Explore one of history's most notorious maximum-security prisons through these tales of mayhem and madness.As "animal factories" go, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the worst. For 150 years, it housed some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States, including murderers, madmen and mobsters. Peer in on America's first vampire, accused of sucking his victims' blood five years before Bram Stoker's fictional villain was even born; peek into the cage of the o...

Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Karpis, "Dock" Barker—these were just a few of the legendary "public enemies" for whom America's first supermax prison was created. In Alcatraz: The Gangster Years, David Ward brings their stories to life, along with vivid accounts of the lives of other infamous criminals who passed through the penitentiary from 1934 to 1948. Ward, who enjoyed unprecedented access to FBI, Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Federal Parole records, conducted ...

This book picks up where The Desperate Ones: Canada's Forgotten Outlaws left off. Here are more remarkable true stories about Canadian crimes and criminals -- most of them tales that have been buried for years. The stories begin in colonial Newfoundland, with robbery and murder committed by the notorious Power Gang. As readers travel across the country and through time, they will meet the last two men to be hanged in Prince Edward Island, smugglers who made lake Champlain a battle...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history—the Ku Klux Klan.On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to ...

A deep dive into James Earl Ray's role in the national tragedy: "Superb . . . a model of investigation . . . as gripping as a first-class detective story" ( The New York Times).On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a single assassin's bullet. A career criminal named James Earl Ray was seen fleeing from a rooming house that overlooked the hotel balcony from where King was cut down. An international manhunt ended two m...

Devils Walking stands as an important milestone in the ongoing struggle to create justice from truth, and perhaps even reconciliation in a nation that must collectively move in this direction or face an uncertain future.”—David Ridgen, Canadian filmmaker and director of award-winning documentary Mississippi Cold CaseAfter midnight on December 10, 1964, in Ferriday, Louisiana, African American Frank Morris awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Outside his home and ...

This true crime history chronicles more than a century in the life of a small Midwestern city with an outsized reputation for violence and vice.Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging have been going on in Steubenville for well over century. In its heyday, the city's Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurre...

The latest in the New York Times Bestselling Notorious USA series...South Carolina, where racial strife and righteous, heavily-armed indignation leads to murder. New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother brings readers compilation of crime stories from this former Confederate state: the first woman in South Carolina to go to the electric chair after a vengeful feud over a dead calf turned fatal; the state’s most prolific serial killer who managed to kill a f...

In 2001 The Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders—the first book to examine the horrific series of unsolved dismemberment murders that terrorized the Kingsbury Run neighborhood from 1934 to 1938. Through his access to a wealth of previously unavailable material, Badal was able to present a far more detailed and accurate picture of the battle between Cleveland safety director Eliot Ness and the unidentified ...

Rotten Apples is a thoroughly investigated treasure of true crime straight from the streets of The City that Never Sleeps. This bushel of vice, victims, and vengeance spotlights sinister citizens from Boss Tweed and Typhoid Mary to Mark David Chapman and Jack Henry Abbot, plus detailed map references to guide you to the locations where they committed their grisly crimes. You'll be shocked by...Murder by MorphinePlayboy medical student Carlyle Harris was eager to end his secr...

"A true story more incredible than fiction." —Kevin Baker, author of Striver's RowIn George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospita...

In June 2005, two small envelopes were found in a closet in a Vermont historical site. One of the envelopes was official Treasury Department stationary and inscribed: valuable letter account of the trial after the assassination of Lincoln. Inside were three letters dated April 18, May 20, and June 15, 1865, containing eyewitness accounts of life in Washington, D.C., after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Heres the story of those letters, of the man who wrote them, and of the confusion...