Polit- & Justizthriller

The history of true crime in Britain is a long and, as we shall see, often stranger than fiction tale. The book that follows offers an eclectic stew of strange and perplexing British true crime cases. These cases are all disconcertingly odd and in many instances downright bizarre. We have the murder of an elderly famer brutally killed with a pitchfork in what may or may not have been a case involving witchcraft. Then there is a shocking train murder which took place in a closed carriage in broad daylight during an afternoon commuter run to London. We also have the baffling case of a retired spinster who was gruesomely killed for no apparent reason in her own home on Halloween night. We shall also be examining the modern legend of the alleged maniac said to randomly push his victims into Manchester's murky canals. Then we'll take a look at the monstrous Victorian terror known as Spring-Heeled Jack. We shall stop too to consider the unsolved murder of a young man in Sussex who was found dissected inside two abandoned suitcases. We shall also explore the high profile killing of Jill Dando - a case which surely ranks as one of the most shocking and baffling celebrity deaths ever to occur in Britain. As if that wasn't enough we also have grave robbers, cannibals, the Brighton trunk murders, a woman who staged a crackpot hoax abduction of her own daughter, a gruesome murderer who operated at the same time as Jack the Ripper and had the macabre signature of leaving torsos and body parts scattered around London, and a suave post-war con artist who in reality was a depraved sexual serial killer. So, draw the curtains, turn off the lights, make sure the doors are locked, and settle down to explore some of the strangest true crime cases Blighty has to offer...

A North Carolina Sheriff's Detective recounts a shocking case of domestic deception and brutal murder in this true crime chronicle. In 1993, single mom Kay Weden endured a series of senseless attacks on her family. Her son was nearly killed by a shot fired through their house. Then her elderly mother was murdered by an unknown intruder. Beyond this, Kay's new boyfriend, Viktor Gunnarsson, had just disappeared without warning. The handsome Swede was in the U.S. seeking political asylum after being charged with the 1986 assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister. With nowhere else to turn, Kay reconnected with her ex-fiance L.C. Underwood, a police officer adept at criminal investigations. L.C. assured Kay he would get to the bottom of her terrible nightmare. But then Viktor's nude body was found two hours away in the Appalachian Mountains. When local Sheriff's Detective Paula May started investigating, she began to unravel a hair-raising case of stalking, assault, and murder.

The Milwaukee detective who interrogated the notorious serial killer shares a vivid chronicle of what was revealed during the weeks-long encounter. In the late hours of July 22, 1991, Detective Patrick ';Pat' Kennedy of the Milwaukee Police Department was asked to respond to a possible homicide. Little did he know that he would soon be delving into the dark mind of one of Americas most notorious serial killers, the ';Milwaukee Cannibal' Jeffrey Dahmer. As the media clamored for details, Kennedy spent the next six weeks, sixteen hours a day, locked in an interrogation room with Dahmer. There the thirty-one-year-old killer described in lurid detail how he lured several young men to his apartment where he strangled, sexually assaulted, dismembered, and in some cases, cannibalized his victims. In Grilling Dahmer,Kennedy takes readers inside the mind of evil as he patiently, meticulously, listens to unspeakable horrors.

This true crime history examines the surprising connection between an infamous small-town murder and the bestselling novel it inspired. Born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, Grace Metalious shocked the nation in 1956 with Peyton Place, her sexually charged debut novel about murder in a small town. It spawned a series of novels, two Hollywood movies, and a long-running television series on ABC. It also made Metalious a pariah in her hometown, where she became tabloid fodder until her untimely death at the age of thirty-nine. Unknown to most readers, the fictional story was inspired by a real crime known as ';The Sheep Pen Murder,' which took place in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, in the late 1940s. Now historian Renee Mallett skillfully weaves together the lives of Metalious and Barbara Roberts, the confessed killer behind The Sheep Pen Murder. In The ';Peyton Place' Murder, Mallett explores what happens when true crime and literature meet.

"e;Having written about New Mexico history for more than forty years,"e; explains the author, "e;it was perhaps inevitable that in time I should publish a few articles on Billy the Kid. After all, he is the one figure from this state's past whose name is known around the world. The Kid's career, although astonishingly short, nonetheless, left an indelible mark in the annals of the Old West. And his name, William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, seems locked forever into the consciousness of the starry-eyed public. Upon request,"e; the author continues, "e;I was able to assemble a collection of my varied writings pertaining to some of Billy's real or imagined deeds. Each section opens a small window on an aspect of his tumultuous life, or casts light upon others whose fortunes intersected with his. In this book, I have stalked Billy in an erratic rather than a systematic way, taking pleasure merely in adding a few new and unusual fragments to his biography. I trust that readers who have a fascination with the history and legend of Billy the Kid will find in these pages something of interest and value. As Eugene Cunningham wrote more than seventy years ago, 'in our imagination the Kid still lives--the Kid still rides.'"e;

Author Cellura provides new insight into the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He firmly establishes that suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was not the "lone nut" sniper who gunned the President down from a sixth-floor window of a warehouse that bounded the Dallas motorcade route, that Oswald was set-up to be the "fall guy" for the shooting, and quickly silenced to conceal all traces of the conspiratorial plot. He shows there were two successive efforts made to eliminate Oswald before Mafia-connected strip club operator was commissioned to seal the deal by gunning Oswald down while the suspect was under arrest lose protective police custody just two days after the assassination.

Frank Morris's death in 1964 was one of several Klan murders that terrorized residents of northeast Louisiana and Mississippi. In Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s, Stanley Nelson details his investigation - alongside renewed FBI attention - into these cold cases.

Despite their wealth, fame, and power, celebrities are ultimately just flesh and blood like all of us. Their status or accomplishments are not a magical shield of protection when it comes to death. In fact, in some cases, celebrities are more vulnerable than your averge person. As we shall see in this book, a number of celebrities have been murdered by their own fans. A number of celebrities have also been murdered in cases that remain unsolved. Fame can be a fickle and fleeting phenomenon and Hollywood is awash with former child stars who died in tragic circumstances when the phone stopped ringing and the money ran out. In this book we will look at a number of celebrity deaths and murders. The cases that follow are eclectic and all darkly fascinating. Drug overdoses, murders, suicides, crazed fans, unsolved deaths, autoerotic asphyxiation, car crashes, freak accidents, drownings, disease, and so on...

This true crime memoir is both a ';high-speed train trip through the modern cocaine trade' and a story of reform, redemption and family (Gerald Posner, and author of Pharma). Born in 1960, Jesus Ruiz Henao wanted to be rich like the drug dealers he saw as he grew up in the cocaine-producing region of Colombia's Valle of the Cauca. In 1985, he moved to the quiet London suburb of Hendon, where he and his wife held down mundane cleaning and bus driving jobs. At least to outward appearances... While keeping a low profile, Henao built a drug trafficking network reaching from Colombia to England and across Europe. It was a risky business with law enforcement on one side and ruthless competitors on the other. By the summer of 2003, he decided to get out. But then he made the one mistake that would get him caught. It cost him a seventeen-year prison sentence, with more tacked on when he tried to make one last deal from behind prison walls. Co-written by Henao with bestselling author Ron Chepesiuk, The Real Mr. Big is the story of how an ambitious Colombian immigrant became known to law enforcement as ';the Pablo Escobar of British drug trafficking.'

The veteran character actor recounts the epic adventure of his life from the NYC mob and prison life to making movies with Hollywood legends. You might know him as the character Tony Darvoin the movie Midnight Run, but before he played tough guys in the movies, Richie Salerno was born into the real-world Brooklyn Mafia. Some of New York's most notorious gangsters were his uncles, aunts, cousins, and family friends. For a time, it looked like he was heading for a life in the family business. During a stint in prison for theft, Richie managed to turn his life around. Using the tailoring skills he learned from his father and butchering abilities he picked up from his father-in-law, he ingratiated himself with the warden and guards, and survived his 120 month sentence without a scratch. After his release, he scored an audition for the Sidney Lumet film Serpico starring Al Pacino. That audition turned into a long career as a character actor in major Hollywood films. In From the Mob to the Movies, Richie recounts his journey from the mean streets of Brooklyn and as a child of the mob to the silver screen.

In our society, there are two types. There is a log of those who do not believe in all this, their feet need to do it, a vlog who believes in science as everything. If it is not working, that is, there is unemployment, then there is science behind it because even though science has been made new by humans, but tomorrow it does not seem that s...