The Library

The Grim Sleeper

Christine Pelisek

An investigative reporter describes how she uncovered the alleged identity of a long-time serial killer who has been murdering women in South Central Los Angeles since the 1980s.

"Discover the most fascinating and historic murders in Staten Island's past"-- "Infamous and lesser-known murders from Staten Island"--

Blood money

Clive Small

Organised crime in Australia is more reckless & more violent than ever before. Controlled by a new wave of gangland bosses, it has broken old taboos & formed alliances that would have once been unthinkable. So who now controls the ark underbelly of Australia's criminal world. This is a world where terrorism and organised crime have merged.

Tangled vines

Frances Dinkelspiel

A deliberately set fire in the Wines Central warehouse destroyed 4.5 million bottles and some of the world's most sought-after wines. Frances Dinkelspiel peels back the casually elegant veneer of California's wine regions to show obsession, greed and violence lying beneath.

Lindbergh

Noel Behn

It is known as the crime of the century - the infamous kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1932. But nearly six decades after Bruno Richard Hauptmann died in the electric chair, questions that even then troubled many have become more insistent. At the time, no less a figure than New Jersey's governor, Harold Hoffman, gambled away his public reputation in a heroic effort to prove Hauptmann's innocence. Today, more puzzling questions and possibilities have surfaced. Lindbergh: The Crime is a book that gets to the heart of the mystery, a grand piecing together of this tangled and many-faceted case that will startle all with its central revelation. Best-selling author Noel Behn has spent eight years researching and investigating the case. Among the new evidence he has uncovered is the personal account of a confidant to Governor Hoffman who maintained that while Hauptmann awaited execution on death row, employees of the Lindbergh and Morrow households provided the governor with affidavits that established the condemned man's innocence by stating how the child was killed and by whom. The governor was reluctant to go public with the explosive disclosures until he could find additional proof. His efforts to do so were Herculean - and futile. Behn picks up the thread of the governor's investigation. Revisiting old evidence and discovering new details, the author builds a compelling, plausible scenario that puts the child's murderer closer to the Lindbergh household than anyone has heretofore dared to suggest. Behn shows how Lindbergh took charge of and possibly manipulated the investigation from the very start; tells how Lindbergh may have paved theway for extortionists to intercept the ransom payment; demonstrates that if there was a case at all for Hauptmann's involvement, it was only as an extortionist; re-examines the theory that the first ransom note and the next twelve notes were written by different people.

In His Garden

Leo Damore

East of Hyannisport lie some of Cape Cod's most romantic seaside towns. But for four especially pretty, outgoing young women, a dream vacation turned into a nightmare of sexual torture, dismemberment, and death. Investigative reporter Leo Damore has written a gripping and suspenseful account of these murders that reads like outstanding fiction. Here is the whole terrifying true story of the search for the missing girls, the clues that implicated one good-looking young man in every disappearance ... and all that happened in the secret bloodcurdling place that a serial killer called "his garden."

Starvation Heights

Gregg Olsen

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, came to a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary "fasting treatment" of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters. But within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women were emaciated shadows of their former selves, waiting for death. They were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed who would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions. As their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard's accounts, Dora Williamson sent a last desperate plea to a friend in Australia, begging her to save them from the brutal treatments and lonely isolation of Starvation Heights.In this true story--a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights--Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Court TV Presents: Murder in Room 103

Harriet Ryan

Exchange student Jamie Penich left her small Pennsylvania hometown to see the world, but her journey ended with a brutal attack in a shabby motel room in Seoul, South Korea, where the raven-haired 21-year-old was found naked and stomped to death. Investigators zeroed in on soldiers, turning out barracks and trolling seedy bars for the GIs who partied with Jamie in the hours leading up to her death. But every lead produced only new mysteries. There were unbreakable alibis, a roommate who claimed she had slept through the crime, and lab tests that hinted at a secret lover. The investigation seemed destined for the cold case file until a high-powered American senator pressed for answers. Soon, a greenhorn detective settled on a shocking new suspect, a pretty blonde exchange student named Kenzi Snider. During an interrogation, the teenager confessed to killing Jamie during a lesbian encounter...but it was what happened next that was truly surprising.What really happened in Room 103?

Rat Bastards

John "red" Shea

John "Red" Shea, 40, was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob run, led by James "Whitey" Bulger. An ice–cold enforcer with a red–hot temper, Shea was a legend among his peers in the 1990s South Boston, as much as John Gotti, Bugsy Siegel, and Al Capone were in their time and place. When the actor and producer Mark Wahlberg, raised in nearby Dorchester, learned of a script based on Shea's life circulating in Hollywood, he immediately committed to playing the gangster on screen. A major feature film project is now in development. From the age of thirteen, when he started robbing delivery trucks, to the age of twenty–seven, when he began serving a twelve–year federal sentence for drug trafficking, Shea was a portrait in American crime – a bantam–weight, red–headed terror, brutal with his fists and deadly with a lead pipe, a baseball bat, or a knife. At fifteen he was selling marijuana . At seventeen he was handling Bulger's cocaine. At eighteen he was loan sharking and laundering Bulger's money. At twenty, initiated into Bulger's inner circle at the point of an Uzi, he was running a multimillion–dollar narcotics operation for his mentor. RAT BASTARDS was the first–ever, firsthand account of mob life that wasn't told by a rat. Red Shea did his crime, then did his time––and never informed, unlike Henry Hill of Wiseguy, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano of Underboss, and so many others. Holding fast to the code of his upbringing, he remained a man of honor.

Best Copy Available

Jay Baron Nicorvo

Summary:"In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to the barracks at Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At that time her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo received a photocopy of the criminal investigation report generated from that brutal night, which offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions. About class and race. Sex and violence. Crime and punishment. Low and high culture. Sanity, madness, and masculinity. And the facsimile nature of the truth. As various American men-some real, some imagined, all prone to violence-move in and then out of their hardscrabble lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year. From the Jersey Shore to the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Midwest, Best Copy Available tells a harrowing and sometimes hilarious American story of how the love of a single mother helped end an awful cycle of abuse and abandonment. Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternative version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads can grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may realize that the most courageous show of strength is not the determined use of force. It's knowing when and how to ask for help"-- Provided by publisher

Gangbusters

Michael Stone

An elite homicide investigation unit takes on one of the most savage and destructive gangs in New York City history in this gritty true-crime narrative.The investigation into the late-night murder of a college student on the West Side Highway leads to the Wild Cowboys, a group of young men who for years terrorized Upper Manhattan and the Bronx while running a $30,000-a-day drug business. What follows is a tale of dogged pursuit that offers a fascinating inside look at the workings of a complex police investigation, and a satisfying account of how a city took back its streets.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Deadly lessons

Ken Englade

A husband’s murder leads to a trial that stunned a nation, and a killer whose motive is the most shocking of all. Pam and Gregg Smart lived a seemingly storybook existence, the newlyweds very much in love. All of this was shattered when Gregg was senselessly shot to death in 1990. In the trial that followed, staggering revelations came out as to the motive behind the killing: Pam Smart had seduced a fifteen-year-old boy into murdering her husband. Master of true crime Ken Englade paints a portrait of a trial that gripped the nation in its scintillating tale of sex and murder. At its center is a woman who never quite grew up, and the reason why she had her husband murdered is the most stunning twist.