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  Guns of Outlaws - Weapons of the...

  Gerry Souter, Janet Souter

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  “Chronicles the misdeeds of many of America’s worst miscreants, with special emphasis on the tools of the outlaw trade.” —American Rifleman 
   
  From colonial-era rifles carried on the “Owlhoot Trail” to John Dillinger’s Colt pistols, the history of the American outlaw is told in guns—weapons that became each man’s personal signature. Authors Gerry and Janet Souter peer into these criminals’ choices of derringers, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and curious hybrids, giving us a glimpse into the minds behind the trigger fingers. With over 200 illustrations, Guns of Outlaws gives a unique look at the lives and the hardware of the most infamous outlaws in American history, and of the law enforcement officers who hunted them. 
   
  As settlers moved further west, away from authority and soft city life into the Great Plains, the push for survival through the endless prairies and jagged isolating mountain ranges bred ruthless men. Most outlaws were technology freaks who seized upon the latest weapon innovations developed in the industrious East to provide an edge in the life-and-death cosmos of the Wild West. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, outlaws on horseback had given way to marauding bank robbers. Using fast cars and faster guns, they became folk heroes of the Great Depression, even as the law was hard on their tails. 
   
  “Historians Gerry and Janet Souter take the reader back to a time between 1840 and 1940 when . . . outlaws and man hunters lived bold and died hard . . . [The] book show[s] actual tools of the trade wielded during a violent century, bound up in a mix of hard truths and mythology.” —Ammoland.com

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  Innocent Blood - A True Story of...

  Terry Ganey

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  Innocent Blood is the true story of Charles Hatcher and his life of crime—a powerful, and blood-chilling glimpse into the darkness between sanity and madness. It also chronicles a justice system gone wrong.Throughout his criminal career Hatcher was able to fool dozens of psychiatrists, who repeatedly failed to identify him as a multiple murderer. Hatcher's astonishing skill was not just in his ability to murder and escape imprisonment. He became an expert at manipulating the criminal justice system; overall, he outwitted police, prosecutors, psychiatrists, and judges in twelve cities and eight states.Terry Ganey first covered this story as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Later, he spent four years researching the material for this book, interviewing over seventy-five people and reviewing thousands of documents, court transcripts, prison files, police reports, and mental health records.What emerges is a fascinating and horrifying portrait of a mass murderer at large in America—a murderer who could have stalked his victims in any of our towns and cities, whether urban or rural, large or small.Contains mature themes.

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  The Ghosts That Haunt Me

  Steve Ryan

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  After years working in homicide, retired Toronto detective Steve Ryan reflects on six cases he will never forget.Retired detective Steve Ryan worked in Toronto’s homicide squad for over a decade. For Ryan, the stories of Toronto’s most infamous crimes were more than just a headline read over morning coffee — they were his everyday life.After investigating over one hundred homicides, Ryan can never forget the tragedies and the victims, even after his retirement from the police force. In The Ghosts That Haunt Me, he reflects on six of the many cases that greatly impacted him — seven people whose lives were senselessly taken — and that he still thinks about nearly every day. While the stories are hard to tell for Ryan, they were harder to live through. Yet somewhere between the crimes and the heartache is a glimmer of hope that good eventually does prevail and that healing can come after grief.

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  Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths...

  Kevin Turton

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  Murder and more in the Midlands—true stories of historical crimes in this British city from the 1850s to the 1950s. Includes photos.   Within the pages of this book are some of the most notorious and often baffling cases in Leicestershire’s history—from the appalling double murder at Melton Mowbray in 1856, known locally as the Peppermint Billy murders, to the 1953 murderer Joseph Reynolds, who killed because he wanted to know how it felt. This book explores the cases that dominated the headlines, not only across the city and surrounding county but also nationwide.   These are the stories from a time when murder was a capital offense and guilt or innocence was proven without the benefit of modern forensic technique or DNA profiling. Included also are some of those mysterious cases that will remain forever unsolved, as in the now famous case of Bella Wright. Known across the whole country as the Green Bicycle Murder, it commanded public attention in 1919 because of the complex and puzzling nature of the crime—and has continued to do so ever since.

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  Bandit - A Daughter's Memoir

  Molly Brodak

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  One woman’s “raw, poetic and compulsively readable” account of growing up with a bank robber for a father (Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help).   In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.   In her powerful and provocative memoir, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too: another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. In Bandit, Brodak unearths and reckons with the fracturing impact her father had on their family and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.   “With unwavering candor and remarkable grace, Brodak pieces together the years she spent trying to make sense of a volatile, complicated man her family never really knew.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (online)   “A poet by training, Brodak writes with great precision and grace, distilling some memories, expanding others; many of her short chapters feel like prose poems.” —The Boston Globe

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  Charlie Peace - Murder Mayhem...

  Ben W. Johnson

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  The true crimes of one of nineteenth century England’s most notorious thieves and killers, whose exploits still capture the public’s imagination.   Once immortalized in Madame Tussauds’s Chamber of Horrors, and brought to life in two silent films, his gnarled and prematurely aged features would be the last image his victims ever saw, yet ironically, he was known by the name of Peace. A grotesque figure who took on many names and many faces, he could slip into the home of an unsuspecting family with the silent stealth of a cool night time breeze, and leave without a trace.   Spending his nocturnal hours limping through the dirty streets with villainy on his mind, and impishly disappearing into the industrial smoke that hung over Victorian Sheffield like a perpetual storm cloud, this devil wrote his own place in the folklore of his hometown. Committing one gruesome crime after the next, he was the most wanted man in England for a time.   Tales of burglary, murder, daring escapes, and a truly shocking miscarriage of justice feature in Charlie Peace along with moments of lost love, damaged pride, and violent revenge. Ben W. Johnson’s biography tells the chilling story of a man who turned to crime through necessity, but consciously chose to continue in an ever spiraling life of wickedness.

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