On Easter Sunday in 1937, the discovery of a grisly triple homicide at Beekman Place would rock the neighborhood yet again—and enthrall the nation. The young man who committed the murders would come to be known in the annals of American crime as the Mad Sculptor.   Caught up in the Easter Sunday slayings was a bizarre and sensationalistic cast of characters, seemingly cooked up in a tabloid editor’s overheated imagination. The charismatic perpetrator, Robert Irwin, was a brilliant young sculptor who had studied with some of the masters of the era. But with his genius also came a deeply disturbed psyche; Irwin was obsessed with sexual self-mutilation and was frequently overcome by outbursts of violent rage.   Irwin’s primary victim, Veronica Gedeon, was a figure from the world of pulp fantasy—a stunning photographer's model whose scandalous seminude pinups would titillate the public for weeks after her death. Irwin’s defense attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, was a courtroom celebrity with an unmatched record of acquittals and clients ranging from Al Capone to the Scottsboro Boys. And Dr. Fredric Wertham, psychiatrist and forensic scientist, befriended Irwin years before the murders and had predicted them in a public lecture months before the crime.   Based on extensive research and archival records, The Mad Sculptor recounts the chilling story of the Easter Sunday murders—a case that sparked a nationwide manhunt and endures as one of the most engrossing American crime dramas of the twentieth century. Harold Schechter’s masterful prose evokes the faded glory of post-depression New York and the singular madness of a brilliant mind turned against itself. It will keep you riveted until the very last page.

     From the ashes of Pablo Escobar’s empire rose an even bigger and more malevolent cartel. A new breed of sophisticated mobsters became the kings of cocaine. Their leader was Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela – known as the Chess Player due to his foresight and calculated cunning. Gilberto and his terrifying brother, Miguel, ran a multi-billion-dollar drug empire like a corporation. They employed a politically astute brand of thuggery and spent $10 million to put a president in power. Although the godfathers from Cali preferred bribery over violence, their many loyal torturers and hit men were never idle.

    Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became one of the first historians allowed inside. What she discovered when she began reading through the duke's letters was a mystery involving one of the most powerful families in British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I. The 9th Duke, who had devoted his entire adult life to organizing and cataloging several hundred years' worth of family correspondence, had carefully erased three periods of his life from the record. But why? Filled with fascinating real-life characters, a mysterious death, family secrets, and affairs aplenty. The Secret Rooms is an enthralling, page-turning true story that reads like an Agatha Christie novel.

    They were responsible for one of the most evocative legends in English folk history - Jack the Ripper. Best of all - for the myth-makers, that is - he was never caught, and there has never been a convincing identification of this man or, as some suggest, woman, who stabbed and disembowelled a succession of East End prostitutes, and left them bleeding in the gaslit streets of Victorian London. This book now lays out all the known evidence in a sumary of the facts and theories that have been written and spoken about the Ripper.

     The favoured murder weapon was the cut-throat razor; carrying a pocket watch was dangerous; the most significant clue at a murder scene could be the whereabouts of a candlestick or hat; large households (family, servants and lodgers) complicated many a case and servants sometimes murdered their masters. Detectives had few aids and suffered many disadvantages. The bloody handprints found at two early murder scenes were of no help, there being no way of telling whether blood (or hair) was human or animal. Fingerprinting was fifty years away, DNA profiling another hundred and photography was too new to help with identification. The detectives had no transport and were expected to walk the first three miles on any enquiry before catching an omnibus or cab and trying to recoup the fares. All reports had to be handwritten with a dip pen and ink and the only means of keeping contact with colleagues and disseminating information was by post, horseback or foot. In spite of these handicaps and severe press criticism, the detectives achieved some significant successes. Joan Lock includes such classic cases as the First Railway Murder, as well as many fascinating, fresh reports, weaving in new developments like the electric telegraph against a background of authentic Victorian police procedure. Charles Dickens said that Scotland Yard detectives gave the impression of leading lives of strong mental excitement. Readers of this book will understand why … Praise for Joan Lock ‘Thorough account of important early cases dealt with by Scotland Yard.’ – Professor B. J. Rahn ‘a better picture of the development of the detectives and the CID in the 19th century Metropolitan Police than any other book I have read.' – Alan Moss ‘vivid detail’ – Historical Novel Society Joan Lock is an ex-nurse and former policewoman. Joan has also written short stories, radio plays, radio documentaries and eight crime novels. She lives in London.

    He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past--a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house--and describes in rich prose the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French.With his extraordinary skill for evoking time and place and his acute eye for the telling detail, Ackroyd recounts the story of warring kings, of civil strife, and foreign wars. But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes the wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. All are brought vividly to life through the narrative mastery of one of Britain's finest writers.

    You get close to evil like that, no matter how long ago it was, and it never leaves you.” Detective David Mullican, recollecting the Houston Mass Murders, April 2011 During the early 1970s, more than three dozen teenage boys went missing from the working-class neighborhood of Houston Heights, in the south of Texas. The parents of a number of these boys received strange postcards from their sons, telling them that they were fine and that they had found jobs somewhere else in the state, anywhere from Dallas to Austin. Then, in August 1973, the Houston Police Department made a shocking discovery; something that would later become known as the Houston Mass Murders. After further spine chilling investigations, the police found that prior to the murders, in the late 1960s, a young man by the name of Dean Corll had been handing out free candy to teenagers in Houston Heights. This man – who was vice-president of his mother’s candy company – was described by fellow residents as gentle, friendly and well-mannered. They couldn’t have been more wrong… The Candy Cards is the shocking true story of Dean Corll, a.k.a. The Candy Man, one of the deadliest serial killers in American history. Robert Browns thrilling account of this chilling story will have readers draw into to this story as much as any page turning crime thriller. Disclaimer: The material in this publication has a strong adult theme and is intended for an adult audience. Reader discretion is advised.

    Yet for centuries Edward III (1327-77) was celebrated as the most brilliant of all English monarchs. In this first full study of his character and life, Ian Mortimer shows how under Edward the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, culminating in the crushing victory over the French at Crecy. Yet under his rule England also experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the middle ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is to Edward that England owes its system of parliamentary representation, its local justice system, its national flag and the recognition of English as the language of the nation. Nineteenth century historians saw in Edward the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted him as a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conqueror. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man - resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. He emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate - the father of both the English people and the English nation.

    All the stories are true and links are provided to the original news source. Yes, people can be very irrational, but it's entertaining. Enjoy.

    In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.

    The murders in London between 1888-91 attributed to Jack the Ripper constitute one of the most mysterious unsolved criminal cases. This story is the result of many years meticulous research. The author reassesses all the evidence and challenges everything we thought we knew about the Victorian serial killer and the vanished East End he terrorized.

    Thompson and Errol Morris, Bruce Robinson offers a radical reinterpretation of Jack the Ripper, contending that he was not the madman of common legend, but the vile manifestation of the Victorian Age's moral bankruptcy.In exploring the case of Jack the Ripper, Robison goes beyond the who that has obsessed countless others and focuses on the why. He asserts that any "gentlemen" that walked above the fetid gutters of London, the nineteenth century's most depraved city, often harbored proclivities both violent and taboo—yearnings that went entirely unpunished, especially if he also bore royal connections. The story of Jack the Ripper hinges on accounts that were printed and distributed throughout history by the same murderous miscreants who frequented the East End of her Majesty's London, wiping the fetid muck from their boots when they once again reached the marble floors of society's finest homes.Supported by primary sources and illustrated with 75 to 100 black and white photographs, this breathtaking work of cultural history dismisses the theories of previous "Ripperologists." A Robinson persuasively makes clear with his unique brilliance, The Ripper was far from a poor resident of Whitechapel . . . he was a way of life.

    The extraordinarily wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a mania for it, hiding in his carriage and building tunnels between buildings to avoid being seen. In 1897, an elderly widow asked the court to exhume the grave of her late father-in-law, T. C. Druce, under the suspicion that he’d led a double life as the 5th Duke. The eccentric duke, Anna Maria contended, had faked his death as Druce, and her son should inherit the Portland millions. Revealing a dark underbelly of Victorian society, Piu Marie Eatwell evokes an era when the rise of sensationalist media blurred every fact into fiction and when family secrets and fluid identities pushed class anxieties to new heights.

    These are the players in a royal drama that ultimate led to Elizabeth's ascension to the throne--one of the most spectacularly successful reigns in English history.

    Horrific crimes, depraved witnesses and sordid accounts of FBI agents who gave their allegiance to the mob boss emerged from the muck as families of 19 murder victims endured the presentation of broken skulls and jaws along with photos from the morgue. At center stage was the defendant, who had been listed and protected by the FBI as a secret informant. He claimed the government had given him a free pass, but prosecutors fought to keep the trial away from questions of who made Bulger what he became and how. In an extraordinary measure of their outrage, the families of the victims cheered Bulger’s own attorneys as they savaged the government’s “cover-up” and the deals prosecutors had given to Bulger’s former associates to win testimony.In the first book to explore the trial in a larger context, WBUR investigative reporter David Boeri weaves his daily trial dispatches into the complete backstory of Bulger’s ruthless ascent to power, the men and the agency who made that possible, and the families of victims who were victimized again and again by the government’s protection of the killer. Boeri’s storytelling is informed by 26 years of national award-winning reporting on the Bulger case. He aggressively dug into FBI corruption and tracked the Bureau’s delayed, often inept search for the 16-year fugitive.Years before Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica, Bulger travelled to California to follow his own tips in search of Whitey and showed the lack of FBI effort and enterprise. His investigation of crimes aided and abetted by FBI agents took Boeri to old murder scenes of Bulger victims in Oklahoma, Florida and Massachusetts. He followed detectives in the difficult and painful search for the bones of Bulger victims long ago buried. He sought out the families to learn what they had endured and sought out Bulger’s criminal associates even tracked some down who were in the Witness Protection Program to chronicle Bulger the boss and Bulger the killer. In “Bulger On Trial,” Boeri brings the reader into the same close contact with Bulger’s corrupt FBI handler, the younger brother who made a parallel rise to political power, the families, the criminals and the saga that links them all.