True Crime Memoir

Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy O'Brien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984. Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense. But during the subsequent trial, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge.

This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture - its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists - but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another.

In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-20th-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.

Nothing could have shocked the sleepy community of Morgantown, West Virginia, more than the lurid details that surfaced after a house fire claimed the life of Shelly Michael's husband, Jimmy. Local authorities suspected possible arson. Then they discovered that Jimmy had been dead before the fire even started - paralyzed by a fatal dose of muscle relaxant.... Did Shelly Michael, a respected nurse and mother, kill her second husband and torch her own home?

You step into a doorway to see a man levelling a shotgun at your chest You hold a dying child in your arms You crawl into a mangled car to help someone trapped and bleeding These are a small sampling of the kinds of things that police officers encounter. Not everyone is able to do the job that cops do, fewer still are willing. Those who do it with grace and dignity are special people. CODE 4 is an insider's view of the police profession, seen through the eyes of one of its veterans. Over a 37-year span Terry Smith worked as a uniformed officer, a long-haired undercover narcotics agent, an ...

Innocent Blood is the true story of Charles Hatcher and his life of crime - a powerful and blood-chilling glimpse into the darkness between sanity and madness. It also chronicles a justice system gone wrong. Throughout his criminal career, Hatcher was able to fool dozens of psychiatrists, who repeatedly failed to identify him as a multiple murderer. Hatcher's astonishing skill was not just in his ability to murder and escape imprisonment. He became an expert at manipulating the criminal justice system.

Don Miller was quiet and reserved. As a former youth pastor, he seemed a devout Christian. No one would have ever suspected that the recent graduate of the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice was a serial killer. However, when Miller was arrested for the attempted murder of two teenagers in 1978, police quickly realized he was probably responsible for the disappearances of four women. Offered a still-controversial plea bargain, he led police to the bodies of the missing women. Now, after 40 years in prison, Miller has served his time.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

November 22, 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the tragedy that has haunted America ever since. For the first time, this concise and compelling book pierces the veil of secrecy to fully document the small, tightly-held conspiracy that killed President John F. Kennedy. It explains why he was murdered, and how it was done in a way that forced many records to remain secret for almost 50 years. The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination draws on exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy.

The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, which sets the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. Doctors from Hell is a significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

In this fascinating, in-depth account of the hunt for serial killers, Colin Wilson, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, examines the ways they can be tracked down and caught, from the tried-and-true methods of the early 20th century to the high-tech processes in use today. Wilson examines such areas as psychological profiling, genetic fingerprinting, and the launch of the Behavioral Science Unit. He delves into the importance of fantasy to serial killers, the urge to keep on killing, the desire to become notorious, and murder as an addictive drug.

The wayward son of a revered Civil War general, Roland Molineux enjoyed good looks, status, and fortune - hardly the qualities of a prime suspect in a series of shocking, merciless cyanide killings. Molineux's subsequent indictment for murder led to two explosive trials and a sex-infused scandal that shocked the nation. Bringing to life Manhattan's Gilded Age, Schechter captures all the colors of the tumultuous legal proceedings.

The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the "Henry Ford of Agriculture." His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called "the biggest vegetable factory on earth." But the carefully cultivated facade—glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends—hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. A compelling tale of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge three decades in the making, The Spinach King explores the author's complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.

This classic of spycraft is based on Allen Dulles's incomparable experience as a diplomat, international lawyer, and America's premier intelligence officer. Dulles was a high-ranking officer of the CIA's predecessor - the Office of Strategic Services - and was present at the inception of the CIA, where he served eight of his 10 years there as director. Here he sums up what he learned about intelligence from nearly a half-century of experience in foreign affairs.

Lacey Spears made international headlines in January 2015, when she was charged with the "depraved mind" murder of her five-year-old son, Garnett. Prosecutors alleged that the 27-year-old mother had poisoned him with high concentrations of salt through his stomach tube. To the outside world, Lacey had seemed like the perfect mother, regularly posting dramatic updates on her son's harrowing medical problems. But in reality, Lacey was a textbook case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

In The Murders That Made Us, the story of the San Francisco Bay Area unfolds through its most violent and depraved acts. From the city's earliest days, where vigilantes hung perps from buildings and newspaper publishers shot it out on Market Street, to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer, crime has made the people of San Francisco who they are. Murder and mayhem are intertwined with the city's art, music, and politics.

Battle Creek, Michigan, is famous as the birthplace of breakfast cereal, and the nearby suburb of Marshall is as wholesome as shredded wheat. Well-known for its colorful Victorian mansions, this stately slice of 19th-century Americana became infamous on a frigid night in February of 1991. Newscaster Diane Newton King was stepping out of her car, her children strapped into the backseat, when a sniper's bullet cut her down.

American-based foreign correspondent Ivor Davis delivers a gripping "I was there" eyewitness, inside story about the most notorious murder spree of the 20th century. In Manson Exposed: A Reporter's 50-Year Journey into Madness and Murder, Davis is the brutally honest guide to this true crime horror story. In this mix of personal memoir, criticism, and investigative journalism, Davis delivers a truly original take on the byzantine case that terrified and mesmerized the nation, including his new conclusion that the Beatles didn't make them do it.

On December 11th, 1978, a daring armed robbery rocked Kennedy Airport, resulting in the largest unrecovered cash haul in world history, totaling six million dollars. The perpetrators were never apprehended and thirteen people connected to the crime were murdered in homicides that, like the crime itself, remain unsolved to this day. The burglary has fascinated the public for years, dominating headlines around the globe due to the story's unending ravel of mysteries that baffled the authorities.

An unrepentant true crime memoir about the life of a man who sold and used cocaine daily for thirty-eight years. A man with over fifty years of involvement with illegal drugs starting at the age of thirteen. Offering a fair and balanced account of how drugs and drug dealing affected his life, those closest to him as well as the lives of others. This is a different kind of drug dealer story. The kind you don't hear. The kind they don't want told.