Kategoria BISAC: True Crime >> Murder - General

How did Ed Lazar,...

On the feast of St. Michael, September 1659, a thirteen-year-old peasant girl left her family s rural home to work as a maid in the nearby city of Braunschweig. Just two years later, Grethe Schmidt found herself imprisoned and accused of murdering her bastard child, even though the fact of her pregnancy was inconclusive and no infant s body was found to justify the severe measures used against her. The tale spiraled outward to set a defense lawyer and legal theorist against powerful city magistrates and then upward to a legal contest between that city and its overlord, the Duchy of...

Most readers know Salem only for the city's notorious witch trials. But years later it became a very different city, one that produced America's first millionaire (still one of history's 75 wealthiest men) and boasted a maritime trade that made it the country's richest city. Westward expansion and the industrial revolution would eventually erode Salem's political importance, but it was a shocking murder and the scandal that followed which led at last to its fall from national prominence.

Death of an Empire is a finely-written tale of a little-known but remarkably rich era of...

This is the fascinating life of femme fatale Alice de Janze, a book that "may well have solved the mystery of Lord Erroll's killing" (San Francisco Chronicle)--the story at the center of James Fox's White Mischief.

A glamorous American multimillionairess, Alice de Janze scandalized 1920s Paris when she left her aristocratic French husband for an English lover--whom she later tried to kill in a failed murder-suicide. Abandoning Paris for the moneyed British colonial society known as Kenya's Happy Valley, she became the lover of womanizer Joss Hay, Lord Erroll. In 1941,...

The year was 1896, and nineteenth-century journalists called the murder of Pearl Bryan the "Crime of the Century." From the day Pearl's headless body was found to the execution of her murderers on the gallows, the details of the murder fascinated newspaper reporters and ballad composers alike.

Often glossing over the facts of the case, newspaper accounts presented the events according to stereotypes that were remarkably similar to those found in well-known murdered-girl ballads, such as "Pretty Polly," "Omie Wise," and "The Jealous Lover." Events, characters, motivations, and plot...

In December 1883, Peter Lazier was shot in the heart during a bungled robbery at a Prince Edward County farmhouse. Three local men, pleading innocence from start to finish, were arrested and charged with his murder. Two of them -- Joseph Thomset and David Lowder -- were sentenced to death by a jury of local citizens the following May. Nevertheless, appalled community members believed at least one of them to be innocent -- even pleading with prime minister John A. Macdonald to spare them from the gallows.

The Lazier Murder explores a community's response to a crime, as well...

It is one of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century. How did Marilyn Monroe die? Although no pills were found in her stomach during the autopsy, it was still documented in the Los Angeles coroner's report that she had swallowed sixty-four sleeping pills prior to her demise. In "Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder," biographer Jay Margolis presents the most thorough investigation of Marilyn Monroe's death to date and shares how he reached the definitive conclusion that she was murdered.

Margolis meticulously dissects the events leading up to her death, revealing a major conspiracy...