True Crime

//True Crime
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  • The criminals who ended their days in Strangeways Prison - and the crimes that sent them there.  A collection of murder cases from around Manchester each of which ends in the accused being executed at Strangeways Prison.  Some of the accounts, at the end, feature an author's note in which suggests that perhaps the accused was innocent and should not have been hanged...Many a lot of these crimes are particularly shocking, evil and unmotivated. There is also a first-hand account written by Charles Parton, who was sentenced to death for murder and served 11 years before being found not guilty.
  • 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.
  • What is the most effective way to dispose of a troublesome corpse? Eat it? Dip it in a vat of acid? Feed it to the pigs - or turn it into sausages? Just pop it in a furnace, maybe...? There's more than thirty cases here: from Catherine Hayes who set a trend in dismemberment in 1726 when she hacked off her husband's head and tossed it into the Thames, to Dennis Nilson who was doing much the same to his victims in 1983; from Marcel Petiot's quicklime pits in Occupied Paris, to New York's infamous Albert 'The Cannibal' Fish. Yet however meticulous and ingenious, none of them got away with it - painstaking investigation and forensics led to the final unmasking of the sadists and psychotics who sought such bloody concealment of their crimes. With black and white photographs.
  • Discover surprising answers in this true-crime treasury of 100 of the most fascinating cases of all time. More than two centuries in the development of modern forensic procedures come to vivid life as everything from handwriting analyses and voiceprints to ballistics, DNA testing and psychological profiles reveal who did it - and, in some startling cases, who didn't do it. Categories: Ballistics; Cause Of Death; Disputed Documents; DNA Typing; Explosives And Fire; Fingerprinting; Forensic Anthropology; Odontology; Psychological Profiling; Identification Of Remains; Serology; Time Of Death; Trace Evidence; Voice Printing. The cases detailed herein range from the 189os to the 1990s. Illustrated with black and white photographs.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • A chance encounter in a fish-’n’-chip shop set Brendan James Murray on the trail of a mystery. Had a gay man been secretly murdered on H.M.A.S Australia during the Second World War? The veteran he spoke to was certain. ‘I knew about it,’ he said. ‘We all did.’ But was the story true? If so, who was the dead man? And why was it so hard to find out? This book is the search for the answer, almost stone-walled by cover-up and silence. In the end, it brings us to the lies that have shrouded our understanding of war, and especially of war at sea. As one of the survivors poignantly says, ‘I want to pass it on to the next generation. What it was like. What it was really like.’
  • On November 25, 1996, in their home in the lakeside community of Eustis, Florida, Rick and Ruth Wendorf were savagely beaten to death with a tire iron. The Wendorfs' new Ford Explorer was stolen, but this was no routine robbery gone bad. This was a crime carried out by one Roderick Ferrell, a sixteen-year-old self-avowed Antichrist. His human sacrifice was a testament to the unique and sinister bond of four brainwashed teens. Heather Wendorf was a straight "A" student, a petite blonde with wide-set brown eyes. Yet she had been heard to wish her parents "off the face of the planet." Heather never dreamed that when she joined her friends for a joyride one fall evening, her wish had already come true. Including exclusive interviews with every living character involved in the case.
  • 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.