American True Crime

Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. As reporter Ali Watkins reveals, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small ragtag band of gunrunners in the United States.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than 30 years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then.

In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin's bullet shattered the nation's confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century.

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors...and then went back to bed. Howard Unruh went from obscurity to infamy overnight. Even after his obsessive diaries were discovered - a catalogue of simmering rage, petty grievances, and sexual repression - the anomalous crime seemed incomprehensible. Succeeding decades would confirm that Unruh’s “Walk of Death” was just the beginning. The prototype for the modern mass murderer, he would usher in a new age of violence in America.

Daniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award-winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot", an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War. In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of 13 days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne.

This candid and darkly witty memoir recounts an exhilarating life - and a few close brushes with death. With remarkable sangfroid and a humorist's eye for absurdity, H. K. Roy describes his many strange and risky exploits in his long career with the CIA. Whether he was pursuing Soviet and Cuban spies, running "denied area" operations in Eastern Europe, hunting Bosnian War criminals, or providing actionable intelligence to US government and coalition forces in Iraq, Roy usually found himself at the right place at the right time.

Chicago during the Gaslight Era was a place that embodied both the elegance of America’s Gilded Age and the vice, crime, and sin of the most corrupt city in the country. During the 1880s and early 1890s, Chicago was home to killers, thieves, gamblers, con artists, and whores–and hosted perhaps the greatest World’s Fair in our nation’s history. It was to this place that a man named H.H. Holmes was drawn like a moth to the flame, and Chicago embraced him as one of its own.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

There have been monsters among us lurking in the darkest corners of America, preying on children since the first settlers arrived on our shores. They have always been with us, stalking the innocent, from the days of the original colonies, to the Gilded Age, the Depression, and beyond. These monsters are not the stuff of fiction. They are bloodcurdlingly real, and they still walk among us, always looking for their next victim.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

This is the riveting account of one of the first Americans to spy for Joseph Stalin. A brilliant Columbia University graduate, Isaiah Oggins went to Berlin to establish a safe house and spy for his country - but he turned coat. Working for the Soviets, he was nevertheless poisoned in 1947 on Stalin's orders. Classified for decades, Oggins' story is a cloak-and-dagger tale to rival the best novels.

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

On a cold night in December 1956, two young girls mysteriously vanished after a night at the movies on the Southwest Side of Chicago, beginning one of the greatest searches to ever take place in the history of the city. Three weeks later, the bodies of the two lost girls, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, were found on the side of a secluded, snow-covered road, miles from where they disappeared. The discovery of their battered corpses created one of the greatest unsolved mysteries to ever baffle post-war America. Where had the girls been for the past three weeks?

The chilling true crime account of a family’s gilded American dream that became a nightmare when a meticulously plotted kidnapping went horribly wrong. In the 1950s and 60s, the Coors beer dynasty reigned over the West, seemingly invincible. When rumblings about labor unions threatened to destabilize the family’s brewery, Adolph Coors, Jr., the septuagenarian president of the company, drew a hard line, refusing to budge. They had worked hard for what they had, and no one had a right to take it from them.

True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, an American who betrayed his country and crushed his family. Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American, spied for Stalin during the 1930s and '40s. Then, a pawn in Stalin's sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades.

In 'Beyond the Grassy Knoll: How JFK's Death Changed American Society Forever,' A.M. Wolf charges through the fog of history with a piercing gaze, dissecting one of America's most catastrophic moments. Wolf's narrative is a relentless pursuit of truth amidst the chaos and sorrow that drowned the nation after Kennedy's fall in Dallas. This book isn't just a recount; it's a crusade against the shadows that have lingered over the American soul since that fateful day in November 1963.

In this startling and original work, best-selling author Charles Higham (Howard Hughes: The Secret Life) addresses one of the greatest historical mysteries: Did John Wilkes Booth act alone on the night of Good Friday, 1865, or was he part of a wide conspiracy? Drawing from letters, diaries, previously unstudied records of official hearings, railway timetables, and obscure shipping manifests, Higham weaves a spellbinding account of intrigue.

Immune to the consequences of immorality, five privileged young men in Bogotá bond over a shared code: worship drugs and drink, exploit women, and scorn the underclass. As males, they declare the right to freedom of pleasure. As friends, only disloyalty to each other is forbidden. When a little girl from the slums disappears, the limits of a perverse and sacred bond will be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.

The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights-era killing, When Evil Lived in Laurel plumbs the nature and harrowing consequences of institutional racism, and brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South - one with urgent implications for today.

In the spirit of Devil in the White City comes a true detective tale of the highest standard: the haunting story of Eliot Ness' forgotten final case - his years-long hunt for "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run", a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland through the Great Depression and tormented Ness to his dying breath.