First True Crime

Murder in the 19th century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama - even into puppet shows and performing-dog acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other - the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P. D. James and Patricia Cornwell.

Terrifying things are happening to Kay Weden, a 40-something single mom and high school teacher in Salisbury, North Carolina. Despite having no known enemies, Kay's home, car, and peace of mind are under attack throughout 1993. Most chilling of all are the senseless attacks on her only son and the shot fired in the night through a wall of her house, which narrowly misses his head as he sleeps.

In the months before World War II, FDR prepared the country for conflict with Germany and Japan by reshuffling various government agencies to create the Office of Strategic Services - America's first intelligence agency and the direct precursor to the CIA. When he charged William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, a successful Wall Street lawyer and Wilkie Republican, to head up the office, the die was set for some of the most fantastic and fascinating operations the US government has ever conducted.

The Black Widow is a non-fiction true crime novel about the notorious drug smuggler Griselda Blanco. Discover Griselda's story from her childhood on the streets, to becoming an international criminal mastermind. Learn how she partnered with infamous criminals like Pablo Escobar to become one of the most powerful businesswomen in organized crime history - earning billions of dollars in profits along the way. This riveting tale of true crime takes you through all the twists and turns as you uncover secrets that span countries and continents while witnessing first-hand what it takes to become ...

Writer Karen Walker knows more than most about murderers. Her first love went on to become The Bagman, a notorious serial killer now locked away for life in a maximum-security prison. Karen has spent her life running from the weight of having loved him, defended him and, ultimately, leading the police to his door. But now, ten years later, just as she’s about to publish her account of his crimes, a young woman is abducted in horribly familiar circumstances.

We tend to think of serial killers as a modern phenomenon. They are not. The first known serial killers in the United States were the Harpe brothers. Active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Harpe brothers spread a path of terror across more than half a dozen American states. Along their way, they murdered between 39 and 50 men, women, and children. Their crimes, which often included grotesque mutilations, were so vicious that they made other murderers cringe with disgust. This is a true story, and it is as gruesome as any horror tale ever told. This fully documented story ...

Mix in murderous maids, bumbling burglars, and unflinching local heroes and you have True Crime Philadelphia.

On February 24, 1986, 29-year-old newlywed Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in the home she shared with her husband, John. The crime scene suggested a ferocious struggle, and police initially assumed it was a burglary gone awry. Before her death, Sherri had confided to her parents that an ex-girlfriend of John’s, a Los Angeles police officer, had threatened her. The Rasmussens urged the LAPD to investigate the ex-girlfriend, but the original detectives pursued only burglary suspects, and the case went cold.

Meet Roxy.... After years of abuse at the hands of her husband, she's completely lost her mind. Sadly though, turns out her insanity might be her only escape from her nightmarish marriage. With her two young children, Jada and Junior witnessing their mother's torment, Roxy vows to put and end to the abuse, refusing to let history repeat itself through her kids. But will she save herself before it's too late, or will she only find her freedom through a hole in the ground? Find out what happens when a woman's feed up to the top of her skull with the mistreating, the cheatings and the beatings.

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

The gun was never supposed to go off. When a drug dealer assured twenty-nine-year-old Ron Hammer and his brother-in-law that they could make some quick easy money, they were intrigued. He promised them that when a local grocer delivered a bag of money to his store to cash Friday paychecks, they only needed to show him a gun and he’d hand over the bag. But high on meth and dulled by liquor, they ended up in a scuffle with their target, and the gun accidentally fired. And when Phillip Robinson rushed from the shelves he’d been stocking to investigate the commotion at the front of the ...

On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin?

Murder, terrorism, and mass killings were prominent in the news for 2018, and in this true crime anthology, you will find the cases that made international headlines from January to the end of December.

As a tough but smart Italian American kid, Ernest Cuneo played Ivy League football at Columbia University and was in the old Brooklyn Dodgers NFL franchise before becoming a city hall lawyer and “Brain Trust'' aide to President Roosevelt. He was on the payroll of national radio columnist Walter Winchell and mingled with the famous and powerful. But his status as a spy remained a secret, hiding in plain sight. During this time, Cuneo began a close friendship with British spy Ian Fleming and helped inspire Fleming's James Bond novels.

From Forever Morris Publishing's best selling author, Chanel Ivy comes the Her Carnal Games Series. Book 1-3 filled with whirlwind lesbian romance and drama unlike any other. The definition of carnal desire is purely sexual and physical, without any spiritual element. That person's ruling passion is that of carnal love. Emma Cross, a hugely successful CEO, is used to getting what she wants when she wants it with no questions asked and no strings attached. When she meets Mia Blackburn, a thirty-two-year-old divorced mother, she can't help but be drawn to her gorgeous body. Still, Mia's ...

Ex-Minneapolis Police Detective Rembrandt Stone walked away from a career he loved - just the price of being sure he can come home to the wife and daughter he cherishes. But he can’t shake the deep regret over a case left behind. When his mentor dies and leaves Rembrandt with a box of cold cases and a mysterious watch, he finds himself thrust into a world he recognizes - the same world he’s woken from in a cold sweat a hundred times. But is it a dream, or some kind of twisted reality? If he solves the case that plagues him, will it destroy the life he loves?

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas, was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives.

The First Counterspy is the story of spy, counterspy, and an American family unwittingly caught in its web. Until this case, the FBI had never recruited civilian counterspies to catch a Soviet agent. The first two were Larry Haas, a leading aviation engineer at Bell Aviation, and Leona Franey, head librarian at Bell's technical library. The FBI pitted them against Andrei Ivanovich Schevchenko, operating legally as one of the highest Soviet officials in the United States during WWII, and illegally as head of a wide-ranging spy network hidden within the American aviation industry.