Frank Carlson Library

In 1981, at the age of eighteen, John N. Huffington was found guilty of a double homicide in Harford County, Maryland. He was given two death sentences plus 21 years in what became known as the Memorial Day Murders. Maintaining his innocence from day one, John spent 32 years, 2 months, and 28 days in the Maryland Prison System, the first 10 years of his sentence were on death row. John's conviction was tainted with flimsy, unsubstantiated science...

Murder Most Criminous: The Cases of William Roughead, Father of Modern True Crime Literature Jim Stovall, Ed Caudill, William Roughead William Roughead is among the founders and one of the great popularizers of the "true crime" genre as it blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By those truly familiar with the genre, he is well-known as the father of modern true-crime writing. Roughead called himself a "historian of homicide." He was...

The first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran were, "I heard you paint houses." To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews, Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned to kill in the U.S. Army, where he saw an astonishing...

"In one of the year's most anticipated debut psychological thrillers, a family made infamous by a true crime documentary is found dead, leaving their surviving son to uncover the truth about their final days. "They found the bodies on a Tuesday." So begins this twisty and breathtaking novel that traces the fate of the Pine family, a thriller that will both leave you on the edge of your seat and move you to tears. After a late night of partying, NYU...

An investigative journalist chronicles his twenty-year obsession with the 1969 Manson murders and describes how he discovered evidence of a cover-up, carelessness from police, misconduct by prosecutors, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents.

What would you do if you found a million dollars? When Joey Coyle did, he was a twenty-eight-year-old drug-dependent, unemployed longshoreman living with his ailing mother in a tight-knit neighborhood in Philadelphia. While cruising the streets just blocks from his home, fate took a turn worthy of a Hollywood caper when he found $1.2 million in unmarked bills-casino money that had fallen off an armored truck. It was virtually untraceable. Coyle? Not...

A violent family living in violent times. In the 1840s, the Donnelly family emigrates from Ireland to the British province of Canada. Almost immediately, problems develop as the patriarch of the family i sent to the Kingston Penitentiary for manslaughter, leaving his wife to raise their eight children on her own. The children are, raised in an incredibly, violent community and cultivate, a devoted loyalty to their mother and siblings, which often...

A story made even more shocking because it's true. In 1880, an organized mob of the Donnellys' enemies murder four family members and burn their house to the ground. Another sibling is, shot to death in a house a short distance away. William Donnelly and a teenage boy are, the only witnesses to the murders. The surviving family members seek justice through the local courts but quickly learn that their enemies control the jury and the press. Two sensational...

A gold mine. A millionaire. An island paradise. An unsolved murder. A missing fortune. The story of the infamous Sir Harry Oakes as only Charlotte Gray can tell it On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold mining tycoon, philanthropist and "richest man in the Empire," was murdered. The news of his death surged across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake, in...

Mark Shaw is the foremost analyst of organised crime in SA.' – Jonny Steinberg At the dawn of the country's brave new democracy, Cape Town was at war. Pagad, which began as a community protest action against crime, had mutated into a sinister vigilante group wreaking death and destruction across the city. Between 1996 and 2001, there were hundreds of bomb blasts – most infamously at the Planet Hollywood restaurant at the V&A Waterfront – and...