In the vein of In Cold Blood, Closing Time is the stunning story of good and evil colliding in the most tragic of ways, both for the victims and their loved ones left behind to re-live their horror. Kenneth Staton was the well-respected owner of a jewelry store in Van Buren, Arkansas. Although crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and unable to walk without crutches, he had built his business through excellent watch repair work, fine quality jewelry sold at fair prices, and a dedication to his customers that surpassed all other merchants. He was the quintessential gentleman in all aspects of his life, and a beloved father. Unknown to him, two men—a seasoned criminal with a propensity for violence and a younger man, handsome, but broke and with an obsessive thirst for alcohol—plotted to rob the jewelry store at closing time on September 10, 1980. The thugs had only met each other days before, and it was the younger one's first venture into armed robbery. When Staton and his daughter Suzanne didn't show up for supper, his other two daughters became alarmed and went to the store. There they found the bodies of their father and youngest sister lying in pools of blood, gagged, hogtied, and shot twice in the head. Close to $100,000 dollars in diamonds and other jewelry had been stolen. This senseless, bloody crime rocked the town of Van Buren and set its lawmen, sworn to find the killers, on a fiercely determined hunt that led from Rogers, Arkansas to Jacksonville, Florida, and all the way to Vancouver, Canada. Seventeen years later, was justice served? Praise for Closing Time “Anita Paddock is the newest and strongest voice in true crime writing. Closing Time makes you feel as if you are there, seeing what happened, and feeling the terror and sorrow of those felled by these brutal crimes.” – Marla Cantrell, Editor of Do South Magazine and an Arkansas Art Council Fellow “Anita Paddock delivers again. Closing Time reveals an unvarnished truth that will, at times, leave her readers breathless. Those familiar with her work will quickly conclude that Closing Time is a worthy successor to her previous best seller, Blind Rage. Get ready for some late nights because you won’t be able to put this one down.” – Greg Shepard, author of Earthstains, the story of Matt and George Kimes who came of age in the Roaring Twenties with a string of sensational bank robberies.

    and vanished. Several days later, Amy's frantic mother, Susan Billig, received an anonymous phone call saying that her daughter had been carried off by one of the biker gangs. And so began Susan's harrowing and extraordinary twenty-five-year search for her lost child -- an odyssey that led a desperate parent into the seedy heart of a dangerous subculture built on drugs, rebellion, brutality, and sex; a relentless hunt for the truth that showed her the best side of humanity...and the very worst.

    What she didn't know was that the FBI had been watching him for years. In the Fall of 2000, she found out why-it was a crime that had been haunting authorities for decades. They called it the mystery of the Lady in the Box.Fifteen Years Later, Police Found The Remains...A decaying body that had been left along an Indiana roadside ditch in 1980 had finally been identified as Janice Hartman. In 1974, the Ohio woman had been reported missing by her estranged husband...John David Smith. The gruesome discovery was only the beginning of Diane Smith's brutal awakening-for Hartman was only the first of Smith's wives to have vanished off the face of the earth. This is the chilling true story of one woman who escaped the deadly hold of the killer she loved and married; and of the grieving families of his victims who banded together after nearly thirty years to prove that justice never forgets. Or forgives.

    In 2008, Terry Caffey, a home health care aide and aspiring preacher, was asleep in his bedroom when he woke up to a barrage of bullets. His wife, Penny, was killed instantly. With blood pouring from five bullet wounds, among other serious injuries, Terry tried—but failed—to save his two youngest children before crawling out of his burning house. Meanwhile, Terry's sixteen-year-old daughter, Erin, was missing…Once Erin was found by local authorities, she claimed she had been kidnapped—but could not remember the details. It wasn't until Terry was fully conscious that he could explain what had really happened: He'd been shot, point-blank, by two young men. One of them he did not know; the other was Charlie James Wilkinson. Charlie was Erin's nineteen-year-old boyfriend, forbidden from entering the Caffey home. Until Erin helped Charlie come up with a plan to do away with her disapproving parents once and for all…

    The victims were strangled, shot, or savagely beaten. Six met their demise in pairs. They had one thing in common: being in the wrong place at the wrong time.The day she vanished, Colette Wilson waited for her mother after band practice. Best friends Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson loved to surf and were last seen hitchhiking. Laura Kate Smither dreamed of becoming a ballerina and disappeared just weeks before her thirteenth birthday.In this harrowing true crime exposition, award-winning journalist Kathryn Casey tracks these tragic cases, investigates the evidence, interviews the suspects, and pulls back the cloak of secrecy in search of elusive answers.

    A former Vassar girl and scion of a prominent local family, Christa had abandoned a glamorous career as a fashion writer for a simpler life on the Cape, where she had an affair with a married fisherman and had his child. After her murder, evidence pointed toward several local men who had known her. Yet in 2005, investigators arrested Christopher McCowen, a thirty-four-year-old African-American garbage collector with an IQ of 76. The local headlines screamed, “Black Trash Hauler Ruins Beautiful White Family” and “Black Murderer Apprehended in Fashion Writer Slaying,” while the sole evidence against McCowen was a DNA match showing that he’d had sex with Worthington prior to her murder. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and although the state medical examiner acknowledged there was no evidence of rape, the defendant was convicted after a five-week trial replete with conflicting testimony, accusations of crime scene contamination, and police misconduct—and was condemned to three lifetime sentences in prison with no parole. Rarely has a homicide trial been refracted so clearly through the prism of those who engineered it, and in Reasonable Doubt, bestselling author and biographer Peter Manso is determined to rectify what has become one of the most grossly unjust verdicts in modern trial history. In his riveting new book he bares the anatomy of a horrific murder—as well as the political corruption and racism that appear to be endemic in one of America’s most privileged playgrounds, Cape Cod. Exhaustively researched and vividly accessible, Reasonable Doubt is a no-holds-barred account of not only Christa Worthington’s murder but also of a botched investigation and a trial that was rife with bias. Manso dug deep into the case, and the results were explosive. The Cape DA indicted the author, threatening him with fifty years in prison. The trial and conviction of Christopher McCowen for rape and murder should worry American citizens, and should prompt us to truly examine the lip service we pay to the presumption of innocence . . . and to reasonable doubt. With this explosive and challenging book Manso does just that.

    When a good-looking, big city FBI agent named Mark Putnam entered her life, Susan thought her prayers had been answered. She was dead wrong.Their relationship began when Susan agreed to be Putnam's paid informant in an investigation of her ex-husband's criminal friends, then quickly grew into an illicit affair that consumed their lives for nearly two years – until she became pregnant and threatened to expose Putnam, ruining his career and his marriage. On June 8, 1989, Putnam took her for a drive into the hills to discuss her demands of marriage. She was never heard from again.The FBI Killer recounts the bizarre events that forced Mark Putnam to confess to brutally killing his lover, then covering up his crime for over one year. The first agent in FBI history to be convicted of homicide, Putnam is now serving sixteen years in a federal prison.

    But Philip Markoff, the handsome, clean-cut, twenty-two-year-old med student who hired Brisman on Craigslist, had different plans. On April 14, 2009, guests notified management of a woman screaming on the twentieth floor, and Brisman was found in a pool of blood, with several bullet wounds to her torso and…plastic restraints around her wrist.Hotel surveillance video captured Markoff’s image, and an additional tip helped police connect him to attacks on several other women, including a prostitute who was tied up at a Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island, both of which bear a striking similarity to the Brisman murder.A skillful blend of hard journalism and fascinating yet chilling true-crime narrative, this headline-making story will appeal to fans of Ann Rule.

    It was left to Brenda's mother Elaine to sustain her stricken family, search for her missing child, and pressure the authorities for justice. From the first minutes of the investigation, suspicion fell on Michael Kay Green, a steroid-abusing "Mr. Universe" hopeful, but there was no proof of a crime, leaving police and prosecutors stymied.Tips and sightings poured in as lawmen and volunteers combed the Cascades forest in the biggest search on Northwest history. Years passed with no sight of the blue-eyed girl or the bright clothes she'd worn on the day she disappeared, but Elaine remained undaunted.Salt of the Earth is the true story of how one woman fought and triumphed over life-shattering violence and how she healed her family-and herself.

    Julie Miller was a successful executive who, through a newspaper ad, met who she thought was "Mr. Right." Little did she know that he had a violent past and a predisposition for bizarre sexual rituals. This tragic, true-crime tale will shock its horrified readers.

    But all of that changes when she drives her car into the darkened parking lot of a fast food restaurant. After she lowers her car window to place an order at the drive-thru, a man suddenly appears and places a gun at her temple. What follows is every woman's worst nightmare. The Edge of Malice is a true story about struggle, determination, and a quest for justice. The author, an attorney, places the reader into the swirling currents of the courtroom where no outcome is ever certain. But the story does not conclude when the legal battle is over. The reader follows Marie as she struggles to resolve the unrelenting anger that the legal system has been unable to extinguish. In the end, Marie's journey to find inner peace is as improbable as it is transformative.

    "Now, for the first time, reporter George Anastasia offers a re-creation of the Capano-Fahey affair, the murder, and its aftermath. The Summer Wind is a story of the clash of two generations and two cultures, of the arrogance of power in a growing city, and of the decaying moral landscape of late-twentieth-century America.

    He was an award-winning student and star athlete. He was drafted by the Green Bay Packers to play in the NFL, and chosen by Playgirl as a centerfold candidate. Working in the swinging West Coast bar scene, he had his pick of willing sexual prospects.But Randall Woodfield wanted more than just sex. An appetite for unspeakable violent acts led him to cruise the I-5 highway through California, Oregon, and Washington, leaving a trail of victims along the way. As the list of his victims grew to a total of at least 44, the police faced the awesome challenge of catching and convicting a suspect who seemed too handsome and appealing to have committed such ugly crimes--crimes that filled every woman within his striking range with feat and horror....

    She was also a three-bottle-a-day alcoholic, hopelessly in love with the IHOP’s manager, Allen Bryant. Bryant wanted his live-in lover, IHOP owner Art Venecia, dead. And Dee Casteel helped him to arrange it. After Venecia’s murder, Dee and Bryant moved into his house, forged checks, spent his money, and embezzled from the IHOP to buy gifts for Bryant’s boyfriends. But there was an even more gruesome killing to come … WITHOUT MERCY is an engrossing, bizarre true story that traces the twisted path to a loathsome crime. But it is also the story of middle-class citizens gone wrong, of an almost-perfect murder, the traumas of alcoholism, and a legal system that can be deadly in itself. Dee Casteel was an ordinary woman—who now stands convicted of one of the most cold-blooded crimes of this century.

    'Perfect Poison' tells the shocking true story of a female serial killer who abused her respected position as a nurse to administer death to her trusting patients.