The Crime Of The Century

The story behind the attack that shocked a nation and opened a new chapter in the history of American crime. On July 14th, 1966, Richard Franklin Speck swept through several student nurses’ townhouse like a summer tornado and changed the landscape of American crime. He broke in as his helpless victims slept, bound them one by one, and then stabbed, assaulted, and strangled all eight in a sadistic sexual frenzy. By morning, only one young nurse had miraculously survived. The killer was captured in seventy-two hours; he was successfully prosecuted in an error-free trial that stood up to appellate scrutiny; and the jury needed only forty-nine minutes to return a death verdict. Here is the story of Richard Speck by the prosecutor who put him in prison for life with a brand new introduction by Bill Kunkle, the prosecutor of the infamous John Wayne Gacy Jr. In The Crime of the Century, William J. Martin has teamed up with Dennis L. Breo to re-create the blood-soaked night that made American criminal history, offering fascinating behind-the-scenes descriptions of Speck, his innocent victims, the desperate manhunt and massive investigation, and the trial that led to Speck’s successful conviction.

In compelling narrative, the authors probe the sensational cases of Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard A. Loeb, the Scottsboro "boys," Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Alger Hiss, and O.J. Simpson, highlighting significant lessons about criminal behavior and the administration of criminal justice. Each case study details the crime, the police investigation, and the court proceedings, profiles the major players, and examines the outcome and aftermath of the trial. The authors untangle the perplexities surrounding the cases and illuminate the many mysteries that remain unsolved today. These celebrated trials reveal issues of overzealous prosecution, sloppy police work, judicial bias, race, class, and ethnic struggles, and the role of wealth in securing a competent defense. They also show how the temper of the times and frenzied media coverage heightened the intensity of drama in the cases.

Traces the two-and-a-half year investigation by the New Jersey State Police of the Lindbergh kidnapping case, challenging the effectiveness of the investigation and the evidence that convicted Bruno Hauptmann.

Addressing developments since the book's initial publication in 1982, Kurtz provides a new introduction and updated bibliography. He discusses the publicity and controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's film JFK, the new books and television programs that have dealt with the different conspiracy theories, new information about the possible role of organized crime in the assassination, and certain materials from the Kennedy autopsy that have only recently come to light.

The “enormously entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) account of a shocking 1897 murder mystery that “artfully re-create[s] the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off” (The New York Times) AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME • “Fascinating . . . won’t disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.”—The Washington Post On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that forever changed newspaper journalism.

The razor-sharp account of a notorious murder The 1924 murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb shocked the nation. One hundred years later, the killing and its aftermath still reverberate through popular culture and the history of American crime. Hal Higdon’s true crime classic offers an unprecedented examination of the case. Higdon details Leopold and Loeb’s journey from privilege and promise to the planning and execution of their monstrous vision of the perfect crime. Drawing on secret testimony, Higdon follows the police investigation through the pair’s confessions of guilt and recreates the sensational hearing where Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous attorney, saved the pair from the death penalty. In-depth and definitive, Leopold and Loeb tells the dramatic story of a notorious crime and its long afterlife in the American imagination.

Definitive account of the famous 1963 Great Train Robbery - and its aftermath. In the early hours of Thursday 8th August 1963 at rural Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, £2.6 million (£50 million today) in unmarked £5, £1 and 10-shilling notes was stolen from the Glasgow to London nightmail train in a daring and brilliantly executed operation lasting just 46 minutes. Quickly dubbed the crime of the century, it has captured the imagination of the public and the world's media for 50 years, taking its place in British folklore and giving birth to the myths of The Great Train Robbery. Ronnie Biggs, Buster Edwards and Bruce Reynolds became household names. But what really happened? This is the story of four talented villains who took the criminal world by storm, of the 'perfect crime'. It is also the story of ruthless policemen, determined to hunt the robbers down and to make sure nobody slipped through the net, not even the innocent. It is the story of an Establishment under siege, and of one mistake which cost the robbers 307 years in prison. Fifty years later, here is the story set out in full for the first time, a true-life crime thriller, and also a vivid slice of British social history.