Crimescape
Series · 13
books · 2011-2017
Books in series
#1
After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
2011
This original edition, published in 2011, is no longer available and has been replaced by the second edition.
The second edition, published in 2013, is 190+ pages and has more than 40 photos and graphics. The 2013 edition has material never published before: interviews with Danny Hansford's girlfriend at the time of this death, details of the short, nasty life of Danny Hansford, key excerpts from trial transcripts, and the closing arguments from the fourth trial by legendary defense attorney Sonny Seiler.
Unlike John Berendt's book that is primarily an entertainment book focused on eccentric characters that once lived in Savannah, Marilyn Bardsley's book is biographical and almost completely focused on the life and trials of Jim Williams—the evolution of the barber's son to a self-made aristocrat that was nearly destroyed by a decade of persistent prosecution. Williams endured four trials for pre-meditated murder after shooting his young lover, Danny Hansford. The "devil is clearly in the details" of the trial transcripts. If you loved Court TV, this new edition is for you.
#2
Death by Rock and Roll
2011
(A 90-page True Crime Short with photographs) On April 1, 1984, Marvin Gaye—one of the world’s most beloved singers—was gunned down by his own father. A generation later, fans still puzzle over how it could be that a man who crooned about peace, love, and understanding could possibly meet with such a violent end—and from his own flesh and blood. Yet the history of popular music is written in blood.
Using the slaying of Marvin Gaye as an abject example of the rock and roll lifestyle, David J. Krajicek’s Death by Rock and Roll pulls together the threads of the violent ends of music stars like John Lennon, Sam Cooke, Tupac Shakur, soul saxophone legend King Curtis, and many others. Between overdoses and suicides of what are often fragile stars, rock and roll seems to qualify as one of Americas most dangerous professions. Here, experts weigh in on whether there are patterns to the violence of rock and roll and whether there have been warning signs in some cases that may have saved some lives. A fascinating read.
#3
Immortal Monster
2011
(A 62-page True Crime Short with photographs) Contract killer, lethal scam artist, loving father, abusive husband, abused son, convicted murderer, jailhouse schemer, liar, TV star. The man they called “The Iceman” was all of those. In 1988 he was sentenced to life for four gruesome murders, but this was just the tip of his iceberg. He had a taste for esoteric methods of death—favoring a cyanide solution in a nasal spray bottle—and body disposal—freezing one of his victims to disguise the time of death. At one point he bragged that his personal body count was over 200, seven times the more likely number.
Still, he has huge following, and a biopic based on his life is about to start shooting this fall. The Iceman told his story in three extremely popular HBO documentaries, which are still broadcast regularly. Why does the Iceman’s story continue to fascinate the public five years after his death and 25 years after his apprehension? And how much of his legend is truth?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Veteran crime writer Anthony Bruno is an expert on the Iceman after researching and corresponding with him for over two years. His full-length book The The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer is the basis for an upcoming feature film set to roll starring Benicio Del Toro and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon as the Iceman. Bruno is currently serving as executive producer for The Iceman feature film.
Anthony Bruno has investigated many serial offenders in his writing career, interviewing murderers and the cops and prosecutors who put them behind bars. He has written more than 50 articles for Time Warner’s Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. His publishers include Amazon Kindle, Bantam Dell, Forge, HarperCollins, iUniverse, RuggedLand, and St. Martin’s Press. His full-length book, The A Bounty Hunter’s Story with Joshua Armstrong, was nominated for an Edgar Award.
Bruno has authored over 50 articles for Time Warner’s Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. He also assisted with film adaptation of his novel, Bad Apple, for Turner Network Television. He acted as consultant to the producers and wrote key scenes.
ABOUT THE SERIES
From the best true crime authors in the business, many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures, comes Crimescape™ — a new collection of compelling short nonfiction crime eBooks from leading independent eBook publisher RosettaBooks. Taking readers into the dark minds of criminals and the tense hunt to bring perpetrators to justice, Crimescape authors stand apart from other true crime writers because they have personal experience in crime investigations, whether as police detectives, investigative reporters, forensics professionals or criminal psychologists. As riveting storytellers, Crimescape’s writers give readers all the information they need to understand relevant clues and the interwoven influences in each criminal case.
“What makes for a good true-crime story? Interesting characters, an engrossing plot, situations that often teeter between life and death. But here’s the MacGuffin about true What you’re reading actually happened. Sometimes truth really is more compelling than fiction. And that’s why you will enjoy reading Crimescape’s true crime series.”
—Paul Alexander, #1 bestselling author of the Kindle Singles Accused and Murdered
#4
Mom
The Killer
2011
(A 90-page True Crime Short with photographs) Over the period of fourteen years, one woman’s children—one only nineteen days old—died suddenly while in her exclusive care. One by one, each child died a quiet and mysterious death while everyone around the woman—friends, family, neighbors, doctors, and police—seemed powerless to stop the killings. She would arrive at funerals, the perfect image of a broken-hearted mother who seemed overwhelmed by inexplicable events. But there were those who believed she had systematically murdered her nine children and then tried to convince others that it was not her, but rather it was some genetic curse on her family. A stunning tale of denial and neglect and murders unsolved, The Killer is one of the most bizarre and unique cases in the history of American justice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Gado was a detective with the city of New Rochelle Police Department in New York for twenty-nine years as well as a federal agent assigned to a special DEA task force between 1997 and 1999. During that assignment, Gado received the International Award of Honor in New Orleans, LA. He was also named Investigator of the Year in 2000 and received dozens of other awards and special commendations during his career as a police officer.
Gado’s first book, Killer The Crimes, Trial, and Execution of Father Hans Schmid was published by Praeger in March 2006. Killer Priest is the terrifying true story of the only Catholic priest in U.S. history to be executed for murder. His second book, Death Row Murder, Justice, and the New York Press was also published by Praeger in November 2007.
Gado has been a writer for more than twenty years, and his award-winning work has appeared in numerous publications and on websites, among them Time Warner’s Crime Library.
ABOUT THE SERIES
From the best true crime authors in the business, many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures, comes Crimescape™ — a new collection of compelling short nonfiction crime eBooks from leading independent eBook publisher RosettaBooks. Taking readers into the dark minds of criminals and the tense hunt to bring perpetrators to justice, Crimescape authors stand apart from other true crime writers because they have personal experience in crime investigations, whether as police detectives, investigative reporters, forensics professionals or criminal psychologists. As riveting storytellers, Crimescape’s writers give readers all the information they need to understand relevant clues and the interwoven influences in each criminal case.
“What makes for a good true-crime story? Interesting characters, an engrossing plot, situations that often teeter between life and death. But here’s the MacGuffin about true What you’re reading actually happened. Sometimes truth really is more compelling than fiction. And that’s why you will enjoy reading Crimescape’s true crime series.”
—Paul Alexander, #1 bestselling author of the Kindle Singles Accused and Murdered
#5
MOM
God Told Me To Kill
2012
The family was seemingly perfect. A loving husband and wife, devoted to each other and to their children. Three young boys, aged twelve, six, and fourteen months. The family was strongly religious and close-knit. And, at the start of our story, they were planning a big barbecue to celebrate Mother’s Day.
Within twelve hours, the young boys would be dead at the hands of their own mother—and the town would be rocked by the greatest tragedy in its history. This book details both the murders and the mother’s trial, at which she claimed that God had commanded her to sacrifice her sons as he had to Abraham in the Old Testament—communicating through a series of signs she saw throughout the day.
Why would a mother kill the children she is bound by love and biology to protect? And can a person who kills because she truly believes God demanded it be found guilty of murder? This trial created a dramatic legal controversy—that still resonates in the present day.
#6
The Vampire Trap
2011
(A 65-page True Crime Short with photographs) A young woman and her nineteen-month-old daughter are last seen alive at a child's clothing store. A troubled young man's obsession with the currently popular vampire culture's larger-than-life charisma becomes the center of a police investigation. The current fascination with vampires makes some people identify with these supernatural figures who dominate their world, taking whatever they want for themselves. It is here that the killer's story opens a window on the fringe of this subculture, where people act out the more violent aspects of the vampire.
#9
Psychopath
2011
"(A 69-page True Crime Short with photographs) H. H. Holmes was a central character in Erik Larson’s hugely successful The Devil in the White City, which is planned as a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Holmes is commonly viewed as a real-life Hannibal Lecter, a devious and cunning serial killer without equal. Holmes used the persona of a successful doctor and entrepreneur to draw untold numbers of young women to his three-story Chicago hotel to experiment on before killing them. Not one to waste, he’d often deflesh the corpses to sell the skeletons to medical schools. He enjoyed trying out methods of murder and watching his victims die. Scientists from his era believed Holmes’ brain would unlock the secret of his perversity, but he denied them the chance to find out. Today, we can figure him out without access to his brain. We know more today about the neuroscience of sadistic psychopaths and we can better understand what his brain – if dissected – would reveal. For the first time, we can look to research findings about killers to decode Holmes’s vile behavior.
From Psychopath:
“After the girls died, he’d enjoy viewing ‘their blackened and distorted faces’ before he dug a shallow grave, removed their clothing, and dumped them into it with ‘fiendish delight.’ Holmes considered that ‘for eight years before their deaths I had been almost as much a father to them as though they had been my own children.’
“It is precisely this behavior that most puzzles the ordinary person and draws the researcher’s attention: how can a man torture and asphyxiate children, or burn them and view it as entertainment? How can he ‘befriend’ them for years, knowing the whole time that he will end their lives? How can he describe it as pleasurable? This is the reason the psychopath holds our fascination. It’s why researchers even during Holmes’s era tried extracting criminal brains post-mortem for study. They hoped to locate the seat of disturbed moral consciousness.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who teaches forensic psychology and criminal justice at Pennsylvania's DeSales University, is unique in having extensive experience in researching and writing about crime and the vampire subculture. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, philosophy and criminal justice. Dr. Ramsland has written over 1,000 articles and thirty-eight books on forensics, serial killers, mass murderers and the popular vampire culture.
ABOUT THE SERIES
From the best true crime authors in the business, many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures, comes Crimescape™ — a new collection of compelling short nonfiction crime eBooks from leading independent eBook publisher RosettaBooks. Taking readers into the dark minds of criminals and the tense hunt to bring perpetrators to justice, Crimescape authors stand apart from other true crime writers because they have personal experience in crime investigations, whether as police detectives, investigative reporters, forensics professionals or criminal psychologists. As riveting storytellers, Crimescape’s writers give readers all the information they need to understand relevant clues and the interwoven influences in each criminal case.
“What makes for a good true-crime story? Interesting characters, an engrossing plot, situations that often teeter between life and death. But here’s the MacGuffin about true crime: What you’re reading actually happened. Sometimes truth really is more compelling than fiction. And that’s why you will enjoy reading Crimescape’s true crime series.
#10
Sexual Obsessions Gone Wrong
2011
A 58-page True Crime Short with photographs
Just when you think you’ve heard it all… An entertaining and at times tongue-and-cheek look into cases of bizarre sexually obsessive behaviors (paraphilias) that had unintended consequences. Each chapter briefly explores the lesser-known fetishes and fixations to the more common ones that unexpectedly led to severe injury, imprisonment and death. Case-by-case accounts provide insight into the circumstances surrounding such infamous incidences as the deaths of INXS singer Michael Hutchence and actor David Carradine, who were believed to have accidently died from auto-erotica asphyxiation, and the more recent Northern Virginia “Serial Butt Slasher” case, where women shopping in malls were brutally stabbed in the behind by an by a suspect identified on a mall video tape. These unusual and often disconcerting accounts seriously challenge the adage “What feels good can’t be wrong.”
#11
The Roppongi Stalker
2011
(A 58-page True Crime Short with photographs) When his last victim was found, she was buried in a cave, her dismembered limbs wrapped in plastic garbage bags, her head encased in a block of concrete. The tall blond 21-year-old from the United Kingdom had worked in a Tokyo hostess bar. The killer was a Japanese playboy/real-estate developer with a taste for young gaijin women. He had stalked Tokyo’s sex districts for years, paying for the company of modern-day geishas and then inviting his favorites on dates, drugging them, and raping them while he videotaped what he called his "conquest play." He eventually became so adept at using date-rape drugs most of his victims never knew what had happened to them.
But something went terribly wrong with the English girl. Investigators would discover that eight years earlier he had killed a young Australian beauty with an accidental overdose of chloroform while raping her. He was finally caught thanks to the bulldog tenacity of the English girl’s father, but the families of his foreign victims never anticipated the odd laws that govern the Japanese criminal justice system. It would take ten years before the case was resolved and the atrocities committed by "the beast with a human face" were fully revealed.
#13
Something Happened to Grandma
2011
70-page True Crime Short
Gabriel Morris was a rambunctious but adorable child who was probably sexually abused by his father while his mother tried to win back custody of him. He grew into an intelligent and gifted adult, but there was something very wrong. As he grew older, serious character flaws and emotional problems emerged which caused made it impossible for him to hold a job for any length of time. Eventually his deceptions and deep-seated anger caught up with him, precipitating a tragic family crisis.
#18
The Sex Beast
2013
(An 85-page True Crime Short, with photos and illustrations) The father lay in the ditch, hands bound in front of him, face savagely bludgeoned. A gruesome sight, but even veteran cops were not prepared for what they saw when they lifted him up: the body of an infant, dressed in a red-and-white pinafore. The baby had been tossed into the ditch alive. She had suffocated when her father's body was pushed on top of her.
The man's wife and another daughter were missing for two years. After they were found nearly a hundred miles away, it was clear that the killer's motive was sexual. The father and the baby were quickly discarded. The real prize had been the wife. Her body bore a silk stocking knotted around the neck in an odd-looking harness and her knees were bruised. Police believed she had been ordered to perform a sexual act and had refused, so her killer used a collar to make her do what he wanted. She appeared to have been bludgeoned and hanged, and her little daughter had been beaten to death.
This area had been linked to an earlier murder with one suspect, but he had passed a polygraph exam. He was intelligent, educated, mild-mannered, and self-assured.
As this case grew more complicated, with more murders linked to a single predator, the emerging motive baffled even the most experienced detectives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (1900 characters including spaces (author and series combined))
Dr. Katherine Ramsland knows exactly what makes killers tick. A professor of forensic psychology and criminal justice at Pennsylvania's DeSales University, Dr. Ramsland has written and published 48 books and over 1,000 articles giving insight into the psychology of the world's most high-profile mass murder and serial killing cases. She holds advanced degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, philosophy, and criminal justice.
Her Crimescape® e-book Psychopath was a Wall St. Journal bestseller. Her other Crimescape e-books are Moonlight Murder on Lovers' Lane, The Vampire Trap, The Ivy League Killer, and MOM: God Told Me to Kill. Her books include The Forensic Psychology of Criminal Minds, The Human Predator, and Inside the Minds of Serial Killers. She writes Shadow Boxing, a blog for Psychology Today.
ABOUT THE SERIES
A collection of compelling short nonfiction crime e-books from leading independent e-book publisher RosettaBooks, Crimescape® provides riveting storytelling that puts its publications at the top of the true crime genre. Crimescape authors are not only the best true crime authors in the business—many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures. They're also police detectives, forensic professionals, criminal psychologists, and investigative reporters. Their inside expertise brings readers unique insight into the murderous mind—and some of the world's most mysterious and fascinating cases.
"What makes for a good true-crime story? Interesting characters, an engrossing plot, situations that often teeter between life and death. But here's the MacGuffin about true crime: What you're reading actually happened. Sometimes truth really is more compelling than fiction. And that's why you will enjoy reading Crimescape's true crime series."
\—Paul Alexander, # 1 bestselling author of the Kindle Singles Accused and Murdered and Homicidal
#19
Fatal Trust
2013
Josette, a pretty, vivacious, and personable twelve-year-old, is angry with her mother over a delay in driving her to a girlfriend's house. When her mother returns home from work, Josette is not there or at her girlfriend's house. Friends, neighbors, and family members mount a diligent search and talk to people who might have seen her, but they learn very little. Nobody knows anything about what happened to Josette—or so it seems.
Police learn that Josette's dislike of her mother's boyfriend caused family tension, and her estranged father lived thousands of miles away. Josette had told her closest friend she wanted to run away. A retired teacher swears she sees Josette in a mall department store. Police are sympathetic, but their investigation is They see Josette as just another runaway youngster. Finally, a shocking discovery demands that police reexamine their theories of Josette's disappearance. As the truth slowly unfolds, the tragedy deepens.
#20
The American Sweeney Todd
Eliot Ness's Toughest Case
2017
In this action-packed novel you will meet the brilliant, highly educated American version of Sweeney Todd, who became the most horrific serial killer ever known. The demons rising within him threaten to undermine decades of exhausting work that liberated him from desperate poverty and positioned him to be an excellent surgeon before he turned killer.
Eliot Ness kept the identity of his most horrifying suspect secret for almost four decades until Marilyn J. Bardsley discovered the name. These are her fictional portrayal of the killer's thoughts and actions, based on interviews with his friends and relatives, the detectives who investigated him, and people close to Eliot Ness.
Marilyn J. Bardsley's "After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was Number 1 on the Wall Street Journal Bestselling Nonfiction Books list. She created and managed Time Warner's Crime Library, the premier crime website on the Net, for more than a decade. As the founder of Crimescape.com, she has brought 21 true crime books to the marketplace.
Authors
Anthony Bruno
Author · 14 books
Anthony Bruno is the author of the non-fiction books, THE ICEMAN: THE TRUE STORY OF A COLD-BLOODED KILLER and co-author of THE SEEKERS: A BOUNTY HUNTER'S STORY with Joshua Armstrong, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. He is also the author of the crime novels SEVEN (based on the Brad Pitt-Morgan Freeman movie), BAD GUYS, BAD BLOOD, BAD LUCK, BAD BUSINESS, BAD MOON, BAD APPLE, DEVIL'S FOOD, DOUBLE ESPRESSO, and HOT FUDGE. His coming-of-age novel, THE TEMPTATIONS OF ST. FRANK, and latest thriller, BLEEDERS, are ebook originals.
David J. Krajicek
Author · 4 books
First things first: The name is pronounced CRY-check. I'm a writer, mostly about crime and murder, although most recently I have published two family-related historical memoirs, "Dear Mama" and "Coming Home to South Omaha." Before retiring recently from the music business, I spent 30 years singing and playing trombone in a band based in the mountains of upstate New York—old-school R&B, like Motown and Stax. Nowadays, most of my spare time is consumed by tennis. I come from South Omaha, Nebraska, although I now split time between New York and the Gulf Coast. I studied at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Columbia University. I spent much of my early professional life as a newspaper crime reporter in the Midwest and New York City. I taught journalism at Columbia during most of the 1990s before being compelled to return full-time to my primary muse: writing. I'm back to writing about crime, though in longer form. For 20 years, from 1999 until 2019, I wrote The Justice Story for the Sunday New York Daily News. It's the longest-running true crime feature in American journalism, published in the News since 1923. Before retiring, each of my 500 columns looked back at an interesting historical crime case—the sorts of stories you will know hear recounted on the countless true crime podcasts. I have written stories about crime and criminal justice for many media venues, including The Crime Report, Alternet, The New York Times, Columbia and Boston magazines, Slate, The Village Voice, The Manchester (U.K.) Guardian and Mother Jones. I've had a long side career as a crime expert on TV, appearing more than 25 times on episodes of true crime shows. I've also talked about crime cases on "The Today Show" and was proud to be a part of "The Poisoner's Handbook" on PBS's American Experience. My books include the family memoirs "Dear Mama" and "Coming Home to South Omaha," both published by News Ink Books; "Charles Manson" and "Mass Killers," by Arcturus/Sirius Books of London, England; "Massachusetts Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival (Second Edition)"; "Death by Rock 'n' Roll," a Kindle ebook from Crimescape/Rosetta Books; "True Crime: Missouri," a longtime regional bestseller published by Stackpole Books; "Murder, American Style" by News Ink Books, and "Scooped!", published by Columbia University Press. I've dabbled in fiction, as well. My first published fiction, a short story called "Sutphin Blvd.," was included in an anthology by Midnight Mind Press in New York. Another of my short stories, "Bluefish," was performed at Literally Speaking, an Albany, N.Y., program similar to NPR's "Selected Shorts." Thanks for your interest in my work. Without readers, there would be no writers.
Elizabeth Engstrom
Author · 13 books
Elizabeth (Liz) Engstrom grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois (a Chicago suburb where she lived with her father) and Kaysville, Utah (north of Salt Lake City, where she lived with her mother). After graduating from high school in Illinois, she ventured west in a serious search for acceptable weather, eventually settling in Honolulu. She attended college and worked as an advertising copywriter. After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, found a business partner and opened an advertising agency. One husband, two children and five years later, she sold the agency to her partner and had enough seed money to try her hand at full time fiction writing, her lifelong dream. With the help of her mentor, science fiction great Theodore Sturgeon, When Darkness Loves Us was published. Engstrom moved to Oregon in 1986, where she lives with her husband Al Cratty, the legendary muskie fisherman. She holds a BA in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing, a Master’s in Applied Theology, and a Certificate of Pastoral Care and Ministry, all from Marylhurst University. An introvert at heart, she still emerges into public occasionally to teach a class in novel or short story writing, or to speak at a writer’s convention or conference.
Rachael S. Bell
Author · 1 books
Licensed mental health therapist and true crime writer. Bell holds andwith masters degrees in both clinical forensi and health psychology and worked for Time Warner’s Crime Library for more than a decade researching, reporting and writing more than 70 in-depth feature stories on major criminal cases, such as O.J. Simpson, the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy
Katherine Ramsland
Author · 52 books
I've loved books since I was 3, and the library was a highlight of my childhood. I've been fortunate to be able to find great joy in what others have written and sometimes to give this to readers. I follow my own muse, because it leads me on interesting adventures. I began my writing career with "Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice." I had a bestseller with "The Vampire Companion." Since then, I've published 69 books and over 2,500 articles, reviews and short stories. I have also been an executive producer for "Murder House Flip" and "BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer." From ghosts to vampires to serial killers, I have taken on a variety of dark subjects, mostly in crime and forensics. I hold graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, criminal justice, creative writing and philosophy. Currently, I teach forensic psychology and criminal justice at DeSales University. My books include "I Scream Man," "How to Catch a Killer", "Confession of a Serial Killer", "The Forensic Psychology of Criminal Minds", "The Mind of a Murderer", "The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation", "Inside the Minds of Serial Killers", "Inside the Minds of Sexual Predators", and "Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers". My background in forensic studies positioned me to assist former FBI profiler John Douglas on his book, "The Cases that Haunt Us", and to co-write a book with former FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, "The Unknown Darkness", as well as "Spree Killers" with Mark Safarik, "The Real Life of a Forensic Scientist" with Henry C. Lee, and "A Voice for the Dead" with James Starrs. I speak internationally about forensic psychology, forensic science, and serial murder, and has appeared on numerous documentaries, as well as such programs as The Today Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, NPR, Dr. Oz, Coast to Coast, Montel Williams, Larry King Live and E! True Hollywood. Currently, I'm working on a fiction series, The Nut Cracker Investigations, which features a female forensic psychologist who manages a PI agency. "I Scream Man" is the first one.
