In September, 2008, Roanoke, Texas, police discovered a house of horrors: poisoned pudding, a bathtub set up for electrocution, a bloody butcher knife, and a hank of chopped-off hair. The worst was yet to come… Days before, seventeen-year-old Jennifer Bailey, her thirteen-year-old brother David, and their friends Paul Henson and Merrilee White had made a gruesome pact: they’d kill their parents, steal their cars and credit cards, and flee to Canada. Paul and Merrilee’s parents thwarted their fates, but Jennifer and David’s mother Susan Bailey wasn’t so lucky. When the devoted mother returned home from work, her two children and their friend Paul took turns stabbing her and slicing her throat. When they were done, they fled in Susan’s car. They made it as far as South Dakota before being arrested. What really led them to make such a despicable pact? The answers would cast a disturbing new light on the way we see the all-American family, our neighbors, our children—and the society that nurtured them. Now an Investigation Discovery TV Special
In September, 2008, Roanoke, Texas, police discovered a house of horrors: poisoned pudding, a bathtub set up for electrocution, a bloody butcher knife, and a hank of chopped-off hair. The worst was yet to come… Days before, seventeen-year-old Jennifer Bailey, her thirteen-year-old brother David, and their friends Paul Henson and Merrilee White had made a gruesome pact: they’d kill their parents, steal their cars and credit cards, and flee to Canada. Paul and Merrilee’s parents thwarted their fates, but Jennifer and David’s mother Susan Bailey wasn’t so lucky. When the devoted mother returned home from work, her two children and their friend Paul took turns stabbing her and slicing her throat. When they were done, they fled in Susan’s car. They made it as far as South Dakota before being arrested. What really led them to make such a despicable pact? The answers would cast a disturbing new light on the way we see the all-American family, our neighbors, our children—and the society that nurtured them. Now an Investigation Discovery TV Special
Winner of the Eisner Prize for Best New Graphic Album Winner of the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for Best Graphic Novel Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Vanity Fair, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection When three daunting dolls intersect with one hapless heroine and a hard-boiled private eye, deception, betrayal, and murder stalk every mean street in… Kill My Mother. Adding to a legendary career that includes a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, Obie Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Cartoonist Society and the Writers Guild of America, Jules Feiffer now presents his first noir graphic novel. Kill My Mother is a loving homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth. Channeling Eisner's The Spirit, along with the likes of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, John Huston, and Billy Wilder, and spiced with the deft humor for which Feiffer is renowned, Kill My Mother centers on five formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and fatally by a has-been, hard-drinking private detective. As our story begins, we meet Annie Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager, jitterbugging in the 1930s. Annie dreams of offing her mother, Elsie, whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon after her husband, a cop, is shot and killed. Now, employed by her husband’s best friend—an over-the-hill and perpetually soused private eye—Elsie finds herself covering up his missteps as she is drawn into a case of a mysterious client, who leads her into a decade-long drama of deception and dual identities sprawling from the Depression era to World War II Hollywood and the jungles of the South Pacific. Along with three femme fatales, an obsessed daughter, and a loner heroine, Kill My Mother features a fighter turned tap dancer, a small-time thug who dreams of being a hit man, a name-dropping cab driver, a communist liquor store owner, and a hunky movie star with a mind-boggling secret. Culminating in a U.S.O. tour on a war-torn Pacific island, this disparate band of old enemies congregate to settle scores. In a drawing style derived from Steve Canyon and The Spirit, Feiffer combines his long-honed skills as cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter to draw us into this seductively menacing world where streets are black with soot and rain, and base motives and betrayal are served on the rocks in bars unsafe to enter. Bluesy, fast-moving, and funny, Kill My Mother is a trip to Hammett-Chandler-Cain Land: a noir-graphic novel like the movies they don’t make anymore.
An inside look into patterns and potential prevention plans for one of the most hotly sensationalized crimes A special kind of horror is reserved for mothers who kill their children. Cases such as those of Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons by driving her car into a lake, and Melissa Drexler, who disposed of her newborn baby in a restroom at her prom, become media sensations. Unfortunately, in addition to these high-profile cases, hundreds of mothers kill their children in the United States each year. The question most often asked is, why? What would drive a mother to kill her own child? Those who work with such cases, whether in clinical psychology, social services, law enforcement or academia, often lack basic understandings about the types of circumstances and patterns which might lead to these tragic deaths, and the social constructions of motherhood which may affect women's actions. These mothers oftentimes defy the myths and media exploitation of them as evil, insane, or lacking moral principles, and they are not a homogenous group. In obvious ways, intervention strategies should differ for a teenager who denies her pregnancy and then kills her newborn and a mother who kills her two toddlers out of mental illness or to further a relationship. A typology is needed to help us to understand the different cases that commonly occur and the patterns they follow in order to make possible more effective prevention plans. Mothers Who Kill Their Children draws on extensive research to identify clear patterns among the cases of women who kill their children, shedding light on why some women commit these acts. The characteristics the authors establish will be helpful in creating more meaningful policies, more targeted intervention strategies, and more knowledgeable evaluations of these cases when they arise.
In this fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection, internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his attention to the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also, with wit and rare tenderness, articulates the great joy of reading their work. In the piece on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Tóibín reveals an artist "alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish" and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, or Thomas Mann and his children, or J.M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children.The majority of these pieces were previously published in the Londron Review of Books, the New York Review Review of Books, and the Dublin Review. Three of the thirteen pieces have never appeared before.
The true story of a Texas cop and wife-killer—and the unbelievable perversions of justice that almost set him free. On July 6th, 2002, schoolteacher Virginia “Viki” Lozano, mother of an eleven-month-old and wife of a Denton, Texas, police officer, died from a gunshot wound the day after her sixteenth wedding anniversary. Her husband, Bobby, claimed that she must have been cleaning his gun and it went off. In bed. In the middle of the night. While she was lying down. Despite his being a known lothario and serial adulterer, authorities still wondered: Could Bobby Lozano, one of their own, really have committed such a crime? In a startling twist, Viki’s mother not only stood by her son-in-law, but continued to share a home with him, even after he was indicted for the murder of her own daughter. Even more shocking, the indictment was vacated when the DA, in a sworn affidavit, said that the medical examiner had changed his mind and ruled the death a suicide. Case closed. For six long years the case languished in limbo...until one reporter discovered that the DA’s affidavit was full of lies, and her exposé blew the lid off the case. The fight to avenge Viki’s brutal murder was just beginning.
When recently-orphaned Barnaby Gaunt is sent to stay with his uncle on a beautiful remote island off the coast of Canada, he is all set to have the perfect summer holiday. Except for one small problem: his uncle is trying to kill him. Heir to a ten-million-dollar fortune, Barnaby tries to tell everyone and anyone that his uncle is after his inheritance, but no one will believe him. That is, until he tells the only other child on the island, Chrissie, who concludes that there is only one way to stop his demonic uncle: Barnaby will just have to kill him first. With the unexpected help of One-Ear, the aged cougar who has tormented the island for years, Chrissie and Barnaby hatch a fool-proof plan. Playful, dark and witty, Let's Kill Uncle is a surprising tale of two ordinary children who conspire to execute an extraordinary murder - and get away with it.
Lauri Taylor was just your average suburban PTA mom and marketing exec. Then tragedy struck. When her mother is found dead in Mexico, Lauri finds herself embarking on a journey to uncover the identity of her mother’s murderer—but what she finds isn’t what she was expecting. With the help of famed FBI profiler Candice DeLong, Lauri works to unearth the secrets buried in her mother’s death. Key evidence comes to light—and a shocking revelation unfolds. Lauri Taylor’s memoir The Accidental Truth: What My Mother’s Murder Investigation Taught Me About Life is a profound narrative of true crime, family bonds, and the grief of sudden death. Achingly intimate, The Accidental Truth chronicles Lauri’s personal journey as she empowers herself with truth, finds the courage and compassion to forgive herself and her mother, and eventually learns to let go.
"Getting the job done" for one single mom takes on a whole new meaning in Finlay Donovan is Killing It. A USA Today bestseller! One of Suspense Magazine's "Best Thrillers of 2021" One of New York Public Library's Best Books of 2021 Nominated for the Left Coast Crime 2022 Lefty Award for the Best Humorous Mystery “Finlay Donovan is irresistible!”—Janet Evanovich Finlay Donovan is killing it . . . except, she’s really not. She’s a stressed-out single-mom of two and struggling novelist, Finlay’s life is in chaos: the new book she promised her literary agent isn’t written, her ex-husband fired the nanny without telling her, and this morning she had to send her four-year-old to school with hair duct-taped to her head after an incident with scissors. When Finlay is overheard discussing the plot of her new suspense novel with her agent over lunch, she’s mistaken for a contract killer, and inadvertently accepts an offer to dispose of a problem husband in order to make ends meet . . . Soon, Finlay discovers that crime in real life is a lot more difficult than its fictional counterpart, as she becomes tangled in a real-life murder investigation. Fast-paced, deliciously witty, and wholeheartedly authentic in depicting the frustrations and triumphs of motherhood in all its messiness, hilarity, and heartfelt moments, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It is the first in a brilliant new series from YA Edgar Award nominee Elle Cosimano.
