Bücher von Nick Vulich

One hundred years ago Villisca, Iowa made the national spotlight when eight people were butchered in their sleep. Attention quickly turned to the Reverend Lyn Kelley, "a queer, strange, little preacher man," often accused of window peeping. Kelley said he was walking by the Moore house when a voice commanded him to, "Go in. Slay utterly." What could he do? He climbed the stairs and slaughtered the children. "Slay utterly. Suffer the little children." Back downstairs, he went into the parent's bedroom. "More work yet. There must be sacrifices of blood." Again, the ax did its work. In another downstairs bedroom, he discovered the Stillinger girls, asleep in their beds. "More work still." The ax resumed its work. Eight people were dead. The ax was satisfied. When Kelley recanted his confession, detectives developed dozens of other suspects, but none of them panned out. The Villisca Ax Murders remain Iowa's most famous cold-case file.

Gruesome Illinois is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book - such as the Monmouth Ax Murders have ever made it into print. Except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph. Read them now, if you dare!

It's not the usual boring history read. It's a fast-paced, easy to read, behind the scenes look at the making of Iowa and Illinois focusing on Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois.

Bat Masterson knew better than most of his contemporaries that the majority of what was written about the old west was little more than rattlesnake piss and bat guano.He said, ""nerve was the quality that marked the great gunfighters.""Perhaps more telling is what Masterson suggested was the ""secret sauce"" that made the big-name gunfighters so fast.""We used to file the notch of the hammer till the trigger would pull 'sweet' which is another way of saying that the blame gun would pretty near go off if you looked at it."" But, ""the real gunfighters did not file the notches off."" They carried one gun in their hip-holster, and another ""swung under the armpit."" It let them ""draw on an adversary while he was waiting for the familiar motion toward the hip.""Here are the real stories of 23 outlaws, gunfighters, and lawmen.The truth may surprise you.