Ever wonder what makes a femme fatale? Find that out and more in Crime Reads’ extended excerpt from The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial by Laura James.
“Classical literature is filled with infectious damsels and dead heroes. ‘The betrayal of a king or hero by his mistress is, in short, a story both old and popular,’ […]
Bigamy & Bloodshed is one of 7 true-crime books newly recommended by NYT critic Marilyn Stasio for your “escapist” reading enjoyment!
“What’s worse, murder or immorality? To American sensibilities in the 1880s, immorality was apparently the greater evil. Or so it seems from Larry E. Wood’s entertaining Bigamy & Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the […]
At the turn of the 20th century, many affluent Brooklyn teens and young adults were bucking the constraints of their immigrant parents and behaving badly: drinking, having sex, staying out all night, stealing, scamming local businesses—and even more serious activities. The culmination for twenty-year-old Walter Brooks was being murdered in a seedy Manhattan hotel in 1902.
They have no witnesses. They have no case. With this blunt observation, Mariann Colby—an attractive, church-going Shaker Heights, Ohio, mother and housewife—bet a defense psychiatrist that she would not be convicted of murder. A lack of witnesses was not the only problem that would confront the State of Ohio in 1966, which would seek to prosecute her for shooting to death Cremer Young Jr., her son’s nine-year-old playmate: Colby had deftly cleaned up after herself by hiding the child’s body miles from her home and concealing the weapon.
Nicknamed “the Blonde Borgia,” Anna Marie Hahn was a cold-blooded serial killer who preyed on the elderly in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district in the 1930s. When the State of Ohio strapped its first woman into the electric chair, Hahn gained a place in the annals of crime as the nation’s first female serial killer to be executed in the chair.
