Con Artists Memoir

As a premier antiques dealer in Savannah, Jim Williams had it all: style, culture, charisma, and sophistication. But three decades of hard work came crashing down the night he shot Danny Hansford, his wild young lover. Jim Williams stood trial four times over the next decade for premeditated murder. While Clint Eastwood's movie - starring Kevin Spacey and Jude Law - and the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt portrayed the natives of Savannah as remarkably decadent, exotic characters, they missed the surprising dark side of Jim Williams himself.

Minnie was just 16 when she stood trial for the wrongful death of her first husband, a successful businessman and politician almost 40 years her senior. Despite overwhelming witness testimony that the Creole beauty from New Orleans had purchased the arsenic that killed him, Minnie's own testimony brought the entire courtroom to tears. She was acquitted. Minnie returned to New Orleans with James Walkup's fortune, but she still didn't have enough cash for her liking, so she successfully targeted, seduced, and murdered two more wealthy older men while evading justice in the courtroom.

Ann Rule, who shared her own nerve-jangling account of unknowingly befriending sadistic sociopath Ted Bundy in The Stranger Beside Me, chronicles other fateful encounters with the hidden predators among us in this riveting collection, fifteenth in the best-selling series drawn from her personal files. First in line is a stunning case that spanned thirty years and took a determined detective to four states - ending, finally, in Alaska - where he unraveled not one but two murders.

Like many aspiring writers, David Breithaupt had money problems. But what he also had was unsupervised access to one of the finest special collections libraries in the country. In October 1990, Kenyon College hired David Breithaupt as its library's part-time evening supervisor. In April 2000 he was fired after a Georgia librarian discovered him selling a letter by Flannery O'Connor on eBay, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. Breithaupt had been browsing the collection, taking from it whatever rare books, manuscripts, and documents caught his eye.

1982: Oregon businessman Phil Champagne, age 52, dies in a tragic boating accident off Lopez Island. He is survived by one ex-wife, four adult children, an octogenarian mother, and two despondent brothers. Phil didn't know he was dead until he read it in the paper. All things considered, he took it rather well. So did Phil's brother, Mitch, the beneficiary of a 1.5 million dollar policy on Phil's life.

When Vonlee "Nicole" Titlow and her aunt, Billie Jean Rogers, came home from a night of gambling in a casino near Detroit, they told police they found Billie's husband unconscious on the floor of the Rogers' mansion. Just another of his alcoholic benders, they assumed. But this time, Donald Rogers didn't wake up.

Marilyn Sheppard, four months pregnant and mother of a toddler son, was bludgeoned to death in her Bay Village, Ohio, home in the early morning of July fourth, 1954. The cause of death was 27 blows to the head with a heavy instrument. Who took her life so brutally has been the subject of much controversy and debate for nearly half a century.

After her mother's untimely death, Clara Schwartz became distant, withdrawn. Her father, a renowned DNA researcher, lived in a farmhouse outside Leesburg, Virginia, where in December 2001 he was fatally stabbed by what seemed to be a ninja-style sword. Police arrested Kyle Hulbert, a troubled teen - and aspiring vampire. Kyle was Clara's friend, one of a circle obsessed with role-playing games.

When she was 15, Jennifer Mee developed an unrelenting case of the hiccups - hiccupping as many as 50 times a minute for months. Soon the Florida teen's strange story went viral. Dubbed the "Hiccup Girl" by the media, she gained international sympathy and appeared on a slew of popular TV shows. Eventually Jennifer's hiccups went away, and so did her fame.

If you want to keep a secret, put it on Facebook! What would you do if you found out that the man you married had a secret life that culminated in the ultimate betrayal? Yve Gibney tells the real-life story from their love-at-first-sight chance encounter while working as expats in Nigeria to the gradual realization that her husband of 19 years, Maurice Gibney, was actually full of deceit, manipulation, and coercive control and that their marriage had been a lie from the moment they had met.

As the 21st century marches into its third decade, our understanding of the world, and our place within it, seems to be clearer than ever. Each day brings us more and more miraculous scientific discoveries, while technology has interconnected us to an extent that our ancestors and forefathers could not have conceived. And yet, despite the collective of human knowledge lying at our fingertips, there are still a multitude of unsolved mysteries that stubbornly resist any attempts at solving them.

When reclusive millionaire artist Robert Indiana died in 2018, he left behind dark rumors and scandal, as well as an estate embroiled in lawsuits and facing accusations of fraud. Here is the true story of the artist’s final days, the aftermath, the deceptive world that surrounded him, and the inner workings of art as very big business.

Audrey Edmunds was a happily married young mother of two with a baby on the way; the neighborhood soccer mom in a small Wisconsin town providing casual childcare when the unthinkable happened. An infant died in her care at the same time the unknown science of Shaken Baby Syndrome hit the media. Swept up in a media frenzy, Edmunds was accused of killing the child through SBS. She was stripped from her children and husband and sent to prison where she would fight for freedom 13 years before she was finally exonerated.

When Mosilo Mothepu was appointed CEO of Trillian Financial Advisory, in March 2016, the prospect of being at the helm of a Black-owned financial consultancy was electrifying for a Black woman whose twin passions were transformation and empowering women. Three months later, suffering from depression and insomnia, she resigned with no other job lined up. In October 2016, a written statement handed to Public Protector Thuli Madonsela detailing Trillian’s involvement in state capture was leaked to the media.

Crimes fueled by emotions. When it comes to the emotions, people can react in strange and unexpected ways. Whether it's a heart hurt by unrequited love, or a lover so passionate they'll stop at nothing to get their way - even the most mild-mannered soul can suddenly flip, becoming a vengeful spirit with dark intentions. From the ancient Greek myth of Jason and Medea to Shakespeare's Othello, themes dealing with deeply felt emotions have persisted. But unlike mythology or fiction, The Best New True Crime Stories contains stories from real life.

Eye-opening, enlightening, and utterly engaging, How to Spot a Liar in 7 Seconds or Less is an essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone who wants to learn what makes people tick, what motivates liars to bend the truth, and how to defend themselves against deceivers and others who want to take advantage of them.

The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

In a world where whispers become roars and rumors turn into accepted reality, Dexter Maxx delves deep into the labyrinth of modern myths, guiding listeners through a mesmerizing journey of the most tantalizing conspiracy theories of our age. From dark corners of the internet to the corridors of power, Conspiracies is a gripping exploration of humanity's age-old quest for answers in an increasingly complex world.

Edgar Laplante was a small-time grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader - and total fraud.

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.