House of Mystery True Crime History

James Fairweather, 15, Britain's youngest serial killer would have continued to hunt random victims had it not been for an observant dog walker. Eerily, she was also Fairweather's third intended victim. Fueled by the grief of his grandmother's passing and anger from being picked on at school, Fairweather turned to violent video games, horror movies, and pornography to escape reality. Soon thereafter, he developed a deep passion for serial killers - becoming one dominated all of his thoughts. When asked by his school teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up, James replied, "A murderer." Fairweather, true to his word, struck twice before police apprehended him and put a stop to this teen-aged killer.

Serial Killers and Prostitutes, by award-winning criminologist and Ripperologist, R. Barri Flowers, taps into the bestselling author’s expertise on serial murderers and sex trade workers in offering an in-depth look at four noteworthy cases in which the two worlds collide. Jack the Ripper, the unidentified Victorian serial killer of at least five prostitutes in the dangerous section of London, known as Whitechapel, in 1888. The Ripper, who slashed and horribly mutilated his sex worker victims, set the tone for diabolical, vicious serial slayers to follow for all time. Aileen Wuornos was a white American prostitute, who doubled as a serial killer in murdering seven johns in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She claimed they tried to or succeeded in raping her during the course of prostituting herself. In the process, Wuornos ended up being apropos for this book as a sex worker and serial predator. Kendall Francois was an African American serial killer, dubbed the “Poughkeepsie Killer,” who strangled to death eight streetwalker prostitutes in Poughkeepsie, New York, between 1996 and 1998. Francois used his own residence as a horrifying house of homicides and burial ground. The Edmonton Serial Killer represented one or more mostly unidentified serial killers who targeted and murdered dozens of prostitutes in the city of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, and possibly beyond that. The sex trade worker victims were often picked up in the city’s red-light district stroll, murdered, and dumped in various killing fields in rural areas around Edmonton.

Eleven children between the ages of nine and eighteen years old were abducted, raped, sodomized and either strangled or knifed to death. Clifford Olson was not only a serial killer, but a true psychopath. And once again, the Canadian government made a deal with the devil, as they did with Karla Homolka and Dr. Shirley Turner. Olson held the location of the bodies for ransom and was paid $10,000 for each burial site. This is a definitive, intense and 'graphic account of Clifford Olson, The Beast of British Columbia, and the eleven innocent children he murdered.'

He was sent to prison for deserting his comrades, sat in a cell contemplating what to do when he got out. He had no control within the prison walls and it drove him mad. The things that happened to him while in custody, unlocked oppressed sadistic feelings within Peter Kurten, and forced him to unleash a level of sexual deviancy on innocent victims in and around Dusseldorf, Germany, that no one will ever forget. Young girls, women, and men would succumb to horrific attacks including being bludgeoned by a hammer and stabbed to death. In several instances, Peter admitted to drinking blood from his victims and needing the act of rape and murder to reach orgasm. Oddly, the man lived a double life and his love for his wife drove him to turn himself in. Had he not done so, 'The Monster' would have continued to keep the country locked in fear. for many more years.

Peter Manuel killed repeatedly, both random and targeted victims, including men, women, and children, because he enjoyed the rush. As a life-long criminal, Manuel mainly committed property crime. That all changed when his heart was broken. The woman he'd been engaged to called off the wedding and left him, causing Peter to snap. His violence escalated then, and Peter terrorized various communities for almost two years. His cockiness had no end, and he went as far as giving a police inspector a ride while the inspector was searching for one of the teenage girls Peter had murdered. Peter toyed with the detective and advised him he thought the police were looking in the wrong spot for the girl. Ultimately, Peter's arrogance and insatiable need for attention led to his demise...one that made him meet his own executioner as he hung from a noose on prison gallows. This is a frightening story because no one was exempt from becoming his victim

A harmless-looking man moved to Montreal looking for a new start and to get off drugs. Somewhere along the line, his urge to prey on unsuspecting women, something he'd done and kept a secret for twenty years, became too much to keep inside. William Fyfe, aka "The Killer Handyman," snapped, leaving at least nine women brutally beaten, murdered and sexual abused (post-mortem). If not for the diligent work of a criminal forensic specialist and her discovery of a single fingerprint, Fyfe may have continued to kill at will, keeping Montreal residents, particularly single elderly women, frightened and sequestered in their own homes.

While there haven't been many Secret Service related books about U.S. presidents, the ones still in print (and even those long out of print) are often sanitized memoirs of a politically correct nature or "tell-all" tabloid historical junk meant merely for entertainment purposes. The Not-So-Secret Service provides the facts with the bark off, so to speak, and reveals politically incorrect information of a decidedly unsafe nature. It may be controversial and against the grain, but this book is heavily documented and timely, as the Secret Service guards our political candidates, foreign dignitaries, and, of course, the President, the first family and the ex-presidents and their families.

While there haven't been many Secret Service related books about U.S. presidents, the ones still in print (and even those long out of print) are often sanitized memoirs of a politically correct nature or "tell-all" tabloid historical junk meant merely for entertainment purposes. The Not-So-Secret Service provides the facts with the bark off, so to speak, and reveals politically incorrect information of a decidedly unsafe nature. It may be controversial and against the grain, but this book is heavily documented and timely, as the Secret Service guards our political candidates, foreign dignitaries, and, of course, the President, the first family and the ex-presidents and their families.

Sean Stone, co-host of ‘Watching the Hawks’, debuts his new documentary, ‘A Century of War’, giving a historical perspective on the shift to a post-industrial society and offering strategies to reinvigorate US infrastructure, starting with a reassessment of America's relationship to energy. The documentary will air as a four-part series on RT America’s ‘Watching the Hawks’ starting November 15. As the US approaches a century since entering World War I, Sean Stone asks, “What happened to the American Century? What happened to America's ideal of progress?” This election year has been punctuated by Americans’ concerns about feeling squeezed out of the traditional middle-class economy. Stone makes the argument that “a century of war has taken its toll on the great US republic.” In ‘A Century of War’, Stone links America’s petrodollar economy with its global military predominance, often to secure corporate access to natural resources.

Despite the rising number of confirmed false confession cases, most people have a hard time grasping why someone would confess to a crime they did not commit, or even why a guilty person would admit to something that could put them in jail for life. How the Police Generate False Confessions takes you inside the interrogation room, exposing the tactics that law enforcement uses to make confessions happen. James L. Trainum reveals how innocent people can become suspects and then confessed criminals even when they have not committed a crime. Using real stories, he looks at the inherent coerciveness of the interrogation process and why so many false confessions contain so many of the details that only the true perpetrator would know. More disturbingly, the book examines how these same processes corrupt witness and victim statements, create lying informants and cooperators, and induce innocent people to plead guilty. Trainum also offers recommendations for change in the U.S. by looking at how other countries are changing the process to prevent such miscarriages of justice. The reasons that people falsely confess can be complex and varied; throughout How the Police Generate False Confessions Trainum encourages readers to critically evaluate confessions on their own by gaining a better understanding of the interrogation process.

On November 6, 1936, 40-year-old Verna Garr Taylor of LaGrange, KY, was found dead in a soggy ditch just over the Henry County line. Her companion that night, 60-year-old Henry H. Denhardt, the sitting adjutant general of the Kentucky National Guard and recent lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, insisted that Verna had spontaneously committed suicide with his gun on the same night she tried to return his engagement ring. Because of a series of macabre, bizarre, and sometimes laughable events, "the Iron General" would never be held legally responsible for the murder of this beautiful, honorable widow and businesswoman. But that does not mean that Denhardt was innocent. Just in the time for the 80th anniversary of this tragedy, Ian Punnett who resigned as host of the most listened to overnight show in North America to pursue a PhD in journalism and mass communication has uncovered the final missing, convincing details that bring A Black Night for the Bluegrass Belle to life. As part of the Commonwealth of Kentucky book series by Acclaim Press, Punnett also reveals the unknown truth behind Denhardt's ignoble demise, a death that is considered the last "code of honor" slaying in Kentucky history. Through storytelling skills honed as a veteran radio personality on the nationally syndicated Coast to Coast AM, a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, and an instructor of Multimedia Journalism at Ohio Northern University, Punnett crafts every chapter of this murder-to-trial-to-murder-to-trial nonfiction narrative with evocative historical detail and the passion that is only possible from a family member. Punnett's maternal grandmother was Verna Garr Taylor's first cousin and confidante. As a result, Punnett has access to family insight no other author can claim.

A deeply reported, New York Times bestselling exposé of the money and the clerics-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican—the world’s biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with “exhaustive research techniques” (The New York Times). From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, God’s Bankers traces the political intrigue of the Catholic Church in “a meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican’s legendary, enabling secrecy” (Kirkus Reviews). Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine financial entanglements across the world. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in one of the world’s most influential organizations. God’s Bankers has it all: a revelatory and astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, and mysterious deaths written off as suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church’s aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger tensions of more recent history. And Posner even looks to the future to surmise if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. “As exciting as a mystery thriller” (Providence Journal), this book reveals with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.

Of all the notorious serial killers of the 20th century, only San Francisco’s Zodiac remains at large. A cold-blooded psycho stalking the nightmare streets of the late 1960s, he left behind at least five dead victims. The menacing sociopath sent more than two dozen letters to the newspapers, including four weird ciphers. Only the first code was cracked, and it began: I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN. His last three ciphers, including the infamously unintelligible Z340, have confounded cryptographers and computer science professionals alike.

In August 2009, former madam Dalia Dippolito conspired with a hit man to arrange her ex-con husband’s murder. Days later, it seemed as if all had gone according to plan. The beautiful, young Dalia came home from her health club to an elaborate crime scene, complete with yellow tape outlining her townhome and police milling about. When Sgt. Frank Ranzie of the Boynton Beach, Florida, police informed her of her husband Michael’s apparent murder, the newlywed Dippolito can be seen on surveillance video collapsing into the cop’s arms, like any loving wife would—or any wife who was pretending to be loving would. The only thing missing from her performance were actual tears. ... And the only thing missing from the murder scene was an actual murder. Tipped off by one of Dalia’s lovers, an undercover detective posing as a hit man met with Dalia to plot her husband's murder while his team planned, then staged the murder scenario—brazenly inviting the reality TV show Cops along for the ride. The Cops video went viral, sparking a media frenzy: twisted tales of illicit drugs, secret boyfriends, sex-for-hire, a cuckolded former con man, and the defense’s ludicrous claim that the entire hit had been staged by the intended victim for reality TV fame.

THE TRAIL OF TED BUNDY is a journey back in time, to when Ted Bundy was killing young woman and girls in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. It’s told by those who knew him, and you’ll hear their revealing stories, many being voiced and put to print for the very first time. The friends of the victims are here as well, and they too share their insights about the victims, and some of what they tell here had been held back from the investigators, such was their commitment to their deceased friends. It’s also the story of those who hunted Bundy; those who guarded him, and those who otherwise were a part of this strange case one way or another