This story details the crimes and trial surrounding the unexpected pregnancy and subsequent childbirth of the Countess de Saint-Geran in 1640s France. Familial jealousies harbored by her sister-in-law, the Marchioness de Bouille, intertwine with the greedy schemes of a fugitive relative, the Marquis de Saint-Maixent, to produce a scandalous series of events. – Summary by jvanstan [chương_files]
Amidst the political winds from Napoleon’s downfall, this tale turns our attention to the flight of a former French marshal and King of Naples, Joachim Murat. Murat, unhappy with the deal he made to obtain pardon from the Austrian Emperor, takes a life-ending resolution to retake his crown rather than live in peaceful obscurity. – Summary by jvanstan [chương_files]
Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history. Includes Vaninka and The Marquise De Ganges. – Summary by Michele Eaton [chương_files]
The story of how Lizzie Borden supposedly murdered her parents has passed into American folklore, partly thanks to the albeit inaccurate playground rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.” Here we have the ‘true’ story, as reported by the local police reporter who attended the trial and lived only streets away from the Borden home with his young wife. After the trial, Porter ‘disappeared’ and it was widely speculated he had either been murdered or bribed to disappear in order to suppress the book. His reappearance some time later put paid to the first theory. After his death at age 39 from tuberculosis, a new theory emerged, that he had been away for treatment while keeping his illness secret. Meanwhile, the trial itself was noteworthy for several reasons: it was one of the first to be followed by nationwide press, providing a template for today’s tabloid and cable coverage of major trials; it also had some distinguished personnel: one of the prosecutors, Frank Moody, later became the attorney general of the United States and was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt; and Borden’s defense attorney, George Robinson, was the former governor of Massachusetts. The appearance of Professor Wood of Harvard University was an early use of an expert witness at trial. [chương_files]
A thorough treatise on different ways people have tried to defraud life insurance companies, with many entertaining examples. The present . . . volume is . . . commended as a trustworthy record to those for whose use and reference it is primarily intended—life insurance companies and agents, medical examiners, insurance lawyers, and medico-legal experts. . . . [It] is not confined to the exposure of the cunning contrivances and artifices of this class of schemers and plotters; it includes picturesque views of detection and punishment; of the determined efforts of the companies, at whatever cost, to run them down; of the machinery of courts of justice; of the gloom of the prison cell; of the dark outlines of the scaffold. The cases in this book are for the most part more suggestive or instructive to detective agencies than to conspirators. . . . These narratives also show that no community has a monopoly of the piratical adventurers who thus prey upon beneficent institutions. They are of all nationalities as well as of both sexes, and everywhere alike “to no code or creed confined.” – Summary by TriciaG and from the Preface [chương_files]
The assassination of Diane de Joannis de Chateaublanc (the Marquise de Ganges) is a fitting tale to conclude Dumas’ celebrated crimes series. This event was as gruesome as it was brazen and, before the final dagger strokes, both the assassins and the assassinated had become embroiled in high-profile intrigues. As a result, it sent reverberations through common and court societies across Europe for decades. – Summary by jvanstan [chương_files]
Former New York DA Arthur Train tells true crime stories from his time in office. – Summary by Colleen McMahon [chương_files]
Hitherto unpublished facts connected with some of Mr. Furlong’s greatest cases—Other interesting incidents of his long and strenuous career which really began on September 14, 1862, when he was detailed from his company, (Co. G., 1st Pennsylvania Rifles, better known as the Pennsylvania Bucktails) for special service. – Summary from the Preface [chương_files]
“If there be a haunted spot in London it must surely be a few square yards that lie a little west of the Marble Arch, for in the long course of some six centuries over fifty thousand felons, traitors and martyrs took there a last farewell of a world they were too bad or too good to live in. From remote antiquity, when the seditious were taken _ad furcas Tyburnam_, until that November day in 1783 when John Austin closed the long list, the gallows were kept ever busy, and during the first half of the eighteenth century, with which this book deals, every Newgate sessions sent thither its thieves, highwaymen and coiners by the score.” We have a strange fascination with crime and criminals; and with their punishment… just or otherwise. Here, we have a collection of papers regarding the most infamous criminals of the early eighteenth century selected from the original and authentic memoirs originally published in 1735. – Summary by Lynne Thompson [chương_files]
”An authentic and thrilling history of the noted outlaws Jesse and Frank James and their bands of highwaymen.compiled from reliable sources and containing the latest facts in regard to these desperate freebooters.” (from the author’s sub-title) The James brothers emerged from the Confederate guerrillas to become notorious outlaws of the American west rising to legendary status. J.W. Buel chronicles their path of robbery and murder across the West in short vignettes. – Summary by Larry Wilson [chương_files]
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