A knee to the groin, a thumb to an eye, all was fair as long as a Donnelly prevailed." "Hit first, talk later," she told her boys. This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: crime biography. The gruesome saga of the Black Donnellys has been heavily mythologized. A thick layer of rumour, legend, and hearsay has built up around the facts of the case. But one thing is clear. No one who reads this book will ever forget the murderous events that occurred near the town of Lucan, Ontario in the 1870s.

    We’ve been told nothing bad happens in small towns. You can leave your doors unlocked, and your windows wide open. We picture peaceful hamlets with a strong sense of community, and everyone knows each other. But what if this wholesome idyllic image doesn’t always square with reality? Small towns might look and feel safe, but statistics show this isn’t really true.Tiny town, big crime. Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns contains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story―they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe. Discover how unsolved murders, kidnapping, shooting sprees, violent robbery, and other bad things can and do happen in small towns all over the world.If you enjoyed Mitzi's last book in the series, The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers, and true crime books like In Cold Blood, Murder in the Bayou, and The Innocent Man, then you’ll love The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns.

    A spasm of violence that took only a few minutes to play out leaves a community divided and searching for answers. From the author of newly released Boston Strong: A City s Triumph Over Tragedy, about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Bad Blood is the riveting account of the long-standing feud between Franconia, New Hampshire, police officer Bruce McKay, 48, and Liko Kenney, 24. In May 2007, Kenney shot and killed Officer McKay, following a dramatic chase that began with a routine traffic stop. Kenney, cousin of ski legend Bode Miller, was then shot and killed by a shadowy passerby. Almost immediately, the tragic incident revealed deep tensions within this otherwise quiet community in the White Mountains with charges that Kenney was a hell-raiser and mentally unstable and counter-charges that Officer McKay was a rogue cop who dispensed justice as a way to settle personal scores. Striving to get at the truth of the story, the author uncovers a complicated mix of personalities and motivations. Local and statewide interests clash while regional and national media and even YouTube viewers supply ready stereotypes to fit their agendas. Amid larger questions of the meaning of individual freedom we are, ultimately, helpless witnesses to an inevitable clash of characters."

    

    He believed that rogues were in his house. I offered to help him to search the property, to which Gruber replied that he was not afraid.” Sometime during the evening of the 31st March 1922, at an isolated farmstead deep in rural Germany, five members of the same family, alongside their maid, were brutally slain in their own home, hacked to death with a short handled pickaxe. The killings stunned a Bavaria already racked by the aftermath of war and hyper-inflation. Almost a century on the murders remain unsolved. In this, the first in depth English language investigation into the slayings, Edward Chilvers attempts to separate myth from fact, relying on contemporary police sources and witness statements to paint a picture of an insular, incestuous family who, for reasons as yet unknown, took it upon themselves to ignore the numerous warnings of what was to come in the days leading up to their demise.

    Foley’s twenty-year pursuit of murderous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, and of Foley’s key role in exposing the FBI’s protection of Bulger’s criminal empire.June 23, 2011. The news of the notorious gangster Whitey Bulger’s capture—after sixteen years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list—swept the nation. Many breathed a sigh of relief. But for Thomas J. Foley, a former Massachusetts state police colonel and the investigator who sparked Bulger’s flight from Boston, the moment was bittersweet. The FBI may have caught Bulger, but as Foley had painfully discovered almost two decades before, they were also responsible for his escape. It has been known that Whitey Bulger was a secret informant for the FBI, but it has never been revealed—until now—that the FBI was actually actively protecting Bulger from Foley, effectively derailing Foley’s efforts to stop Bulger’s horrific crime sprees time and again. At one point, the FBI even presented Foley with a plaque at a holiday party that read “the Most Hated Man in Law Enforcement,” a not-so-subtle suggestion that he and his team should lay off their investigation. Most Wanted is a true-life thriller, and Foley is the hero at its center. His investigative efforts resulted in criminal convictions of a half-dozen of Boston’s most notorious thugs and also led to the conviction of John Connolly, one of the FBI agents who abetted Bulger; Connolly is now serving a forty-year prison sentence. In this book, Foley, a cop’s cop, honestly recounts how his wide-eyed admiration for the nation’s top law enforcement agency was gradually transformed by dark realities he didn’t want to believe.

    How did he become Glasgow's most feared gangster, deemed a risk to national security?Arthur Thompson, Godfather of the crime world and senior partner of the Krays, recruited young Ferris as a bagman, debt collector and equaliser. Feared for his capacity for extreme violence, respected for his intelligence, Ferris was the Godfather's heir apparent. But when gang warfare broke, underworld leaders traded in flesh, colluding with their partners - the police. Disgusted, Ferris left the Godfather and stood alone. They gave him weeks to live.While Ferris was caged in Barlinnie Prison's segregation unit accused of murdering Thompson's son, Fatboy, his two friends were shot dead the night before the funeral and grotesquely displayed in a car on the cortége's route. Acquitted against all the odds, Ferris moved on, determined to make an honest living.They would not let him.The National Crime Squad, MI5, the police and two of the country's most powerful gangsters saw to that. A maximum-security prisoner, Ferris is known as 'Lucky' because he is still alive.This is one man's unique insight into Britain's crime world and the inextricable web of corruption - a revealing story of official corruption and unholy alliances.

    Mumia Abu-Jamal was unanimously convicted of the crime by a racially mixed jury based on: the testimony of several eyewitnesses, his ownership of the murder weapon, matching ballistics, and Abu-Jamal’s own confession.After his conviction, however, a national anti-death penalty movement was started to “Free Mumia;” Mike Farrell, Ed Asner, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jesse Jackson rallied on his behalf, and led the charge.  For his part, while on death row, Abu-Jamal published several books, delivered radio commentaries, was a college commencement speaker, found himself named an Honorary Citizen of France, and had his defense coffers enhanced by ticket sales from a sold out (16,000-person) concert featuring Rage Against the Machine.Here, from Maureen Faulkner and acclaimed talk show host / journalist Michael Smerconish, is the first book to carefully and definitively lay out the case against Abu-Jamal, and those who’ve elevated him to the status of political prisoner. Smerconish, a lawyer, has provided pro bono legal counsel to Faulkner for over a decade and knows both the legal intricacies and personal subtleties of the case like no other person.  He’s personally acquainted himself with the more than five thousand pages of trial transcript.  “My reading starkly revealed that Abu-Jamal murdered Danny Faulkner in cold blood and that the case tried in Philadelphia in 1982 bore no resemblance to the one being home-cooked by the Abu-Jamal defense team.”As Abu-Jamal’s lawyers contemplate their final appeal, Faulkner and Smerconish weave a compelling, never-before-told account of one fateful night and the 25-year-long rewriting of history.

    Part of one of the most prominent and richest families in America: The du Pont Family. Then, strangely, he started losing his mind. This is what is known: du Pont was a fan of amateur sports and established a wrestling facility at his Foxcatcher Farm. He befriended several Olympic champions--including Dave Schultz, who he murdered. It was a never a question of if he did it; the question is why. What turns an otherwise sane man into a psychotic killer? This page-turning true crime story will take you into the mind of a man who had everything and let it all fall away due to madness and paranoia.

    In the early hours of 19 June 2004, 16-year-old Liam Kelly was lured to a location in Liverpool and shot dead. The following year, another Liverpudlian, 22-year-old mother of three, Lucy Hargreaves, was shot dead in her own home. Her partner and their 2-year-old daughter escaped after the house was set alight by leaping from a first-floor bedroom window. How could Parle have evaded national and international crime investigators for so long? Who is harbouring him? Bleksley is determined to find the answers. Immersing himself in the world of serious and organised crime, he has vowed not to rest until Parle is found. Two murders, one fugitive and a hunter tracking down the target. This is the gripping true story of hunting Britain’s most wanted murderer, going behind the scenes of the hit BBC Sounds podcast, Manhunt: Finding Kevin Parle. Author, investigator, broadcaster and the former Chief on Channel 4’s hit shows Hunted and Celebrity Hunted, Peter Bleksley has lived an astonishing life since retiring as a Scotland Yard Detective, where he earned a glittering reputation as a fearless undercover cop.

    But in November of their Freshman Year, the two young lovers spent a night in a Delaware motel room where, after hiding her pregnancy from her family and her friends for nine months, Amy gave birth to a baby boy. Only she and Brian knew the child even existed . . . until the next morning when the newborn's corpse turned up in the motel dumpster. The case caused a countrywide outrage, and the teenagers ended up in court, desperately fighting for their lives and ultimately against each other...

    It is a law intended to protect the innocent from unfair harassment and persecution.But sometimes it protects the guilty as well.Guilty As SinThe circumstantial evidence against southern businessman Mel Ignatow was solid -- effectively damning him for the savage 1988 sex torture/slaying of his former girlfriend, Brenda Schaefer. There was motive, unimpeachable forensic evidence . . . even testimony from an eyewitness who took photographs of the gruesome, horrific crime. But in a Kentucky courtroom, frustration, ignorance, incompetence and fate pulled a supposedly open-and-shut case in shocking, unexpected directions -- and tied the concept of American justice into knots that might never be undone.

    England’s Peak District. A violent fugitive attacks his prison escort and escapes over the wintry moors. He stumbles on an isolated cottage and takes a family hostage. What transpires will send a shiver down the spine of Britain. Award-winning investigative journalist and author, Alan Hurndall has spent the best part of a decade piecing together the events surrounding Pottery Cottage and offers this hour by hour account of the trauma and the controversial police operation as they close in on their man. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he gained access to previously confidential police files, witness statements and official reports. He says: “I was a young reporter on The Star, Sheffield when this story broke, and it has always held a fascination for me. It has a place in criminal and social history in the sense that many felt the Permissive Society was to blame.’ Pottery Cottage is a dark, psychological thriller that happens to be true. It will shock and anger in equal measure. It might even make you weep. But it will certainly provoke you into asking searching questions about yourself and how you might act in such a crisis. What would YOU have done?

    Gulag America tells the story of the eight years that followed, through two federal trials and the underworld of the federal prison system, at a time when it was undergoing unprecedented expansion due to the War on Drugs. Stratton was shipped by bus from LA's notorious Glass House to jails and prisons across the country, a softening process known as diesel therapy. Resisting pressure to falsely implicate his friend and mentor, Norman Mailer, he was convicted in his second trial under the kingpin statute and sentenced to twenty-five years without the possibility of parole.While doing time in prisons from Manhattan's Criminal Hilton to rural Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and New York, he witnessed brutality as well as camaraderie, rampant trafficking of contraband, and crimes by both guards and convicts. He first learned the lessons of survival. Then he learned to prevail, becoming a jailhouse lawyer and winning the reversal of his kingpin sentence and eventual release.Gulag America includes cameos by Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali, and an account of the author's friendship with mafia don Joe Stassi, a legendary hitman from the early days of the mob who knew gangsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Abe Zwillman and has insights into the killing of Dutch Schultz and the Kennedy assassinationGulag America is the second volume in Richard Stratton's trilogy, Remembrance of the War on Plants.

    The Beast of Birkenshaw, a.k.a. Peter Manuel, was such an individual man. Download FREE with Kindle Unlimited! Peter Manuel was Scotland’s first serial killer and certainly the country’s most notorious mass murderer. But he was so much more than that. As well as the horrific nature of his murders, which killed men, women, and children, he possessed a constant arrogance and a swift intelligence that often allowed him to operate right underneath the noses of the local law enforcement. Always happy to embarrass the police in Glasgow and the surrounding area, he waged a lifelong battle of wits which ended with him being hanged. But the legend of Peter Manuel lives on. He had a penchant not only for violent killings, but for having the audacity to represent himself in court. Sometimes, this was successful and sometimes it was not. But each time, he was noted for his deft ability to out manoeuvre the best police officers Glasgow had to offer. When he eventually faced his last court hearing, it was described in the tabloids as the Trial of the Century. In this book, we will attempt to look into the history of the killer and the reasons he might have had for carrying out his horrific series of crimes. Throughout the various chapters of this book, we will meet the friends, the family members, and the enemies of Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel, the man described as having the names of the saints, but the heart of Satan himself. We will examine Manuel’s worst crimes, while exploring the background that made him into the man he was. We will even look at his obsession with outsmarting the authorities. If you would like to learn more about the life of Peter Manuel, this is the book for you. Scroll back and click the buy button for immediate download