True Crime

//True Crime
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  • Australia has had its fair share of murders - the grisly, the macabre, the humdrum, the unsolved and the controversial. Men have been hanged who perhaps should never have been convicted; men have gone free who perhaps should have been found guilty.  Just the chapter headings alone are enough to entice the reader: The Crimson Feather; Roadside Nightmare - the murder of a courting couple by William Moxley; The Pyjama Girl case, still unsolved to this day; The Walking Corpse ( dubbed the 'Mutilator Murders') and more.
  • What made them do it? What were they thinking? Was it nature or nurture, that is, were they born evil or were they the products of their environment? And why are we so fascinated with crime? Journalists Helen Goltz and Chris Adams have been spoilt for choice selecting stories for the first Grave Tales: True Crime volume. These are some of the terrible crimes that took away the public innocence, crimes destined never to be solved that live on in Australian history… crimes that are confounding with their cruelty, staggering in their brilliance and amazing in their sheer audacity. In this volume: Edward Leonski; Norman 'Chops' Lee; Linda Agostini, the 'pyjama girl'; The Battle Of Broken Hill; Martha Needle; John T.W. Smith; Bertha and Mary Schippan; Creswell and Orton; Frderick Bailey Deeming; Betty Shanks; Robert Francis Burns; The Clarke Brothers; Chrissie Venn; Eugenia Falleni; The Somerton Man. Illustrated with maps, photographs and includes all references and grave locations.
  • Kay Scarpetta III.  In Richmond, Virginia, young lovers are dying. So far, four couples in the area have disappeared, only to be found months later as mutilated corpses. When the daughter of the president's newest drug czar vanishes along with her boyfriend, Dr. Kay Scarpetta knows time is short. Following a macabre trail of evidence that ties the present homicides to a grisly crime in the past, Kay must draw upon her own personal resources to track down a murderer who is as skilled at eliminating clues as Kay is at finding them...
  • With the advantage of access to some of Scotland Yard's most confidential papers, Donald Rumbelow  lays out all the evidence in the most comprehensive summary ever written about the Ripper. Rumbelow, a former London Metropolitan policeman, and an authority on crime, has subjected every theory – including those that have emerged in recent years – to the same deep scrutiny. He also examines the mythology surrounding the case and provides some fascinating insights into the portrayal of the Ripper on stage and screen and on the printed page. More seriously, he also examines the horrifying parallel crimes of the Düsseldorf Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper in an attempt to throw further light on the atrocities of Victorian London.
  • Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California - the home of the imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home and police officers, responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance, were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered. This is a chilling true story of incest, abuse, madness and murder - it is one family's terrible and ultimately fatal ordeal at the hands of a powerful, manipulative man - a cultist who envisioned vengeful gods and vampires, and totally controlled those closest to him before their world came to a brutal and bloody halt. Illustrated with black and white photos.
  • On a remote cattle station in Far North Queensland, four gold prospectors push their luck and pay the price. Venturing too close to the homestead they attract the attention of the landholders, who arrive armed and dangerous. Only three of the prospectors make it out alive. This is the story of Bruce Schuler’s murder at Palmerville Station on the 9th of July, 2012. His murderers, Stephen Struber and his wife Dianne Wilson, had for decades been a law unto themselves, terrorising all who dared cross ‘their’ land. Or as Struber saw it, playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ and chasing them off the property. Using real bullets. Struberville is also a look at the darker side of isolation, and what happens to the civilising influence of society when nobody’s watching out there. Illustrated with colour photographs.
  • The Mafia murders that stunned Italy and how the killers were brought to justice...On 23 May 1992, the Mafia murdered its 'Number One Enemy', prosecutor Judge Falcone, with a motorway bomb that also killed his wife and three bodyguards. Fifty-seven days later, the Mafia also murdered Falcone's friend and colleague, Judge Borsellino, with a car bomb outside his mother's home that also killed five bodyguards. These murders changed forever the way that Italy views the Mafia. Based on interviews and the testimony of investigators, Mafia super grasses, survivors, relatives and friends, Vendetta recounts how the Mafiosi planned and carried out the murders and how the police hunted them down. Illustrated with black and white photographs.
  • Many people remember Roscoe Arbuckle as 'the fat comedian who raped that girl'. He was one of the highest paid actors of his day and Hollywood was at his feet. On September 5 1921 he threw a lavish party to celebrate his $3 million Paramount contract. It got wildly out of hand and ended abruptly when a starlet named Virginia Rappé let out a terrifying scream. Rappé died five days later and Arbuckle was charged with first-degree murder . Three trials later, he was finally acquitted - and by then his multi million dollar career was devastated and his life was ruined. Recreating the glittering Hollywood of the 1920s, Edmonds draws on new and hitherto unpublished evidence to determine what really happened on that fateful day. Illustrated with photographs.
  • London, 1910 - the city is rocked by its first encounter with foreign gangsters. In December, a group of Russian anarchists were surprised while burgling a jeweller's shop in Houndsditch. They shot and  killed three policemen and wounded two others. Within two weeks, most of the gang had been captured. Then the police were informed that the last two members of the gang were hiding at 100 Sidney Street. The police called in the military, local residents were evacuated and the firefight raged for six hours, culminating in the burning of the house and the discovery of the two agitators' bodies  in  the ruins. On New Year's Day, Leon Beron, a middle-aged Russian Jew, was found battered to death on Clapham Common. Knife cuts on his cheeks, inflicted after death, formed the shape of a rough 'S' - rumour said it was the revenge murder of an informer, 'S'  being the initial letter for 'spy' in both Russian and Polish. Steinie Morrison, who had been seen in his company the night before, was arrested and charged with Beron's murder, and sentenced to hang.  This was later commuted to life in prison. Morrison protested the change of sentence and for the next ten years, demanded that the original sentence be carried out, proclaiming his innocence and staging hunger strikes.  He never changed his story, not even by the smallest detail, and died ten years later in prison. Was an innocent man convicted? And did the murder of Beron have any connection to the Siege of Sidney Street?  With black and white photographs.