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Author: Keven McQueen
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9781931672498
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor Keven McQueen relates tales of true crime from Kentucky history, including the story of the abuse and murder of Mary Magdalene Pitts, a three-year-old girl from Greenup County who was killed by her father and a housekeeper.
Author: Keven McQueen
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2019-10-07
Total Pages: 135
ISBN-13: 1614234388
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis illustrated compendium by the author of Horror in the Heartland reveals macabre tales of death, hauntings and unexplained events in Kentucky’s past. Author Keven McQueen specializes in uncovering local legends, strange-but-true incidents, and outright hoaxes that newspapers of the past found fit to print. In his Kentucky Book of the Dead, McQueen resurrects creepy stories of life and death in the Bluegrass State, each presented with commentary as well as line drawing by illustrator Kyle McQueen. In these pages, readers will discover the Grim Reaper's creative side, meet the disgusting ghosts of Louisville, and find out more than they to know about old-fashioned embalming techniques. Kentucky Book of the Dead is by turns spine-tingling and entertaining, engrossing and just plain gross
Author: William Van Meter
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2018-01-02
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781416538691
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA shocking investigation into a true crime that tore a town apart—the violent murder of a young coed in Kentucky, the innocent boy who was jailed for the crime, and a small Southern community filled with haunting, unforgettable characters. Katie Autry was a foster child from a tiny village in Kentucky; a little awkward, but always with the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, majoring in the dental program. She worked days at the smoothie shop, nights at the local strip club, and fell in love with a football player who wouldn’t date her. On the morning of May 4, 2003, Katie Autry was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hairspray, and set on fire in her own dormitory room. In telling the true story of this shocking crime, William Van Meter describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, at the scene; and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and a history of domestic abuse, is held by an ever-changing confession. The friends of the suspects and the foster and birth families of the victim form complex and warring social nets that are cast across town. And a small southern community, populated by eccentrics of every socioeconomic class, from dirt-poor to millionaire, responds to the horror. With the keen eye of a talented young journalist returning to his southern roots, Van Meter paints a vivid portrait of the town, the characters who fill it, and the simmering class conflicts that made an injustice like this not only possible, but inevitable. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Bluegrass is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes.
Author: David Dominé
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-10-05
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 1643138642
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis true crime saga—with an eccentric Southern backdrop—introduces the reader to the story of a murder in a crumbling Louisville mansion and the decades of secrets and corruption that live within the old house’s walls. On June 18, 2010, police discover a body buried in the wine cellar of a Victorian mansion in Old Louisville. James Carroll, shot and stabbed the year before, has lain for 7 months in a plastic storage bin—his temporary coffin. Homeowner Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend, Joseph Banis, point the finger at each other in what locals dub The Pink Triangle Murder. On the surface, this killing appears to be a crime of passion, a sordid love tryst gone wrong in a creepy old house. But as author David Dominé sits in on the trials, a deeper story emerges: the struggle between hope for a better future on the one hand and the privilege and power of the status quo on the other. As the court testimony devolves into he-said/he-said contradictions, David draws on the confidences of neighbors, drag queens, and other acquaintances within the city's vibrant LGBTQ community to piece together the details of the case. While uncovering the many past lives of the mansion itself, he enters a murky underworld of gossip, neighborhood scandal, and intrigue.
Author: Robert G. Lawson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2017-11-24
Total Pages: 142
ISBN-13: 0813174643
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn October 26, 1961, after an evening of studying with friends on the campus of Transylvania University, nineteen-year-old student Betty Gail Brown got into her car around midnight—presumably headed for home. But she would never arrive. Three hours later, Brown was found dead in a driveway near the center of campus, strangled to death with her own brassiere. Kentuckians from across the state became engrossed in the proceedings as lead after lead went nowhere. Four years later, the police investigation completely stalled. In 1965, a drifter named Alex Arnold Jr. confessed to the killing while in jail on other charges in Oregon. Arnold was brought to Lexington, indicted for the murder of Betty Gail Brown, and put on trial, where he entered a plea of not guilty. Robert G. Lawson was a young attorney at a local firm when a senior member asked him to help defend Arnold, and he offers a meticulous record of the case in Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? During the trial, the courtroom was packed daily, but witnesses failed to produce any concrete evidence. Arnold was an alcoholic whose memory was unreliable, and his confused, inconsistent answers to questions about the night of the homicide did not add up. Since the trial, new leads have come and gone, but Betty Gail Brown's murder remains unsolved. A written transcript of the court proceedings does not exist; and thus Lawson, drawing upon police and court records, newspaper articles, personal files, and his own notes, provides an invaluable record of one of Kentucky's most famous cold cases.
Author: Gary P. West
Publisher: Acclaim Press
Published: 2020-03-20
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9781948901499
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn January 13, 1975, the enterprising community of Elizabethtown, Kentucky (a few miles from Fort Knox and the gold vault) was rocked with the news that one of their own, Peggy Rhodes--beloved housewife, mother, and grandmother--was killed when a bomb exploded in the family barn. An hour south along I-65 lies Bowling Green, a city known for small town values, a burgeoning industrial complex, the expanding Western Kentucky University campus, and as "Home of the Corvette". However, the city was also just one generation removed from earning the nickname "Little Chicago," a regional hotbed for car thefts, bootlegging, gambling, prostitution--and worse still--bombings and horrific murders. Murder on Youngers Creek Road is the true story of a murder-for-hire gone wrong that involves a well-known automobile dealer, two hit men hired to kill him, and a pair of high-profile business partners. The product of more than two years of research and interviews and writing, this book details one of the most complex murders of the decade and how it brought together two Kentucky towns in an unflattering way. It is a "tale of two cities" mired in the muck of greed, violence and murder, and of local efforts to bring the guilty parties to justice. In the end, both the innocent and the guilty would lose their lives. In the beginning investigators were baffled. Why would anyone want to kill a 57-year-old woman, who by all appearances did her part in community activities, loved her family and enjoyed her time playing bridge with friends? Two weeks into the New Year of 1975, a horrific explosion ripped through the body of Peggy Rhodes and her pet horse, Tony. Who could possibly have wanted her dead? On a cold dark January night, a sudden blast interrupted the stillness of freshly fallen snow and with it, the lives of several Kentucky families were changed forever....
Author: Darcy O'Brien
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-07-01
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1497658535
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn Edgar Award–winning author’s true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed. Kentucky never deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” more than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor. Three men had breached Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with the fortune he had stashed away over his lifetime. The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Barkers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. The cash came in handy soon after when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated and corrupt Lester Burns, into representing them. Full of colorful characters and desperate deeds, A Dark and Bloody Ground is a “first-rate” true crime chronicle from the author of Murder in Little Egypt (Kirkus Reviews). “An arresting look into the troubled psyches of these criminals and into the depressed Kentucky economy that became fertile territory for narcotics dealers, theft rings and bootleggers.” —Publishers Weekly “The smell of wet, coal-laden earth, white lightning, and cocaine-driven sweat arises from these marvelously atmospheric—and compelling—pages.” —Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating portrait of the mountain way of life and thought that forged the lives of these criminals.” —Library Journal
Author: Keven McQueen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2021-07-20
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13: 0253057493
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKentucky—land of bluegrass, horse racing, bourbon, and . . . murder. In Murder in Old Kentucky: True Crime Stories from the Bluegrass, Keven McQueen recounts dark and disturbing tales from the pages of Kentucky history, including the 1825 murder of Col. Solomon Sharp—a sordid affair that inspired Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Penn Warren—and the 1881 Ashland Tragedy, a heartbreaking murder of three innocent teenagers. This revised and expanded edition includes the story of a family terrorized by an arsonist who massacred eleven of their members and burned the property of even more, the tale of a husband and wife found shot in each other's arms with a life-sized photo of another man between them, and many more deaths that made headlines. Meticulously researched and written with McQueen's trademark humor, Murder in Old Kentucky will captivate any fan of true crime or Kentucky history.
Author: Richard M. Levine
Publisher: Signet Book
Published: 1983-11
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9780451155030
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Keven McQueen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-06-16
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0253029120
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA spooky history of the American Midwest—from grave robbers to ghost sightings and more—by the author of Creepy California. Most people think of the American Midwest as a place of wheat fields and family farms; cozy small towns and wholesome communities. But there’s more to the story of America’s Heartland—a dark history of strange tales and unsettling facts hidden just beneath its quaint pastoral image. In Horror in the Heartland, historian Keven McQueen offers a guided tour of terrible crimes and eccentric characters; haunted houses and murder-suicides; mad doctors, body snatchers, and pranks gone comically—and tragically—wrong. From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the region’s untold stories and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature.
