Book picks similar to
Trading Life: Organ Trafficking, Illicit Networks, and Exploitation by Sean Columb
crime
history-politics
place-africa
true-crime
The Fire She Set
Leigh Overton Boyd - 2020
They did not talk about their mom's extended absences or why their dad put Scotch tape on the backdoor frame. To cover up the chaos, they kept their clothes neat and got good grades. But when they were teenagers, an arson fire destroyed their home and killed their parents. Rumors were thick that summer that smart, angry, fourteen-year-old Lisa set the blaze. Then, adult powers they did not understand squelched the investigation. As teenagers accustomed to keeping silent, they packed up and moved on.Forty years later, Leigh, the oldest, decided it was time to find out who killed their parents. She obtained copies of the police and fire investigations and began unwrapping the past. This memoir is the story of that investigation as Leigh tried to piece together the truth, but found more lies instead. With the help of her sisters, Leigh was able to reconstruct much of what happened to them in the beach towns around Atlantic City in the early 1970s. After the fire, one sister turned to heroin and another to alcohol; Leigh became Miss Atlantic City. Then, one by one, they each moved to California and shut the door on their past, even though they privately wondered whether one of them killed Frank and Nancy Overton. It's funny. They never wondered whether one of their parents was trying to kill them.
Through a Mother's Tears: The tragic true story of a mother who lost one daughter to a brutal murderer and another to a broken heart
Cathy Broomfield - 2020
Cathy's worst fears had been realised...Through a Mother’s Tears is the poignant and heartbreaking story of how Cathy lost not only Kirsty, her youngest daughter, but Kirsty’s big sister Hayley, who died of heartbreak when the agony of her baby sister’s loss became too much to bear.
Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers
Donald B. Kraybill - 2014
Answering a late-night knock from what appeared to be an Amish neighbor, Mrs. Miller opened the door to her five estranged adult sons, a daughter, and their spouses. It wasn't a friendly visit. Within moments, the men, wearing headlamps, had pulled their frightened father out of bed, pinned him into a chair, and--ignoring his tearful protests--sheared his hair and beard, leaving him razor-burned and dripping with blood. The women then turned on Mrs. Miller, yanking her prayer cap from her head and shredding it before cutting off her waist-long hair. About twenty minutes later, the attackers fled into the darkness, taking their parents' hair as a trophy for their community.Four similar beard-cutting attacks followed, disfiguring nine victims and generating a tsunami of media coverage. While pundits and late-night talk shows made light of the attacks and poked fun at the Amish way of life, FBI investigators gathered evidence about troubling activities in a maverick Amish community near Bergholz, Ohio--and the volatile behavior of its leader, Bishop Samuel Mullet.Ten men and six women from the Bergholz community were arrested and found guilty a year later of 87 felony charges involving conspiracy, lying, and obstructing justice. In a precedent-setting decision, all of the defendants, including Bishop Mullet and his two ministers, were convicted of federal hate crimes. It was the first time since the 2009 passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act that assailants had been found guilty for religiously motivated hate crimes within the same faith community."Renegade Amish" goes behind the scenes to tell the full story of the Bergholz barbers: the attacks, the investigation, the trial, and the aftermath. In a riveting narrative reminiscent of a true crime classic, scholar Donald B. Kraybill weaves a dark and troubling story in which a series of violent Amish-on-Amish attacks shattered the peace of these traditionally nonviolent people, compelling some of them to install locks on their doors and arm themselves with pepper spray.The country's foremost authority on Amish society, Kraybill spent six months assisting federal prosecutors with the case against the Bergholz defendants and served as an expert witness during the trial. Informed by trial transcripts and his interviews of ex-Bergholz Amish, relatives of Bishop Mullet, victims of the attacks, Amish leaders, and the jury foreman, "Renegade Amish" delves into the factors that transformed the Bergholz Amish from a typical Amish community into one embracing revenge and retaliation.Kraybill gives voice to the terror and pain experienced by the victims, along with the deep shame that accompanied their disfigurement--a factor that figured prominently in the decision to apply the federal hate crime law. Built on Kraybill's deep knowledge of Amish life and his contacts within many Amish communities, "Renegade Amish" highlights one of the strangest and most publicized sagas in contemporary Amish history.
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.
Poisoned Love
Carlton Smith - 2008
In 2003, her husband Chuck died of an apparent stroke. Only a month later, she married Chaz Higgs, an ER nurse who, it was later revealed, had attended to her late husband just before his death. Three years later, fifty-year-old Kathy died after a heart attack—the result, her family and friends believed, of a stressful political campaign. But when an autopsy of Kathy’s body revealed no signs of heart disease, investigators dug deeper into Kathy’s case…only to find the presence of a powerful, paralyzing emergency-room drug in Kathy’s system. A jury would later charge Nurse Chaz with murder in the first degree. But could Kathy’s first husband also have been the victim of Chaz’s treachery? And just how much did Kathy know? This is the shocking true story of a family torn apart by lies, medical crime, and POISONED LOVE.
When The Bough Breaks: The True Story Of Child Killer Kathleen Folbigg
Matthew Benns - 2003
She killed her four children over 10 years. Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura Folbigg died one by one over a 10-year period in similar circumstances - suddenly, unexpectedly and while sleeping. Each was discovered by Kathleen, their mother, who raised the alarm to her husband, Craig, that they were not breathing. When the Folbiggs' marriage fell apart six weeks after the death of their fourth child, Laura, Craig was devastated. It only got worse when he discovered Kathleen's diary in her bedside drawer. Horrified at his wife's ramblings about losing control with the children, her 'terrible thoughts' and her fears she was her 'father's daughter', he took the diary to the police. The diary was the crucial evidence Detective Bernie Ryan had been searching for to confirm his suspicions that the babies had been murdered. With his career and credibility on the line, he made the decision to charge Kathleen Folbigg with the murder of her four innocent babies. No one who knew Kathleen could believe she had murdered her own children. Yet few knew of her tragic past - the fact that her own father had stabbed her mother to death four decades earlier. When The Bough Breaks exposes the secret life of Australia's worst convicted female serial killer, a woman jailed for the unthinkable crime of killing her own children. It raises important issues about parents who do not feel emotionally attached to their children and about the diagnosis of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome as a cause of death.
Prescription: Murder! Volume 3: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd
Alan Hynd - 2014
From the files and pen of world renowned true crime writer Alan Hynd (1903 - 1974) comes the final installment of deliciously dark true murder cases of the first half of the 20th Century. These stories, the third of these three short collections, are unified by a single theme: they all involve physicians. And not for the autopsy, but as perpetrators or accused perpetrators. You may never see your family care giver again in the same light. Told in the characteristic wry, anecdotal reportorial style that made Alan Hynd famous in his day (two wartime best sellers in 1943, contributions to The Reader's Digest, Colliers, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post, True, Liberty, The American Mercury and almost every true detective magazine in print) these tales will have you cringing one minute, laughing the next, and gasping in shock a moment later. Truly, no one could make up classics like these. We meet here the notorious Dr. Cream, a twitchy-eyed psychotic with a yen for prostitutes, a Philadelphia chiropractor whose girlfriend lost her head, and Marcel Petiot, whose patients payed their own way out of this world. Then as a bonus, get to know (from a safe distance) "Lethal Louise," the black widow of California, and Adolf Luetgert of Chicago, whose sausage-making plant was put to extracurricular uses. This is not for the faint of heart. True crime is always farther out there than fiction.
All in a Day's Work
Kerry Hamm - 2016
There are stories of heroism, miracles, close calls, disgusting things patients have done, and even stories from patients themselves--all that give the Real Stories series a run for its money. Containing submissions from RNs, CNAs, medics, PA-Cs, M.D.s, clinic secretaries, and unit clerks, this compilation of tales will surely pull at your heart strings, make you giggle, and let you know that you are not alone in your struggle to get through another 12-hour shift.
The Deadly Dozen: India's Most Notorious Serial Killers
Anirban Bhattacharya - 2019
A schoolteacher who killed multiple paramours with cyanide; a mother who trained her daughters to kill children; a thug from the 1800s who slaughtered more than 900 people, a manservant who killed girls and devoured their body parts.If you thought serial killers was a Western phenomenon, think again!These bone-chilling stories in The Deadly Dozen will take you into the hearts and heads of India's most devious murderers and schemers, exploring what made them kill and why?
Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County
Richard M. Levine - 1982
Their killers were the Olives’ 16-year-old daughter and her 20-year-old lover.This is the story of that shocking murder and the appalling events that led up to it. It is the story of the middle-class dream turned into a nightmare, of parents and children living in mutually alien and hostile worlds, and of a youth culture for which promiscuous sex and every kind of drug are no longer enough.It is a story that cuts to the bone of American life – and strikes inescapably close to home.
The Sociopath Next Door
Martha Stout - 2005
He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win. The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game. It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
Katherine Eban - 2019
Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects.The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings? A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.
The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science
Douglas Starr - 2010
At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as "The Killer of Little Shepherds," terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years--until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era's most renowned criminologist. The two men--intelligent and bold--typified the Belle Epoque, a period of immense scientific achievement and fascination with science's promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition. With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher's infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal profiling, as Fourquet painstakingly collects eyewitness accounts and constructs a map of Vacher's crimes. We follow the tense and exciting events leading to the murderer's arrest. And we witness the twists and turns of the trial, celebrated in its day. In an attempt to disprove Vacher's defense by reason of insanity, Fourquet recruits Lacassagne, who in the previous decades had revolutionized criminal science by refining the use of blood-spatter evidence, systematizing the autopsy, and doing groundbreaking research in psychology. Lacassagne's efforts lead to a gripping courtroom denouement. "The Killer of Little Shepherds" is an important contribution to the history of criminal justice, impressively researched and thrillingly told.
Narco Wars: The Gripping Story of How British Agents Infiltrated the Colombian Drug Cartels
Tom Chandler - 2018
Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply, and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments. It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multi-national, with armies of hitmen and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices. Their intelligence systems flushed out turncoats and traitors, and they ruthlessly exterminated their enemies. Yet Chandler, an HM Customs investigator fluent in Spanish, knew he could only succeed by recruiting local informants, and went out into the field to find them. Within four years he had a network of fifty agents buried deep inside the trafficking organisations. The result was unprecedented. Their intel led to the arrest of hundreds of narcos and to the seizure of 300 tonnes of drugs, worth a staggering $3 billion. Chandler's web disrupted the Bogotá mafia, who controlled the main airport and boasted they could put anything on a plane, from drugs to bombs; penetrated the go-fast crews who raced coke-laden speedboats to the transit station of Jamaica; dismantled the 'rip-on' teams who smuggled through the coastal ports; and identified the so-called motherships, the largest method of bulk transit ever discovered. He faced appalling risks. Treacherous stool pigeons worked for both sides, and some of his Colombian law-enforcement colleagues were abducted, tortured and killed. Chandler too faced a grave threat when the crime lords learned he was responsible for a string of interdictions. Yet he persisted, driven to continue with the greatest series of sustained seizures ever made, until he finally burned out and his tour of duty came to an end. Two of his best sources were subsequently murdered, and his bosses dropped the entire overseas informant programme, with dire consequences. Narco Wars is an unflinching story of danger fear and stress, and of the tradecraft and unsung heroism of the agents and their handlers.
Being the Soham Psychic
Dennis McKenzie - 2009
'I am really sorry but both the girls are dead'. Dennis McKenzie was brought to the world's attention following his involvement in the tragic Soham murder case. Making stunningly accurate predictions about the deaths of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, he was dubbed the 'Soham Psychic'. Since then, Dennis's expertise has continually been drawn on to help solve many horrific crimes, including the case of the 'BTK' Killer - a serial killer who bound, tortured and killed women in Wichita, Kansas and evaded the police for over 30 years. An ordinary boy from a working-class background, Dennis never imagined his life would follow such an extraordinary path. From his first psychic sighting at the age of four to his traumatic prediction of a family friend's death, Dennis shares the experiences that have defined his remarkable life in his typically frank and down-to-earth way. This is the fascinating story of how Dennis discovered his gift and how, with the help of his spirit guides, he has shared his psychic wisdom with the world.