Showing titles in Historical

On May 16, 1922, a young man's body was found on a desolate road in Westchester County. The victim was penniless ex-sailor Clarence Peters. Walter Ward, the handsome scion of the family that owned the largest chain of bread factories in the country, confessed to the crime as an act of self-defense against a violent gang of "shadow men," blackmailers who extorted their victims' moral weaknesses. From the start, one question defined the investigation: What scandalous secret could lead Ward to murder?

Whenever a tragic event happens, our first thoughts are with the victims, their families, and even with the motives driving the perpetrators. But what happens after the police tape comes down? Damned Spot revisits the places where painful memories of death and destruction still linger, and explores what a building and, ultimately, a community needs in order to heal.

The Instant Top 5 Irish Times Bestseller From the creator of The Irish History Podcast comes a fascinating look at Irish history through the lens of murder. In A Lethal Legacy, Fin Dwyer charts 200 years of Irish history, opening up our past as never before, by observing the grand societal...

The Co-Ed Killer, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and Dating Game Killer—in many ways, terrifying serial killers were as synonymous with the 1970s as Watergate, disco, and the oil crisis. This fascinating collection of profiles presents the most notorious as well as lesser-known serial murderers of that decade. Beyond Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz, it includes more obscure killers like Coral Eugene Watts, known as “The Sunday Morning Slasher,” who killed 80 women; Edmund Kemper, the "Co-Ed Killer"; and Rodney Alcala, who is believed to have killed between 50 and 130 people between 1971-1979.

Murder and mayhem, bullets and bombings, carnage and corruption…and a whole lot of outlaws gambling for the highest stakes of all. Poker Wars tells the true story of the hitmen, bandits, card sharks, and mobsters who brought about the internationally successful World Series of Poker.

At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the other way. At the end of the night, Italian American star athlete Andy Puopolo, raised in the city's North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's red-light district.

The people of mid-Ohio's Pleasant Valley went on with their normal lives that cold and rainy spring of 1896, not knowing that young Ceely Rose was brooding. She'd been told to forget her obsession with handsome Guy Berry. She'd been told about the danger of Rough-on-Rats poison. She'd heard about murdering those who stand in the way of love. By the time she was done, her family would be dead and others threatened. Later, the place where these crimes took place became Malabar Farm, the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and conservationist Louis Bromfield. 

After sixty years, Paul Gregory finally tells everything he knows about the Oswalds and how he watched the soul of a killer take shape. He offers the intimate details of his time spent with Lee and wife Marina in their run-down duplex on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, Texas, and his admission into the inner world of a young marriage before candidly assessing the murder that marked a turning point in our country’s history. As a scholar and skilled researcher, Gregory debunks the vast array of conspiracy theories by demonstrating that Lee Harvey Oswald did it and did it alone.

Muchas personas pasan años en la cárcel sin haber cometido ningún crimen. Esta injusticia, que sirve de premisa a tantas novelas, se hace real en este libro en el que John Grisham ha decidido contar diez desgarradores casos de inocentes que fueron obligados a sacrificar amigos, familias, parejas y décadas de sus vidas en prisión mientras los culpables seguían libres.

This collection is not for the faint of heart. From the twisted tale of Rhonda Belle Martin, a housewife and mother who took more than five lives, to Janet Christman, a killer whose story sparked a major motion picture, as well as made the young people in an entire town refuse to babysit. You’re bound to feel a creepy chill listening to this collection. No matter what, you’re going to lose time, lose sleep, and maybe even lose your mind as you dig deep into the twisted thoughts and desires of killers. The team at True Crime Seven discourages listening to this collection before bed.

Dr. Josef Mengele wurde zum Synonym des Bösen schlechthin: Intelligent, ehrgeizig, skrupellos. Er gilt als einer der berüchtigtsten Kriegsverbrecher der NS-Zeit. An der Rampe des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz II (Birkenau) begutachtete er die neu angekommenen Juden und pfiff während der Selektion Arien. An unzähligen Gefangenen führte Mengele unmenschliche Experimente durch. Obwohl er seit 1945 auf internationalen Fahndungslisten stand, konnte er bis zu seinem Tod 1979 unbelangt in Südamerika leben.

For three centuries, New Orleans has harbored dark secrets in its shadowy streets and atmospheric courtyards. While tourists flock to ghost tours and vampire fiction, locals whisper about something far more real—and infinitely more dangerous.Fangs of the French Quarter exposes the documented encounters, unexplained disappearances, and chilling testimonies that reveal the truth behind New Orleans' vampire legends.

FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE PODCAST EPISODE HOSTED BY THE AUTHOR A murdered young woman; a missing wife; a forty-year mystery. In 1986 on Phillip Island, a young woman called Beth Barnard was savagely murdered and her boyfriend’s wife, Vivienne Cameron, went missing. The police immediately jumped...

You won't be familiar with every one of the huge array of women featured in this book, but all, familiar or not, leave unanswered questions behind them—from Cleopatra to Ruth Ellis, from Boudicca to Bonnie Parker, from Lady Caroline Lamb to Moll Cutpurse, from Jezebel to Ava Gardner. The risqué, the adventurous and the outrageous, the downright nasty and the downright desperate—all human (female!) life is here. Wicked? Misunderstood? Naïve? Foolish? Predatory? Manipulative? Or just out of their time? Listen and decide.

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government's wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike.

In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit.  

The definitive history of Japanese organized crime, from its origins in samurai-era black markets and gambling rings to the shadowy syndicates of the present. Japan’s gangster groups, known collectively as the yakuza, are among the oldest underworld societies in the world. With military-style...

“Cinematic, suspenseful, totally immersive.” —Zoë Schlanger, New York Times bestselling author of The Light Eaters “This book is a marvel.” —Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails and In Trees “Masterful reporting. As riveting as any thriller.” —Seth Harp...

As compelling as fiction, The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of nineteen-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901. Bloodhounds, detectives, divers, and even a psychic were brought in to search for her, and the case immediately became a national sensation. Bland Simpson, who first heard the tale as an Elizabeth City schoolboy, weaves this true story into a colorful nonfiction account, told in three first-person voices.

In the eighteenth century the first American medical school was established in Philadelphia. Following the model of European universities, anatomical lectures were conducted with cadavers. But where did the bodies come from? Dissection was viewed as a fate worse than death, and the only legal source of "stiffs" was executed criminals. But there were not enough. As the medical profession and its need for "anatomical material" grew, a new, macabre practice emerged: body snatching.