Júlio Santana as seen through the eyes of acclaimed investigative reporter Klester Cavalcanti is not a monster: he is a loyal son, a family man, a devout Christian who is tormented by his conscience with every shot. But in a cruel and lawless area of Brazil, where every life has its price, respect for life is a luxury that he can't afford. Trained by his uncle, an assassin, and initiated in murder at seventeen years of age, Santana proved to be a natural. Without moralizing about mass murder, The Name of Death attempts to show how such a career can be not so very different from other ordinary working lives.The portrait that emerges in this riveting narrative based on seven years of phone conversations between Cavalcanti and Santana is not only that of a man but also that of a country. Describing in detail only a handful of the almost five hundred murders Santana carried out, Cavalcanti reveals just how lawless much of the interior of Brazil has been for the past fifty years. The state, the police, and the security forces play almost no part in establishing the rule of law-except when suppressing the guerilla threat of the early 1970s. Cavalcanti shows just how easy it is for a boy like Júlio to take the law into his own hands, and what a wild place Brazil has been and, in many ways, continues to be.
In the heart of Indianapolis in the mid-1960's, through a twist of fate and fortune, a pretty young girl came to live with a thirty-seven-year-old mother and her seven children. What began as a temporary childcare arrangement between Sylvia Likens's parents and Gertrude Baniszewski turned into a crime that would haunt cops, prosecutors, and a community for decades to come . . .
When police found Sylvia's emaciated body, with a chilling message carved into her flesh, they knew that she had suffered tremendously before her death. Soon they would learn how many others-including some of Baniszewski's own children-participated in Sylvia's murder, and just how much torture had been inflicted in one House of Evil.
Days before, seventeen-year-old Jennifer Bailey, her thirteen-year-old brother David, and their friends Paul Henson and Merrilee White had made a gruesome pact: they'd kill their parents, steal their cars and credit cards, and flee to Canada. Paul and Merrilee's parents thwarted their fates, but Jennifer and David's mother Susan Bailey wasn't so lucky. When the devoted mother returned home from work, her two children and their friend Paul took turns stabbing her and slicing her throat. When they were done, they fled in Susan's car. They made it as far as South Dakota before being arrested. What really led them to make such a despicable pact? The answers would cast a disturbing new light on the way we see the all-American family, our neighbors, our children-and the society that nurtured them.
AN OLD WAY OF LIFE
Thirty-year-old Barbara Weaver was content to live as the Amish have for centuries-without modern convenience-but her husband, Eli, wanted a life beyond horses and buggies. Soon he gave in to the temptation of technology and found ways to go online and meet women. When Barbara was found dead, shot in the chest at close range, all eyes were on Eli . . . and his mistress, a Conservative Mennonite named Barb Raber.
A NEW KIND OF BETRAYAL-AND DEATH . . .
Barb drove Eli to appointments in her car. She gave him everything he asked for: a laptop, rides to his favorite fishing and hunting spots-and sex. Above all, she gave him the cell phone he would use to plan a murder. The Weaver case marked only the third time an Amish man was suspected of killing his wife in more than two hundred years in America. But the investigation raised almost as many questions as it answered: Was Barb Raber the one who fired the fatal shot? Or was Barbara Weaver dead before someone entered the house? What did Eli's friends, family, and church really know about him? And will life among the "Plain People" ever be the same?
This book tells the stories of Britain's most depraved killers - monsters whose crimes outraged society and demanded the harshest penalty available to a British court. In a UK prison population of close to 100,000, fewer than forty men and women have been told they will end their days in a prison cell. A graphic and harrowing read, this book is the first to bring together the case histories of every full-term lifer in Britain's jails, as police, lawyers and the relatives of both victims and killers describe how the truth was pieced together - and how these awful crimes have affected their lives. Offering never-before-published information about these extraordinary offenders, Life Means Life uncovers the shocking true stories of the thirty-six who have forfeited their right to live among us - forever.
The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante-the king of Jazz Age con artists-who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game.
Edgar Laplante was a smalltime 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.
Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and traveled throughout the American West, narrowly escaping exposure and arrest each time he left town. When the heat became too much, he embarked upon a lucrative continent-hopping tour that attracted even more enormous crowds, his cons growing in proportion to the adulation of his audience. As he moved through Europe, he spied his biggest mark on the Riviera: a prodigiously rich Hungarian countess, who was instantly smitten with the con man. The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. But then, at the pinnacle of his improbable success, Laplante's overreaching threatened to destroy him…
In King Con, Paul Willetts brings this previously untold story to life in all its surprising absurdity, showing us how our tremendous capacity for belief and our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all-and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on the "The Dating Game," one of America's most popular television shows at the time. Handsome, successful, and romantic, he was embraced by the audience-and chosen as the winner by the beautiful bachelorette. To viewers across the country, Rodney seemed like the answer to every woman's dreams. Until they learned the truth about his once and future crimes . . .
Ten years before his TV appearance, Rodney was charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of an eight-year-old girl. In the decades that followed, he would be accused of seven murders-and, as new DNA evidence continues to be uncovered, the list may grow. The case is so disturbing that it's been documented in several news outlets, from People magazine and USA Today to 48 Hours Mystery and Dr. Phil.
Phoenix, Arizona, 2004. Former stripper turned suburban housewife Marjorie Orbin filed a missing person's report on her husband. She claimed that Jay, a successful art dealer, had left town on business after celebrating their son's birthday more than a month before. Jay loved his family more than life itself-and no one believed he would ever abandon them. Authorities suspected foul play . . .
A WIFE LYING IN WAIT
The search for Jay made local headlines. But key elements in Marjorie's story still weren't adding up: Why did she wait so long before going to police? If Jay was away on business, as she claimed, why were there charges made to his credit card in Phoenix? Then, the unthinkable happened.
A SHOCKING DISCOVERY
Jay's headless, limbless torso was discovered on the outskirts of the Phoenix desert-and all evidence pointed to Marjorie as the killer. Soon, an exhaustive investigation would reveal surprising new details about her life-six previous marriages, an ongoing and passionate affair with a man from her gym, alleged ties to the New York mafia, a drug habit-and lead to her conviction for the murder and dismemberment of her seventh husband.
Two young, attractive women. Both savagely attacked, brutalized, raped, and murdered. Rachel Newhouse disappeared on the night of November 12, 1998, in San Luis Obispo, California. Only months later, in the same town, Aundria Crawford lost her life in an act of unimaginable violence.
As authorities worked to find clues to the killer's identity, parole officer David Zaragoza paid a routine visit to one of his charges-Rex Allan Krebs, a violent serial rapist who'd served only ten years of a twenty-year sentence. After sending Krebs back to jail for violating his parole, Zaragoza found a keychain belonging to one of the victims. An intensive search led to the gruesome discovery of buried remains near Krebs's secluded cabin. In his confession, Krebs asked, "If I am not a monster, then what am I?" A jury responded by sentencing him to death by lethal injection.
While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story.
Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone-with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it. And at the center of it all-an elusive French psychic named Maria Duval.
Based on the five-part series that originally appeared on CNN's website in 2016 and was seen by more than three million people, A Deal with the Devil picks up where the series left off as Ellis and Hicken reveal more bizarre characters, follow new leads, close in on Maria Duval, and connect the dots in an edge-of-your-seat journey across the U.S. to England and France. A Deal with the Devil is a fascinating, thrilling search for the truth and is long-form investigative journalism at its best.
A Two-Time Widow Leading a Double Life
Miriam Giles ran away to Colorado to bury her violent past-but this seductive, charismatic widow had a dark side that could never stay buried. After finding the "sugar daddy" she was looking for in Alan Helmick, her new marriage seemed happy. Then, two years later, Alan met a gruesome fate. Returning home from errands, Miriam found him lying in a pool of blood. Miriam showed police a cryptic note warning her to "run, run, run." But Miriam was no distraught housewife. She was a master manipulator always able to stay one step ahead of her unwitting partner-and the law-until now.
Contains mature themes.
In September 2001, the headless body of an elderly man washing ashore in Galveston, Texas. Also recovered were garbage bags containing the severed limbs of the victim-and a newspaper with a home delivery address that left arresting officers to the downscale apartment of Robert Durst, an unkempt transient who dressed in drag.
Incredibly, his bail was posted the following morning. New York authorities were quick to make the unbelievable connection. This was the Robert Durst, the dashing real estate scion whose family's fortune was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was also the Robert Durst who was a "person of interest" in the number of a prominent woman journalist, as well as a high-profile suspect in the mysterious disappearance of his first wife 20 years earlier.
How could Robert Durst degenerate from a powerful New York City businessman to a cross-dressing fugitive wanted in a murder investigation? The answer was more startling than anyone who knew him could ever have imagined . . .
