Tragedy in the North Woods: The Murders of James Hicks (True Crime)


Trudy Scee - 2009
      Jennie Cyr disappeared in 1977. Jerilyn Towers vanished in 1982. Lynn Willette never came home on a night in 1994. Each woman had a relationship with James Hicks, who in 2000 confessed to murdering them, dismembering their bodies and burying the remains alongside rural roads in Aroostook County. This is their story. Trudy Irene Scee follows Hicks from the North Woods to west Texas, detailing three decades of evasion, investigation and prosecution. She interviews police officers and victims’ families—and meets Hicks at the state prison in Thomaston, where he remains remorseless as he lives out his days behind bars. Thoroughly researched and carefully documented, Tragedy in the North Woods is the definitive history of one of Maine's most ruthless killers.   Includes photos!

The Devil's Tickets: A Vengeful Wife, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age


Gary M. Pomerantz - 2009
    As the game intensifies, Myrtle complains that Jack is a “bum bridge player.” For such insubordination, he slaps her hard in front of their stunned guests and announces he is leaving. Moments later, sobbing, with a Colt .32 pistolin hand, Myrtle fires four shots, killing her husband.The Roaring 1920s inspired nationwide fads–flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, swimming-pool endurance floating. But of all the mad games that cheered Americans between the wars, the least likely was contract bridge. As the Barnum of the bridge craze, Ely Culbertson, a tuxedoed boulevardier with a Russian accent, used mystique, brilliance, and a certain madness to transform bridge from a social pastime into a cultural movement that made him rich and famous. In writings, in lectures, and on the radio, he used the Bennett killing to dramatize bridge as the battle of the sexes. Indeed, Myrtle Bennett’s murder trial became a sensation because it brought a beautiful housewife–and hints of her husband’s infidelity–from the bridge table into the national spotlight. James A. Reed, Myrtle’s high-powered lawyer and onetime Democratic presidential candidate, delivered soaring, tear-filled courtroom orations. As Reed waxed on about the sanctity of womanhood, he was secretly conducting an extramarital romance with a feminist trailblazer who lived next door.To the public, bridge symbolized tossing aside the ideals of the Puritans–who referred derisively to playing cards as “the Devil’s tickets”–and embracing the modern age. Ina time when such fearless women as Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, and Marlene Dietrich were exalted for their boldness, Culbertson positioned his game as a challenge to all housebound women. At the bridge table, he insisted, a woman could be her husband’s equal, and more. In the gathering darkness of the Depression, Culbertson leveraged his own ballyhoo and naughty innuendo for all it was worth, maneuvering himself and his brilliant wife, Jo, his favorite bridge partner, into a media spectacle dubbed the Bridge Battle of the Century. Through these larger-than-life characters and the timeless partnership game they played, The Devil’s Tickets captures a uniquely colorful age and a tension in marriage that is eternal.From the Hardcover edition.

Bali 9: The Untold Story


Cindy Wockner - 2006
    

Nightmare in Napa: The Wine Country Murders (48 Hours Mystery)


Paul LaRosa - 2007
    A third roommate heard the horrific commotion but never saw the killer. News of the tragedy sent shockwaves throughout the peaceful region as well as the nation -- but while investigators pursued every angle from a satanic cult to a disgruntled suitor, the murders of Leslie Mazzara and Adriane Insogna remained unsolved. Until someone came forward with a shocking confession -- someone who was close enough to the women to escape suspicion. Someone who knew the victims all too well.Complete with up-to-the-minute court action and the stunning crime scene breakthroughs that turned the case around, here is the full story of the Nightmare In Napa.

Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil's Deal


Lehr & O'Neill - 2012
    update of first edition

Old Maine Woman: Stories from the Coast to the County


Glenna Johnson Smith - 2010
    The book also includes some of her best fiction pieces.

The Mammoth Book of the Mafia


Nigel Cawthorne - 2009
    It contains accounts by Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 200 people in a career lasting 43 years.

Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco


Daniel J. Flynn - 2018
    The Reverend Jim Jones, the darling of the San Francisco political establishment, orchestrates the murders and suicides of 918 people at a remote jungle outpost in South America. Days later, Harvey Milk, one of America’s first openly gay elected officials—and one of Jim Jones’s most vocal supporters—is assassinated in San Francisco’s City Hall. This horrifying sequence of events shocked the world. Almost immediately, the lives and deaths of Jim Jones and Harvey Milk became shrouded in myth. The distortions and omissions have piled up since. Now, forty years later, this book corrects the record. The product of a decade of research, including extensive archival work and ­dozens of exclusive interviews, Cult City reveals just how confused our understanding has become. In life, Jim Jones enjoyed the support of prominent politicians and Hollywood stars even as he preached atheism and communism from the pulpit; in death, he transforms into a fringe figure, a “fundamentalist Christian,” and a “fascist.” In life, Harvey Milk outed friends, faked hate crimes, and falsely claimed that the U.S. Navy dishonorably discharged him over his homosexuality; in death, he is honored in an Oscar-winning movie, with a California state holiday, and with a U.S. Navy ship named for him. His assassin, a blue-collar Democrat who often voted with Milk in support of gay issues, is remembered as a right-winger and a homophobe. But the story extends far beyond Jones and Milk. Author Daniel J. Flynn vividly portrays the strange intersection of mainstream politics and murderous extremism in 1970s San Francisco—the hangover after the high of the Summer of Love. In recounting the fascinating, intersecting lives of Jim Jones and ­Harvey Milk, Cult City tells the story of a great city gone horribly wrong.

Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders


Jerry Allen Potter - 1995
    This "devastating rebuttal to Fatal Vision" (Boston Phoenix) demonstrates that the jury was not privy to crucial evidence in the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret Captain convicted of the murders of his wife and two young daughters.

The Edge of Innocence: The Trial of Casper Bennett


David P. Miraldi - 2017
    Bennett's sensational trial pitted an aggressive, mercurial county prosecutor against the author's father, a civil trial attorney who had never before defended anyone for murder. The book not only recreates the tension and excitement of this courtroom battle, but also highlights the uncertain edge that often divides guilt from innocence. The author was ten years old when he answered the phone late at night when Bennett called his father from jail, seeking his legal representation. Forty years later and long after his father's death, the author found the Bennett file in the bottom of his mother's closet. From the moment he began reading the papers, the long-forgotten drama cast a spell on him. As he uncovered more and more of the facts, the story he had known as a child disappeared, replaced by one far different. The Edge of Innocence takes the reader through the criminal justice system and ultimately to the trial where the reader, like a juror, must sift through competing claims and conflicting evidence. Full of twists and turns and colorful characters, The Edge of Innocence is all the more entertaining because it tells a true story.

Khaki Files: Inside Stories of Police Missions


Neeraj Kumar Neeraj Kumar - 2019
    In Khaki Files, Neeraj Kumar, a former Delhi Police Commissioner revisits many such high profile police cases of his career -from investigation of one of the biggest lottery frauds in the country to foiled ISI attempt to kill Tarun Tejpal and Anirudh Behal of Tehalka-bringing to light numerous achievements of the country's police force, otherwise largely reviled and ridiculed.

Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans


Gary Krist - 2014
    This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. Surrounding him are the stories of flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen, ruthless Mafiosi, venal politicians, and one extremely violent serial killer, all battling for primacy in a wild and wicked city unlike any other in the world.

Black Widow: A Beautiful Woman, Two Lovers, Two Murders


Marion Collins - 2007
    But Glenn died in agony - his body racked with spasms, his mind plunged into delirium. And by the time he was found dead, Glen's wife was more than ready for his funeral.Julia Lynn Turner, a former sheriff's assistant and 911 operator, had a thing for men in uniform - and for their money. While detectives and forensic examiners ruled Glenn's death the result of a virulent flu, time would tell another story. Lynn was already secretly living with Randy Thompson, a firefighter, who would meet the same excruciating death.Driven by family who would not give up their quest for justice, a new investigation and an explosive trial eventually exposed the truth about a woman who had a way of making men die, and about a means of murder that was pure intoxicating evil.

Grace and Justice on Death Row: The Race against Time and Texas to Free an Innocent Man


Brian W. Stolarz - 2016
    The book chronicles Brown’s extraordinary journey to freedom against very long odds, overcoming unscrupulous prosecutors, corrupt police, inadequate defense counsel, and a broken criminal justice system. The book examines how a lawyer-client relationship turned into one of brotherhood.Grace And Justice On Death Row also addresses many issues facing the criminal justice system and the death penalty – race, class, adequate defense counsel, and intellectual disability, and proposes reforms.Told from Stolarz’s perspective, this raw, fast-paced look into what it took to save one man’s life will leave you questioning the criminal justice system in this country. It is a story of injustice and redemption that must be told.

Human Monsters: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Most Vicious Murderers


David Everitt - 1993
    Presents 100 gripping case studies of the worst killers of all time.