Benjamin Franklin. You know him as a founding father, a drafter of the Declaration of Independence, the discoverer of electricity, a diplomat. But did you know he wrote true crime, too? He started his career as a printing apprentice and later...
A triple insult As I scanned the ink scratched onto the yellowing letter, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for its author. It’s one thing to be falsely accused of a murder. It’s another to be driven out of your country. But the final insult is to...
This is the stuff slumber party folklore is made of. You’ve probably heard the story, perhaps even at a slumber party. Evil incarnate once waited in the attic for a family to retire. Then it slunk down the stairs to murder them all. It really...
In April 1865, more than just the Confederacy was dying in Macon, Georgia. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was dying too. Only 17, he succumbed to tuberculosis a few months after the Civil War ended. What made LeRoy Wiley Gresham different was his writing...
Eighty-six years ago, in August 1932, a highly unusual crime put the felony murder rule, an old law in Mississippi case law, to the test. That night, Emily Burns accepted an invitation to take a walk with one of her boarders. The 37-year-old widow...
On May 19, the Gaithersburg Book Festival will witness a world true crime record being broken when a German mayor pays a 146-year-old reward for solving a murder of his predecessor in 1835. It will go to the American descendants of the man who...
Criminal investigations in the 17th and 18th centuries differed from the ones we know today. Forget the police. They didn’t exist yet. Superstition played a big role. City and castle walls helped entrap crooks; citizens pitched in with the...
What happened to the man who shot John Wilkes Booth? One of the lingering mysteries of the Lincoln assassination concerns Boston Corbett, the man who shot John Wilkes Booth. In 1888, Corbett disappeared into thin air. Michael W. Kauffman, a Lincoln...
The history of the forensic autopsy is peppered with names you’d probably recognize. Julius Caesar. Paul Revere. Although you may have not heard of Emperor Charles V himself, you’ve certainly heard of the Holy Roman Empire. And if...
Two years ago I interviewed Cat Warren, a cadaver dog handler and author of the New York Times bestselling What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. She gave my readers advice about whether their dogs might...
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