Book picks similar to
The Poison Tree: A True Story of Family Terror by Alan Prendergast
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The Bigamist: The True Story of a Husband's Ultimate Betrayal
Mary Turner-Thomson - 2007
The woman on the other end of the line told her that Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married to her for fourteen years and they had five children together. The Bigamist is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of £200,000 and leaving her to bring up the children he claimed he could never have. It's a story we all think could never happen to us, but this shameless con man has been doing the same thing to various other women for at least 27 years, spinning a tangled web of lies and deceit to cover his tracks. How far would you go to help the man you love? How far would he go to deceive you? And what would you do when you found out it was all a lie?
Murdered Innocents
Corey Mitchell - 2005
Describes how, in 1991, four teenage girls were brutally raped, murdered, and set on fire in a small yogurt shop, a shocking crime that rocked the town of Austin, Texas and resulted in false confessions and an unexpected twist.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden
Cara Robertson - 2019
Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence.The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central, enigmatic character has endured for more than a hundred years, but the legend often outstrips the story. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper articles, previously withheld lawyer's journals, unpublished local reports, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a definitive account of the Borden murder case and offers a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.
My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers
Helen Morrison - 2004
Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.
Perfect Husband: The True Story of the Trusting Bride Who Discovered Her Husband Was a Coldblooded Killer
Gary Provost - 1991
As Lisa and Kosta Fotopoulos lay sleeping in their home, a burglar broke in and shot Lisa at point-blank range in the head. Miraculously, she survived to learn the sobering truth about her would-be assassin—and about her sociopathic husband's deadly agenda.
Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters
Peter Vronsky - 2007
Mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers-fiendish killers all. Society is conditioned to think of murderers and predators as men, but in this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women who kill-and the political, economic, social, and sexual implications. From history's earliest recorded cases of homicidal females to Irma Grese, the Nazi Beast of Belsen, from Britain's notorious child-slayer Myra Hindley to 'Honeymoon Killer' Martha Beck, from the sensational murder-spree of Aileen Wournos, to cult killers, homicidal missionaries, and the sexy femme fatale, Vronsky challenges the ordinary standards of good and evil and defies the accepted perceptions of gender role and identity.
The Michigan Murders
Edward Keyes - 1976
One month later, her naked body—stabbed over thirty times and missing both feet and a forearm—was discovered, partially buried, on an abandoned farm. A year later, the body of twenty-year-old Joan Schell was found, similarly violated. Southeastern Michigan was terrorized by something it had never experienced before: a serial killer. Over the next two years, five more bodies were uncovered around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. All the victims were tortured and mutilated. All were female students. After multiple failed investigations, a chance sighting finally led to a suspect. On the surface, John Norman Collins was an all-American boy—a fraternity member studying elementary education at Eastern Michigan University. But Collins wasn’t all that he seemed. His female friends described him as aggressive and short tempered. And in August 1970, Collins, the “Ypsilanti Ripper,” was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole. Written by the coauthor of The French Connection, The Michigan Murders delivers a harrowing depiction of the savage murders that tormented a small midwestern town.
High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict's Double Life
Tiffany Jenkins - 2017
Now, she's clean and sober, a married mother of three. As she found her way in her new life, she started sharing on social media as an outlet for her depression and anxiety. She struck a chord, several of her videos went viral (one with 46million views), and in the past year her following exploded from a few hundred thousand to more than 3 million.The memoir opens in the Florida women's prison where Tiffany was incarcerated for 180 days. The memoir flashes back in time to the events that led to Tiffany's imprisonment (during the time of her active addiction, Tiffany was dating and living with a cop), and moves forward to her eventual sobriety.
Every Mother's Nightmare
Charles Bosworth Jr. - 1995
Louis, in 1986, someone murdered Jude Govreau's 15-year-old daughter and Mari Winzen's 3-year-old son. It would take five years of investigation to bring the killer to trial. This is the story of two determined mothers and a tireless young prosecutor who helped them achieve justice. The killer is now serving a life sentence in prison.
Closing Time: The True Story of the "Goodbar" Murder
Lacey Fosburgh - 1977
In 1973, Roseann Quinn, an Irish-Catholic teacher at a school for deaf children, was killed in New York City after bringing a man home to her apartment from an Upper West Side pub. The crime would not only make headlines, but would soon be fictionalized in the #1 New York Times–bestselling novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar and adapted into a film of the same name, starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere. The case evolved a cultural phenomenon, sparking debates about the sexual revolution and the perils of the “pickup scene” at what were popularly known as singles bars. In this groundbreaking, inventive true crime tale, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story offers “a meticulous, investigative account of the so-called Goodbar killing” (Los Angeles Times). Using a dramatization technique in which she gives the victim a different name, Lacey Fosburgh veers between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty facts of the aftermath, including the NYPD investigation and the arrest of John Wayne Wilson. The result is a must-read that earned an Edgar Award nomination for Best Fact Crime, and a classic of the genre that Men’s Journal described as “more riveting, and more tragic, than the Judith Rossner novel—and the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” In the words of the New York Times, “Fosburgh writes with compassion of these sick and shattered lives.”
Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three
Mara Leveritt - 2002
Award-winning journalist Mara Leveritt's The Devil's Knot remains the most comprehensive, insightful reporting ever done on the investigation, trials, and convictions of three teenage boys who became known as the West Memphis Three.For weeks in 1993, after the murders of three eight-year-old boys, police in West Memphis, Arkansas seemed stymied. Then suddenly, detectives charged three teenagers, alleged members of a satanic cult, with the killings. Despite the witch-hunt atmosphere of the trials, and a case which included stunning investigative blunders, a confession riddled with errors, and an absence of physical evidence linking any of the accused to the crime, the teenagers were convicted. Jurors sentenced Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley to life in prison and Damien Echols, the accused ringleader, to death. The guilty verdicts were popular in their home state, even upheld on appeal, and all three remained in prison until their unprecedented release in August 2011.With close-up views of its key participants, this award-winning account unravels the many tangled knots of this endlessly shocking case, one which will shape the American legal landscape for years to come.
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii
Susanna Moore - 2015
This is true of many cultures, but in Hawaii, no one seems to have left. And in Hawaii, a set of myths accompanied each of these migrants--legends that shape our understanding of this mysterious place. In Paradise of the Pacific, Susanna Moore, the award-winning author of In the Cut and The Life of Objects, pieces together the elusive, dramatic story of late-eighteenth-century Hawaii--its kings and queens, gods and goddesses, missionaries, migrants, and explorers--a not-so-distant time of abrupt transition, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo, without a currency or a written language, was confronted with the equally ritualized world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.
The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator
Joakim Palmkvist - 2017
When a search yielded nothing, and all physical evidence had seemingly disappeared, authorities had little to go on—except a disturbing phone call five weeks later from Göran’s daughter Maria. She was sure that her sister, Sara, was somehow involved. At the heart of the alleged crime: Sara’s greed, her father’s land holdings, and his bitter feud with Sara’s idler boyfriend. With no body, there was no crime—and the case went as cold and dark as the forests of southern Sweden. But not for Therese Tang. For two years, this case was her obsession.A hard-working ex-model, mother of three, and Missing People investigator, Therese was willing to put her own safety at risk in order to uncover the truth. What she found was a nest of depraved secrets, lies, and betrayal. All she had to do now, in her relentless and dangerous pursuit of justice, was prove that it led to murder.
Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America
Les Standiford - 2011
In the aftermath of that six-year old's abduction and slaying in 1981, everything about the nation's regard and response to missing children changed.The shock of the crime and the inability of law enforcement to find Adam's killer put an end to innocence, and altered our very perception of childhood itself - gone forever are the days when young children burst out the doors of American homes with a casual promise to be home by dark. And, due in large part to the efforts of Adam's parents, John and Reve Walsh, the entire mechanism of law enforcement has transformed itself in an effort to protect our children.Before Adam went missing, there were no children's faces on milk cartons and billboards, no Amber Alerts, no national Center for Missing and Abused Children, no national databases for crimes against children, no registration of pedophiles - in fact, it was easier to mobilize the FBI to search for a stolen car or missing horse than for a kidnapped child. Such facts may be sad testimony to the weariness of a modern world, but there is also an uplifting aspect to Adam's story - the 27 years of undaunted effort by decorated Miami Beach Homicide Detective, Joe Matthews, to track down Adam's killer and bring justice to bear at long last.Bringing Adam Home tells the story - the good, the bad, and the ugly - of what it took for one cop to accomplish what an entire system of law enforcement could not. Matthews' achievement is a stirring one, reminding us that such concepts as hard work, dedication, and love, survive, and that goodness can prevail.