Sometimes, all it takes is one moment, one reaction; other times, it's a slow and methodical build-up. But all the killers portrayed in this book committed crimes of passion - through jealous rages or intense love-hate relationships, or both. The motives and actions of over 100 murderers who commited crimes of passion are revealed with detail and clarity.
On 26 November 1983 six armed robbers escaped with ?28 million worth of gold bullion from a Brink's-Mat warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport. The heist made the careers of many of the underworld's biggest names, and changed the face of British crime for ever. In the years following the robbery, many of those involved, innocent and guilty alike, have been sent to an early grave. Two decades on, the death toll is still rising. Nobody knows more about that extraordinary morning's events than Wensley Clarkson. Nobody is better placed to track the vicious, violent and unexpected waves that followed in its wake, or bring to life its cast of larger-than-life characters. From small-time crime in south-east London, to 'the heist of the century' and its bloody consequences, Wensley Clarkson's The Curse of Brink's-Mat is an epic tale of villainy, gold and revenge.
While Jack the Ripper spread fear throughout the East End of London in 1888, another man stalked the streets hunting flesh. He called himself 'Walter'. He was a rapist, voyeur, and fetishist obsessed with prostitutes. Walter was not only a wealthy man, but a literary one. In the same year as the Ripper killings, Walter first printed up his vast memoir of sex and perversion under the title "My Secret Life". Fewer than 20 sets were struck off on a secret Amsterdam press between 1888 and 1894. Long banned for obscenity, only censored excerpts of Walter's masterwork were seen for a century. One of the few complete sets not destroyed by the authorities was locked away in the British Library's closed cupboard. This is the story of the volumes in that locked room and the horrific clue they contain - a clue that unlocks the diary as the final confession of Jack the Ripper. "Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession" shows how this notorious work of Victorian pornography reveals that its author had the means, the motive and the opportunity to be Jack the Ripper. As importantly, it delves into dark psychiatric motives within the text, to show Walter possessed the unique psycho-sexual fingerprint of a knife killer.
In the summer of 1985, in his exclusive Manhattan apartment, Robert Bierenbaum, a reputable and widely respected surgeon, murdered his wife Gail. According to prosecutors, he then drove her body to an airstrip, and dumped it into the Atlantic Ocean from a single-engine private plane. The next day he reported her missing. Gail's parents had been thrilled to learn she was marrying Robert Bierenbaum. He seemed to be the perfect match for their daughter. He was from a well-to-do family, a medical student who spoke five languages fluently, a skier, and he even had a pilot's licence. But Gail soon came to learn of her husband's dark side. She filed a police report on one occasion, when Robert had tried to choke her because he caught her smoking. She also alleged that he had tried to kill her cat because he was jealous of it. For years, Gail's sister pleaded with her to run for her life. Even her therapist warned her that she could eventually die at the hands of the man she married. Fifteen years after this unspeakable, unfathomable crime, a jury found Robert Bierenbaum guilty of murder. This gripping account reveals the sinister hidden life of this privileged professional.
Occupied Paris, 1944. A swastika crowns the Eiffel Tower, Nazis march through the streets and in the dark heart of the city, a madman is at work?At a chic Right Bank address, a horrific pile of dismembered bodies is discovered. The property's owner, the well-to-do Dr Petiot, immediately becomes the prime suspect, but now he has vanished without a trace. As the police delve into the doctor's past, a disturbing history of violence and corruption is uncovered. What seems like a cut-and-dried case takes an unexpected turn. Is Petiot a sadistic killer or a hero of the Resistance? And who exactly are his victims? This book is a fascinating true account of a case that gripped wartime Paris, David King draws extensively on new sources to paint a chilling portrait of a murderer whose crimes devastated a city already in the grip of evil.
The twin fascinations of death and villainy will always hold us in their grim but thrilling grip. In Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Suffolk the chill is brought close to home as each chapter investigates the darker side of humanity in cases of murder, deceit and pure malice committed over the centuries in this part of East Anglia. From crimes of passion to opportunistic killings and coldly premeditated acts of murder, the full spectrum of criminality is recounted here. The traditionally rural nature of Suffolk creates isolated, inward looking communities with their own peculiar customs and practices. While this is one of the more endearing aspects of country life, it can also spawn narrow-mindedness and parochialism that leads to conflict - and occasionally even to death. In this collection of grisly crime stories Mark Mower takes us on a journey through the darker side of Suffolk folklore, with tales of poisoning, grave robbing, stabbing, shooting and larceny. On the way we meet highwaymen, cut-throats, murderous lovers, homicidal relatives, pirates and purveyors of human flesh. The dramas he describes are often played out in the most commonplace of circumstances, but others are so odd as to be stranger than fiction.
Enter the dark streets of Victorian London, east-end life, and unsolved mysteries with this intriguing insight into the notorious Jack-the-Ripper murders. From the gruesome murder reports to a detailed look at the suspects, the Memorabilia Collection is an investigation of one of the world's most infamous unsolves crimes and is a must-have for all budding detectives. The Jack The Ripper Memorabilia Collection includes a detailed murder map of the crime scenes, a replica of the infamous Jack-the-Ripper letter and a poster of all the possible suspects.
The Idea of the 'gentler and fairer sex' is hard to find in these stories of murder by women in all parts of Yorkshire. Some are tales of marital tension and tragedy, while others are sad accounts of infanticide while under mental duress. The media like a crime of passion story, as in the life and death of Ruth Ellis, and Yorkshire has its own women killers in that category, but the glamour is an illusion: women killing their partners or husbands is never melodramatic and always terrible, as these tales show. Here the reader will meet the Leeds double murderer Louie Calvert, Mary Bateman the poisoner, the Hull woman who hired a hit-man and many more tales of violence and death across the Ridings. But behind these stories, Stephen Wade also explores the uneasy relationship between social change and the criminal law, so the courtrooms as well as the murder scenes have their absorbing and dramatic stories.