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The Good Wife: The Shocking Betrayal and Brutal Murder of a Godly Woman in Texas
By Clint Richmond. 2007
Roger and Penny Scaggs seemed a poster couple for family values. Evangelical Christians living in booming Austin, Texas, in the…
mid-1990s, they were respected leaders in their church and community. As Roger diligently worked his way up the high-tech corporate ladder, Penny kept a pristine home and coached similarly devout young women on how to be perfect wives. But on a windy March evening, this godly woman met the devil head-on. And when the police discovered her lifeless body—repeatedly bludgeoned with a lead pipe, then mutilated with a knife from her own spotless kitchen—they were shocked by the rage and savagery behind her slaying.The Good Wife is a startling true story of greed, hatred, betrayal, and an unimaginable murder—a tale of the dark decay that can be hidden behind a facade of saintliness when a marriage seemingly made in heaven descends into hell.Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story
By Kristine S. Ervin. 2024
A Washington Post &“Most Anticipated&” Book of the Year • A New York Times &“Must Read&”For readers of My Dark…
Places and The Fact of a Body, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman&’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother"Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them—the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory . . . A powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime." —The New York Times Book ReviewKristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.In her mother&’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin&’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding into her own fraught adolescence. She reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a &“true&” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.Cults: The Shocking True Stories of Heaven's Gate, the Manson Family, Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, and More Deathly Cases (True Crime)
By Wendy Joan Biddlecombe Agsar. 2024
Discover the truth of what happens when true believers go too far with the shocking stories of the world&’s most…
known and horrific cults like The Order of the Solar Temple and the NXIVM Cult.Cults have been around for centuries, and many have been dubbed as satanic and murderous due to their heinous crimes. In Cults: A True Crime Collection, you will get to study the most notorious ones and what they did to achieve that notoriety. Get to know the story behind the scariest cults in history, including: Charles Manson and the Manson Family Heaven&’s Gate and their mass suicide attempts Blood-consuming cults like the Vampire Clan Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre The People&’s Temple and their cyanide-laced drinks And more! From gruesome suicides to clan murders, Cults: A True Crime Collection will tell you the real story behind the crimes and the leaders who orchestrated them. This book also studies the rise and fall of said clans and what led them to commit such terrible crimes like mass murders and human sacrifices.Death Row Welcomes You: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber
By Steven Hale. 2023
In the vein of Waiting for an Echo and Dead Man Walking, a deeply immersive look at justice in America,…
told through the interwoven lives of condemned prisoners and the men and women who come to visit them . . .In 2018, after nearly a decade&’s hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death, more than any other state but Texas in that time period. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, one only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal.In Death Row Welcomes You, Hale traces the lives of condemned prisoners at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution—and the people who come to visit them. What brought them—the visitors and convicted murderers alike—to death row?The visitors are, for the most part, not activists—or at least they did not start out that way. Nor are they the sort of killer-obsessed death row groupies such settings sometimes attract. In fact, in most cases they are average people whose lives, not to mention their views on the death penalty, were turned upside down by a face-to-face meeting with a death row prisoner.Hale&’s access to the people that make up that community afforded him a perspective that no other journalist has been granted, largely because Tennessee&’s Department of Correction has all but shut off official media access.Combining topics that have long fascinated readers—crime, death, and life inside prison—Hale writes with humanity, empathy, and insight earned by befriending death row prisoners . . . and standing witness to their final moments.Under the Bridge
By Rebecca Godfrey. 2019
It has been a long road to justice for Reena Virk, beaten and murdered at the hands of her teenage…
peers. The murder of this girl is one of the most notorious and heartbreaking cases in Canadian history. Here, for the first time, acclaimed author Rebecca Godfrey reveals the stunning truth about a Canadian tragedy that captured international headlines.Who were the seemingly ordinary suburban teenagers who found themselves under the bridge in Victoria, BC, on the night of November 14, 1997? Why would a girl who longed to be their friend be beaten and killed? And how did so many teenagers keep terrible secrets from parents, teachers and police for eight days? These are the questions all of us have been asking, and in Under the Bridge the answers are revealed in a stunning narrative. Godfrey spent six years researching the case, conducting exclusive interviews with parents, classmates, police, prosecutors and, perhaps most importantly, several of the youths, including Warren Glowatski, one of the two teenagers convicted of murdering Virk. Godfrey also witnessed firsthand the many trials of Kelly Ellard, also found guilty of killing a girl who just wanted to fit in.Was Albert DeSalvo Really the Boston Strangler? Handyman Albert DeSalvo confessed to eleven brutal rape/murders that terrorized Boston from 1962…
to 1964. The repeat sex offender boasted he had raped an additional 2,000 women. His story became the subject of a bestselling book, a major Hollywood movie, and a Hulu docuseries. But DeSalvo was not The Boston Strangler. Author Susan Kelly&’s detailed investigation shows us the true DeSalvo—a pathological liar whose hunger for celebrity drove him to false confessions—and indicates that the stranglings were committed by more than one killer. Exploring stunning DNA findings, a shocking re-autopsy, expert profiling evidence, and other recent developments, she shows why this savage, unsolved case continues to fascinate and haunt us.Blood Trail
By Steven Walker, Rick Reed. 2005
&“Every page crackles with authenticity and truth. This is the kind of true crime that grabs you by the throat…
and never lets go.&” —Gregg Olsen, #1 New York Times bestselling author In this classic true crime book, veteran journalist Steven Walker and decorated police detective Rick Reed delve into the disturbed mind of a sadistic serial killer. The murderous crimes of serial killer Joseph W. Brown first came to light in October 29, 1997, when Andrea "Slick" Hendrix's beaten and strangled naked body was discovered in a roadside ditch near Stewartsville, Indiana. With no leads for police to follow, the case went cold, but it wouldn't stay that way. In 1999 Brown, an ex-con with a brutal history, met Ginger Gasaway, 53, at a Gambler's Anonymous meeting. She didn't know that when she took up with him, she was gambling with her life. On August 30, 2000, Brown murdered and dismembered Gasaway and scattered her remains across three Indiana counties. Detective Rick Reed of the Evansville Police Department was on the scene when Brown led investigators to his ex-lover&’s body parts. Reed was again present when Brown later confessed that during the past five years, he had indulged in a seven-state rampage of torture and murder, including Andrea Hendrix among more than a dozen victims. For Gasaway&’s grisly death, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. But being behind bars did not end his murder spree. On June 19, 2011 Brown strangled his cellmate, Charles Miller, to death, then called to the desk sergeant to come and get the body. Blood Trail tells the twisting, fascinating true story of a monster who killed at whim—and the dedicated law enforcement professionals who brought him to justice. Includes 16 pages of photosA larger-than-life narrative of the making of the classic film, marking the rise of America as a superpower, the ascent…
of Hollywood celebrity, and the flowering of Texas culture as mythology.Featuring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is an epic film of fame and materialism, based around the discovery of oil at Spindletop and the establishment of the King Ranch of south Texas. Isolating his star cast in the wilds of West Texas, director George Stevens brought together a volatile mix of egos, insecurities, sexual proclivities, and talent. Stevens knew he was overwhelmed with Hudson’s promiscuity, Taylor’s high diva-dom, and Dean’s egotistical eccentricity. Yet he coaxed performances out of them that made cinematic history, winning Stevens the Academy Award for Best Director and garnering nine other nominations, including a nomination for Best Actor for James Dean, who died before the film was finished. In this compelling and impeccably researched narrative history of the making of the film, Don Graham chronicles the stories of Stevens, whose trauma in World War II intensified his ambition to make films that would tell the story of America; Edna Ferber, a considerable literary celebrity, who meets her match in the imposing Robert Kleberg, proprietor of the vast King Ranch; and Glenn McCarthy, an American oil tycoon; and Errol Flynn lookalike with a taste for Hollywood. Drawing on archival sources Graham’s Giant is a comprehensive depiction of the film’s production showing readers how reality became fiction and fiction became cinema.The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow
By Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner. 2008
True story from the major motion picture "In Darkness," official 2012 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.In 1943,…
with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.The Girl in the Green Sweater is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, The Girl in the Green Sweater is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.Wealthy Men OnlyStella Sands Nanette Johnston's personal ad made it clear: "I know how to take care of my man…
if he knows how to take care of me." Newport Beach millionaire Bill MacLaughlin made the fatal mistake of responding.Within months, the gorgeous 28-year-old moved in with the middle-aged entrepreneur. Three years later, she began seeing another man on the side, a former NFL linebacker who took a job at a nearby nightclub. Three weeks later, MacLaughin would be dead.He was found lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Nannette had an alibi—and a million-dollar life insurance policy on the victim. Police discovered she'd embezzled a small fortune from MacLaughlin's business—but didn't have enough evidence to charge her with murder. For years, the crime went unsolved—until new evidence brought the golddigger and her boyfriend back to the courtoom—in a sordid case of lust, betrayal, greed, and murder…"I KILLED MY PARENTS."Seventeen-year-old Tyler Hadley posted an invitation on Facebook: party at my crib tonight. But this was no…
ordinary house party in the Florida suburbs; it was a grisly crime scene. Later that night, Tyler revealed to his best friend, Michael, that he'd bludgeoned his parents to death with a hammer. Michael didn't believe him…until he entered the master bedroom and saw the bodies of Tyler's parents on the floor—murdered, beyond the shadow of a doubt. "THEY DESERVED IT."Mary Jo and Blake Hadley had always known their son had a dark side. He would make disturbing jokes about murder on Facebook. He apparently idolized the infamous Menendez brothers, who murdered their parents for money. But how could they have known their son was dead serious? What kind of person could kill his mother and father, throw a party with their bodies in the next room, and brag about it? This riveting account by an award-winning journalist takes you deep inside the mind of a troubled teenager—and behind the scenes of a true American nightmare…Claiming he'd been sent by God to confess, truck driver Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humbolt County Sheriff's Office…
and admitted to them that he was a serial killer. After police found a gruesome piece of evidence in Ford's pocket, he told them that he had to be stopped before he killed again, before he murdered his ex-wife, and made his beloved three-year-old son an orphan. Authorities arrested the long-haul trucker and listened in horror to his startling confession...Ford was a long-distance trucker who had traveled fourteen western states. Prowling the highways in his big rig tractor-trailer, he picked up young, vulnerable women and then raped, killed, and dismembered them. He scattered some of their bodies in waterways along the road. He kept parts of others for over a year in the freezer of his trailer home. Learn the shocking truth in Shadows of Evil--a chilling account of madness, depravity, and murder...Slave Girls: The Shocking World of Human Bondage (St. Martin's True Crime Classics)
By Wensley Clarkson. 1996
***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***Secret prisoners behind closed doors, they…
were real-life Cinderellas-- with no hope of rescue. Nowhere to run...nowhere to hide...nowhere to turn...Enter today's sordid world of slaves and masters, where innocent young girls are sold to the rich, and subjected to horrifying degradation.Beautiful Laxmi was the servant of two Arab princesses who regularly beat her and even yanked out her gold teeth. Bleeding and hysterical, she escaped-- only to be returned to the evil sisters.Helen was allowed two to four hours of sleep a night by the married couple who kept her. Rarely did a day pass that she wasn't slapped, kicked, punched, and beaten by this cruel doctor and his wife.Marita was sold by her husband to his best friend as a sex slave. He forced her to endure horrific beatings-- often locked in wooden stocks.Virtual captives in the mansions of the rich and famous, they risked their lives to tell their stories for the first time, in Wensley Clarkson's Slave Girls.City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
By Paul French. 2018
Now one of Kirkus Reviews' "Best Books of the Year" From Paul French, the New York Times bestselling author of…
Midnight in Peking—winner of both the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction—comes City of Devils, a rags-to-riches tale of two self-made men set against a backdrop of crime and vice in the sprawling badlands of Shanghai.Shanghai, 1930s: It was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, and fortunes made—and lost.“Lucky” Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex–U.S. Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison and rose to become the Slots King of Shanghai. “Dapper” Joe Farren—a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto—ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld’s.In 1940, Lucky Jack and Dapper Joe bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation, and war. They thought they ruled Shanghai, but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction left in their wake. Shanghai was their playground for a flickering few years, a city where for a fleeting moment even the wildest dreams could come true.Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case
By Stuart Taylor Jr., Kc Johnson. 2008
What began that night shocked Duke Universityand Durham, North Carolina. And it continues to captivate the nation: the Duke lacrosse…
team members‘ alleged rape of an African-American stripper and the unraveling of the case against them. In this ever-deepening American tragedy, Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson argue, law enforcement, a campaigning prosecutor, biased journalists, and left-leaning academics repeatedly refused to pursue the truth while scapegoats were made of these young men, recklessly tarnishing their lives. The story harbors multiple dramas, including the actions of a DA running for office; the inappropriate charges that should have been apparent to academics at Duke many months ago; the local and national media, who were so slow to take account of the publicly available evidence; and the appalling reactions of law enforcement, academia, and many black leaders.Until Proven Innocent is the only book that covers all five aspects of the case (personal, legal, academic, political, and media) in a comprehensive fashion. Based on interviews with key members of the defense team, many of the unindicted lacrosse players, and Duke officials, it is also the only book to include interviews with all three of the defendants, their families, and their legal teams. Taylor and Johnson‘s coverage of the Duke case was the earliest, most honest, and most comprehensive in the country, and here they take the idiocies and dishonesty of right- and left-wingers alike head on, shedding new light on the dangers of rogue prosecutors and police and a cultural tendency toward media-fueled travesties of justice. The context of the Duke case has vast import and contains likable heroes, unfortunate victims, and memorable villains—and in its full telling, it is captivating nonfiction with broad political, racial, and cultural relevance to our times.Deadly Seduction (St. Martin's True Crime Classics)
By Wensley Clarkson. 1996
***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***Young, Glamorous and Sexy, She Was…
Every Man's Fantasy...And A Nightmare of Death For Her Husband.She Hid Her Criminal Past...Prominent Indiana attorney Jimmy Grund thought he'd found the woman of his dreams when he wed his second wife Susan. But beneath the silky blond society lady lurked a calculating, evil-tempered seductress whose murderous future was about to rival her sordid past.She Plotted A Brutal Murder...While she hid her previous marriages and an appalling crime from Jimmy, she was soon plotting to get her hands on his fortune. When Jimmy Grund finally found out the truth about his wife, he told her he was divorcing her. But no one left Susan Grund.She Killed Her Husband With A Gun Stolen From His Own Son...All of Peru, Indiana was stunned when it was revealed the fatal bullet came from a gun stolen from young David Grund. Yet even that paled next to Susan's incredible testimony that she had carried on a two-year affair with the innocent teenager, who denied the affair and was not implicated in the crime.Wensley Clarkson's Deadly Seduction is the story of a real femme fatale, who spun a web of deceit and murder that shocked an entire town.In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on the "The Dating Game," one of America's most popular television shows at…
the time. Handsome, successful, and romantic, he was embraced by the audience—and chosen as the winner by the beautiful bachelorette. To viewers across the country, Rodney seemed like the answer to every woman's dreams. Until they learned the truth about his once and future crimes... Ten years before his TV appearance, Rodney was charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of an eight-year-old girl. In the decades that followed, he would be accused of seven murders—and, as new DNA evidence continues to be uncovered, the list may grow. The case is so disturbing that it's been documented in several news outlets, from People magazine and USA Today to 48 HoursMystery and Dr. Phil. The Dating Game Killer is the shocking true story about the dark and twisted man.American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
By Thomas Reppetto. 2004
"Reppetto's book earns its place among the best . . . he brings fresh context to a familiar story worth…
retelling." —The New York Times Book Review Organized crime—the Italian American kind—has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia's rise—from the 1880s to the post-WWII era—that is as exciting and readable as it is authoritative.Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally grown Mafia. It wasn't until the 1920s, thanks to Prohibition, that the Mafia assumed what we now consider its defining characteristics, especially its octopuslike tendency to infiltrate industry and government. At mid-century the Kefauver Commission declared the Mafia synonymous with Union Siciliana; in the 1960s the FBI finally admitted the Mafia's existence under the name La Cosa Nostra.American Mafia is a fascinating look at America's most compelling criminal subculture from an author who is intimately acquainted with both sides of the street.Mafia Summit is the true story of how a small-town lawman in upstate New York busted a Cosa Nostra conference…
in 1957, exposing the Mafia to AmericaIn a small village in upstate New York, mob bosses from all over the country—Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, and future Gambino boss Paul Castellano—were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession.For years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but young Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Appalachian summit. As attorney general when his brother JFK became president, Bobby embarked on a campaign to break the spine of the mob, engaging in a furious turf battle with the powerful Hoover.Detailing mob killings, the early days of the heroin trade, and the crusade to loosen the hold of organized crime, fans of Gus Russo and Luc Sante will find themselves captured by this momentous story. Reavill scintillatingly recounts the beginning of the end for the Mafia in America and how it began with a good man in the right place at the right time.The Man Who Would Be Sherlock: The Real Life Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle
By Christopher Sandford. 2017
A world-famous biographer reveals the strange relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's real life and that of Sherlock Holmes in…
the engrossing The Man Who Would Be Sherlock.Though best known for the fictional cases of his creation Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was involved in dozens of real life cases, solving many, and zealously campaigning for justice in all. Stanford thoroughly and convincingly makes the case that the details of the many events Doyle was involved in, and caricatures of those involved, would provide Conan Doyle the fodder for many of the adventures of the violin-playing detective. There can be few (if any) literary creations who have found such a consistent yet evolving independent life as Holmes. He is a paradigm that can be endlessly changed yet always maintains an underlying consistent identity, both drug addict and perfect example of the analytic mind, and as Christopher Sandford demonstrates so clearly, in many of these respects he mirrors his creator.