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Built during Los Angeles's rapid growth in the Roaring Twenties, the Beaux Arts-style Cecil Hotel was briefly a glimmering downtown landmark until it became one of the most infamous sites of violence and murder in the country. Nicknamed "The Suicide," the Cecil was the eerie location of more than a dozen people taking their own lives going back to the 1940s and '50s. Rumors still swirl that Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, frequented the hotel in...
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Edgar Award Finalist: The true story of a string of brutal crimes committed in the name of religious fanaticism and racial hatred in 1970s San Francisco.
In the early 1970s, a small band of well-dressed, clean-cut African American men began terrorizing the residents of San Francisco with guns and machetes. Their victims ranged from a teenage Salvation Army cadet to a middle-aged Jordanian grocer to an eighty-one-year-old janitor. The streets became...
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On March 15, 1987, police in Anchorage, Alaska, arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.
After an intense investigation, the police focused on a principal...
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The pleasant neighborhoods of the Crescenta Valley offer no hint of the many violent and heinous crimes that have occurred between the San Gabriel and Verdugo Mountains. But ties to such macabre episodes as the Onion Field murder and the search for the Hillside Strangler left lasting scars here. Infamous criminals such as mafia boss Joe "Iron Man" Ardizzone, red-light bandit Caryl Chessman and accused yacht bomber Beulah Overell have left a black...
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Frank Rodriguez, a much-loved counselor of troubled teens, lies dead on the bedroom floor. His wife and stepdaughter are in shock, and so is the medical examiner when he performs the autopsy. Aside from being dead, Frank is in perfect health.
Demanding to know the cause of her husband's death, Angie Rodriguez badgers the police, insisting that Frank was murdered. The cops attribute her assertions to overwhelming grief, but soon they too believe that...
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In the fall of 1920, two couples pulled into a campsite just off the famous Yellowstone Trail. A few weeks later, one couple drove away, while the other simply vanished. The identities and fate of the couple left behind didn't hit newsstands until three years later. In one of the most sensational murder cases ever played out in a Montana court, Seth Orrin Danner put up a fight for his life and lost. The state executed Seth on July 18, 1924, at the...
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We like to think of women as nurturers, not murderers, but women do kill. California's Deadliest Women is the definitive guide to the murderesses of the Golden State, a horrifying compendium of women driven to kill by jealousy, greed, desperation, or their own inner demons. From Brynn Hartman, who killed her husband, comedian Phil Hartman, to chemist Larissa Shuster, who dissolved her husband in acid, to dominatrix Omaima Aree Nelson, who cooked and...
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Delve into a world of cold cases, serial killers, and false confessions pulled straight from the archives of the San Diego Police Department.
From a rash of attacks in Balboa Park to the slayings of two police officers that remain unsolved to this day, detectives have investigated several vexing and violent cases over the years. In 1931, the murder of ten-year-old Virginia Brooks was initially linked to serial slayer Gordon Stewart Northcott, later...
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In 1939, four brutal murders occurred at three separate locations on a single day in "Cache Creek country," a remote Alaska gold-mining region near Talkeetna. Two of the victims, Dick Francis and Frank Jenkins, had mined there for almost three decades, but disputes over mining claims in the 1930s launched the two men into protracted court battles and an arena of antagonism. By 1938, when Francis' claims were auctioned to satisfy courtordered damages...
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In 1974, one of San Francisco's most horrific unsolved serial murder cases began.
In less than two years, the man police called "The Doodler" took at least five lives, terrorized the LGBTQ community, and left three survivors forever changed. Initial reports claimed the murderer didn't approach his victims with the knife he used to kill them, but that the suspect shared skilled drawings-sketches of faces and animals-before leaving a string of gay...
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A charismatic killer terrorizes a beautiful Los Angeles socialite in this dramatic saga of love, lies, and murder among the very rich Hope Masters lived in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Beverly Hills-but was entitled to food stamps. Pretty, petite, and privileged, she was recovering from two failed marriages and a string of poor decisions. But when Hope met and fell in love with a handsome advertising executive, she believed her life...
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The story of the infamous escape attempt and bloody siege at Alcatraz.
In 1946, six men attempted to break out of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison on an island off the coast of San Francisco. Their bloody siege lasted two days, and ended with five dead and fifteen wounded-plus two of the perpetrators executed for their role in the endeavor.
In Six Against the Rock-the basis for a TV movie-an award-winning crime writer tells...
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Explore Boise's Bloody History!
Shortly after the nearby discovery of gold in 1862, outlaws and ruffians from all over began to congregate in newly platted Boise City. One of the city's only recorded pistol duels settled a dispute between a covetous husband and the lover of a young damsel-both happened to be lawyers. After getting busted running a long con, the King of Boise's Underworld was sent to the penitentiary. What could be called the area's...
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Lies, murder, and a legendary courtroom battle threaten to tear apart the Territory of Hawaii.
In September of 1931, Thalia Massie, a young naval lieutenant's wife, claims to have been raped by five Hawaiian men in Honolulu. Following a hung jury in the rape trial, Thalia's mother, socialite Grace Fortescue, and husband, along with two sailors, kidnap one of the accused in an attempt to coerce a confession. When they are caught after
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Quiet fields broken by gunfire, the splash of a body dropping into the Madison River, cries for help cut off into silence and the grim last words spoken on the gallows all color the bloody history of Gallatin County. Cut-and-dried murder charges, unsolved cases and questionable accusations all paint the picture of law enforcement in and around early Bozeman. From the gruesome to the mysterious, sordid accounts of robbery, crimes of passion and fatal...
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Edgar Award Finalist: The thrilling true story of the abduction of world-class biathlete Kari Swenson and the five-month manhunt to bring her tormentors to justice. Former rodeo cowboy Johnny France had been sheriff of Madison County, Montana, for three years when Kari Swenson, a Bozeman resident training for the World Biathlon Championship, went missing near Big Sky Resort in July 1984. Her friends feared that Kari had been attacked by a grizzly...
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Early twentieth-century San Diego was growing fast, and the officers sworn to protect the city encountered more than their fair share of wily lawbreakers. From a shootout with a lone gunman in Mission Hills to gunfights with a gang of bank robbers that involved enthusiastic bystanders hoping to assist, detectives and patrolmen alike tried to maintain the peace. They encountered unexpected bodies, confronted car thieves and pursued criminals through...
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The true crime memoir about a 1950s doctor, his girlfriend, the murder of his wife, and the 3 trials that followed, written by one of his former patients.
Did the handsome, wealthy doctor and his beautiful young paramour plan to kill his glamorous socialite wife? Or did the gun accidentally discharge as he claimed?
Early in the evening on July 18, 1959, Dr. Bernard Finch and his girlfriend, Carole Ann Tregoff, drove from their Las Vegas love-nest...
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In 1974, the brutal murder of Anita Fagiani Andrews, a fifty-one-year-old former beauty queen and mother of two, shook the small working-class town of Napa. Detectives, criminalists and forensic experts raced to identify who'd struck Anita down in her own bar, but despite their efforts, the case went cold. Decades passed, during which the town grew into a world-renowned wine region and tourist destination, but the case remained an open question. After...
20) Unholy sacrifice
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Born Again
San Francisco Bay area stockbroker Taylor Helzer was young, handsome, and--to all outward appearances--normal. But that was before a three-day self-awareness seminar left him convinced he was a new Messiah. In the interest of funding his own church and "saving" America from Satan, Helzer began making and selling Ecstasy and convinced girlfriend Kerri Furman to pose for Playboy. She eventually left him, only to be replaced by naive, gullible...
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