Western True Crime

The sand hides everything. Eventually. Far from the city lights and paved roads, there are stretches of earth that belong only to the scavengers. This is where the desperate run, where the violent thrive, and where the unlucky simply disappear. From the merciless slaughter of territorial border massacres to the blood-stained dirt of isolated arroyos where legendary lawmen met unpunished ends, this collection strips away the frontier myths to reveal the brutal reality underneath. These are not neat, tidy mysteries wrapped up with a courtroom gavel. These are raw, unflinching accounts of ...

Fifteen cases. Three states. One coal seam crossing every county line. From the mine wars of early twentieth-century West Virginia to an Ohio death initially suspected to be an overdose, Blood Seam follows documented crimes across the coal towns of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southern Ohio. An armored train passes through a strike settlement under gunfire, leaving a miner dead. Two union figures are killed on courthouse steps. A Black household employee is convicted on circumstantial evidence in a socially explosive murder. Harlan County miners receive life sentences when no jury ...

WHEN THE NEAREST NEIGHBOUR IS FIFTY KILOMETRES AWAY, THERE IS NO ONE COMING TO SAVE YOU. Western and Northern Canada are celebrated for endless golden prairies, dense boreal forests, and rugged mountain passes. Yet beneath this frontier mythology lies another reality — a landscape so vast and unforgiving that predators use the geography itself as a weapon. In White Silence, Julian Maddox reconstructs fifteen of the region's most harrowing true crime cases, relying strictly on RCMP archives, trial transcripts, and official public records. Inside you'll discover: Nowhere on the Highway — ...

A fun, high-stakes true crime story story set in the Wild West. Perfect for fans of MONA LISA VANISHES! "Steve Sheinkin is more than an author―he’s a time traveler whose deep research and fabulous writing whisk readers on thrilling rides through history. Kids will be transfixed by this...

On the night of June 19,1982 in suburban Houston, respected attorney James Campbell and his wife Virginia were shot to death in their luxurious home. The scene showed no signs of struggle or forced entry. Although the police eventually suspected James and Virginia Campbell’s daughter, Cindy Campbell Ray, was involved, for years there wasn’t enough evidence to make an arrest. When the truth was eventually discovered it was far more horrifying than anyone imagined.

“A haunting true crime tale of systemic incompetence and racism” (New York Times) – and its devastating effect on innocent lives After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon...

They rode home to do what even Jesse James never dared — rob two banks at the same hour. Ten minutes later, four of them were dead in the dirt. On the morning of October 5, 1892, five men in false beards rode into the plaza of Coffeyville, Kansas, with Winchesters under their coats. Three of them — Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton — had grown up just outside town. The neighbors knew their faces. The disguises fooled no one. The Daltons were not born outlaws. Their older brother Frank died wearing a deputy U.S. marshal's badge at Judge Parker's Fort Smith court, and Bob, Grat, and Emmett ...

A Cambridge aristocrat. A disgruntled CIA officer. An FBI agent who knelt in church. Three men who sold the West to Moscow – and nearly won. Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen – three double agents who betrayed their countries for ideology, money, and ego. This is the definitive account of the intelligence failures that let them operate for decades. The official histories celebrate the spies who saved the West. They bury the ones who tried to destroy it. The textbooks mention the Cambridge Five and the CIA moles in a single paragraph. But they never answer the question that haunts...

One mounted man with a Colt and a badge, supposed to be worth a mob. That was the legend. The truth is older, stranger, and far bloodier. They are the most famous lawmen in American history — pulp heroes, radio idols, the men behind "one riot, one ranger." But the real Texas Rangers began in the 1820s not as police but as an irregular frontier militia: mounted men paid in land and plunder, with no uniforms, no manuals, and no oversight. For fifty years they were less a constabulary than the armed edge of conquest — raised under Stephen F. Austin to take and hold land from the Comanche ...

Acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan follows Russell Poole, a highly decorated LAPD detective who in 1997 was called to investigate a controversial cop-on-cop shooting, eventually to discover that the officer killed was tied to Marion “Suge” Knight’s notorious gangsta rap label, Death Row Records. During his investigation, Poole came to realize that a growing cadre of black officers were allied not only with Death Row, but with the murderous Bloods street gang. And incredibly, Poole began to uncover evidence that at least some of these “gangsta cops” may have been involved in the murders of rap superstars Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.

They marched the elected sheriff to the gallows he had ordered built, put the rope around his neck, and let him strangle in the snow — and no judge had heard a single word of evidence. In the winter of 1863–64, the Montana gold camps of Bannack and Virginia City were among the richest and most lawless places on earth. Gold dust moved out along the trails by the hundredweight, and along those same trails travelers were robbed and murdered with terrifying regularity. The nearest real courts lay hundreds of miles away across the mountains. Into that vacuum stepped two answers to a single ...

Fifteen documented crimes. Four connected regions. One northern belt where violence repeatedly crossed the boundaries drawn on the map. From the residential streets of Manchester and Liverpool to the commuter towns of Warrington, Rochdale, Wakefield and West Yorkshire, Northern Belt examines murders, disappearances, wrongful convictions, terrorist violence and institutional failures from across northern England. The cases include the murders of Brianna Ghey, Olivia Pratt-Korbel, Shafilea Ahmed, Clare Wood, Anthony Walker and Garry Newlove; the disappearance of Helen McCourt; the Warrington ...

Behind closed doors on Cromwell Street, horror had a house number. In Murder Tales: Fred & Rose, acclaimed crime historian H. N. Lloyd strips away the veneer of normality to expose the monstrous partnership of Fred and Rose West. From their abusive childhoods to the gruesome secrets buried beneath their Gloucester home, Lloyd combines meticulous research with sharp psychological insight to chart how this couple lured, tortured and killed at least twelve people. Along the way, he examines the societal blind spots and systematic failings that allowed their crimes to continue unchecked. Part ...

The agency in this book never existed. There was no "Dickenson National Detective Agency," no superintendent who broke up the Molly Maguires under that name. Before this memoir could be published in 1912, Charlie Siringo's real former employer took him to court and forced the substitution — and Siringo tells you so himself, on the second page, in the flattest, most carefully lawyered sentence in the whole book. This edition presents the complete 1912 text, exactly as it appeared after that legal intervention, in the public domain worldwide. A critical afterword by Henry Bugalho, "The Town...

In 1534, Benvenuto Cellini killed a man in the streets of Rome and was pardoned by the Pope the same afternoon. In 1869, Dante Gabriel Rossetti had his dead wife exhumed to retrieve the poems he had buried with her. In 1970, three executors sold a great painter’s entire estate to a gallery one of them secretly worked for, three weeks after his death. The Art of Crime tells fifteen stories from five centuries of Western art in which murder, fraud, sexual violence, forgery and institutional corruption intersect with the making of some of the greatest paintings and sculptures in human ...

On a sultry August morning in 1970, the battered body of a young woman was hoisted from a dry well just outside Hogansville, Georgia. Author and investigator Clay Bryant was there, witnessing the macabre scene. Then fifteen, Bryant was tagging along with his father, Buddy Bryant, Hogansville chief of police. The victim, Gwendolyn Moore, had been in a violent marriage. That was no secret. But her husband had connections to a political machine that held sway over the Troup County Sheriff's Office overseeing the case. To the dismay and bafflement of many, no charges were brought.

He was not Robin Hood. He was a Confederate guerrilla, a political terrorist, and a killer—and a newspaper editor turned him into a hero while he was still robbing trains. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James took off his gun belt, climbed onto a chair to straighten a picture, and Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head for reward money and a pardon. The dust was still settling when the legend swallowed the man whole. Within hours, the murder of the most wanted man in America became a national sensation, and Ford became “the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard.” But the legend of ...

Kathleen Richards was just 17 when she and her sister Deirdre found themselves on the doorstep of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, seeking lodgings from a seemingly friendly local couple: Fred and Rose West. While growing up in poverty-stricken Dublin in the 1960s, Kathleen was abused from a...

The gripping tale chronicles the lives of Britain's most infamous husband and wife serial killers couple. Over the course of two decades, Fred and Rosemary West murdered more than a dozen young females. Most of the murders were sexually motivated and took place at the couple's house of horrors on 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, in South West England. Only when the killers were brought to justice did their murderous reign of rape, torture, bondage, and terror come to an end.

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian John Boessenecker—as seen on Netflix’s Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War—brings the authoritative account of one of the most notorious outlaws of the West Joaquin Murrieta’s story is one for the ages. Fiercely compelling and...