Mostrando títulos en Histórico

Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of the trade. She swept from town to town, assuming new identities and running new swindles at each railroad stop. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, years after the robber barons had amassed their fortunes, she was amassing her own. Using her wits and a series of forged documents, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland to New York City that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. The con made her impossibly rich.

On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.

A compelling blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author’s investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades

The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and “mysterious” deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school’s management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

Dallas, Texas. November 22, 1963. Shots ring out at Dealey Plaza. The president is struck in the head by a rifle bullet. Confusion reigns. Special Agent Paul Landis is in the follow-up car directly behind JFK’s and is at the president’s limo as soon as it stops at Parkland Memorial Hospital. He is inside Trauma Room #1, where the president is pronounced dead. He is on Air Force One with the president’s casket on the flight back to Washington, DC, an eyewitness to Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office. What he saw is indelibly imprinted upon his psyche.

Like sharks to blood in the water, the mob arrived in Hollywood greedy and ready to tear away huge chunks of cash. Opportunistic mobsters saw labor unions as the means for muscling into the movie industry and extorting millions of dollars from studio bosses. Control the unions to which projectionists, art directors, cinematographers, electricians, scene designers, stagehands, extras belong, and you control the whole industry.

A Jacket Off the Gorge peels back the layers of the criminal mind, revealing a fascinating look at one man's struggles within himself and with others. Jon's story raises questions about incarceration versus rehabilitation, lack of mental health treatment for offenders, and abuses by those we entrust to uphold the law.

In Cult Following, Ocker sheds light on the terrifying attraction of cults, demonstrating the elasticity of belief, the desperateness of belonging, and the tragedy of trust.

The Riders Come Out at Night is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham shine a light on the jackbooted and sadistic cops known as “The Riders,” and the lack of political will and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city’s police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland’s present-day revival.

The true crime tale of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters and blamed it on hippies.

In 1941, with London burning in the Blitz, a group of hedonistic English nobles partied shamelessly in Kenya. Far removed from falling bombs, the wealthy elites of "Happy Valley" indulged in morphine, alcohol, and unrestricted sex, often with their friends' spouses. But the party turned sinister in the early hours of a January morning for Josslyn Hay, Lord Erroll, who had been enjoying the favors of the beautiful young wife of a middle-aged neighbor. Hay was found dead, a bullet in his brain.

One of America's most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf—working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses.

On April 10, 1834, firefighters smashed through a padlocked attic door in the burning Royal Street mansion of Creole society couple Delphine and Louis Lalaurie. In the billowing smoke and flames they made an appalling discovery: the remains of Madame Lalaurie's chained, starved, and mutilated slaves. This house of horrors in the French Quarter spawned a legend that has endured for more than 150 years. But what actually happened in the Lalaurie home? Rumors about her atrocities spread as fast as the fire. But verifiable facts were scarce.

In Talking with Serial Killers: World's Most Evil, bestselling author and criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee delves deeper into the gloomy underworld of killers and their crimes. He examines, with shocking detail and clarity, the lives and lies of people who have killed and shines a light on the motives behind their horrific crimes. Through interviews with the killers, the police, and key members of the prosecution, alongside careful analysis of the cases themselves, the listener is given unprecedented insight into the most diabolical minds that humanity has to offer.

In this exhilarating and terrifying new book, Emma Kenny explores the bewildering world of cults, looking into the magnetic pull of cult leaders who find, ensnare and indoctrinate followers, transforming them from normal people into devoted acolytes, and, in the most extreme cases, into killers. From Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians; Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate to Order of the Solar Temple, Emma unpicks the interplay between power, manipulation and faith that makes cults work.

When she was kidnapped from Long Meadow Farm in Stony Brook, New York, in 1937, Alice McDonell Parsons was the heir to a vast fortune among Long Island's wealthy elite. The crime shocked the nation and was front-page news for several months.

No other event in the last fifty years is shrouded in myth like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Today, we remember this moment for the 76 people, including 20 children, who died in the fire; for its inspiration of the Oklahoma City bombing; and for the wave of anti-government militarism that followed. What we understand far less is what motivated the Davidians’ enigmatic leader, David Koresh.

On January 21, 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather changed the course of crime in the United States when he murdered the parents and sister of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend (and possible accomplice), Caril Ann Fugate, in a house on the edge of Lincoln, Nebraska. They then drove to the nearby town of Bennet, where a farmer was robbed and killed. When Starkweather’s car broke down, the teenagers who stopped to help were murdered and jammed into a storm cellar. By the time the dust settled, ten innocent people were dead and the city of Lincoln was in a state of terror.

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.

Charles Brandt, who handled over fifty-six homicides as the chief deputy attorney general of Delaware, in charge of all homicides and a private homicide defense attorney in the 1970s, has now used his hands-on professional experience in murder investigation and his analytic skills to conclusively solve every secret of the homicides of JFK, Officer Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963.