For such a small city, Norton's past is rife with bloody deeds, tragic accidents and destructive disasters. This community on the edge of Akron had its share of train wrecks, plane crashes and devastating fires, but other events were decidedly more sinister in nature. In 1931, a young robber allowed his twelve-year-old brother to ride along on a bank heist--to little brother's great delight. A labor dispute in 1950 resulted in two bombings of a local residence in a single year. In the 1970s and '80s, serial killers Robert Buell and Edward Wayne Edwards left their evil marks on the city. Digging through two centuries of news coverage, local author Lisa Merrick uncovers Norton's most loathsome crimes and heartbreaking calamities.

The Agatha Award–nominated account of Northeast Ohio’s most chilling unsolved crimes from the author of Wicked Women of Ohio. Cold case files litter the desks of authorities all across Northeast Ohio. Louise Wolf and Mabel Foote, Parma teachers, were on their way to school one winter morning when a maniac sprang from the bushes and bludgeoned them to death. When young Melvin Horst went missing on his way home from playing with friends in 1928, many thought he was kidnapped or accidentally killed by a bootlegger’s car. Charles Collins’s death looked like suicide but was proved otherwise by two preeminent surgeons and has remained a mystery for more than one hundred years. Author Jane Ann Turzillo recounts eight unsolved murders and two chilling disappearances in Northeast Ohio’s history. Includes photos!

The Miami Valley of Ohio has a rich but gruesome and bloody history. In Dayton, Christine Kett murdered her daughter and confessed seventeen years later on her deathbed. William Fogwell of Beavercreek clung to life long enough to name his killer before he died. Joshua Monroe, a Yellow Springs man, killed his lover--also his sister-in-law--in a jealous rage. Reputed serial killer Oliver Crook Haugh was accused of murdering multiple women over several years, but he was ultimately convicted of killing "only" his family. Author and founder of the Dayton Unknown history blog Sara Kaushal uncovers the violent and horrific crimes of the past.

Rendered in painstaking detail, accounts of high-profile killings and courtroom drama filled the pages of Stark County's early newspapers. The triple hanging of three teenage boys in 1880 seized the attention of the entire community. When George Saxton, notorious womanizer and President McKinley's brother-in-law, was shot dead on the front lawn of his widowed lover in 1898, the whole nation looked on. For the brutal slaying of his wife, James Cornelius became the first local prison inmate executed in the electric chair in 1906. Using contemporary local newspaper accounts, author Kim Kenney tells the story of eight Stark County murders, unfolding the grisly details while honoring the lives cut short by violence.

Cincinnati's history is rife with reprehensible crimes and great tragedies. In 1874, a brutal murder caught the attention of a strange and notorious journalist, who turned the crime into a legend. In the 1930s, Cincinnati resident Anna Marie Hahn became Ohio's first female serial killer and the first woman executed in its electric chair--but she isn't the only serial killer to have darkened the dangerous streets of the city. Murderers are not the only monsters. Microbes did the dirty work in 1849 and 1919, and Mother Nature herself turned killer in 1937 when the Ohio River lethally overflowed its banks. Explore stories of murder and catastrophe as author and history lecturer Roy Heizer leads this dark journey into the sinister side of Cincinnati.

New York City’s own Lizzie Borden, and eleven other true crimes “as ghastly as anything in American Horror Story” (SILive.com). Today, Polly Bodine’s name is lost to history. But on Christmas night of 1843, she was accused of murdering her sister-in-law and infant niece in ways so heinous that the great showman P.T. Barnum, proclaimed her “The Witch of Staten Island.” Even Edgar Allan Poe weighed in on the female fiend, fearing she’d escape justice. He was right. Polly was tried three times, finally acquitted, and disappeared into anonymity—and legend—until her death fifty years later. Her story is just one of a dozen horrific murders unearthed by historian Patricia M. Salmon in this fascinating peek into the gruesome history of the New York borough. Among the other headline-making cases: The Baby Farm Murders, The Jazz Age Kiss Slayer, The Body in the Barrel, and more. These turn-of-the century tabloid tales of serial killers and psychopaths, love gone wrong, cold-blooded revenge, and unsolved mysteries are still the stuff of nightmares.

This is the first volume of a three volume collection of the correspondence of Caroline Norton, covering the period July 1828-Deember 1837. The collection also includes an introduction and five commentaries by the editor, contextualising and embedding Caroline’s literary and political achievements within the narrative of her letters.

It's not the usual boring history read. It's a fast-paced, easy to read, behind the scenes look at the making of Iowa and Illinois focusing on Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois.

The epic horrors of psychopathic mastermind Eddie Lee Sexton from the New York Times bestselling author who “knows how to dramatize true crime” (Elmore Leonard). For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally, in 1992, Sexton’s eighteen-year-old daughter Machelle, seeking refuge in a women’s shelter, revealed the shocking, sordid details of her father’s abuse to authorities. As the law attempted to catch up to Eddie Lee Sexton, he moved his family to a mobile home in western Florida. Ultimately, Sexton’s efforts to escape prosecution led to two grisly murders in his own family. Yet Sexton’s sick genius almost helped him elude the justice he deserved. Lowell Cauffiel’s true-crime masterpiece vividly exposes the horrors of Eddie Lee Sexton’s psychosis and the shattered lives of those who survived. Includes sixteen pages of photos “An odyssey into American pathology . . . Deeply disturbing.” —Detroit Free Press “Incest, rape, murder, infanticide, torture, psychological abuse . . . House of Secrets is bedtime reading for devoted true crime fans!” —Booklist “A balanced and grimly engaging account of one of the weirdest domestic situations this side of the House of Usher.” —Publishers Weekly