[CLOSED] Murder and Mystery: Win 10 Chilling Books

Once deemed "the most powerful man in the South," Charleston newspaper editor Frank Dawson met his violent death on March 12, 1889, at the hands of his neighbor, a disreputable doctor who was attempting to seduce the Dawson family governess. Drawn from events surrounding this infamous episode, the third novel from the Lillian Smith Award-winning William Baldwin pulls back the veil of a genteel society in a fabled southern city and exposes a dark visage of anger and secret pain that no amount of imposed manners could restrain, and only love might eventually heal.

Lynching rumors simmered as journalists descended on the small town of Millington, Maryland, in the spring of 1892. The frenzy focused on nine African American men and boys--some as young as fifteen--accused of murdering Dr. James Heighe Hill, who was white. Prosecutors portrayed this as retribution for the Christmas Eve slaying of Thomas Campbell, an African American, for which no one faced criminal charges. Hill's alleged assailants were tried as a group before three white judges. Although some were clearly bystanders, all but one were convicted and sentenced. Four were executed by hanging, and the rest died in prison. Using court records, contemporary accounts and newspapers, author G. Kevin Hemstock narrates the tragic and compelling story of justice denied on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

New Orleans has a reputation as a home for creatures of the night. Popular books, movies and television shows have cemented the city's connection to vampires in public imagination. In the early days of Louisiana's colonization, rumors swirled about the fate of the Casket Girls, a group of mysterious maidens traveling to the New World from France with peculiar casket-shaped boxes. A charismatic man who moved to the French Quarter in the early 1900s eerily resembled a European aristocrat of one hundred years prior bearing the same name. A pair of brothers terrorized the town with their desire to feed on living human blood during the Great Depression. Marita Woywod Crandle investigates the origins of these legends so intricately woven through New Orleans's rich history.

Connecticut's witch hunt was the first and most ferocious in New England, occurring almost fifty years before the infamous Salem witch trials. Between 1647 and 1697, at least thirty-four men and women from across the state were formally charged with witchcraft. Eleven were hanged. In New Haven, William Meeker was accused of cutting off and burning his pig's ears and tail as he cast a bewitching spell. After the hanging of Fairfield's Goody Knapp, magistrates cut down and searched her body for the marks of the devil. Through newspaper clippings, court records, letters and diaries, author Cynthia Wolfe Boynton uncovers the dark history of the Connecticut witch trials.

On April 10, 1834, firefighters smashed through a padlocked attic door in the burning Royal Street mansion of Creole society couple Delphine and Louis Lalaurie. In the billowing smoke and flames they made an appalling discovery: the remains of Madame Lalaurie’s chained, starved, and mutilated slaves. This house of horrors in the French Quarter spawned a legend that has endured for more than one-hundred-and-fifty years.


But what actually happened in the Lalaurie home? Rumors about her atrocities spread as fast as the fire. But verifiable facts were scarce. Lalaurie wouldn’t answer questions. She disappeared, leaving behind one of the French Quarter’s ghastliest crime scenes, and what is considered to be one of America’s most haunted houses.

On December 12th, 1982, Tony West and Avery Brock made a visit to Corpsewood Manor under the pretense of a celebration. Then they brutally murdered their hosts.


Dr. Charles Scudder had been a professor of pharmacology at Chicago’s Loyola University before he and his boyfriend Joey Odom moved to Georgia and built their own home in the Chattahoochee National Forest. As a member of the Church of Satan who had absconded with 12,000 doses of LSD, Scudder had a very particular vision for their “castle in the woods.” It included a “pleasure chamber” and was adorned with occult symbols. Scudder even claimed to have summoned a demon to protect the estate.


But when Scudder and Odom welcomed West and Brock into their strange abode, they had no idea the men were armed and dangerous. When the evening of kinky fun turned to a scene of gruesome slaughter, the murders set the stage for a sensational trial engulfed the sleepy Southern town of Trion in shocking revelations and lurid speculations.

In this intense insider's study of murder in South Carolina, Lt. Rita Y. Shuler leads us through the dark twists and turns of twelve homicide cases that gripped the state during her career as a forensic photographer with South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). Shuler's fascination with the criminal mind began with her exposure as a young girl to a 1953 double-homicide that shocked South Carolina. When she came face to face with the original case records twenty-four years later on her first day of work as a forensic photographer she was immediately hooked on a profession that took her deep into the investigation of hundreds of cases. Shuler's firsthand experience with forensic evidence of crime scenes and the court system gives her a unique perspective on murder and its horrifying effects on public and private lives. By combining analysis of court transcripts and official statements and confessions from murderers with her own personal interactions with the key players in some of these tragic dramas, Shuler allows the reader to see into the criminal minds of notorious killers like Pee Wee Gaskins, Rudolph Tyner, Ronald Rusty"? Woomer and Larry Gene Bell. Shuler's study is a must for everyone fascinated by the criminal mind and by the most famous murder cases in South Carolina's recent past."

A road trip becomes a dead end for a schoolteacher in this haunting cold case of murder that became a fifty-year fight for justice.


In June of 1968, Irene Izak, a young French teacher from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was pulling an all-nighter on the road toward the promise of a new life in Quebec. The last time she was seen alive was at 2:09 a.m. by a toll collector at Thousand Island Bridge who claimed Irene was visibly afraid. Less than a half-hour later, Irene was found bludgeoned to death in a ravine bordering DeWolf Point State Park. There were no signs of robbery or sexual assault. For reasons unknown, Irene had been compelled to pull off the interstate and abandon her car, only to be brutally murdered.


Irene’s body was discovered by State Trooper Dave Hennigan, who’d stopped her for speeding shortly before—and issued the young woman a warning.


Blending novelistic suspense with true-crime reporting, author Dave Shampine investigates a crime that shook the communities of northeast Pennsylvania and New York's North Country—a vicious and confounding killing that has remained unsolved but not forgotten.

As Springfield residents decorated for Halloween in September 1972, the crime rate in the affluent New Jersey township was at its lowest in years. That mood was shattered when the body of sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma was discovered in the woods, allegedly surrounded by strange objects. Some feared witchcraft was to blame, while others believed a serial killer was on the loose. Rumors of a police coverup ran rampant, and the case went unsolved—along with the murders of several other young women.


Including extensive interviews with DePalma’s friends and family, new evidence, and theories about who could have committed this horrible crime, Death on the Devil’s Teeth provides the definitive account of this shocking cold case more that remains a mystery more than four decades later.

Before midnight on March 19, 1950, several startled bystanders watched two men force a screaming young woman into a car and drive away from Saint Joseph's Hospital in Vancouver. One of them yelled out that she was his wife and was drunk. That was the last time anyone saw JoAnn Dewey alive. Her battered, naked body washed up on the banks of the Wind River seven days later. Suspicion quickly fell on two brothers, Turman and Utah Wilson, who fled town before police caught them in Sacramento. Their arrest and sensational trial captivated and divided the peaceful community. Author Pat Jollota uncovers the chilling details of this tragic story.