WINNER: American Book Fest Award for True Crime: Non-Fiction! Maybe the youngest son of a violent criminal named Hoggy Thompson was born a beast. Maybe rage was beaten into him. One thing was certain, by the time he reached manhood, Jerry Thompson was a savage killer. He had no conscience about rape, child molestation, or thrashing a dozen men in a prison fight. Once he got his hands on a gun, any target would do. He didn't leave … [Read more...]
Author Larry Sells Debates The Death Penalty
If you offend someone, you might talk it over and come to a point of forgiveness. If you steal someone’s money, it can be repaid. If you take or destroy property, there may be a way to make restitution. Violence is another matter. Wounds can heal but trauma lingers. You cannot un-rape a person and you cannot un-do an injury. Certainly, you cannot return a life that’s been taken. Our justice system staggers beneath the weight of crimes that can … [Read more...]
Margie Porter On What She Has Learned From Writing True Crime
My grandson, a college student, asked if I gain any special insights from writing about crime. He raised the age-old question, “Can people be born evil? Can life events force them to become that way?” There are no clear-cut, scientific answers, of course, but it is interesting to ponder how we become the people we are. We have all experienced our share of trauma, but if hunger, poverty, and mistreatment made people evil, wouldn’t the residents … [Read more...]
THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS Reveals Serial Killers’ Connection to 50-Year-Old Double Murder Cold Case
Harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the parkway. In "The Garden State Parkway Murders," true crime writer and attorney Christian Barth dives into the harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the … [Read more...]
Author Christian Barth on Samuel Cowell, Ted Bundy’s Abusive Grandfather: Fact Or Fiction?
From somewhere within Dante Alighieri’s Ninth Circle of Hell, encased far beneath the deepest strata of ice the Florentine bard carved especially for Judas Iscariot, the ghost of Ted Bundy has surfaced, merrily laughing. With the rating success of the true-crime docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, America’s preoccupation with the notorious serial killer has rekindled once more, enjoying a peculiar renaissance unseen since … [Read more...]
HOW NOW, BUTTERFLY? A Mother’s Struggle After Her Son Murders Her 4-Year-Old Daughter
A mother recounts her unthinkable experience after her thirteen-year-old son murders his little sister-and her struggle to emerge from devastation. Losing a young daughter to murder is the worst nightmare that a mother could possibly imagine-but what if the killer was her son? Charity Lee was thrust into this unimaginable situation when her thirteen-year-old son, Paris, murdered her beloved four-year-old daughter, Ella. Charity goes through … [Read more...]
Christian Barth
I never set out to become a writer. When I graduated from college, I was a directionless and unmarketable young man with a political science degree. Fresh off two stage productions, for a brief time, I entertained delusional fantasies of moving to Hollywood and becoming an actor, but for the next two years, what theatrical aspirations I'd secretly harbored were subsumed by the ebb and flow of what we do before we discover what we want to do with … [Read more...]
Charity Lee
Charity Lee Photo Credit: Ben Easter Charity Lee is the subject of the award-winning documentary The Family I Had, which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Fest, and has been distributed worldwide and viewed by millions. She is the author of her memoir, How Now, Butterfly?, that tells her tale of Hell and back. Charity is the daughter of a murdered father, daughter of an acquitted mother, mother of a murdered daughter, and mother of a … [Read more...]
SURVIVAL; A Man’s Hard Journey To World Boxing Champion
Vinnie Curto was born in East Boston, Massachusetts on July 10, 1955. His father, Jimmy Curto, was a raving, sick, alcoholic homosexual. Vinnie’s father and his drunken friends sexually abused young Vinnie, frequently raping him and performing other deviant sexual acts on him, while his mother, Loretta, stood by and let it happen. When Vinnie was fourteen, his father forced him to pursue a boxing career. Jimmy Curto told his son that the only … [Read more...]
Jeff Morris On Why He Chose To Write LEGION RISING
To be completely honest, it still does not seem real to me to have written a book about my life and experiences. After all, it’s my life. It’s what I’ve lived and to me, it’s normal with nothing special about it. Why in the world would someone be interested in reading something about me? Yet here we are. The seed was first planted during my first deployment by a writer who was in Iraq for a project. It was early 2005 and I took him out on … [Read more...]