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Books > Fiction > True stories > Crime
A full and frank account of a unique case and one of the most
notorious in our criminal history. The detail comes from the
personal knowledge and recollections of one who was closely
involved in the prosecution of the accused, Gordon Park, who was
eventually convicted of the crime nearly thirty years after its
commission. The author is a former solicitor and Crown Advocate who
prosecuted cases in the criminal courts for more than thirty-five
years.
Mike Pressler walked into the bottomfloor meeting room of the
Murray Building and, as he had done hundreds of times over a
sixteen-year career at Duke University, prepared to address his
men's lacrosse team. Forty-six players sat in theater-style chairs,
all eyes riveted forward.
It was 4:35 P.M. on Wednesday, April 5, 2006. The program's
darkest hour had arrived in an unexpected and explosive
announcement.
Pressler, a three-time ACC Coach of the Year, informed his team
that its season was canceled and he had "resigned," effective
immediately. While his words reverberated off the walls, hysteria
erupted. Players cried, confused over a course of events that had
spun wildly out of control. What began as an off-campus team party
with two hired strippers had accelerated into a rape investigation
-- one that exposed prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy police work,
an administration's rush to judgment, and the media's disregard for
the facts -- dividing both a prestigious university and the city of
Durham.
Wiping away tears, Pressler demonstrated the steely resolve that
helped him win more than two hundred games. For the next thirty
minutes, Pressler put his personal situation aside and encouraged
his players to stick together. He also made a bold promise: "One
day, we will get a chance to tell the world the truth. One day."
This is that day.
Pressler, who has not done an interview since the saga began, has
handed his private diary from those three weeks to New York Times
bestselling author Don Yaeger, exposing vivid details, including
the day Pressler was fired, when the coach asked Athletic Director
Joe Alleva why the school "wasn't willing to wait for the truth" to
come out. "It's not about the truth anymore," Alleva said to the
coach in a signature moment that said it all. In addition to
Pressler, Yaeger interviewed more than seventy-five key figures
intimately involved in the case. The result is a tale that defies
logic.
"It is tough to be one of fifty people who believed a story when
fifty million people believed something else," Pressler said. "This
wasn't about the truth to many of the others involved. My story is
all about the truth."
'I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read
it. Every time he writes an article, I read it . . . he's a
national treasure.' Rachel Maddow Patrick Radden Keefe's work has
garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the
National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize in
the UK for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on
the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen
of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. As Keefe says
in his preface: 'They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations:
crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane
separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power
of denial.' Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging
$150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared
to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist,
spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest
to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant,
and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the
'worst of the worst', among other bravura works of literary
journalism. The appearance of his byline in the New Yorker is
always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can
see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait
of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against
them.
Christopher Berry-Dee, criminologist and bestselling author of
books about the serial killers Aileen Wuornos and Joanne Dennehy,
turns his uncompromising gaze upon women who not only kill, but
kill repeatedly. Because female murderers, and especially serial
murderers, are so rare compared with their male counterparts, this
new study will surprise as well as shock, particularly in the cases
of women like Beverley Allitt, who kill children, and Janie Lou
Gibbs, who killed her three sons and a grandson, as well as her
husband. Here too are women who kill under the influence of their
male partners, such as Myra Hindley and Rosemary West, and whose
lack of remorse for their actions is nothing short of chilling. But
the author also turns his forensic gaze on female killers who were
themselves victims, like Aileen Wuornos, whose killing spree, for
which she was executed, can be traced directly to her treatment at
the hands of men. Christopher Berry-Dee has no equal as the author
of hard-hitting studies of the killers who often walk among us
undetected for many years, and who in so many cases seem to be
acting entirely against their natures.
Minnesota might not seem like an obvious place to look for traces
of Ku Klux Klan parade grounds, but this northern state was once
home to fifty-one chapters of the KKK. Elizabeth Hatle tracks down
the history of the Klan in Minnesota, beginning with the racially
charged atmosphere that produced the tragic 1920 Duluth lynchings.
She measures the influence the organization wielded at the peak of
its prominence within state politics and tenaciously follows the
careers of the Klansmen who continued life in the public sphere
after the Hooded Order lost its foothold in the Land of Ten
Thousand Lakes.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
11 Oak Street is the true story of how the Queen's bankers, Coutts
& Co, sent two cashier's cheques to the law firm of Urie Walsh
in San Francisco with the wrong address on the envelope (11 Oak
Street instead of 1111 Oak Street), setting off a chain of events
that led to the abduction of a three-year-old child from Bristol,
England, to San Francisco, California. It is a horrifying story of
greed, ineptness, corruption, stupidity and wasted years as the
father tries to seek justice and access to his son in the midst of
a thirteen-year nightmare that even Kafka could not have thought
up. If you want to read about the seven California lawyers involved
in this story who either went to jail, were disbarred, or resigned
with charges pending, and inept judges who broke all the rules or
were disciplined, this is the book for you. This is a story that
would never have happened if those concerned had fulfilled their
duties correctly and not broken the law. If Graham Cook, the
author, had known then what he knows now, there would have been no
story and he would not have gone bankrupt, become homeless or,
through the actions of his own brother, ended up in a California
jail. This is the book the California Judges Association refused to
let the author promote to its members, since it reveals in detail
the judicial abuse by some of their past and present members whose
conduct will shock and disgust any right- minded person. The best
way to describe this book is that everything that could go wrong
went and if the internet was around at the start of the nightmare
most of what went on in this book would not have happened.This is a
book where certain people have gone to extraordinary lengths to
stop people buying and have dismally failed in their objective.
'Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with
gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that
it's all true.' Time In this thrilling panorama of real-life
events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a
secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic
middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York's
Chinatown, managed a multimillion-dollar business smuggling people.
In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the inner workings
of Cheng Chui Ping aka Sister Ping's complex empire and recounts
the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down.
He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it
pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America,
and along the way he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of
undocumented immigrants and the intricate underground economy that
sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in
narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story
and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in
America.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
When convicted murderer Gary Tison broke out of an Arizona prison
with the help of his sons in 1978, it was an embarrassment to the
state. Then it became a nightmare. Tison and his gang murdered six
people before they were stopped near the Mexican border. Clarke's
story of that manhunt is a chilling account of both cold-blooded
murder and astonishing corruption within the state penal system.
"Last Rampage" is a tale of criminal ruthlessness that has been
called the "In Cold Blood" of the American West. Twenty years
later, overtaxed law enforcement and overcrowded prisons can only
make us wonder if such an incident could happen again.
* PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY * The compelling and moving memoir of
forensic psychiatrist Dr Duncan Harding
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