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  My Life Among the Serial Killers...

  Helen Morrison, Harold Goldberg

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  In this memoir, a forensic psychiatrist chronicles her work with more than 80 serial killers and her thoughts on what compels them. 
   
  Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is more than that. She is one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers’ psyches in ways no profiler ever has before. 
   
  In My Life among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims’ body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their Gloucester “House of Horrors”; and Brazil’s deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade. 
   
  Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims—and the spouses and parents of the killers—to gain a deeper understanding of the killer’s environment and the public persona they adopt. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H.H. Holmes of the late nineteenth-century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties. 
   
  Through it all, Dr. Morrison’s goal has been to discover the reasons serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you. 
   
  Praise for My Life Among the Serial Killers 
   
  “A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.” —Kirkus Reviews 
   
  “A profoundly enlightening book. Morrison provides startling insights into what factors breed serial killers, and she avoids the broad generalizations that make other books of the topic seem slick and superficial. . . . This is an absorbing, disturbing book that makes it clear just how much we have yet to learn.” —Booklist

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  Duped - Why Innocent People...

  Ph. D. Saul Kassin

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  “As you read this blurb, you know you would never confess to a crime you didn’t commit. Read this compelling study and you’ll change your mind. Dr. Kassin lays bare the dirty tricks used by police to make innocents confess. And he describes, convincingly, what should be done to stop them.”– John Grisham, #1 New York Times-bestselling authorWritten by the world's leading expert on false confessions, this landmark book reveals the psychology behind why innocent men, women, and children, intensely stressed and befuddled by the promises, threats, trickery, and deception of a police interrogation, are duped into confession, no matter how horrific the crime. Featuring riveting case studies, highly original research, work done in tandem with the Innocence Project, and quotes from individuals who confessed to crimes they did not commit, Duped tells the story of how this happens, how the system turns a blind eye, and how to make it stop.Why do people confess to crimes they did not commit? And, surely, those cases must be rare? In fact, it happens all the time—in police stations, workplaces, public schools, and the military. Psychologist Saul Kassin, the world’s leading expert on false confessions, explains how interrogators trick innocent people into confessing, and then how the criminal justice system deludes us into believing these confessions.Duped reveals how innocent men, women, and children, intensely stressed and befuddled by lawful weapons of psychological interrogation, are induced into confession, no matter how horrific the crime. By featuring riveting case studies, highly original research, work by the Innocence Project, and quotes from real-life exonerees, Kassin tells the story of how false confessions happen, and how they corrupt forensics, witnesses, and other evidence, force guilty pleas, and follow defendants for their entire lives— even after they are exonerated by DNA.Starting in the 1980’s, Dr. Kassin pioneered the scientific study of interrogations and confessions. Since then, he has been on the forefront of research and advocacy for those wrongfully convicted by police-induced false confessions. Examining famous cases like the Central Park jogger case and Amanda Knox case, as well as stories of ordinary innocent people trapped into confession, Dr. Kassin exposes just how widespread this problem is. Concluding with actionable solutions and proposals for legislative reform, Duped shows why the stigma of confession persists and how we can reform the criminal justice system to make it stop.

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  Dannemora - Two Escaped Killers...

  Charles A. Gardener

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  In June 2015 two vicious convicted murderers broke out of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, in New York's "North Country," launching the most extensive manhunt in state history. Aided by prison employee Joyce Mitchell, double murderer Richard Matt and cop-killer David Sweat slipped out of their cells, followed a network of tunnels and pipes under the thirty-foot prison wall, and climbed out of a manhole to freedom. For three weeks, the residents of local communities were virtual prisoners in their own homes as law enforcement from across the nation swept the rural wilderness near the Canadian border. The manhunt made front-page headlines—as did the prison sex scandal involving both inmates and Joyce Mitchell—and culminated in a dramatic and bloody standoff. Now Charles A. Gardner—a lifelong resident of the community and a former prison guard who began his training at Clinton and ultimately oversaw the training of staff in twelve prisons, including Clinton—tells the whole story from an insider's point of view.

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  Long Island's Vanished Heiress -...

  Steven C. Drielak

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  A new look at the 1937 abduction of a wealthy wife and mother, based on previously classified FBI documents—includes photos.   When she was kidnapped from Long Meadow Farm in Stony Brook, New York, in 1937, Alice McDonell Parsons was the heir to a vast fortune among Long Island’s wealthy elite. The crime shocked the nation and was front-page news for several months.   J. Edgar Hoover personally assigned his best FBI agents to the case, and within a short time, Parsons’s husband and their live-in housekeeper, Anna Kupryanova, had become prime suspects. Botched ransom attempts, clashes between authorities, and romantic intrigue kept the investigation mired in drama. The crime remained unsolved. Now, in this book, former Suffolk County detective Steven C. Drielak reveals previously classified FBI documents—and pieces together the mystery of the Alice Parsons kidnapping.

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  Let This Be Our Secret - The...

  Deric Henderson

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  May 1991. The location: a quiet, picturesque seaside town. The scene: two bodies in a car filled with carbon monoxide. Police officer Trevor Buchanan and nurse Lesley Howell have apparently taken their own lives, unable to live with the pain of their spouses' affair with each other.
  The adulterous pair – Sunday school teacher Hazel Buchanan and dentist Colin Howell – had met in the local Baptist Church. Following the apparent double–suicide, they continue their affair secretly before both later remarrying.
  A series of disasters in Howell's life – the death of his eldest son, massive losses in an investment scam and the revelation that he has been sexually assaulting female patients – lead to him declaring that he is a fraud and a godless man.
  He tells the elders of his Church that he and Hazel Stewart conspired together to murder their spouses nearly two decades earlier.
  What follows the dramatic confession are two of the most sensational murder investigations ever seen in Ireland, leading to both Howell's conviction for murder in December 2010, and Stewart's in March 2011 – despite her protestations of innocence.

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  No Stone Unturned - The True...

  Steve Jackson

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  The New York Times bestselling author takes readers on “a fascinating journey into the trenches of crime [investigation]”—now revised and updated (Lowell Cauffiel, New York Times bestselling author).A body stuffed in a car trunk swallowed by the swirling, muddy waters of the Missouri River. A hiker brutally murdered, then thrown off a steep embankment in a remote mountain range. A devious killer who hid his wife’s body under a thick cement patio. For investigators, the story is often the same: they know a murder took place, they may even know who did it; but without key evidence, or a body, pursuing a conviction is nearly impossible. That’s when they call NecroSearch International, a brain trust of the nation’s top scientists in a wide variety of fields, who along with law enforcement, use the latest technology and field techniques to locate clandestine graves and hidden secrets to solve “unsolvable” crimes. In No Stone Unturned, Steve Jackson—who became a member of NecroSearch International in 2015—gives a captivating, insider’s look into a realm of crime investigation of which few people are aware. “The book covers the group’s quirky beginnings and digs into its most important cases suspensefully; Jackson’s sharp eye misses nothing in the painstakingly rendered details. A must-have for true crime fans, it should also be of great interest to anyone fascinated with the practical applications of science.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Delves into cases that would make good novels, but they’re real. Furthermore, he describes a group of uncommon people performing uncommon tasks, and he does it with respect, accuracy and genuine style.”—Ron Franscell, bestselling author of Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story

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