Search Results: True Crime from I Cannot Live Without Books

At Any Cost: A Father's Betrayal, A Wife's Murder, and a Ten-Year War for Justice by Rebecca Rosenberg and Selim Algar
Wealthy, beautiful, and brilliant, Shele Danishefsky had fulfillment at her fingertips. Having conquered Wall Street, she was eager to build a family with her much younger husband, promising Ivy League graduate Rod Colvin. But when his hidden vices surfaced, marital harmony gave way to a merciless divorce. Rod had long depended on Shele's income to fund his tastes for high-stakes backgammon and infidelity -- and she finally vowed to sever him from her will. In late December 2009, Shele made an appointment with her lawyer to block him from her millions. She would never make it to that meeting.
Two days later, on New Year's Eve, Shele was found dead in the bathtub of her Upper West Side apartment. Police ruled it an accident, and Shele's deeply Orthodox Jewish family quickly buried her without an autopsy, on religious grounds. Rod had a clear path to his ex-wife's fortune -- but… Read More

The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan
Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During her Cape Cod summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter -- the gentle, handsome handyman at the motel -- took her and her sister on adventures in his truck, sometimes to his "secret garden" in the Truro woods. He was one of the few kind, understanding adults in her life.
But there was one thing she didn't know: the babysitter was a serial killer.
Some of his victims were buried -- in pieces-- right there, in his garden in the woods. Though Tony Costa's gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never connected her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer until decades later.
Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case. Now she and co-writer Jennifer Jordan reveal the unimaginable story of a charming but brutal psychopath through… Read More

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham
In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period -- and through to today.
Drawing on an extensive database collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been… Read More

Death on the Devil's Teeth: The Strange Murder That Shocked Suburban New Jersey by Jesse P. Pollack & Mark Moran
As Springfield residents decorated for Halloween in September 1972, the crime rate in the quiet, affluent township was at its lowest in years. That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the local woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police cover-up ran rampant, and the case went unsolved, along with the murders of several other young women. Now, four decades after Jeannette DePalm'as tragic death, authors Jesse P. Pollack and Mark Moran present the definitive account of this shocking cold case.
History Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 2nd Printing, 2015

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson tells the spellbinding true story of two men, an architect and a serial killer, whose fates were linked by the greatest fair in American history: The Chicago World's Fair of 1893, nicknamed "The White City."
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York, and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds -- a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham… Read More

Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the maximum-security Jefferson City Penitentiary in Missouri, stuffed himself into a bread-filled metal box bound for the prison farm workers. He became the first man to successfully escape in the institution's 131-year history. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man drifted through the American South, down into Mexico, and then to Los Angeles. His dream was to become a director of porn films.
On February 1, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, two garbage men were crushed to death by the hydraulic press of their antiquated truck. The exclusively African American workforce, which labored for long hours with little pay, went on strike. A month later, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. joined their cause. Exhausted by constant death threats and the toll of his punishing schedule, the Nobel laureate was at the nadir… Read More

Helltown: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod by Casey Sherman
1969: The hippie scene is vibrant in Provincetown, Massachusetts... and Tony Costa is at the center of it all. To a certain group of smitten young women, he is known as Sire -- the leader of their counter-culture movement, the charming man who speaks eloquently and hands out hallucinogenic drugs like candy. But beneath his benign persona lies uncontrollable rage that threatens to break loose at any moment. Tony Costa is the most dangerous man on Cape Cod, and no one who crosses his path is safe.
When young women begin to disappear, Costa's natural charisma and good looks initially protect him from suspicion. But as the bodies are discovered, the police close in on him as the key suspect. Meanwhile, up-and-coming local writers Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer are locked in a desperate race to secure their legacies as great literary icons -- and they both set their sights on Tony Costa and the hippie culture he embodies as their… Read More

Hunting the Unabomber: The FBI, Ted Kaczynski, and the Capture of America's Most Notorious Domestic Terrorist by Lis Wiehl with Lisa Pulitzer
On April 3, 1996, a team of FBI agents closed in on an isolated cabin in remote Montana, marking the end of the longest and most expensive investigation in FBI history. The cabin's lone inhabitant was a former mathematics prodigy and wunderkind professor who had abandoned society decades earlier. Few people knew his name, Theodore Kaczynski, but everyone knew the mayhem and death associated with his nickname: the Unabomber.
For two decades, Kaczynski had masterminded a campaign of random terror, killing and maiming innocent people through bombs sent in untraceable packages. The FBI task force charged with finding the perpetrator of these horrifying crimes grew to 150 people. yet his identity remained a maddening mystery. Then, in 1995, a "manifesto" from the Unabomber was published in the New York Times and Washington Post, resulting in a cascade of tips --… Read More

Murder in the Heartland, Book 3 by Harry Spiller
In a place where murder isn't supposed to happen -- rural Missouri and Southern Illinois -- deputy sheriff and investigator Harry Spiller learned the hard reality: murder is all around us. It doesn't matter whether you live in a big city or a small county with farms and churches -- murder is swift and can happen to anyone, anywhere, and any time. All too often, victims fall prey in places we think are safe to raise our families, where we take walks on hot summer nights, where our children play in the park or yard without concern, and where we leave our doors unlocked at night.
Murder in the Heartland, Book 3 tells the stories of innocent victims in these seemingly innocent places. From his research and investigations of twelve murder cases, Spiller recounts the gruesome details of a homicidal nurse, a murder instigated by the devil, and the "death of the machine." Each account includes chilling mug shots, crime scene photos, and interviews from the… Read More

Murder in the Heartland, Book #2 by Harry Spiller
In a place where murder isn't supposed to happen -- rural Missouri -- deputy sheriff and investigator Harry Spiller learned the hard reality: murder is all around us. It doesn't matter whether you live in a big city or a small county with farms and churches -- murder is swift and can happen to anyone, anywhere, and any time. All too often, victims fall prey in places we think are safe to raise our families, where we take walks on hot summer nights, where our children play in the park or yard without concern, and where we leave our doors unlocked at night.
Murder in the Heartland, Book 2 tells the stories of innocent victims in these seemingly innocent places. From his research and investigations of ten murder cases, Spiller recounts the gruesome details of a fraternity hazing gone deadly, teen killings, and even murders by those living and working with the victims.
As much as we like to think we're safe, murder can happen even in rural America -- and… Read More

Murder in the Heartland, Book #1 by Harry Spiller
In a place where murder isn't supposed to happen -- Southern Illinois -- deputy sheriff and investigator Harry Spiller learned the hard reality: murder is all around us. It doesn't matter whether you live in a big city or a small county with farms and churches -- murder is swift and can happen to anyone, anywhere, and any time. All too often, victims fall prey in places we think are safe to raise our families, where we take walks on hot summer nights, where our children play in the park or yard without concern, and where we leave our doors unlocked at night.
Murder in the Heartland tells the stories of innocent victims in these seemingly innocent place. From his research and investigations of twenty murder cases, Spiller recounts the gruesome details of an axe murder, a hitchhiking incident, serial killings, and even a victim buried within the concrete floors of her own basement.
As much as we like to think we're safe, murder can happen even in rural… Read More

The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP by Alex Tresniowski
In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small-town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective's first murder case, and the specifics of the investigation and daring stink operation that caught the killer are captured in all their rich detail for the first time.
Occurring exactly halfway between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the formal beginning of the civil rights movement in 1954, the ruthless murder and its highly covered investigation sit at the historic intersection of sweeping national forces -- religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal forensics, and racial violence of Jim Crow America.
History and true crime collide in this sensational murder mystery featuring characters as complex and colorful as those found in the best psychological… Read More

True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy by Kati Marton
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES.
In a plot worthy of a John Le Carre, TRUE BELIEVER transports the reader to a turbulent era in which fascism and Communism are on the rise and America retreats from the world. Noel Field joined the secret underground of the international Communist movement during a time of national collapse, when Communism promised the righting of all social and political wrongs. Many in Field's generation were seduced by its siren song, but none paid a higher price for his betrayal of his country and family than Field.
With a reporter's eye and a historian's grasp of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Kati Marton captures Field's futile and tragic quest for a life of meaning, which caused his and his family's near destruction. Marton gained access to previously unavailable Soviet secret police records, reporting on figures from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and "Wild Bill"… Read More