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  Darker than Night - The True...

  Tom Henderson

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  In 1985, two twenty-seven-year-old friends left their suburban Detroit homes for a hunting trip in rural Michigan. When they did not return, their families and police suspected foul play. For eighteen years, no one could prove a thing. Then, a relentless investigator got a witness to talk, and a horrifying story emerged.In 2003, this bizarre case hit the glare of the criminal justice system, as prosecutors charged two brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, with murder. With no bodies ever found, the case hinged on the testimony of one terrified witness who saw a bloody scene unfold-and who was still nearly too frightened to talk.Now, the truth behind an eighteen-year-old mystery is revealed against the backdrop of an unusual, electrifyingly dramatic trial. Raymond and Donald Duvall bragged to friends that they killed their victims, chopped up their bodies, and fed them to pigs. A Michigan jury soon had evidence of this brutally methodical execution-evidence that would lead a shocked courtroom through the heart of evil and beyond a shadow of a doubt.

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  Kidnapped - The Tragic Life of J...

  Charles Fox

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  Previously published as Uncommon Youth, Charles Fox's Kidnapped examines the glamorous life, gilded family, and tragic times of J. Paul Getty III, whose kidnapping made headlines in 1973. 
  J. Paul ("Little Paul") Getty III,  the grandson of Getty Oil founder J. Paul Getty, may have been cursed by money and privilege from the moment he was born. Falling in with the wrong people and practically abandoned by his famous family, Getty was a child of his international jet set era, moving from Marrakesh to Rome, nightclubs to well-appointed drug dens. His high-profile kidnapping defined the decade—and was permanently memorable for the ear that was mailed to his mother as evidence of the kidnappers' intentions. 
  Kidnapped is richly reported, and includes many interviews with Getty himself conducted from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, that raise new angles about the case. How much did Getty acquiesce to the kidnappers? Why wouldn't his rich-as-Croesus grandfather pay the ransom, which began at the equivalent of $550,000 in lire and bulged to 3.6 million as the months dragged on?  Charles Fox began following and researching this story since the days shortly after Getty's disappearance. Fox's writing captures the voices of models and maids, mistresses and mothers, carabinieri and club-owners, drug dealers and drivers, alongside the Getty family members themselves to paint an evocative portrait of an era and one of its most misunderstood participants.

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  Dred Scott's Revenge - A Legal...

  Andrew P. Napolitano

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  Racial hatred is one of the ugliest of human emotions. And the United States not only once condoned it, it also mandated it?wove it right into the fabric of American jurisprudence. Federal and state governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years and then denied blacks equal protection of the law for another 150. 
  How did such crimes happen in America? How were the laws of the land, even the Constitution itself, twisted into repressive and oppressive legislation that denied people their inalienable rights? 
  Taking the Dred Scott case of 1957 as his shocking center, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano tells the story of how it happened and, through it, builds a damning case against American statesmen from Lincoln to Wilson, from FDR to JFK. 
  Born a slave in Virginia, Dred Scott sued for freedom based on the fact that he had lived in states and territories where slavery was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Scott, denied citizenship to blacks, and spawned more than a century of government-sponsored maltreatment that destroyed lives, suppressed freedom, and scarred our culture. 
  Dred Scott's Revenge is the story of America's long struggle to provide a new context?one in which "All men are created equal," and government really treats them so.

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  Double Homicide - Two Tales of...

  John Coston

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  Two riveting true crime sagas—of a mother who murdered her two sons, and a sex-crazed serial killer who terrorized Montana—together in one volume.   In this terrifying collection, veteran reporter and former Wall Street Journal editor John Coston recounts the disturbing crimes of Ellen Boehm and Wayne Nance, two seemingly ordinary citizens who killed for the most twisted and selfish reasons.  Sleep, My Child, Forever: Single mom Ellen Boehm appeared to be a devoted mother. But in reality, she was unequipped for motherhood, financially strapped, and desperate. Within a year of each other, her sons, ages two and four, died mysteriously, and Boehm’s eight-year-old daughter suffered a near-fatal accident when a hair dryer fell into the girl’s bath. Det. Sgt. Joseph Burgoon of St. Louis Homicide soon unraveled a labyrinth of deception, greed, and obsession that revealed a cold-blooded killer whose get-rich-quick scheme came at the cost of her children’s lives.  To Kill and Kill Again: To neighbors, Wayne Nance appeared to be an affable, considerate, and trustworthy guy. No one knew that he was the “Missoula Mauler,” a psychopath responsible for a series of sadistic sex slayings that rocked the idyllic town between 1974 and 1986. His victims included a preacher’s wife, a teenage runaway, and a female acquaintance. Then, one September night, Nance pushed his luck, preying on a couple that lived to tell the tale.

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  They Stole Him Out of Jail -...

  William B. Gravely

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  “Reminds readers that the history of lynching and racial violence in the United States is not a closed book, but an ever-relevant story.” —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books 
   
  Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. 
   
  In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously recreates the case’s details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article “Opera in Greenville” is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area. Gravely also probes problems with memory that resulted in varying interpretations of Willie Earle’s character and conflicting narratives about the lynching itself.

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  Better Off Dead - A Sordid True...

  Michael Fleeman

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  The true story of the love triangle murder of Robert Limon—from the New York Times bestselling author of Missing . . . and Presumed Dead.In Better off Dead, Michael Fleeman strips away the pleasant veneer of the Silver Lakes neighborhood in California’s high desert to tell a shocking story about a headline-grabbing crime. A conversation with handsome young firefighter Jonathan Hearn leads Sabrina Limon, a vivacious blond mother of two, into a steamy affair that has them hooking up once and twice a week at her home, his home, and out in hidden spots in the vast Mojave. To the outside world, Sabrina and her husband Robert, a hard-working railroad mechanic, seemed matched by their love of family, friends and good times.But the partying had gotten out of control for Sabrina. There was boozing and wife-swapping and group sex. Once a turn-on, it now left Sabrina feeling debased, dehumanized, spiritually adrift. Robert won’t talk about it, consumed by his work, boat, truck and porn. Until one hot August night, Robert is found dead of two gunshots in a pool of blood. False leads send police into dead ends until a tip arrives from a most unexpected place. For Sabrina, it’s a stunning betrayal that hurtles the case back to a perfect little place in the desert. With informants, undercover cops and wiretaps, investigators discover a romance fueled by lies and dangerous fantasies—ultimately leading to a devious murder plot . . .

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