Dead True Crime

The "Axe-man" came in the night. No one heard him come. No locks could keep him out. In the morning, whole families lay slaughtered in their beds, a riot of blood corrupting the room. Town by town, terror gripped the black communities of Louisiana and East Texas, as men, women, and children fell to the killer's ax. The police were powerless to stop it. Was it simply a homicidal maniac on the loose, or was a deeper evil afoot? Could one person perpetrate over forty atrocities? Was the serial killer even a man? People whispered voodoo, and white newspapers in the Jim Crow era South fanned the hysteria. As the police slowly unraveled the mystery, they were stunned by the bizarre truth of the "Axe-man."

Sailors trusted him with their money and their lives. That was a mistake. The lucky ones woke up with headaches in the holds of ships headed to China. The others never took another breath. Billy Gohl robbed, 'shanghaied,' and killed sailors across the Pacific Northwest. Grays Harbor in Aberdeen, Washington was so full of bodies that newspapers dubbed it a 'floaters fleet.' His trapdoor of death was famous. In his time, Gohl murdered over 100 people, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.

First, she predicts your death. Then, you die. Usually, writhing in pain. Is she a fortune teller, or something much, much darker? Nobody tells the police, not for a long time, because, well, nobody in Chicago's Little Warsaw wants to cross Tillie Klimek. The body count racks up as Jazz Age Chicago's most notorious female poisoner takes down husband after husband, and some other relatives while she's at it. Few, it seems, can resist Tillie's cooking. But is this Mrs. Bluebeard working alone? Or is she part of a bigger, more diabolical "poison trust"? And can Chicago's Finest get to her before her latest husband, already mortally ill, dies? Poison Widow is a true-crime aficionado's feast, arsenic-laced and stuffed with tasty noir morsels.

Don't turn your back on her. Don't even blink. She may be crazy, but Lizzie Halliday is strong, she moves fast, and she's a stone cold killer. When famed journalist Nellie Bly interviews the woman the New York Times called "The Worst Woman on Earth," she has no idea how easy it would be for Lizzie Halliday to make Bly her next victim. In the peaceful Catskills, Halliday dispatches husbands, neighbors and peddlers by fire, poisoning and gunshot.