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The inside story of an upstate New York serial killer who abducted, raped, and murdered women and hid their bodies in his home. In the late 1990s in Poughkeepsie, New York, prostitutes began to go missing off the streets of the old Hudson River town. Due to the women’s nomadic lifestyles, which many people condemned, few in the town noticed they were gone besides their families and Lieutenant Bill Siegrist, who suspected that a serial killer was behind the disappearances. Local prostitutes described a strange man lurking around, leading Siegrist to Kendall Francois, an overweight, slovenly middle school hall monitor nicknamed Stinky. Police brought in Francois for a lie detector test, whic...
Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historical approaches to the study of the central idea of utilitarianism, the chapters provide a rich set of insights into a founding component of ethics and modern political and economic thought, as well as political and economic practice. In doing so, the chapters examine the multiple dimensions of utilitarianism and the contested interpretations of this standard for judgement in morality and public policy.
The shocking exposé of a carny’s murder arranged by his wife—and the daughter who threatened the author to keep the truth from getting out. In his account of the sensational life and murder of Grady Stiles Jr., also known as the legendary carnival “freak” Lobster Boy, author Fred Rosen explains how Stiles’s death was engineered by his wife, Mary Teresa, the carny known as the Electrified Girl. Rosen describes how Mary Teresa arranged for her husband’s murder after years of physical and emotional abuse. The narrative is full of appearances from the couple’s colorful acquaintances, including the World’s Only Living Half Girl, Midget Man, and the Human Blockhead. During Mary Teresa’s dramatic trial, Rosen becomes a character in his own book. When both he and the prosecution are threatened by Mary Teresa’s daughter, who Rosen believes was a co-conspirator although she was never indicted, the writer risks his life in pursuit of the truth and the evidence that leads to Mary Teresa’s conviction.
Baptist deacon, family man, pillar of his Florida community . . . and serial killer of prostitutes: chilling true crime from the author of Lobster Boy. By day, Sam Smithers was the deacon of his Baptist church in Plant City, Florida, a respected neighbor to many, and a devoted husband and father. But after the sun set, he became something else: a violent attacker—and killer—of prostitutes. Smithers’s twisted double life came to light when a local woman who had hired him to take care of her property found him in her garage, cleaning an ax—and then discovered a puddle of blood. Through exclusive interviews with Smithers’s wife, who described her spouse as nothing but a doting husband and father, author Fred Rosen learned why this man of God, raised in an intensely religious Tennessee home, was the last person anyone would suspect of committing these savage crimes. Rosen reveals the details behind the deaths of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach after Smithers picked them up in Tampa—and the fate of a man who seemed holier than thou, but was actually guilty as sin.
Two brothers turn from Jehovah’s Witnesses in Allentown, PA, to neo-Nazi murderers in this true crime investigation from the author of Lobster Boy. Raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses and frustrated with their parents’ repressive rules, Bryan and David Freeman rebelled as teenagers. Encouraged by an acquaintance he met while institutionalized at a reform school, Bryan became a neo-Nazi. Bryan then indoctrinated David, and their flare for defiance took a dark turn. After callously murdering their father, mother, and younger brother, the skinhead brothers took flight across America, with police from three states in hot pursuit. They were eventually captured in Michigan and returned to Pennsylvania for trial. During the trial, author Fred Rosen uncovered evidence that one of the brothers might not have been as culpable as authorities claimed, and divulged the history of a family torn apart by stringent religious beliefs.
Since the early nineteenth century, the United States has repeatedly intervened in the affairs of Latin American nations to pursue its own interests and to “protect” those countries from other imperial powers or from internal “threats.” The resentment and opposition generated by the encroachment of U.S. power has been evident in the recurrent attempts of Latin American nations to pull away from U.S. dominance and in the frequent appearance of popular discontent and unrest directed against imperialist U.S. policies. In Empire and Dissent, senior Latin Americanists explore the interplay between various dimensions of imperial power and the resulting dissent and resistance. Several essay...
The German lacuna in Edward Said’s 'Orientalism' has produced varied studies of German cultural and academic Orientalisms. So far the domains of German politics and scholarship have not been conflated to probe the central power/knowledge nexus of Said’s argument. Seeking to fill this gap, the diplomatic career and scholarly-literary productions of the centrally placed Friedrich Rosen serve as a focal point to investigate how politics influenced knowledge generated about the “Orient” and charts the roles knowledge played in political decision-making regarding extra-European regions. This is pursued through analyses of Germans in British imperialist contexts, cultures of lowly diplomat...
A Michigan couple’s affair leads to two grisly murders by heroin injection in this true crime account from the acclaimed author of Lobster Boy. When Carol Giles’s friend Nancy Billiter was found dead—she had been bound, sexually violated, and injected with a lethal dose of battery acid and heroin—detectives in Michigan traced Billiter’s death back to Giles and her boyfriend, Tim Collier. Police also learned that the diabolical duo shared another secret: They had murdered Giles’s husband, Jessie. Jessie, who had died months before Billiter, was disinterred, and an autopsy proved he’d been given a lethal shot of heroin instead of his prescribed insulin. Homebound and diabetic, Jessie was a heroin dealer. Police determined that Giles—who was fed up with taking care of her husband and children—along with her lover, Collier, had stolen the fatal dose from Jessie’s own drug supply. The cops surmised that Billiter’s death might have been due to her knowledge of the couple’s plot. In their dramatic trial, Giles and Collier turned against each other, but both were eventually convicted of murder.
An astonishing true story of bizarre love and lethal obsession in America's last frontier. Mechele Hughes came to Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 4200), looking for a new life and easy money. As an exotic dancer at the Great Alaskan Bush Company in nearby Anchorage, she was soon earning thousands a night—and getting expensive gifts from admiring male clients. Three in particular fell under her spell. Each claimed to be engaged to her . . . and they all lived with her together in the same house. But in May 1996, the bullet-ridden body of Kent "T.T." Leppink, a local fisherman and one of her fiancés, was discovered in a wooded area ninety miles away—possibly slain by suitor number two, John Carlin III, at the stripper's urging. Ten years would elapse before the arrests and trials of Mechele Hughes Linehan and John Carlin III. Was the real Mechele a murderess, a ruthless sexual manipulator as the prosecution claimed, killing for insurance money—or the loving wife and mother she had since become, dedicated to children, animals, and charitable causes?