The 1970s saw some of the worst mass killings and murders in recent history. Fanatical cult leader Jim Jones was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, while serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy each had dozens of victims. The chilling crimes of murderers including the Yorkshire Ripper - Peter Sutcliffe - and the Hillside Strangler stunned the world when the details were made public. In Murders That Shook the World - 1970s, author Stuart Qualtrough investigates the decade's worst murders and murderers.
The 1970s saw some of the worst mass killings and murders in recent history. Fanatical cult leader Jim Jones was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, while serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy each had dozens of victims. The chilling crimes of murderers including the Yorkshire Ripper – Peter Sutcliffe – and the Hillside Strangler stunned the world when the details were made public. In Murders That Shook the World – 1970s, author Stuart Qualtrough investigates the decade’s worst murders and murderers.
The book is a gripping historical narrative of some of the most horrific murders to occur in Barbados. Going as far back as 1933, it captures close to 80 years of a dark history of Barbados where such homicides as the canefield murders of the 1970s and 1980s had the average Barbadian terrified to walk the streets of Barbados. The book also outlines one of the most tragic events in recent history - the Campus Trendz robbery and murder; it also unravels a dark part of Barbadian history, and then speaks to the typography and motives of homicide.
Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955. Till's death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book is also the basis for HBO's mini-series produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck, Aaron Kaplan, James Lassiter, Jay Brown, Ty Ty Smith, John P. Middleton, Rosanna Grace, David B. Clark, and Alex Foster, which is currently in active development. For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades. Anderson covers the events that led up to this probe in great detail, as well as the investigation itself. This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago over a ten-year period to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.
On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme-- better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry-- and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline's mother, Honorah. When Honorah Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline confessed to the killing. Their motive: a plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honorah's determination to keep them apart. Graham offers a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial and shares dramatic revelations about the fates of the young women after their release from prison.
The story behind the attack that shocked a nation and opened a new chapter in the history of American crime. On July 14th, 1966, Richard Franklin Speck swept through several student nurses’ townhouse like a summer tornado and changed the landscape of American crime. He broke in as his helpless victims slept, bound them one by one, and then stabbed, assaulted, and strangled all eight in a sadistic sexual frenzy. By morning, only one young nurse had miraculously survived. The killer was captured in seventy-two hours; he was successfully prosecuted in an error-free trial that stood up to appellate scrutiny; and the jury needed only forty-nine minutes to return a death verdict. Here is the story of Richard Speck by the prosecutor who put him in prison for life with a brand new introduction by Bill Kunkle, the prosecutor of the infamous John Wayne Gacy Jr. In The Crime of the Century, William J. Martin has teamed up with Dennis L. Breo to re-create the blood-soaked night that made American criminal history, offering fascinating behind-the-scenes descriptions of Speck, his innocent victims, the desperate manhunt and massive investigation, and the trial that led to Speck’s successful conviction.
Fans of Mindhunter and true crime podcasts will devour these chilling stories of serial killers from the American "Golden Age" (1950-2000). With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers. In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. From Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer, our fascination with these classic serial killers seems to grow by the day. American Serial Killers gives true crime junkies what they crave, with both perennial favorites (Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer) and lesser-known cases (Melvin Rees, Harvey Glatman).
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007 called for review and reinvestigation of "violations of criminal civil rights statutes that occurred not later than December 31, 1969, and resulted in a death." The U.S. Attorney General's review observed that date, while examining cases from 1936 (a date not specified in the Till Act) onward. In selecting violations for review, certain "headline" cases were included while others meeting the same criteria were not considered. This first full-length survey of American civil rights "cold cases" examines unsolved racially motivated murders over nearly four decades, beginning in 1934. The author covers all cases reviewed by the federal government to date, as well as a larger number of cases that were ignored without official explanation.
A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.
