True Crime

//True Crime
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  • Boxing Day, 1898. Three members of the Murphy family - Michael, Ellen and Norah — are returning to the family farm after a trip in to Gatton, a small town west of Brisbane. On a deserted, moonlit road a few miles out of town they are ambushed. Their horse is killed and the three young people are taken to a remote paddock where the women are brutally raped and bludgeoned to death - and Michael is shot. By the time the police arrived the following day, locals had swarmed all over the crime scene, obliterating the evidence. What followed was a hopelessly bungled investigation and the crime remained unsolved. Fear and mistrust rocked the farming community. Theories about the perpetrator abounded. Was this the work of a sex-crazed tramp? Could a member of the Murphy family have been involved - or was revenge the motive? Stephanie Bennett's detailed examination of this baffling crime after many years spent scouring the available archival material, interviewing relatives of suspects and victims and visiting far flung areas of Queensland brings a new and disturbing theory to the surface that is both chilling and challenging. Queensland's most infamous unsolved murder.
  • Eric Clegg, formerly  His Honour Eric Clegg Q.C. is more than qualified to examine these famous trials and his expert viewpoint reveals many important and often controversial points which arose during the hearings. Cases contained in this volume include: The Kalgoorlie murders of two policemen in 1926, found down a disused mine-shaft; the Passionate Parson, acquitted on a charge of murdering his wife; the Lavers mstyery and the Sundown murders; the Pyjama Girl murder; the fantastic case of T. J. Ley, former Minister for Justice in New South Wales who was eventually convicted for the chalkpit murders and more. Illustrated with black and white photographs.
  • When high school sweethearts Karen and Richard Sharpe married, they shared an interest in medicine, a desire for a family and dreams for the future.  For Karen, the dream turned into a nightmare. After years of abuse at the hands of her physician husband, she tried to end their 27-year marriage.  Fearing a crushing divorce settlement, Richard ended the marriage first by unloading a .22 rifle into Karen's chest.  The murder revealed more than Boston society was ready for: Richard Sharpe's compulsive cross-dressing, with a preference for his own daughter's underwear; his taking of hormones to grow breasts, even stealing his wife's birth control pills to help the process.  But there was more - much more...Illustrated with black and white photographs.

  • On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped out onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, and into his killer's line of fire. One shot ended Dr. King's life and forever changed the course of American history - setting into motion a massive cover-up that has withstood a quarter-century of scrutiny. Now, after 18 years of intensive investigation, William F. Pepper tears away the veil of subterfuge that has hidden the truth of King's death - proving the innocence of convicted assassin James Earl Rayand revealing the cabal of government leaders and organised crime figures that masterminded the assassination of one of the most influential leaders of our age. The author was an associate of Dr. King and executive director of the independent political coalition that hoped to put King forward as a third party presidential candidate in 1968. After  the murder, Pepper walked away from politics. But in 1977. Reverend Ralph Abernathy asked Pepper to interview James Earl Ray. Initially sceptical, Pepper became convinced that Ray was innocent of the crime and that Ray had always claimed, he had been manipulated by a man named Raul and was the victim of a set-up. But who was behind the set-up - and why?
  • On October 9, 1959, Kevin Simmonds and Les Newcombe broke out of Long Bay Gaol. Both incarcerated for strings of minor crimes, their escape set in train the most incredible  manhunts in Australian history - a media event which aroused public feeling to fever pitch. The death of a prison warder, the dogged determination  of police and the often ingenious desperation of the fugitives focussed public attention on not only the escapees, but also on the prison system from which they had sprung - its brutality and its systematic denial of hope and humanity. This is Les Newcombe's story - a story of life in prison and out of it, as a free man, a prisoner and an escapee. Illustrated with black and white photos.
  • This really is the ultimate for Ripperologists - an encyclopedic work, solidly researched and profusely illustrated, collated from all the known and still-existing official records and supplemented by contemporary press reports. It presents. for the first time in one volume, a prime-source reference book on the eleven shocking prostitute murders that took place in the East End of London between 1888 and 1891. While there is no doubt that the Whitechapel Murders, as they were classified by Scotland Yard, were committed by more than one person, no one knows how many of the killings can be attributed to a single culprit. More than one murderer wore the guise of Jack the Ripper, and the  identities of all suspects to this day remain unknown. Divorcing the facts of the Ripper case from the myths that have proliferated in fiction and film, this is a factual, documented narrative of the entire series of crimes, their forensic evidence, the official suspects and possible accomplices, police reports,  inquests, newspaper articles of the day and rare photographs.
  • With such intriguing chapters as: The Riddle of the Bordereau (the Dreyfus case); Murder in High Society (the murder of Stanford White and the affair of Evelyn Stanford nee Nesbit and Harry Thaw) ; the Tragedy of Oscar Slater (the murder of Marion Gilchrist); The Original Winslow Boy (the tragedy caused by the theft of a five shilling postal order); A Matter of High Treason (Roger Casement); The Green Bicycle Mystery (the murder of Bella Wright) ; Buccaneer in Morning Coat (Horatio Bottomley, swindler par excellence) ; The Incredible Fire Raisers (the Leopold Harris arson gang) ; Justice Comes To Nuremburg; The Double Betrayal (the case of Klaus Fuchs); Teenagers On A Roof (the thrill-killing of a police man in London, 1952) ; The Great Train Robbers.
  • Armed robbery, murder, lies, treachery, 'confession' and legal tangle that ended in a sensational trial, followed by three executions - all the ingredients of a callous crime committed on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866. A gang of brutal Londoners - Richard Burgess, Tom Noon (Noonan), Joseph Sullivan and Phil Levy waylaid five gold-laden prospectors on a lonely track on Maungatapu ('Sacred Mountain'), killed them and hid the bodies before going on a spree. The prospectors were missed, and suspicion fell on the four. Hoping for a free pardon, Sullivan 'dobbed' on his mates and Burgess wrote a confession but implicated Sullivan. Clune traces the lives of the four and shows the influences played such an important role in shaping their twisted lives - the overcrowded Thames-side slums created by the Industrial Revolution, the laws that punished rather than reformed, the rotting prison hulks, the transportation system and the mental cruelty in the prisons of the day.
  • 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.