True Crime Literature

Alcala was sentensed to death in 2010 after killing 5 women.

The 1924 murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb caused much public outrage. Leopold, a 19 year old college student with an IQ of 200, enlisted his friend Richard Loeb, to abduct and kill 14 year old Franks, not because of something that he did, but because Leopold and Loeb were bored.

One of the killers lost his prescription glasses at the crime scene and it didn't take long for the police to find them. Their attorney, Clarence Darrow, was able to keep them out of the gallows, but the were both sentenced to life in prison.

In 1936 Loeb was murdered by a fellow inmate. After serving 33 years, Leopold was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico and married in 1961. He died 10 years later.

Crime is an act forbidden by law, failure to do an act required by law, an act that is sinful, foolish or disgraceful (as in being wasteful). That pretty much covers most bases.

I am going to assume you mean the ranch that Charles Manson and his 'family' lived at before and right after the Tate-LaBianca murders. The ranch was an old movie set called Spahn's Movie Ranch. It was located east of L.A. and I can imagine it was no Garden of Eden. Hot and dry beyond belief, but a good place to hide from the law.

I guess its all a matter of personal preferece, but if you want a JTR book that is well researched, well written, and a breath of fresh air then Patricia Cornwell's - Jack The Ripper:Case Closed is the best. Cornwell used to work for the state-of-the-art coroner/forensic office in Virginia. For 6 years she assisted with autopies and anything else that needed to be done. She knew and understood death. Also, and this is very important, she knew nothing of the murders of JTR. She didn't even know his victims were prostitutes. Cornwell started from scratch and studied the evidence. She did not want to repeat the same falsehoods that have become 'fact' when indeed they were not fact. Some of the problem came from some newspapers. Once things are written down, whether true or not, they get repeated and passed on. She stuck to the evidence that remained.

Another very good JTR book is :Jack the Ripper A to Z by Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner. Once again the old falsehoods have been researched and found untrue so they stuck with the evidence. This is a great companion book for Cornwell's.

Since OJ Simpson was aquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman the case is technically unsolved and open. But I sincerely doubt that much energy is spent looking for the guilty party. With the civil trial finding Simpson responsible for the two deaths it would be a waste of taxpayers money to persue the case any further.

Melvin Foster was the falsely accused taxi-driver. As a 63-year-old retired taxi driver and ambulance medic, he fit the profile of the Green River Killer and quickly became the focus of the investigation. After the real killer was caught, Foster was quoted as saying, "My refusal to bow, now they know why." The man's name is Melvyn Foster, taxi driver by profession. Foster was of extreme interest to the Green River task force for quite awhile. He knew several of the victims, and in fact one stayed with him for a short time. He sometimes acted strange and wanted to be helpful and inject himself into the investigation. Many killers act exactly this way.

He could have saved himself a lot of trouble and minded his own business, but for some reason that proved impossible for Foster. But like with so many other suspects in this case, it all went south. Until Gary L. Ridgeway.

Peter Kurten of Dusseldorf Germany

One of the most common murders are for profit; murder as part of a burglary or robbery; murder for inheritance or insurance proceeds; and less common, murder for hire or murder to save expense such as child or elder support.

Other murders can to avoid responsibility for another crime by eliminating witnesses. Some murderers derive a sense of power, or control, get vengeance, or self righteousness from their crime.

Peterson was supposed to have had a partial golf scholarship to Arizona State University but when asked the golf coach could not remember Peterson and was in doubt that he had a scholarship. The rumor was that Scott had the talent for high school golf but was not good enough for anything more serious, such as a pro.

Here is the most recent I could find.

-Lawrence Bittaker-serial killer from So. California

sentenced February 17, 1981.

-Richard Allen Davis-murder of Polly Klaas of Petaluma, CA

sentenced August 5, 1996.

-Robert Diaz

sentenced 1984.

-John Iving Lewis

Charles Ng-serial killer

sentenced 1998.

-Scott Peterson-killer of Lacy and Conner, wife and unborn son.

sentenced 2006

-Fermin Rodriguez Ledesma

sentenced 1980 and 1990

-Richard Ramirez-serial killer, So. California

sentenced 1989

-Ryan Hoyt

sentenced 2001

-Anthony Deondrea Cain

sentenced November 12, 2009

Of course anything is possible but it's hard to believe that 2 murders and one 'maybe' assault could have happened without him knowing when he was just upstairs. Not only was his wife Darlie acting strangely, but Darren was also.

When question by police immediately after the murders, he was bragging about how beautiful his wife was and commented on her 'lovely breasts'. Police found this more that a little 'off'. This man just lost two of his children and he was preoccupied with his wife's attributes.

But suspecting is much different than knowing, and there was no evidence that he took part in the murders.

Darlie now sits on death row in a Texas prison trying to drum up some sympathy and a new trial. Good luck with that.

Routier sits on Texas' death row in Gatesville, TX.

The Production Budget for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was $35,000,000.

Joseph Kuklinski was older brother to Richard.

The punishment of branding has a long and painful history, not just in Europe but in the US as well. The most forgiving brand was for first offenses. The offender wore a brightly colored letter on their clothing. Not so lucky the second time around. A hot iron was held onto the offending part of the accused's body. A thief had a hand branded with a T (for thief). A third offense was usually death.

Some crimes though were deemed so horrible that iron branding came with the first punishment. Counterfeiting was one such crime. For printing your own currency you got a large, hot F on your face. (the F stands for forger)

The branding iron was officially used for the last time on a man named Jonathan Walker, who in 1844 had the letters SS (slave stealer) burned into the palm of his right hand.

Except for a mass branding during the Civil War for deserters, branding had just about run its course. There were tales of unlawful branding, vigilante branding, but even these were gone by the 1880s and 1890s.

As a little girl in Michigan, Wuornos fantacized of some day being rich and famous. Not an uncommon dream for an American girl. But into adulthood she would often tell people that someone would one day write a book about her. It is possible that she felt this way because she instinctively knew she was very different from most people. Wuornos is a textbook case of 'nature and nurture' as a recipe for serial killers. She was a product of bad genes in a bad environment. It would have been very difficult for her to rise above it. And just as she had always dreamed, she had many books written about her life, not to mention, several documentaries and a Hollywood movie based on her life and crimes.

Stayner's kidnapper Kenneth Parnell died December 4, 2008. Parnell was 76 years old and was serving his time in Vacaville, CA at the time of his death.

To all appearances it seems that yes, his motivation was greed. But according to several books by different authors, he seemed to like the power that he had over his victims and liked playing God instead of Dr. Shipman.

As the name implies, Boston and/or the Boston area. The has been much talk as to whom the real Boston Strangler was, since DNA evidence has cleared Albert DeSolvo of the last murder, that of Mary Sullivan. Even FBI agents felt the crimes were not committed by a single killer, most likely two killers working simultaniously in the same geographical area at approximately the same time. (not unheard of)

But, there are facts that cannot be ignored. Although DeSolvo was vague about some of the crimes, others he knew far too much. In all homicide investigations, police hold back certain facts as a way to weed out false confessors. DeSolvo knew unpublished facts that only the killer and the police would know. There is also the fact that the killings stopped with DeSolvo's arrest.

It is also possible that DeSolvo killed his first victim in the Boston suburb of Belmont. In Sebastian Junger's bestseller A Murder In Belmont, Junger puts forth the theory that the murder of Bessie Goldberg, circa 1962, was also the work of DeSalvo. DeSalvo was a carpenter's helper in that year, helping to add an art studio for Junger's artistic mother. Only a mile and a quarter from the Junger's home, Goldberg was raped and murdered, found in the early evening by her husband. Although another man, Roy Smith, was convicted of the crime, I'm not a big believer in coincidences, and more investigation is needed to sort out the truth.

Andrea Yates, the Texas housewife that murdered her 5 small children by drowning them in the bathtub was convicted and sentenced to death for the killings. She was later tried again and found insane and committed to a mental hospital where she resides today. Although the prosecution claimed she was competent and deserved the original punishment of death many others feel she should not be held responsible. She was in fact severely mentally ill. One of the few cases that truly should not be punished. Yates had been in and out of mental health facilities for several years before the murders, and diagnosed delusional and suicidal. Made worse was her post-partum physcosis and the wrong combinations of drugs and an overwhelmed spouse. She never tried to hide the crimes or evade punishment which is the criteria under the McNauten Rule.

The statue you refer to is called The Bird Gird Statue, which oringinally stood in the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, GA, and was moved to the Telfair Museum shortly after the book's publication in 1994.*

*The movie was based on a book of the same name. The front cover was a photo of The Bird Girl Statue.

The almost execution of John Lee in the year 1885 at the Exeter Jail in England. Lee was sentenced to death for the murder of an elderly woman whom had employed Lee as a footman. Three times Lee was led to the scaffolding to be hung. And three times for one reason or another the equipment would not work. Eventually they gave up trying to hang him and he spent the next 20 years or so in prison. He was finally released on December 18, 1907. After release Lee wrote a book on his experiences in prison. It sold well but nobody believed his claims of innocence.

This is a very intriguing possiblity. In Rochester, NY in the early 1970s three young girls were murdered. Oddly enough, the victims were as follows: Carmen Colon from Churchville, Wanda Walkowicz from Webster, Michelle Maenza from Macedon. The killer was never found and after Maenza's murder the killing stopped. This story gets stranger. A young man named Kenneth Bianchi, an ice cream vendor, lived in Rochester at the time of the Alphabet murders. The police were interested in two local men but both were cleared by DNA. I'm not a big believer in coincidences. The Alphabet killer of Rochester, NY disappears and Los Angeles women begin to turn up dead, their bodies dumped in the hills just outside the City of Angels. Bianchi had family in LA and for a time lived with an older cousin, Angelo Bono. When things heat up in LA for the Hillside Strangler(s) Bianchi turns up in Bellingham, WA, a Seattle suburb. Within weeks two young women are found dead while housesitting to earn extra money. Bianchi worked for a home security company and had arranged for the women to housesit for the weekend.

Bellingham was the end of the line for Bianchi (and cousin Bono). Bianchi made a deal to rat out his cousin in exchange for prosecutors not persuing the death penalty. Bianchi is serving his 'life with no parole' sentence at Walla Walla Prison in Washington state. Bono died in a California prison. And the Alphabet killer has never been identified. Bianchi has denied any involvement in the Rochester murders but a vehicle matching Bianchi's was seen at two of the crime scenes. And one of the young girls told a family member she was on her way to buy ice cream from the ice cream truck.

Gary Leon Ridgeway, aka The Green River Killer, had one son who is now an adult. I have heard that after his father's arrest and the world-wipe publicity backlash, that the killer's son changed his name and moved elsewhere. Can't say I blame him.