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.

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

Racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system is much debated and discussed, but until now, no single volume has covered the full expanse of the issue. In Bias in the Law, sixteen outstanding experts address the impact of racial bias in the full roster of criminal justice actors. They examine the role of legislators crafting criminal justice legislation, community enforcers, and police, as well as prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, judges, and jurors. Understanding when and why bias arises, as well as how it impacts defendants requires a clear understanding how each of these actors operate. Contributions touch on other crucial topics—racialized drug stigma, legal technology, and interventions—that are vital for understanding how the United States has reached this moment of stark racial disparity in incarceration. The result is an important entry into understanding the pervasiveness of racial bias, how such bias impacts legal outcomes, and why such impact matters. This is an issue that is as relevant today as it was fifty—or even one hundred fifty—years ago, and collection editors Joseph Avery and Joel Cooper provide a glimpse at how to proceed.

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.

School shootings scare everyone, even those not immediately affected. They make national and international news. They make parents afraid to send their children off to school. But they also lead to generalizations about those who perpetrate them. Most assumptions about the perpetrators are wrong and many of the warning signs are missed until it’s too late. Here, Peter Langman takes a look at 48 national and international cases of school shootings in order to dispel the myths, explore the motives, and expose the realities of preventing school shootings from happening in the future, including identifying at risk individuals and helping them to seek help before it’s too late.

From a National Jewish Book Award–winning author: The “revelatory and shocking” investigation into the CIA’s liberation of Nazi war criminals (Kirkus Reviews). How did Gen, Karl Wolff, one of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party’s Waffen-SS, who personally oversaw the deportation of three hundred thousand Jews to the Treblinka extermination camps, escape prosecution at the Nuremberg trials? As revealed in this groundbreaking investigation—culled from recently uncovered archival documents—the answer lies within the US government, which buried reports on the Final Solution and was complicit in the recruitment of Nazi war criminals, all to protect the world economy. Among the key players was CIA director Allen Dulles, who was not only instrumental in Wolff’s exoneration but also responsible for installing former slave-labor specialists into positions of power in postwar Germany. In this damning exposé of American government malfeasance, author Christopher Simpson traces the roots of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler’s Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. Detailing how the existing structures of international law and commerce have encouraged mass killings, corporate looting, and profiteering at the expense of innocent victims, The Splendid Blond Beast is a disturbing and profound book about the success of evil in our time. The award-winning author of Blowback and Science of Coercion, Simpson also served as research director for Marcel Ophüls’s Oscar-winning documentary, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.

Drawing on extensive interviews with the accused herself, here is the sordid, twisted, and surprising story of Brookey Lee West—a successful technical writer from Silicon Valley who became Las Vegas’ most notorious female serial killer. In February, 2001, police uncovered the decomposed remains of Christine Smith bagged like garbage in a Las Vegas storage unit. She’d been dead for years. Next to the makeshift tomb were books on witchcraft and Satanism. It didn’t take long for authorities to discover that the owner of the foul Canyon Gate Unit #317 was Christine’s own daughter, Brookey Lee West. Further investigation revealed something even more shocking—a one-woman crime spree that spanned two decades, stretched from Nevada to California, and may have counted among its victims Brookey’s own husband and brother....

-With a new preface and a new postscript.-

Comprehensive, reliable and eye-opening, this A to Z examines the sexual practices, expressions and attitudes of the Greeks and Romans, from Catullus and Caligula, to orgies and obscenity to pederasty and prostitution.

A comprehensive examination into the frightening true crime history of serial homicide—including information on America’s most prolific serial killers such as: Jeffrey Dahmer • Ted Bundy • “Co-ed Killer” Ed Kemper • The BTK Killer • “Highway Stalker” Henry Lee Lucas • Monte Ralph Rissell • “Shoe Fetish Slayer” Jerry Brudos • “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez • “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski • Ed Gein “The Butcher of Plainfield” • “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy • Andrew Cunanan • And more... In this unique book, Peter Vronsky documents the psychological, investigative, and cultural aspects of serial murder, beginning with its first recorded instance in Ancient Rome through fifteenth-century France on to such notorious contemporary cases as cannibal/necrophile Ed Kemper, the BTK killer, Henry Lee Lucas, Monte Ralph Rissell, Jerry Brudos, Richard Ramirez, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the emergence of what he classifies as the “serial rampage killer” such as Andrew Cunanan, who murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace. Vronsky not only offers sound theories on what makes a serial killer but also makes concrete suggestions on how to survive an encounter with one—from recognizing verbal warning signs to physical confrontational resistance. Exhaustively researched with transcripts of interviews with killers, and featuring up-to-date information on the apprehension and conviction of the Green River killer and the Beltway Snipers, Vronsky’s one-of-a-kind book covers every conceivable aspect of an endlessly riveting true crime phenomenon. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS