On the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile plunged off a narrow one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. By morning, the car had been found submerged. Inside was the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, twenty-eight years old, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy. The next morning, Senator Ted Kennedy walked into the Edgartown police station and identified himself as the driver.What happened in those hours has never been fully explained. Kennedy himself said his ...

A Harrowing True Story of Survival on the Eiger's Deadly North FaceThe Germans call it the Mordwand. The Murder Wall. The north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps is a vertical mile of unstable limestone, perpetual avalanches, and weather that can turn lethal without warning. Eighteen climbers had already died attempting it. In August 1957, four more went up.They started as two separate teams. Claudio Corti and Stefano Longhi were Italians from Lecco, rely...

Before he was Muhammad Ali, there was the riddle of Cassius Clay.In 1967, Jack Olsen wrote the very first biography of the man who would become the most recognizable athlete on earth. Sports Illustrated's editors called it one of the best sports biographies of all time. More than fifty years later, it remains indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand how Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali — and what that transformation revealed about America.Wh...

Across the vast stretches of the American West, wildlife was being systematically exterminated, poisoned, shot, trapped, and bounty-hunted, for the profit of ranchers and stockmen, with the full cooperation of government agencies. Hardest hit were the great predators: wildcats, wolves, eagles, bears, and mountain lions. And above all, the coyote.Shrewd, wily, solitary, and adaptable, the coyote had survived everything the West could throw at it until modern chemistry and federal po...

"A giggle, a crunch of gravel, a single wave of a grimy hand, and her only child was gone."One cool April day, Mike Pritcher visits the home of his estranged wife, Lael, and takes their five-year-old son, Ace, for an overnight outing. He doesn't bring him back. When Lael calls the police, they tell her it's a domestic matter. When she calls her lawyer, he tells her she has the right to snatch Ace back. That's about it.So that's what she sets out to do.What follows i...

The chilling true story of the Nazi massacre of 1,800 Italian civiliansMonte Sole. Mountain of the Sun. A 2,000-foot peak in the Apennines, fifteen miles south of Bologna, where tenant farmers tended their fields, priests served their parishes, and families had lived for generations. On the morning of September 29, 1944, the SS came.Over three days, soldiers of Walter Reder's 16th Waffen-SS Reconnaissance Battalion, acting with the full authorization of Fie...

Winner of the American Mystery Award for Best True Crime, from two-time Edgar Award winner Jack Olsen, known as "the dean of true crime."For more than a decade, a serial rapist moved through the suburbs of Seattle. He was outwardly ordinary: steady job, regular churchgoer, polite and unremarkable to everyone around him. He would eventually confess to more than fifty rapes. Police departments, working in isolation, never connected the pattern. Every attack was treated as a standalon...

Winner of the Edgar Award. A New York Times Bestseller.Between 1978 and 1981, a rapist prowled the South Hill neighborhood of Spokane, Washington. He targeted women jogging alone, waiting for buses, walking home after dark. His signature was unmistakable and terrifying: a gloved fist rammed into his victim's mouth to silence her screams. By the time police made an arrest, more than forty women had been attacked.The suspect was clean-cut, conservative, and c...

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen spent his career telling other people's stories. The Pitcher's Kid is his own, a memoir of his first eighteen years, finished just before his death in 2002 and never lived to see published.Born in Indianapolis in June 1925, Jack Olsen grew up chasing his father across a Depression-era America of unpaid bills, midnight departures, and furnished rooms abandoned in the dark. Ole "Swede" Olsen was a man of spectacular invention, a charmer, a...

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. With a new introduction by bestselling true-crime author Ron Franscell.For twenty-five years, Dr. John Story was the most trusted man in Lovell, Wyoming. He was the town's family doctor, a pillar of the community, a man who delivered babies, treated children, and cared for generations of the same families. He was also systematically raping his patients.His victims were mostly Mormon women, raised in a faith that emphasized subm...

For fifty-seven years, the grizzly bears of Glacier National Park had never killed a human being.That ended on the night of August 12, 1967.In the dark hours before dawn, in two separate locations miles apart, two grizzly bears attacked two young women sleeping at backcountry campsites. Julie Helgeson, nineteen, a seasonal park employee from Minnesota, was dragged from her sleeping bag near Granite Park Chalet and mauled while her companion survived. Michele Koons, also nin...

From New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, known as "the dean of true crime," comes a shattering account of a killer the system created, enabled, and then set loose to kill again.Little Artie Shawcross bullied classmates, started fires, tortured animals, and roamed the woods of upstate New York talking to imaginary friends. He also scored top grades, excelled in sports, and shared his toys with the children who ridiculed him. From second grade on, psychiatrists examined him...