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  • Book cover of The Shawnee

    Many Indian tribes claimed Kentucky as hunting territory in the eighteenth century, though for the most part their villages were built elsewhere. For the Shawnee, whose homeland was in the Ohio and Cumberland valleys, Kentucky was an essential source of game, and the skins and furs were vital for trade. When Daniel Boone explored Kentucky in 1769, a band of Shawnee warned him they would not tolerate the presence of whites there. Settlers would remember the warning until 1794 and the Battle of Fallen Timbers. In The Shawnee, Jerry E. Clark eloquently recounts the story of the bitter struggle between white settlers and the Shawnee for possession of the region, a conflict that left its mark in the legends of Kentucky.

  • Book cover of Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

    Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.” She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania, Diehl-Armstrong’s hometown. Diehl-Armstrong’s life unfolded in an enthralling portrait; a fascinating interplay between mental illness and the law. As a female serial killer, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was in a rare category. In the early 1970s, she was a high-achieving graduate student pursuing a career in education but suffered from bipolar disorder. Before her death, she was sentenced to serve life plus thirty years in federal prison. In Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella examine female serial killers by focusing on the fascinating and tragic life of one woman. This book also explores mental illness and forensic psychology and provides a history of how American jurisprudence has grappled with such complex and controversial issues as the insanity defense and mental competency to stand trial. The authors’ account shows why Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was unlike any other criminal – man or woman – in American history. Accounts of Diehl-Armstrong’s travails – her difficult childhood, her murder trials, her hoarding – are interpolated with chapters about mental disorders and the law.

  • Book cover of On the Lam

    Fugitives occupy a unique place in the American criminal justice system. They can run and they can hide, but eventually each chase ends. And, in many cases, history is made along the way. John Dillinger’s capture obsessed J. Edgar Hoover and helped create the modern FBI. Violent student radicals who went on the lam in the 1960s reflected the turbulence of the era. The sixteen-year disappearance and sudden arrest of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in 2011 captivated the nation. Fugitives have become iconic characters in American culture even as they have threatened public safety and the smooth operation of the justice system. They are always on the run, always trying to stay out of reach of the long arm of the law. Also prominent are the men and women who chase fugitives: FBI agents, federal marshals and their deputies, police officers, and bounty hunters. A significant element of the justice system is dedicated to finding those on the run, and the most-wanted posters and true-crime television shows have made fugitives seemingly ubiquitous figures of fear and fascination for the public. In On the Lam, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella trace the history of fugitives in the United States by looking at the characters – real and fictional – who have played the roles of the hunter and the hunted. They also examine the origins of the bail system and other legal tools, such as most-wanted programs, that are designed to guard against flight.

  • Book cover of Pizza Bomber

    The bizarre, true story of a robbery gone wrong and the explosive murder that shocked the nation—as seen on Netflix’s docuseries Evil Genius. For the first time, two of the people who followed the story from the beginning—Jerry Clark, the lead FBI Special Agent who cracked what became known as the Pizza Bomber case, and investigative reporter Ed Palattella—tell the complete story of what happened on August 28, 2003. In the suburbs of Erie, Pennsylvania, a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells was accosted by several men who locked a time bomb around his neck. They then ordered him to rob a bank. After delivering the money, he would receive clues to help him disarm the bomb. It was one of the most ingenious bank robbery schemes in history, known as Collarbomb by the FBI. It did not go according to plan. Wells, picked up by police shortly after the robbery, never found the clues he needed. Investigating the crime after his grisly death, the FBI soon discovered that Wells was not, in fact, an innocent victim. He was merely the first co-conspirator to fall in a bizarre trail of death following the crime... INCLUDES PHOTOS

  • Book cover of The Road Out of Hell

    The New York Times–bestselling author’s “haunting, compassionate, and terrifyingly true” story of a man breaking free from his notorious past (Gregg Olson, New York Times–bestselling author of Starvation Heights). From 1926 to 1928, Gordon Stewart Northcott committed at least twenty murders on a chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles. He held his nephew, Sanford Clark, captive there from the age of thirteen to fifteen. Sanford would be Northcott’s sole surviving victim. Forced by Northcott to take part in the murders, he carried tremendous guilt all his life. Yet despite his youth and the trauma he endured, Sanford helped gain justice for the dead and their families by testifying at the trial that led to Northcott’s execution. These shocking events inspired Clint Eastwood’s film The Changeling. But in The Road Out of Hell, acclaimed crime writer Anthony Flacco uses revelatory new accounts from Sanford’s son to tell the complete, true story. Going beyond the film’s narrative, Flacco recounts not only Sanford’s nightmarish captivity, but also the inspiring life he led afterward. In dramatizing one of the darkest cases in American crime, Flacco constructs a riveting psychological drama about how Sanford was able to detoxify himself from the evil he’d encountered, offering the ultimately redemptive story of one man’s remarkable ability to survive hell on earth and emerge intact.

  • Book cover of A Hinged Heart
    Jerry Clark

     · 2009

    Written words often portray what the voice cannot speak. Each sunrise presents a desire for new understanding and a fresh challenge to epitomize in expression. With this in mind these words reveal what might have never been spoken. Now, this book is shared with all. What if you Love, But resist speaking it? This poetry reaches out to your emotions to be shared with loved ones. Emotion and life stories spilling directly from this hinged heart to yours.

  • Book cover of A History of Heists

    No crime is as synonymous with America as bank robbery. Though the number of bank robberies nationwide has declined, bank robbery continues to captivate the public and jeopardize the safety of banks and their employees. In A History of Heists, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella explore how bank robbers have influenced American culture as much as they have reflected it. Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, and Patty Hearst are among the most famous figures in the history of crime in the United States. Jesse James used his training as a Confederate guerrilla to make bank robbery a political act. John Dillinger capitalized on the public’s scorn of banks during the Great Depression and became America’s first Public Enemy Number One. When she held up a bank with the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst fueled the country’s social unrest. Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella delve into the backgrounds and motivations of the robbers, and explore how they are as complex as the nation whose banks they have plundered. But as much as the story of bank robbery in America focuses on the thieves, it is also a story of those who investigate the heists. As bank robbers became more sophisticated, so did the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies. This captivating history showshow bank robbery shaped the modern FBI, and how it continues to cultivate America’s fascination with the noble outlaw: bandits seen, rightly or wrongly, as battling unjust authority.

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    Based on actual events in the lives of John Cappelletti, the football player and his younger brother Joey, a victim of leukemia.

  • Book cover of Cyclosportives

    Cyclosportives, or sportives as they are usually known, are the cycling equivalent of marathons. They often last over seven hours and are ridden over distances in excess of 100 miles. If they are to compete successfully, serious sportive riders require a high level of physical fitness, mental strength and focus, good bike-handling skills and the ability to commit themselves to a stringent programme of training and preparation.Written by two accomplished and experienced sportive competitors the book covers: The origins and development of the sportive; The bike, clothing and equipment; Training and avoiding injury; Nutrition, planning and preparation; Bike-handling and group-riding techniques; The mental aspects of sportive riding; Competing in an event and 'the recovery'; Frequently asked questions. This comprehensive book is written for all those who want to achieve their maximum potential, or who simply want to improve their knowledge and performance by following the authors' straightforward and practical advice. A new and fast growing discipline that offers a big ride challenge to seasoned racers.Written for the rider who is prepared to do the training and compete in the knowledge that they have prepared fully so that they can perform to the best of their ability. Superbly illustrated with 157 colour photographs. Jerry Clark and Bill Joss are two accomplished and experienced sportive competitors.

  • Book cover of George S. Kaufman, Collaborator