Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Spurned Lover - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
In 1901 Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle chose a notorious, four-decades-old British murder case for a rare foray into writing true crime. George Townley killed his fiancée, Elizabeth Goodwin, after she broke off their engagement. “I have stabbed her,” he confessed. “She proved false to me.” Was he insane or a cold-blooded killer?
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Delusions of Grandeur: The Scandalous Crime of a Los Angeles Millionaire - CrimeReads / Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Griffith Jenkins Griffith, one of the richest men in California, donated a vast swath of ranch land and wilderness north of Los Angeles to the city in 1896, creating a park that still bears his name. Seven years later, he shot and almost killed his wife. The rise and fall of an erratic Gilded Age millionaire.
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Trapping Florida’s Alligator Poachers - Southern Review of Books
Rebecca Renner tells the story of a Florida game warden’s elaborate undercover operation in this impressive debut that draws readers into a shadowy world where nature’s defenders match wits with poachers. The line between the good guys and the bad guys is not always clear-cut.
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The ‘Bogus Priest’ and the Murdered President - CrimeReads / Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Gaston Derohan was a con artist who specialized in posing as a man of the cloth. Rev. Van Hoagland and Father Dominique were among his many aliases. And after he escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in 1880, the man the press dubbed the “Swindling Monk” and the “Bogus Priest” became a strange footnote in American presidential history.
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Witness to an Execution - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Mary Knight in 1932.
When officials refused to allow a woman to witness the guillotine in action, trailblazing American journalist Mary Knight refused to back down — and devised a plan to cover the 1932 execution of the assassin of French president Paul Doumer.
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How Do You Say Murder? When a Dispute Over the Pronunciation of “Newfoundland” Turned Deadly - CrimeReads / Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
The argument erupted in March 1876 at a Colorado lumber camp about thirty miles south of Denver. William Atcheson had a large dog and someone asked what breed it was. Newfoundland, he replied. When a co-worker questioned Atcheson’s pronunciation of the word, their dispute turned deadly.
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Great Fire, Great Upheaval: A review of The Burning of the World - Washington Independent Review of Books
Historian Scott W. Berg recreates the chaos of the 1871 fire that devastated Chicago as well as the city’s incredibly swift, phoenix-like rise from the ashes. This top-notch, eye-opening history proves that the Great Fire shaped and reinvented the city in myriad ways, and long after the last embers had been extinguished.
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The ‘Human Bomb’ and the Great Chanute Bank Robbery of 1939 - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
The First National Bank of Chanute, Kansas in 1939
