Profiles the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, presents new evidence that points the finger of suspicion to Martha's neighbors, and discusses how the police mishandled the case and may have prevented the crime from being solved.
A historical thriller based on the real-life 1941 robbery of a Kentucky golf club that ended in the murder of a young champion golfer and her mother. Today, the name Marion Miley is largely unrecognizable, but in the fall of 1941, she was an internationally renowned golf champion, winning every leading women’s tournament except the elusive national title. This unassuming twenty-seven-year-old woman was beloved by all she met, including celebrities like jazz crooner Bing Crosby. With ambitions to become a doctor, it seemed Marion Miley was headed for greatness. But on September 28, 1941, six gunshots broke through the early morning stillness of the Lexington Country Club. Marion had been brutally murdered. News of her death spread quickly, headlining major papers such as the New York Times. Support flooded in, spurring police in the hunt for her killers. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor less than two months later would redirect public attention and sweep Marion's story to a forgotten corner of time?until now. The Murder of Marion Miley recounts the ensuing manhunt and trial, exploring the impact of class, family, and opportunity in a world where steely determination is juxtaposed with callous murderous intent. As the narrative voice oscillates between Marion’s father, her best friend, and one of her killers, an ever-present specter of what could have been?not just for Marion, but for all those affected by her tragic death?is conjured. Drawing on intensive research typical of the true crime genre, Beverly Bell produces a passionate homage to one of the greatest golfers of the early twentieth century. Praise for The Murder of Marion Miley “Don’t let Beverly Bell fool you: she must have been reporting live in 1941 from the scene of Lexington’s most notorious crime. Bell writes with a golden erudition and preternatural imagination that keep the wide-eyed reader up all night—think Truman Capote.” —Patty Friedmann, author of Where Do They All Come From? “In The Murder of Marion Miley, author Beverly Bell takes literary crime-writing to new heights. Unearthing the remains of an actual 80-year-old crime—the murder of a world-class golfer in her prime—Bell creates a lyrical, page-turning novel about chance, class, and the strains of family bonds. Set in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region in the weeks before and after Pearl Harbor, Bell’s book recounts the crime while plunging us into the minds of an assortment of American characters of the 1940s. From its riveting opening scene, The Murder of Marion Miley is story-telling excellence.” —Neil Chethik, author of FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms With the Deaths of Their Dads
Who would have thought golf could be such a deadly game? When two players stumble upon a dead body in a bunker on the thirteenth hole of their favourite golf club, their discovery is about to set in motion a series of events that will lay bare some of the less savoury aspects of the human condition. Inspector Leslie Dykeman and the irascible Sergeant Stanley Shapes find themselves engaged on a case that will drive them to distraction as they begin to investigate the murder of a man who seems, at first sight, to have had no enemies. But first sight, they will discover, can be a deceptive thing, especially when deceit, greed, envy and desperation are at work. The Golf Club Murder is the fifth book in a classic murder mystery series set in the Oxfordshire town of Banbury in the early 1960s by British author Ben Westerham. Purchase your copy now, curl up on a sofa and lose yourself in a classic murder mystery that comes complete with a touch of romance and a streak of humour.
Mandy Carter, the pretty 18-year-old cart girl, is found buried in a sand trap at an upscale country club in New England. Who clubbed her to death ... and why? That's the question haunting Detective Abby Sanders, whose own teenage daughter looks so much like the victim they could have been sisters. A former competitive golfer herself, Abby quickly lets the country club crowd know that no one is above suspicion.
On October 30, 1975, fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley headed home from Halloween Eve antics with her Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbors Tommy and Michael Skakel. She never made it. Her brutal murder with a golf club in her own backyard made national headlines. But for years no one was arrested, despite troubling clues pointing to the Skakels, a rich and powerful family related to the Kennedys. After the police department's first unsuccessful attempts to catch the killer, the case lay dormant, and the culprit remained free. Enter Leonard Levitt. In 1982, the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time newspapers asked investigative reporter Levitt to look into the murder and the undying rumors of a cover-up. Levitt soon uncovered groundbreaking information about how the police had bungled the investigation, and he learned that Tommy and Michael had lied about their activities on the night of the murder. But Levitt's articles about his findings -- and the haunting questions they raised -- almost never saw the light of day. For years, Levitt's superiors mysteriously refused to publish the stories. Convinced that the Moxley family deserved the peace and closure they had so long been denied, Levitt fought desperately to keep his discoveries alive. Finally, after Levitt's first article appeared, the case was reopened. Enter Frank Garr. As the newly appointed investigator on the Moxley case, the seasoned Greenwich detective doggedly pursued unexplored leads and became increasingly convinced that for over a decade, his colleagues had been pursuing the wrong suspects. At first mistrustful of one another, as reporters and detectives often are, Levitt and Garr became friends, encouraging each other in their quest for the truth as the obstacles against them piled up. In 2002, more than twenty-five years after Moxley's death, a shocked world watched as Michael Skakel was convicted of the murder, thanks largely to the evidence Garr alone had marshaled against him. Now, for the first time, Leonard Levitt tells the amazing true story of Garr's fight to solve the case and of how their friendship with each other, and with Martha Moxley's mother, Dorthy, sustained them over the years. A riveting, suspenseful drama that unfolds like a mystery novel, this incredible memoir also reveals how a police officer and a reporter refused to give up, and how they helped justice to prevail, against all odds.
The New York Times bestseller – now in paperback, with a new afterword “A must-read for those who care about justice and integrity in our public institutions.” —Alan M. Dershowitz, Esq. The Definitive Story of One of the Most Infamous Murders of the Twentieth Century and the Heartbreaking Miscarriage of Justice That Followed On Halloween, 1975, fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley’s body was found brutally murdered outside her home in swanky Greenwich, Connecticut. Twenty-seven years after her death, the State of Connecticut spent some $25 million to convict her friend and neighbor, Michael Skakel, of the murder. The trial ignited a media firestorm that transfixed the nation. Now Skakel’s cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., solves the baffling whodunit and clears Michael Skakel’s name. In this revised edition, which includes developments following the Connecticut Supreme Court decision, Kennedy chronicles how Skakel was railroaded amidst a media frenzy and a colorful cast of characters—from a crooked cop and a narcissistic defense attorney to a parade of perjuring witnesses.
The golfing eco-estate on the KwaZulu-Natal coast seems idyllic, with its diplomatic-level security, smarmy country club, and resort-style pools and restaurants. But beneath the luxurious and well-manicured surface, corruption, lechery, evil, and debauchery seethe. It is in this rotten stew that a series of seemingly random and coincidental events leads to the murder of one of the estate's most respected residents: advocate Norman Ware. As Detective De Villiers sifts through the witnesses and suspects--a philandering plastic surgeon, a harvester of body parts, a property tycoon, a serial killer with a penchant for teenage girls, a recluse with ophidiophobia, and a cross-dressing homophobe--the pillars of lies and deceit upon which the exclusive estate residents' lives have been built start collapsing. Clever and macabre, this South African novel plays with the ideas of fate and of action and consequence.
With his dying breath, Bobby Lowell begs Ellison Russell, "Tell her I love her." Unable to refuse, Ellison struggles to find the girl the murdered boy loved. Too bad an epically bad blind date, a vindictive graffiti artist, and multiple trips to the emergency room keep getting in the way. Worse, a killer has Ellison in his sights, her newly rebellious daughter is missing, and there's yet another body in her hostas. Mother won't be pleased. Now Ellison must track down not one but two runaway teenagers, keep her promise to Bobby, and elude the killer-all before her next charity gala committee meeting.
Monsieur Renauld dies on a golf course just days after sending a plea for help to detective Poirot. Since Renauld possessed a plundered fortune, a scorned wife, a mistress, and an estranged son, there is no lack of suspects. It's up to Poirot to put the police onto the culprit before more murders occur.
From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.