Showing results for "Audio in Media" in Murder

You probably know Roxie and Velma, the good-time gals of the 1926 satirical play Chicago and its wildly successful musical and movie adaptations. You might not know that Roxie, Velma, and the rest of the colorful characters of the play were inspired by real prisoners held in "Murderess Row" in 1920s Chicago - or that the reporter who covered their trials for the Chicago Tribune went on to write the play Chicago. Now, more than 90 years later, the Chicago Tribune tells the story of the four women who inspired the timeless characters of Chicago.

As a premier antiques dealer in Savannah, Jim Williams had it all: style, culture, charisma, and sophistication. But three decades of hard work came crashing down the night he shot Danny Hansford, his wild young lover. Jim Williams stood trial four times over the next decade for premeditated murder.  While Clint Eastwood's movie - starring Kevin Spacey and Jude Law - and the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt portrayed the natives of Savannah as remarkably decadent, exotic characters, they missed the surprising dark side of Jim Williams himself.

On October 7, 1964, Debra Miller's life turns upside down when her mother is arrested for the murder of her father. At only 14 years old, Debra becomes a ward of the court, grappling with the unfathomable trauma of watching her mother's trial and conviction—a devastation that is only amplified when her family's tragedy is splashed across headlines and featured in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Desperate to escape the notoriety of her family and ill equipped to face the world, Debra spends her young adulthood sinking into mental illness, toxic relationships, and substance abuse.

In 1949, the year of the Berlin airlift and the founding of the two post-war German states, Elisabeth Kusian (nurse, black marketeer, morphine and methamphetamine addict, and pathological liar) garroted and dismembered two people in a mini crime spree. Her actions both fascinated and terrified...

A meticulously researched page-turner about one of the Philadelphia suburbs' most shocking twentieth-century crimes. A gunman broke into Jack and Peggy Abt's house moments after the last family member left for the day. He took a seat in the living room and waited for eleven hours. People expect...

Imagine losing a loved one in the public eye. A media frenzy ensues and spreads your family name through the news. Reporters ambush you, and across the country, strangers gossip about your personal loss. Welcome to the circus. In Media Circus, Kim Goldman, now a dedicated victims' advocate who works with families across the country, presents the first collective look at these ordinary, grieving victims - forced to manage their very private trauma and despair in a very public way.

Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the North Dallas suburbs known as Silicon Prairie. But beneath the placid surface of their seemingly perfect lives, both women simmered with unspoken frustrations and unanswered desires. On a hot summer day in 1980, the secret passions and jealousies that linked Candy and Betty exploded into murderous rage. 

The full story of an industry, a city, and two men—one who got everything he ever wanted, one who never got what he thought he deserved—and what happened the night it all came apart.

Seattle harbors a dark and violent history that stretches back to a bloody battle between natives and settlers in 1856. In the early 1900s, Dr. Linda Hazzard stole money from countless patients after starving them to death in her infamous sanitarium. Three robbers opened fire in the notorious Wah Mee gambling club in 1983, killing thirteen people in the state's deadliest mass homicide. Some of America's most notorious serial killers wrought terror in Seattle, including the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway.

The evening of November 17, 1978, should have been like any other for the four young crewmembers closing the Burger Chef at 5725 Crawfordsville Road in Speedway, Indiana. After serving customers and locking the doors for the night, the kids began their regular cleanup to ready the restaurant for the following day. But then something went horribly wrong. Just before midnight, someone muscled into the place, robbed the store of $581, and kidnapped the four employees.

Fear was the unacknowledged specter haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for violent crime. In this absorbing, sometimes shocking account, Amy Helen Bell uncovers the hidden stories of murder and violence that were rife in wartime London.

In 2018, after nearly a decade's hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal.

In 2002, acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan’s groundbreaking book LAbyrinth ignited a firestorm with its startling disclosures about corruption in the LAPD. It told the story of Russell Poole, a highly decorated LAPD detective, who uncovered a cabal of “gangsta cops” tied to Marion “Suge” Knight’s notorious rap label, Death Row Records, and allegedly to the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Over 20 years later, no one has been held accountable for their killings.

John Edward Robinson was a 56-year-old grandfather from rural Kansas. An entrepreneur and Eagle Scout, he was even honored as "Man of the Year" at a Kansas City charity. To some of the women he met on the internet, he was known as Slavemaster - a sexual deviate with a taste for sadomasochistic rituals of extreme domination and torture...even killing. 

You fall in love, you get married, and you build a lifetime's worth of dreams around each other. Then suddenly, it's gone - the past tainted, the present a living nightmare, the future wiped out. Divorce is the blade that cuts the still-beating heart out of a marriage. What's left is a gaping wound that festers and can all too quickly become infected. Where once was love, now comes hate, where once was purity, now comes corruption. Dreams of happy ever after are replaced by visions of revenge.

On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the new and luxurious Astor House hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the Astor House. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him, just missing his heart.

In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquin Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labelled the "crime of the century," these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers.

In the summer of 1982, the body of 20-year-old Maggie Hume was found under a pile of blankets in the closet of her apartment. A Catholic school girl and daughter of a local football coach, Maggie had been raped and strangled. It was the only active murder investigation in Battle Creek, Michigan, suggesting the case would be an easy victory for authorities. Plus, they already had two persons of interest on watch.

On a cold January morning in 1981, a knock on an apartment door began what would become one of the bloodiest crime sprees in Arkansas history. In the coming days the bodies of newlyweds Larry and Jawana Price, businessman Holly Gentry, and Police Detective Ray Tate were discovered. They had been executed in cold blood and discarded like so much trash. What kind of person murders four people in cold blood? Did the right one go to prison?

In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was dead, murdered by a group of 12 men. Most accounts of this event have linked Standing's murder to the virulent 19th-century anti-Mormonism that also took the life of prophet Joseph Smith and to an enduring southern tradition of extralegal violence.