'This volume is a collection of seven fascinating articles...This is a revealing book that probes beneath the surface of what one participant calls the 'sheep to shawl' displays of such historic sites. It is a refreshing work well worth reading.'-THE HUDSON VALLEY REGIONAL REVIEW
Join local historian Gregg Seidl on this deliciously wicked romp with New Albanys most heinousthe treacherous, greedy, drunken, insane and plain unfortunate. Catch a whiff of rum and candor when Jacob Ritter sits to write one morning in 1861. His opening line: I have killed my wife because she is a witch. When the trains roar through this New Albany, they are quite likely meeting flesh. The men in the saloons are armed and irritated. And the murderous can be most industrious, like the man who was sentenced to death, sold his body to New Albanys first physician, collected the cash, reneged on the contract and then tried to sell his corpse again. Millions have roamed these broad avenues during New Albanys nearly two hundred years. Most have been honest sorts. Others, well
"Hey Frankie, we need ya." One phone call, five words, and I'm back in the town I swore I'd never return to. Hill Crest Library smelled bad, and it wasn't just the corpse in front of me causing it. The once beautiful building had fallen into disrepair over the past few years. Belinda the new librarian was doing her best to clean it up, but a dead body wasn't helping matters. Dad needs help to solve the murder, so that's what I'm here to do, then get out of town before anyone even knows I'm back The case should be easy for an MBI agent, even a newly minted one like me, but before I can check into the hotel my three reasons for leaving, corner me in the lobby. My life just got a lot more complicated. Homecoming Homicide is a Slow Burn RH series
IBPA-Benjamin Franklin Award, Gold Medal; MIPA-Midwest Publishers Association Award, Finalist; Great Midwest Book Festival, First Runner Up Does it take a monster to catch a monster? As a student, Francis Vincenti asked his mentor, former Chicago PD detective Thomas Aquinas Foster, if it took a monster to catch a monster. Foster, a man with a tortured soul and his own self-righteous brand of justice, didn't have an answer. Now a detective with a string of famous arrests under his belt, Vincenti is known as a cop with an uncanny insight into a killer's psyche. Until the Bricklayer of Albany Park. Obsessed with the brutal slayings, Vincenti studies the murderer and his victims, reconstructing the killings and burials by day and, at night, recreating the murders one by one in his nightmares. He knows the Bricklayer. But not well enough to stop him.
Albany, California--just 1.7 miles square--is one of the smallest cities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Located across the bay from the Golden Gate Bridge, Albany not only has its own captivating past, but it is also tightly linked to the fascinating regional history of the Bay Area: from notorious 19th-century powder company explosions to an early-1900s plague scare and a famous actor accused of murder. This colorful collection of historical vignettes reveals little-known details about Charles MacGregor, the man who built many Albany homes; the origins of the famous Solano Stroll street fair; and how extensive train systems once linked local residents to the rest of the Bay Area. Today, Albany is known as a family-oriented "Urban Village by the Bay." The stories of the city--many obscured by time--reflect its struggle to incorporate and the circuitous path leading to the modern, vibrant community of today.
One night in December 1800, in the distant mission outpost of San Antonio in northern Mexico, Eulalia Californio and her lover Primo plotted the murder of her abusive husband. While the victim was sleeping, Prio and his brother tied a rope around Juan Californio's neck. One of them sat on his body while the other pulled on the rope and the woman, grabbing her husband by the legs, pulled in the opposite direction. After Juan Californio suffocated, Eulalia ran to the mission and reported that her husband had choked while chewing tobacco. Suspicious, the mission priests reported the crime to the authorities in charge of the nearest presidio. For historians, spousal murders are significant for what they reveal about social and family history, in particular the hidden history of day-to-day gender relations, conflicts, crimes, and punishments. Fatal Love examines this phenomenon in the late colonial Spanish Atlantic, focusing on incidents occurring in New Spain (colonial Mexico), New Granada (colonial Colombia), and Spain from the 1740s to the 1820s. In the more than 200 cases consulted, it considers not only the social features of the murders, but also the legal discourses and judicial practices guiding the historical treatment of spousal murders, helping us understand the historical intersection of domestic violence, private and state/church patriarchy, and the law.
In 1882 human remains were discovered at the Sinkings, a lonely campsite near Albany, Western Australia. The surgeon conducting the autopsy claimed they were those of a woman. Why, then, was the victim later identified as Little Jock, a former convict? And why was the murder so brutal, so gruesome? More than a hundred years later, Willa Samson embarks on a long and lonely search to find out. The Sinkings is a story within a story, the tragic historical account of Little Jock’s life embedded within a contemporary narrative of a mother’s guilt and grief. Beautifully crafted, the novel deals with the dilemma confronting parents of an intersexed child and the issue of gender. While a work of fiction, the discovery of Little Jock’s remains and the controversy surrounding their identification are actual events.
This fascinating collection examines murder jurisprudence—the social rules that govern the arrest, trial, and punishment of people accused of murder—in the United States from the colonial period to the present. The contributors show how changing social mores have influenced the application of murder law by highlighting the ways cultural biases like racism, changing ideas about childhood and insanity, and the ameliorative effects of middle class status and paternal imagery both helped and handicapped persons accused of murder. Such famous cases as the Lizzie Borden axe murder and African American activist Abu-Jamal's murder trial are included.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary, unforgettable” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) memoir of redemption and second chances amidst America’s mass incarceration epidemic, from a member of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and beatings from his mother worsened, which sent him on a downward spiral. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to survive, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of nineteen, full of anger and despair. Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next. During his nineteen-year incarceration, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, Senghor discovered literature, meditation, self-examination, and the kindness of others—tools he used to confront the demons of his past, forgive the people who hurt him, and begin atoning for the wrongs he had committed. Upon his release at age thirty-eight, Senghor became an activist and mentor to young men and women facing circumstances like his. His work in the community and the courage to share his story led him to fellowships at the MIT Media Lab and the Kellogg Foundation and invitations to speak at events like TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival. In equal turns, Writing My Wrongs is a page-turning portrait of life in the shadow of poverty, violence, and fear; an unforgettable story of redemption; and a compelling witness to our country’s need for rethinking its approach to crime, prison, and the men and women sent there.
WINNER • 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY Finalist • National Book Award for Nonfiction Best Books of the Year • TIME, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews The Pulitzer Prize-winning history that transforms a single event in 1722 into an unparalleled portrait of early America. In the winter of 1722, on the eve of a major conference between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) and Anglo-American colonists, a pair of colonial fur traders brutally assaulted a Seneca hunter near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, the crime ignited a contest between Native American forms of justice—rooted in community, forgiveness, and reparations—and the colonial ideology of harsh reprisal that called for the accused killers to be executed if found guilty. In Covered with Night, historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the attack and its aftermath, introducing a group of unforgettable individuals—from the slain man’s resilient widow to an Indigenous diplomat known as “Captain Civility” to the scheming governor of Pennsylvania—as she narrates a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations. Taking its title from a Haudenosaunee metaphor for mourning, Covered with Night ultimately urges us to consider Indigenous approaches to grief and condolence, rupture and repair, as we seek new avenues of justice in our own era.