Julesburg Public Library

From Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the true stories that inspired and informed his novels. Covering the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles in vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations...

Started by Italian brothers from North Denver, the high-profile Smaldone crime syndicate began in the bootlegging days of the 1920s and flourished well into the late twentieth century. Connected to such notorious crime figures as Al Capone and Carlos Marcello, as well as to presidents and other politicians, charismatic Clyde Smaldone was the crime family's leader from the Prohibition era to the rise of gambling to the family's waning days. Uncovering...

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave stirred New York City, then the entire country, into panic. The children of Italian immigrants were being kidnapped and dozens of innocent victims gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators' only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. Standing between the American public and the...

Young people whose lives have been impacted by violence and crime, either as perpetrators or as victims, tell their stories. Also includes comments from concerned adults who work with these teens.

Writing for the magazine from the 1930s through the 1960s, McKelway specialized in light true crime stories about arsonists, embezzlers, counterfeiters, suspected Communists, and innocent men and the fire investigators, forensic accountants, Secret Service men, clueless FBI agents, and biased cops who pursued them.

A beautiful and ruthless lady from Ohio, Zeo Zoe Wilkins made her living as a gold digger, marrying a series of wealthy older men. She hired attorney Jesse James, Jr. to provide legal muscle to extract money from an ex-husband. On the night of March 15, 1924, she was brutally murdered in her Kansas City home. Deftly mixing historical conjecture with forensic fact, the author follows the opportunistic, eccentric, and troubled lives of Wilkins and James,...