From growing up on the tough streets of Queens NY as a child to struggling with the realities of growing into an adult on Long Island NY, this story is about the trials and tribulations of a young man who tried to do the right thing in life but due to unlucky circumstances, chose a life of crime, drugs and violence. This story chronicles the life of a man who lived in the fast lane for over twenty years and would eventually be led into one of the biggest unsolved multiple murder controversies that our country has ever endured. This is a high paced, gripping story that will not only keep you page turning, but will have you thinking long after you finish the book. W
From growing up on the tough streets of Queens NY as a child to struggling with the realities of growing into an adult on Long Island NY, this story is about the trials and tribulations of a young man who tried to do the right thing in life but due to unlucky circumstances, chose a life of crime, drugs and violence. This story chronicles the life of a man who lived in the fast lane for over twenty years and would eventually be led into one of the biggest unsolved multiple murder controversies that our country has ever endured. This is a high paced, gripping story that will not only keep you page turning, but will have you thinking long after you finish the book. W
A bittersweet coming-of-age story that quietly bores to the essence of friendship and how it survives even as it is destined to change. “So outrageous and so true.... the book rockets along, powered by the high octane of Cohen’s candor [and] off-beat observations.” —The New York Times Book Review Raised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a cluster of interesting friends, but none more interesting than Jamie Drew. Fatherless, reckless, and lower middle class in a place that wasn’t, Jamie possessed such an irresistible insouciance and charm that even the teachers called him Drew-licious. Through the high school years of parties and Cub games and girls, of summer nights on the beach and forbidden forays into the blues bars of Chicago’s notorious South Side, the two formed an inseparable bond. Even after Cohen went to college in New Orleans (Jamie went to Kansas) and then moved to New York, where he had a memorable interlude with the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Jamie remained oddly crucial to his life.
“The memories within the millions of people who experienced Crystal Beach, even just once, will never be lost.” One of Canada’s greatest entertainment centres existed for one hundred years in an isolated little village in one of the southernmost corners of Ontario, just across the lake from Buffalo, New York. Nicknamed “Buffalo’s Coney Island,” the Crystal Beach Amusement Park swarmed with American visitors in its mid-century glory days, and its stories were carried all over the world. A Crystal Beach resident since childhood, Gary Pooler takes readers behind the scenes of a world class amusement park, combining local history, sports journalism, true crime, and North American folklore to create a unique picture of the quirky Crystal Beach community, both in and “out of the park,” through its geographical and social history. These collected stories tell of the life and times in an amusement park resort community—a summer-long carnival, illegal prizefighting in the nearby sand hills, world class entertainers and athletes, featuring the likes of Jesse Owens, an eccentric traveling minstrel, vaudevillians settling in the village, police scandals, bootlegging, and even murder. Pooler chronicles the gradual decline and closure of the amusement park and the effect this had on the village, and illustrates the community’s triumphant renaissance in recent years. Harrowing and nostalgic, Crystal Beach: Out of the Park is a rare and vital historical record and a spirited exploration of Crystal Beach in all of its various shades and stages.
On Gay Pride Day in 1973, someone set the entrance to a French Quarter gay bar on fire. In the terrible inferno that followed, thirty-two people lost their lives, including a third of the local congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, their pastor burning to death halfway out a second-story window as he tried to claw his way to freedom. A mother who'd gone to the bar with her two gay sons died alongside them. A man who'd helped his friend escape first was found dead near the fire escape. Two children waited outside of a movie theater across town for a father and step-father who would never pick them up. During this era of rampant homophobia, several families refused to claim the bodies, and many churches refused to bury the dead. Author Johnny Townsend pored through old records and tracked down survivors of the fire and relatives and friends of those killed to compile this fascinating account of a forgotten moment in gay history.
" Among the darkest corners of Kentucky’s past are the grisly feuds that tore apart the hills of Eastern Kentucky from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. Now, from the tangled threads of conflicting testimony, John Ed Pearce, Kentucky’s best known journalist, weaves engrossing accounts of six of the most notorior accounts to uncover what really happened and why. His story of those days of darkness brings to light new evidence, questions commonly held beliefs about the feuds, and us and long-running feuds—those in Breathitt, Clay Harlan, Perry, Pike, and Rowan counties. What caused the feuds that left Kentucky with its lingering reputation for violence? Who were the feudists, and what forces—social, political, financial—hurled them at each other? Did Big Jim Howard really kill Governor William Goebel? Did Joe Eversole die trying to protect small mountain landowners from ruthless Eastern mineral exploiters? Did the Hatfield-McCoy fight start over a hog? For years, Pearce has interviewed descendants of feuding families and examined skimpy court records and often fictional newspapeputs to rest some of the more popular legends.
The 4th volume of this comprehensive work features hundreds of serial killers from Sacramento to Soviet Russia—plus numerous unsolved cases. The World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the most complete reference guide on the subject, featuring more than 1,600 entries about the lives and crimes of serial killers from around the world. Defined by the FBI as a person who murders three or more people with a hiatus of weeks or months between murders, the serial killer has presented unique and terrifying challenges to have walked among us since the dawn of time—a fact this extensive record makes chillingly clear. The series concludes with Volume Four, T-Z. Entries include the Terminator Anatoly Yuriyovych Onoprienko; Trailside Killer David Joseph Carpenter; Vampire of Sacramento Richard Trenton Chase; and the Voroshilovgrad Maniac Zaven Almazyan; plus the unsolved cases of the Adelaide Child Murders; the Axeman of New Orleans; the Chillicothe Killer; the Dead Women of Juarez; the Korea Frog Boy Murders; and the Volga Maniac.
An ingenious, masterfully written novel, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs is a classic of suspense and storytelling and the basis for the Oscar award-winning horror film starring Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. A serial murderer known only by a grotesquely apt nickname—Buffalo Bill—is stalking particular women. He has a purpose, but no one can fathom it, for the bodies are discovered in different states. Clarice Starling, a young trainee at the F.B.I. Academy, is surprised to be summoned by Jack Crawford, Chief of the Bureau's Behavioral Science section. Her assignment: to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and grisly killer now kept under close watch in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter's insight into the minds of murderers could help track and capture Buffalo Bill. Smart and attractive, Starling is shaken to find herself in a strange, intense relationship with the acutely perceptive Lecter. His cryptic clues—about Buffalo Bill and about her—launch Clarice on a search that every reader will find startling, harrowing, and totally compelling.
Over 800 entries examine the facts, evidence, and leading theories of a variety of unsolved murders, robberies, kidnappings, serial killings, disappearances, and other crimes.
