Tresia was murdered on March 21, 1992. She was in her BMW in a gas station parking lot, attempting to use a payphone to call her husband, who was three blocks away in his office building. Three gang members approached her car. One of those killers brandished a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. He then shot her, at point-blank range, through her driver window. The fired shot blew a hole through her driver's window and entered her body (just below her left arm and shoulder), exploding her heart. We were later informed that her husband, only one minute away, in his railroad employment office, drove to the gas station parking lot where Tresia was shot, removed her body from her car, then placed her in his truck, driving her the furthest distance until she died on the way to the nearest hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced DOA in the emergency room. Years of doubt, anger, and grief have crippled my family, leaving us with unanswered questions, hurt, and enormous loss. We felt that no one understood what we were going through. It seemed to us no one cared, and the ones that acted as if they did slowly fell away like leaves on a tree approaching fall season. We felt ostracized and discarded, like we had a disease. Even those who were close to us avoided our family. We felt very alone and isolated. We were suffering. We were grieving. We had no one to tell us what was about to unfold in our lives or how Tresia's murder was going to change the course of our lives. We didn't understand the anger that we were feeling. Each and every task we set out to accomplish seemed to have stumbling blocks in front of them. The Christian family we had once known and grown to love over the years washed away like waves in the sea and disappeared from our memories as well because they did not reach out to us in our time of mourning. This was an added loss to us because we believed they loved us, would be there for us if we ever needed them, and that they cared about us. Instead, they acted afraid, like they did not want to be involved. Some of my former friends acted as though they were thinking my family was cursed, and even stated in our presence that we possibly did something to anger God and that we were being punished, that perhaps God was unleashing his wrath on us. This couldn't have been further from the truth. Murdered without Cause was written with the sole intention(s) of sharing Tresia's story to help others in overcoming their loss of a loved one by murder. This book was also written to restore peace in my family to obtain a sense of closure that we never knew existed and to establish unspeakable justice by assisting survivors. The only way to cope with any loss by murder is to continue to pray and seek God's divine purpose for your own life. By reaching out to you, the survivor of a loved one murdered, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was no book written, in 1992, that could tell us how we were going to feel or what we were going to go through. With this writing, my wish is to guide you through the stages of shock, anger, and grief, so you are able to rediscover a hope that moves you forward out of your sorrow, courage to lift your journey and a vision to claim a new purpose in life.

Tresia was murdered on March 21, 1992. She was in her BMW in a gas station parking lot, attempting to use a payphone to call her husband, who was three blocks away in his office building. Three gang members approached her car. One of those killers brandished a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. He then shot her, at point-blank range, through her driver window. The fired shot blew a hole through her driver's window and entered her body (just below her left arm and shoulder), exploding her heart. We were later informed that her husband, only one minute away, in his railroad employment office, drove to the gas station parking lot where Tresia was shot, removed her body from her car, then placed her in his truck, driving her the furthest distance until she died on the way to the nearest hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced DOA in the emergency room. Years of doubt, anger, and grief have crippled my family, leaving us with unanswered questions, hurt, and enormous loss. We felt that no one understood what we were going through. It seemed to us no one cared, and the ones that acted as if they did slowly fell away like leaves on a tree approaching fall season. We felt ostracized and discarded, like we had a disease. Even those who were close to us avoided our family. We felt very alone and isolated. We were suffering. We were grieving. We had no one to tell us what was about to unfold in our lives or how Tresia's murder was going to change the course of our lives. We didn't understand the anger that we were feeling. Each and every task we set out to accomplish seemed to have stumbling blocks in front of them. The Christian family we had once known and grown to love over the years washed away like waves in the sea and disappeared from our memories as well because they did not reach out to us in our time of mourning. This was an added loss to us because we believed they loved us, would be there for us if we ever needed them, and that they cared about us. Instead, they acted afraid, like they did not want to be involved. Some of my former friends acted as though they were thinking my family was cursed, and even stated in our presence that we possibly did something to anger God and that we were being punished, that perhaps God was unleashing his wrath on us. This couldn't have been further from the truth. Murdered without Cause was written with the sole intention(s) of sharing Tresia's story to help others in overcoming their loss of a loved one by murder. This book was also written to restore peace in my family to obtain a sense of closure that we never knew existed and to establish unspeakable justice by assisting survivors. The only way to cope with any loss by murder is to continue to pray and seek God's divine purpose for your own life. By reaching out to you, the survivor of a loved one murdered, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was no book written, in 1992, that could tell us how we were going to feel or what we were going to go through. With this writing, my wish is to guide you through the stages of shock, anger, and grief, so you are able to rediscover a hope that moves you forward out of your sorrow, courage to lift your journey and a vision to claim a new purpose in life.

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Because there was only evidence to convict Williams for the murders of two men, the children's cases were closed, offering no justice to the families or the country. Baldwin's incisive analysis implicates the failures of integration as the guilt party, arguing, "There could be no more devastating proof of this assault than the slaughter of the children." As Stacey Abrams writes in her foreword, "The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin's writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort." In this, his last book, by excavating American race relations Baldwin exposes the hard-to-face ingrained issues and demands that we all reckon with them.

"The Rue Morgue Murders" is a pioneering tale in the mystery genre, in which detective Auguste Dupin uses his acute observation and logic to solve a brutal double murder in Paris, revealing a surprising and unusual outcome.

Justine van der Leun reopens the murder of a young American woman in South Africa, an iconic case that calls into question our understanding of truth and reconciliation, loyalty, justice, race, and class—a gripping investigation in the vein of the podcast Serial “Timely . . . gripping, explosive . . . the kind of obsessive forensic investigation—of the clues, and into the soul of society—that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm.”—The New York Times Book Review The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa: The twenty-six-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents’ forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel. Why didn’t the eyewitness reports agree on who killed Amy Biehl? Were the men convicted of the murder actually responsible for her death? And then van der Leun stumbled upon another brutal crime committed on the same day, in the very same area. The true story of Amy Biehl’s death, it turned out, was not only a story of forgiveness but a reflection of the complicated history of a troubled country. We Are Not Such Things is the result of van der Leun’s four-year investigation into this strange, knotted tale of injustice, violence, and compassion. The bizarre twists and turns of this case and its aftermath—and the story that emerges of what happened on that fateful day in 1993 and in the decades that followed—come together in an unsparing account of life in South Africa today. Van der Leun immerses herself in the lives of her subjects and paints a stark, moving portrait of a township and its residents. We come to understand that the issues at the heart of her investigation are universal in scope and powerful in resonance. We Are Not Such Things reveals how reconciliation is impossible without an acknowledgment of the past, a lesson as relevant to America today as to a South Africa still struggling with the long shadow of its history. “A masterpiece of reported nonfiction . . . Justine van der Leun’s account of a South African murder is destined to be a classic.”—Newsday

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

The bestselling author of The Hot House once again combines the facts, the real people, and the location itself into this true story, a wide-ranging portrait of the interplay of race, sex, and justice in the American South, made all the more real because it takes place in the same small Alabama town that was the fictional "Maycomb" in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Optioned for film by MGM. Photos.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Contents. -- Minor's Reports v.l. -- Stewart's Reports v. 1-3. -- Stewart and Porter's Reports v. 1-5. -- Porter's Reports v. 1-9. -- Alabama Reports v. 1-80.