycle Case. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Hinterkaifeck Farm. The St. Aubin Street Massacre. The Wallace Case. The Atlas Vampire. The Brighton Trunk Crime. The Cleveland Torso Murderer. The Horror in Room 1046. Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? The Pitchfork Murder. The Sodder Children. The Phantom Killer. The Black Dahlia. Somerton Man. The Grimes Sisters. The Boy in the Box. And Much More!

    The thirst for blood and cry for deadly vengeance lie deep in humankind, as criminologist Colin Wilson authoritatively illustrates in this millennial history of the most heinous of human crimes. Analyzing the tangle of motives behind murder and examining an astonishing variety of homicidal methods over the past twenty centuries, Wilson not only profiles infamous historical figures like Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Gilles de Rais, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Marquis de Sade, and Jack the Ripper, but also studies particular categories of homicide and such phenomena as the Jacobean witch hunts and gangland killings of America's Jazz Age. Wilson's chronicle includes, too, the serial killings, random shooting sprees, and cult murders that have troubled more recent times. The comprehensive history and illuminating analysis of how humans kill, and why, make crime-expert Wilson's volume one that no true-crime fan or student of criminology will want to miss.

    William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer.  In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.

    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.

    Then a forensic scientist leads police to the peeled skin from two boiled hands--and the fingerprints that will crack the case.The murder weapon was smashed to smithereensA man was killed by a blow from a bottle. Now, determined investigator carefully puts the pieces of glass back together to catch a kiler--and to carry out a crime of his own...What the corpse revealedOnce detectives solved crimes with shoe leather and a gun. Now they use DNA samples, blood splatters, microbes and psychological profilings. This extraordinary book, through details drawn from some of the most baffling cases of the last fifty years, shows how a new generation fo real-life crime busters is catching stalkers, poisoners, mass murderers, and assassins--through the astounding art of forensic science.

    More than two centuries in the development of modern forensic procedures come to vivid life as everything from handwriting analyses and voiceprints to ballistics, DNA testing, and psychological profiles reveal whodunit (and, in some startling cases, who didn't do it)."Pithy, concise, and remarkably accurate." -Science Books & Films"Contains ample material to hold the attention and foster interest in science." -Science Teacher

    To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help justice to be done using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene or the faintest of human traces. Forensics uncovers the secrets of forensic medicine, drawing on interviews with top-level professionals, ground-breaking research and Val McDermid's own experience to lay bare the secrets of this fascinating science. And, along the way, she wonders at how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine time of death, how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist uncovered the victims of a genocide.In her crime novels, Val McDermid has been solving complex crimes and confronting unimaginable evil for years. Now, she's looking at the people who do it for real, and real crime scenes. It's a journey that will take her to war zones, fire scenes and autopsy suites, and bring her into contact with extraordinary bravery and wickedness, as she traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.

    What happens to them is beyond your most terrifying nightmares.You’re History: The discovery of a human skull panics a killer into a confession. Perhaps he should have waited for the coroner’s report.Cold-Blooded: Karen was the former wife of an American icon. But celebrity is no shield against a determined psychopath.The Janitor: When a preteen girl goes missing from a school, suspicion falls on the one person all of the female students are wary of – the creepy janitor.A Bullet for Your Broken Heart: Roy Joe had been dealt many tribulations in his life. None of them, though, was as bad as Carolyn.The Other Ripper: For years, Joan was thought to be a victim of Britain’s most notorious slayer. Her killer turned out to be a different psychopath entirely.Young Blood: Two teenagers meet up for a moonlight tryst in an abandoned building. One of them won’t make it out alive.Neighborhood Monster: It was a simple errand, a quick run to the store in a safe neighborhood. It should not have cost a little girl her life.Plus 10 more horrific true murder cases. Scroll up to grab a copy of Cold Cases: Solved Volume 1.

    When a Serial Killer is active in a community it is extremely scary for everyone. This book focuses on Serial Killers who have been captured and some of the most notorious and ruthless killers in history. Serial killers stay close to home and their victims are random. Dennis Rader found all his victims in Kansas not far from the Wichita home he shared with his wife and two kids. Rader, the president of his local church, knocked on his victim's doors and they simply let him in. John Wayne Gacy, met many of his 33 victims, all young men and boys, at charity events where he appeared dressed a clown. After luring them to his house and murdering them he stuffed them under his Cook County, Illinois home. Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of strangling 49 random women he met in Washington. He confessed to killing 71 but authorities believe the number of victims could be over 90. Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee admitted to killing and cannibalizing 17 young men and boys before he was arrested. Case Closed is a compilation of criminal file dossiers on several of those Serial Killers that were captured, including:Ted BundyJohn Wayne Gacy - The Killer ClownJeffrey DahmerDonald Henry GaskinsGary Ridgway - The Green River KillerDennis Rader - The BTK KillerDavid Berkowitz - The Son of SamOttis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas - The Homosexual Crime TeamAnd Many More.

    To Lee Goff and his fellow forensic entomologists, each body recovered at a crime scene is an ecosystem, a unique microenvironment colonized in succession by a diverse array of flies, beetles, mites, spiders, and other arthropods: some using the body to provision their young, some feeding directly on the tissues and by-products of decay, and still others preying on the scavengers.Using actual cases on which he has consulted, Goff shows how knowledge of these insects and their habits allows forensic entomologists to furnish investigators with crucial evidence about crimes. Even when a body has been reduced to a skeleton, insect evidence can often provide the only available estimate of the postmortem interval, or time elapsed since death, as well as clues to whether the body has been moved from the original crime scene, and whether drugs have contributed to the death.An experienced forensic investigator who regularly advises law enforcement agencies in the United States and abroad, Goff is uniquely qualified to tell the fascinating if unsettling story of the development and practice of forensic entomology.

    They are responsible for over ten percent of the nation's homicides. They are often victims themselves of neglect, violence and sexual abuse, of drugs and poverty. They murder alone or in groups -- in anger and frustration, for attention . . . or for thrills. And they have one thing in common: they are all children.

    With the brilliant insight he brought to his renowned work inside the FBI's elite serial-crime unit, John Douglas pieces together motives behind violent sociopathic behavior. He not only takes us into the darkest recesses of the minds of arsonists, hijackers, bombers, poisoners, assassins, serial killers, and mass murderers, but also the seemingly ordinary people who suddenly kill their families or go on a rampage in the workplace.Douglas identifies the antisocial personality, showing surprising similarities and differences among various types of deadly offenders. He also tracks the progressive escalation of those criminals' sociopathic behavior. His analysis of such diverse killers as Lee Harvey Oswald, Theodore Kaczynski, and Timothy McVeigh is gripping, but more importantly, helps us learn how to anticipate potential violent behavior before it's too late.

    In this absorbing, surprising, and undeniably compelling book, forensics expert Emily Craig tells her own story of a life spent teasing secrets from the dead.Emily Craig has been a witness to history, helping to seek justice for thousands of murder victims, both famous and unknown. It's a personal story that you won't soon forget.Emily first became intrigued by forensics work when, as a respected medical illustrator, she was called in by the local police to create a model of a murder victim's face. Her fascination with that case led to a dramatic midlife career change: She would go back to school to become a forensic anthropologist——and one of the most respected and best-known "bone hunters" in the nation.As a student working with the FBI in Waco, Emily helped uncover definitive proof that many of the Branch Davidians had been shot to death before the fire, including their leader, David Koresh, whose bullet-pierced skull she reconstructed with her own hands. Upon graduation, Emily landed a prestigious full-time job as forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a state with an alarmingly high murder rate and thousands of square miles of rural backcountry, where bodies are dumped and discovered on a regular basis. But even with her work there, Emily has been regularly called to investigations across the country, including the site of terrorist attack on the the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, where a mysterious body part——a dismembered leg——was found at the scene and did not match any of the known victims. Through careful scientific analysis, Emily was able to help identify the leg's owner, a pivotal piece of evidence that helped convict Timothy McVeigh.In September 2001, Emily recieved a phone call summoning her to New York City, where she directed the night-shift triage at the World Trade Centre's body identification site, collaborating with forensics experts from all over the country to collect and identify the remains of September 11 victims.From the biggest new stories of our time to stranger-than-true local mysteries, these are unforgettable stories from the case files of Emily Craig's remarkable career.

    It's a fascinating and often dramatic world.Go behind the scenes with forensic anthropologists and learn about their techniques, how they locate a body, how they carefully uncover evidence, and how the unique characteristics of each body bears silent witness to age, sex, cause of death and clues as to who or what was responsible.With 29 real-life case studies and more than 350 color photographs and illustrations, Silent Witness is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the world of forensics.