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Ghost Girl: Surviving the Black Swan Murder--A Memoir
by Eva Benefield
Eva Benefield, the daughter of the victim of the viral "Black Swan Murder", describes coming of age amid grief, violence, and a true-crime spectacle. Reeling from the sudden loss of both her parents and the looming criminal trial of her stepmother, Eva begins to navigate the confusing world of adulthood all alone. From losing friends who can't understand the nature of her new reality, to processing her grief and anger as she slowly pulls herself together and begins to chart a new path forward, Eva confronts the triumphs and challenges of a truly incredible situation head on in this unforgettable memoir.
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Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
by Pamela Colloff
The riveting, true story of an audacious con man who helped send another man to death row for a murder he did not commit. For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. Whenever Skalnik got caught, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik's account of his confession helped put Dailey on death row. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Skalnik still refused to recant his testimony.
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Confessions of the Green River Killer: A True Story of Manipulation, Madness, and a Search for Justice
by Maria Dilorenzo
A startling profile of one of the most prolific serial killers and the disturbing experience of the journalist who earned his trust for the sake of justice. When crime journalist Maria DiLorenzo mailed a letter to Gary Ridgway, she never expected him to reply. He refused to speak to reporters and would send only religious materials back to anyone who contacted him in prison--if he replied at all. But instead of silence or a boilerplate letter, Maria's phone rang-and it was the Green River Killer calling. Over the next several years, Ridgway would call Maria hundreds of times, using all of his free time in prison to speak with her. Her goal: to pry the details of his dozens of unidentified and unsolved murders from him. His motivation in speaking to her: unknowable. Through these hundreds of hours of phone calls, Ridgway revealed new details about his life, his crimes, and his motives - and manipulated Maria much like he tormented his victims.
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Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
The son of Weather Underground radicals tells the story of a childhood on the run and a half-century of revolutionary struggle in America. Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents were fugitives after a decade fighting the US government; his mother was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. All his life, Dohrn’s parents said his birth marked a clean break with violent revolutionary struggle, but in this explosive memoir, he discovers that story wasn’t entirely true. Reckoning with the emotional damage the Weathermen inflicted on their victims, their children, and themselves, Dohrn’s unflinching memoir explores the roots of radicalism and asks how a young person survives when the place they feel safest―with their family―also puts them in danger.
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Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution
by Katherine Grandjean
Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The killers are brothers, named Wiley and Micajah Harp. The Harps killed dozens, but why they did it has eluded folklorists and historians for generations. Almost every story imagines that their motive was pure bloodlust, but for historian Katherine Grandjean, that's too simple. Instead, she uses the Harp murders to reveal the dark side of the young United States' independence. These were uncertain and dangerous years--a time when the fledgling federal government could do little to protect its citizens. And if the American Revolution was liberating, it was also deeply destabilizing, politically and socially. Even as it built up some men, it stacked the deck against others, punishing them with volatile markets, lost safety nets, and shattered aspirations. Unspooling the mystery of what sent the Harps reeling exposes the hidden, violent legacies of the revolutionary era.
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No Memory for Murder: The Incredible Story of a Sadistic Murder in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park
by Blain Henshaw
In 1975, Jimmy Odo was charged with the murder of fourteen-year-old Tony Cluett, who was found strung up crucifixion-style in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park. Six years later, he was charged with bludgeoning to death Darlene Davidson, his former girlfriend's five-year-old daughter. At trial in 1981, Odo testified that although he didn't remember the killings, he had lied to avoid conviction for the Cluett murder. He also spoke of being part of a satanic cult while living in Montreal. This is the true story of two brutal murders, a flawed parole system that granted early release to a convicted sex offender with known homicidal tendencies, the questionable conduct of two defense lawyers, and the sick mind of a killer.
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American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda
by Ru Marshall
American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, it defies conventional biography. Carlos Castaneda, born in Peru in 1925, fled to the U.S. in 1951, escaping responsibility for a child he fathered with a thirteen-year-old girl. In 1968, he published his first book, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a Westerner. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality--despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices. For a time, his truth went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing expos revealing that Castaneda wasn't who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive spiritual group that blurred the line between fiction and reality.
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Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska
by Rebecca Wright Stevens
Rebecca Wright is a defense attorney living in the Lower 48 when she suddenly finds herself a widow and an empty nester. In need of a radical change, she accepts a public defender position in Utqiagvik on Alaska's North Slope, an oil-rich area the size of Wyoming where the Iñupiat community holds great cultural, political, and economic power. Though she'll always be an outsider, she works hard to gain the trust and friendship of the folks who call this singular place home. When two well-known sisters, Bernice and Wanda Ipalook, are found murdered, Wright is tasked with representing Amos Lane, a drifter on the short-list of murder suspects. Criminal charges are looming. But this is summer in northern Alaska, the season of the midnight sun, when twenty-four-hour sunlight makes it difficult for witnesses to confirm the time--or even the day--they last saw the sisters, Amos, or anyone else. Wright must navigate an unreliable client, a prosecution willing to entrap her to get a conviction, a budding romance, and a community that believes Amos might deserve a different form of justice from what the legal system can provide.
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Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival
by Justine Van Der Leun
When journalist Justine van der Leun began researching the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see women being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, years-long investigation into how survivors are targeted for prosecution, leading her to collect more than a thousand personal accounts from women's prisons across America. In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive.
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