Download or read book Murder New England written by M. William Phelps and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling true-crime author M. William Phelps, star of the new investigative television series “Dark Minds,” takes readers to his own backyard in these eight bloodcurdling murder cases. Think New England is all bucolic landscapes and Robert Frost poems? Think again. In Murder, New England, Phelps explores different motives, themes, and community reactions to horrific crimes: ** Murder by Blood: The Strange Death of Rebecca Cornwell (1673, Narragansset Bay, RI). A 73-year-old widow burned to death in front of her bedroom fireplace… ** William Beadle: Husband, Father, Murderer (1782, Wethersfield, CT). A man murders his wife and kids before taking his own life... ** The Angry Man: Murder in Manchester (1821, Manchester, NH). A poor widow killed in her home by a “ruffian” looking for food and drink... ** Better Off in Heaven: John Kemmler Kills His Three Children (1879, Holyoke, MA). After losing his mill job, a man kills his daughters because he fears they will become prostitutes... ** Birth of the “Big Seven”: Gaspare Messina’s Mafioso (1917, Boston). An ol’ fashioned Mafia murder tale... ** Electronic Kill Machine: “Forensic Files” Murder (2001, Somerville, MA). Teenage slackers, the show “Forensic Files,” and the murder of a grandmother blamed on TV, youth, drugs, sex, money, and rock-n-roll... ** Sings of Life (2006, Lanesborough, MA). A woman employs the help of her cocaine-snorting daughter and Goth son to help her get rid of their step-father. ** Sesame Street Murder: Death on Big Bird’s Estate (2008, Woodstock, CT). A young woman out for a jog murdered by the groundskeeper of an estate owned by the puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. [Page Two of spread] A chilling scene unfolds on the Woodstock, Connecticut, estate of the Sesame Street puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch: Near the end of the access road was a picnic area with a large pagoda-like structure topped by an A-framed roof. Two paddle boats were stored under the ceiling of the open-air building. The pagoda had that sacred, spiritual look one would expect of a place to relax and meditate. Here was a haven separated from the main living space where one could retreat and disconnect from the world. What upset the serenity of the scene was the trail of blood. It lead from the roadway directly to the pagoda—and yet stopped in the center of the ground under the ceiling. The paddle boats, investigators noticed, had blood spatter and smudge marks on them. But what did it mean that the trail of blood just stopped? As they continued to search, troopers looked above them and spied a set of pull-down stairs. There was a storage area or attic within the pagoda’s A-frame. The blood trail had stopped directly beneath the pull-down stairs.

Download or read book Killing Season written by Carlton Smith and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling journalist traces a string of unsolved murders—and the botched investigation that let the New Bedford Highway Killer walk away. Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day. How could such a thing happen? How, in what was once one of America’s richest cities, could the authorities let their most vulnerable citizens down this badly? As Carlton Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the Green River Killer case, demonstrates in this riveting account, it was the inability of police officers and politicians alike to set aside their personal agendas that let a psychopath off the hook. In Killing Season, Smith takes readers into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.

Download or read book Dogtown written by Elyssa East and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The area known as Dogtown -- an isolated colonial ruin and surrounding 3,000-acre woodland in storied seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts -- has long exerted a powerful influence over artists, writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings, pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In 1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked in the woods. Dogtown's peculiar atmosphere -- it is strewn with giant boulders and has been compared to Stonehenge -- and eerie past deepened the pall of this horrific event that continues to haunt Gloucester even today. In alternating chapters, Elyssa East interlaces the story of this grisly murder with the strange, dark history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. East knew nothing of Dogtown's bizarre past when she first became interested in the area. As an art student in the early 1990s, she fell in love with the celebrated Modernist painter Marsden Hartley's stark and arresting Dogtown landscapes. She also learned that in the 1930s, Dogtown saved Hartley from a paralyzing depression. Years later, struggling in her own life, East set out to find the mysterious setting that had changed Hartley's life, hoping that she too would find solace and renewal in Dogtown's odd beauty. Instead, she discovered a landscape steeped in intrigue and a community deeply ambivalent about the place: while many residents declare their passion for this profoundly affecting landscape, others avoid it out of a sense of foreboding. Throughout this richly braided first-person narrative, East brings Dogtown's enigmatic past to life. Losses sustained during the American Revolution dealt this once thriving community its final blow. Destitute war widows and former slaves took up shelter in its decaying homes until 1839, when the last inhabitant was taken to the poorhouse. He died seven days later. Dogtown has remained abandoned ever since, but continues to occupy many people's imaginations. In addition to Marsden Hartley, it inspired a Bible-thumping millionaire who carved the region's rocks with words to live by; the innovative and influential postmodernist poet Charles Olson, who based much of his epic Maximus Poems on Dogtown; an idiosyncratic octogenarian who vigilantly patrols the land to this day; and a murderer who claimed that the spirit of the woods called out to him. In luminous, insightful prose, Dogtown takes the reader into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy, eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.

Download or read book Notes on a Killing written by Kevin Flynn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Their friendship would kill her… Weaver and fiber artist Edith “Pen” Meyer knew her friend Sandy Merritt’s relationship with a married man was wrong. She had even urged Sandy to take out a restraining order against Kenneth Carpenter. Which was why her call to Sandy on February 23, 2005, seemed to come from out of the blue. During it, she told Sandy to drop the restraining order and get back together with Ken. Pen was never seen again. One man stood to gain from Pen’s disappearance: Ken Carpenter. But evidence was bleak: no blood, no DNA, no body. Until detectives found notes hidden beneath a leather chair that turned out to be a playbook for murder… INCLUDES PHOTOS

Download or read book Legal Executions in New England written by Daniel Allen Hearn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1623 and 1960 (the date of the last execution as of 1999), Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont legally put to death more than 700 men and women for a wide variety of capital crimes ranging from army desertion to murder. This is a companion volume to Legal Executions in New York State and Legal Executions in New Jersey, both published by McFarland. It is comprised of chronologically arranged biographical entries for the executed persons. Each entry gives personal data on the executed person, including age, ethnicity, and gender, as well as a detailed account of the crime for which he or she was sentenced to death and information on the place and method of execution. Fully indexed.

Download or read book A Death in Belmont written by Sebastian Junger and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-04-17 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fatal collision of three lives in the most intriguing and original crime story since In Cold Blood. In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston, the police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim's house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the Belmont murder, but the terror of the Strangler continues. On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo—the man who would eventually confess in lurid detail to the Strangler's crimes—is also in Belmont, working as a carpenter at the Jungers' home. In this spare, powerful narrative, Sebastian Junger chronicles three lives that collide—and ultimately are destroyed—in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America.

Download or read book Pretty Evil New England written by Sue Coletta and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four centuries, New England has been a cradle of crime and murder—from the Salem witch trials to the modern-day mafia. Nineteenth century New England was the hunting ground of five female serial killers: Jane Toppan, Lydia Sherman, Nellie Webb, Harriet E. Nason, and Sarah Jane Robinson. Female killers are often portrayed as caricatures: Black Widows, Angels of Death, or Femme Fatales. But the real stories of these women are much more complex. In Pretty Evil New England, true crime author Sue Coletta tells the story of these five women, from broken childhoods, to first brushes with death, and she examines the overwhelming urges that propelled these women to take the lives of a combined total of more than one-hundred innocent victims. The murders, investigations, trials, and ultimate verdicts will stun and surprise readers as they live vicariously through the killers and the would-be victims that lived to tell their stories.

Download or read book New England White written by Stephen L. Carter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-06-26 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Lemaster Carlyle, the president of the country's most prestigious university, and his wife, Julie, the divinity school's deputy dean, are America's most prominent and powerful African American couple. Driving home through a swirling blizzard late one night, the couple skids off the road. Near the sight of their accident they discover a dead body. To her horror, Julia recognizes the body as a prominent academic and one of her former lovers. In the wake of the death, the icy veneer of their town Elm Harbor, a place Julie calls "the heart of whiteness," begins to crack, having devastating consequences for a prominent local family and sending shock waves all the way to the White House.

Download or read book Our Little Secret written by Kevin Flynn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a teenage killer and the silence of a small New England town. For twenty years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie- redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge.

Download or read book The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories written by Elizabeth A. De Wolfe and published by True Crime History. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the winter ice melted in April 1850, residents of Saco, Maine, made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young girl submerged in a stream. Thanks to evidence left at the scene, a local physician was arrested and tried for the death of Mary Bean, the name given to the unidentified young girl; the cause of death was failed abortion. Garnering extensive newspaper coverage, the trial revealed many secrets: a poorly trained doctor, connections to an unsolved murder in New Hampshire, and the true identity of Mary Bean - a young Canadian mill worker named Berengera Caswell, missing since the previous winter. The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories examines the series of events that led Caswell to become Mary Bean and the intense curiosity and anxiety stimulated by this heavily watched trial. these events through a wide-angle lens exploring such themes as the rapid social changes brought about by urbanization and industrialization in antebellum nineteenth-century society, factory work and the changing roles for women, unregulated sexuality and the specter of abortion, and the sentimental novel as a guidebook. She posits that the real threat to women in the nineteenth century was not murder but a society that had ambiguous feelings about the role of women in the economic system, in education, and as independent citizens. of Mary Bean and Other Stories features two reprinted accounts of Caswell's death, both fictional and originally printed in the 1850s, as well as an introduction that places these salacious accounts in a historical context. This book serves not simply as true crime but, rather, presents a seamy side of rapid industrial growth and the public anxiety over the emerging economic roles of women.

Download or read book Fall River Outrage written by David Richard Kasserman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fall River Outrage recounts one of the most sensational and widely reported murder cases in early nineteenth-century America. When, in 1832, a pregnant mill worker was found hanged, the investigation implicated a prominent Methodist minister. Fearing adverse publicity, both the industrialists of Fall River and the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church engaged in energetic campaigns to obtain a favorable verdict. It was also one of the earliest attempts by American lawyers to prove their client innocent by assassinating the moral character of the female victim. Fall River Outrage provides insight in American social, legal, and labor history as well as women's studies.

Download or read book All American Murder written by James Patterson and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-01-22 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the shocking #1 New York Times bestseller: the true story of a young NFL player's first-degree murder conviction and untimely death -- and his journey from the Patriots to prison. Aaron Hernandez was a college All-American who became the youngest player in the NFL and later reached the Super Bowl. His every move as a tight end with the New England Patriots played out the headlines, yet he led a secret life -- one that ended in a maximum-security prison. What drove him to go so wrong, so fast? Between the summers of 2012 and 2013, not long after Hernandez made his first Pro Bowl, he was linked to a series of violent incidents culminating in the death of Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player who dated the sister of Hernandez's fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins. All-American Murder is the first book to investigate Aaron Hernandez's first-degree murder conviction and the mystery of his own shocking and untimely death.

Download or read book Shallow Graves written by Maureen Boyle and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The worst serial killing case in Massachusetts since the Boston Strangler

Download or read book Murder in Boston written by Ken Englade and published by Diversion Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shocking true story of crime, punishment, and injustice in a major American city. Charles Stuart claimed it was a black man who carjacked him, shooting both himself and his wife, ending both her life and the life of their unborn child. The accusation and subsequent manhunt enflamed the long-simmering racial tensions of Boston, leading to the arrest of an innocent man. It was then discovered that Stuart had killed his wife and shot himself to cover up the crime, seeking a big insurance payout. When his crimes were exposed, Stuart jumped off a bridge to his death. Ken Englade explores the story with panoramic vision and a stunning eye for detail. Looking at the crime itself and the police response, Englade shows how Stuart’s crime unraveled, how the truth came out, and what the media’s response can tell us about the biases through which we view the worst of crimes.

Download or read book Murder in an English Village written by Jessica Ellicott and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As friends, the boisterous and brash American Beryl couldn’t be less alike than the prim and proper British Edwina. But as sleuths in an England recovering from the Great War, they’re the perfect match . . . 1920: Flying in the face of convention, legendary American adventuress Beryl Helliwell never fails to surprise and shock. The last thing her adoring public would expect is that she craves some peace and quiet. The humdrum hamlet of Walmsley Parva in the English countryside seems just the ticket. And, honestly, until America comes to its senses and repeals Prohibition, Beryl has no intention of returning stateside and subjecting herself to bathtub gin. For over three decades, Edwina Davenport has lived comfortably in Walmsley Parva, but the post–World War I bust has left her in dire financial straits and forced her to advertise for a lodger. When her long-lost school chum Beryl arrives on her doorstep—actually crashes into it in her red motorcar—Edwina welcomes her old friend as her new roommate. But her idyllic hometown has a hidden sinister side, and when the two friends are drawn in, they decide to set up shop as private inquiry agents, helping Edwina to make ends meet and satisfying Beryl’s thirst for adventure. Now this odd couple will need to put their heads together to catch a killer—before this sleepy English village becomes their final resting place . . .

Download or read book A Death in Canaan written by Joan Barthel and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “riveting” true crime classic: The trial of Connecticut teen Peter Reilly, accused of killing his mother, and the community that defended him (People). In the sleepy hamlet of Canaan, Connecticut, Barbara Gibbons stood out. She and her eighteen-year-old son, Peter Reilly, lived in a drab one-bedroom house on a desolate stretch of road. An intelligent, lively woman with a wicked sense of humor, Barbara also had dark moods and drank too much. She fought loudly with neighbors and her son, and appeared to have a messy, complicated love life. When Peter came home from the Teen Center one night to discover his mother lying naked on the bedroom floor with her throat slashed, the police made him their prime suspect. After eight hours of interrogation and a polygraph test, Peter confessed. Investigators were convinced they had an open-and-shut case, but the townspeople disagreed. They couldn’t believe that the naïve teenager was capable of such a gruesome crime, and blamed detectives for taking advantage of the boy’s trust. With the help of celebrities including Mike Nichols and William Styron, who contributes an eloquent and persuasive introduction to Joan Barthel’s account of the case, the community of Canaan rallied to Peter’s defense. A gripping murder mystery and an intimate portrait of the loyalties, resentments, and secrets lurking beneath the placid surface of quiet towns across America, A Death in Canaan is a masterpiece of “first-class journalism” (The New York Times).

Download or read book The New England Primer written by John Cotton and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: