American True Crime

In the face of a president who lobs accusations without facts, evidence, or logic, truth tellers are under attack. Meanwhile, the world order is teetering on the brink. North Korea is on the verge of having a nuclear weapon that could reach all of the United States, Russians have mastered a new form of information warfare that undercuts democracy, and the role of China in the global community remains unclear.

In 2018, after nearly a decade's hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than 30 years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then.

He's a predator. She's his latest prey. Will she fall for him or bring him to his knees? When it is revealed there is a serial predator in the midst, the women of the congregation must come together to stop him before someone else gets hurt. It may already be too late. Scroll up and "Click Buy to Buy" for your Instant Copy

The man who would become the Father of Organized Crime in the United States was born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily, but he would quickly make a name for himself after his family moved to New York City when he was still a child. By his teenage years, he was running the streets, organizing his own teenage gang, and moving in circles with the likes of Meyer Lansky, who would become key figures in Lucky's rise to power.

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

In The Assassin’s Accomplice, historian Kate Clifford Larson tells the gripping story of Mary Surratt, a little-known conspirator in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and the first woman ever to be executed by the federal government. A Confederate sympathizer, Surratt ran the boarding house where the conspirators met to plan Lincoln’s assassination. Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, The Assassin’s Accomplice tells the intricate story of the Lincoln conspiracy through the eyes of its only female participant, offering a fresh perspective on America’s most famous murder.

Sulick reveals six fundamental elements of espionage in these stories: the motivations that drove them to spy; their access and the secrets they betrayed; their tradecraft, i.e., the techniques of concealing their espionage; their exposure; their punishment; and, finally, the damage they inflicted on America's national security.

Chris Thomas is not yet 30 years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the reputation of her family. Now, 20 years later, Thomas takes listeners behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary on finding Elizabeth Smart.

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.

Under the cover of night on June 11, 1962, using only crude homemade tools, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin tunneled their way out of Alcatraz, America's most secure maximum security prison. Enacting a complex escape plan, the trio broke free from the cellblock, made it undetected past patrolling guards, inflated homemade life vests and a raft, and set sail into a foggy history.

In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him - only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal Midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son's death.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.

In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners—their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years—have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period.

Early on August 12, 2000, four of America's best young rock climbers were sleeping in their portaledges high on the Yellow Wall, in the central Asian mountain range of Kyrgyzstan,. By daybreak, they would be taken at gunpoint by militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. In a life-and-death journey over six terrifying days, they would be forced to choose between saving their own lives and committing an act none of them thought they ever could.

On a hot rainy summer night in Nassau, the Bahamas, in 1943, someone murdered Sir Harry Oakes, one of the richest men in the world, as he slept. When police found him the next morning, there were four wounds to his skull. His corpse had been abused, covered ritualistically with feathers and set on fire. The murder was perverse, horrific, and jaded by anyone’s standards. A few evenings later in New York City, the phone rang in the home of Alan Hynd, identified in that era by the NY Times as America’s highest paid true crime reporter.

Just as WASPs, Irish-Catholics, and Our Crowd Jews once made the ascent from immigrants to powerbrokers, it is now the Indian-American's turn. Citigroup, PepsiCo and Mastercard are just a handful of the Fortune 500 companies led by a group known as the "Twice Blessed". Yet little is known about how these Indian émigrés (and children of émigrés) rose through the ranks. Until now....

In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, 10-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small-town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time.