Kategoria BISAC: True Crime >> Murder - General

When the winter ice melted in April 1850, residents of Saco, Maine, made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young girl submerged in a stream. Thanks to evidence left at the scene, a local physician was arrested and tried for the death of Mary Bean, the name given to the unidentified young girl; the cause of death was failed abortion. Garnering extensive newspaper coverage, the trial revealed many secrets: a poorly trained doctor, connections to an unsolved murder in New Hampshire, and the true identity of...

Tell kids not to worry. sorting my life out. be in touch to get some things.
Instead of being a simple sms message, this text turned out to be crucial and chilling evidence in convicting the deceptive killer of a mother of two. Sent from her phone, after her death, tell tale signs announce themselves to a forensic linguist. Rarely is a crime committed without there being some evidence in the form of language.

Wordcrime features a series of chapters where gripping cases are described - involving murder, sexual assault, hate mail, suspicious death, code...

In Laurel, Mississippi, in 1935, a daughter in a wealthy and troubled family stood accused of murdering her mother. On her testimony, authorities arrested an equally prominent and well-to-do businessman, her reputed lover and accomplice. Ouida Keeton apparently shot her mother, chopped her up, and disposed of most of the corpse down the toilet and in the fireplace, burning all but the pelvic region and the thighs. Attempting to dispose of these remains on a one-lane, isolated road, Ouida left a trail of evidence that ended in her arrest. Witnesses had seen her driving there. Within hours,...

The townsfolk of Logan, Ohio, a mined-out area of the Appalachian foothills, cheered as an innocent man was convicted and sent to death row. The occasion was the conviction of Dale N. Johnston. His trial ended nothing; the tragedies had just begun. What really happened on that bitter cold day in January 1984 was the total collapse of the local criminal justice system.

It began with a lovers' quarrel. On October 4, 1982, Johnston's stepdaughter Annette Cooper Johnston--an 18-year-old beauty contestant,...

In the Fall of 1857, some 120 California-bound emigrants were killed in lonely Mountain Meadows in southern Utah; only eighteen young children were spared. The men on the ground after the bloody deed took an oath that they would never mention the event again, either in public or in private. The leaders of the Mormon church also counseled silence. The first report, soon after the massacre, described it as an Indian onslaught at which a few white men were present, only one of whom, John D. Lee, was actually named.

With admirable scholarship, Mrs. Brooks has traced the background of...

On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate...

The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers.

Combing through original sources, including eye-witness accounts never before published, Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corner beyond the reach of government.

But Allen has uncovered evidence that the vigilantes refused to disband...

Benedict Giamo has published widely on the condition of historical and contemporary homelessness in America. In "Homeless Come Home: An Advocate, the Riverbank, and Murder in Topeka, Kansas, " Giamo offers a deeply sympathetic yet critical look at the life of homeless advocate David Owen, who was tortured and killed in 2006 by some of those he intended to help. Part chronicle, part social analysis, part investigative journalism, and part true-crime book, "Homeless Come Home "examines why and how David Owen contributed to his own gruesome death.

David Owen defined his single-minded...