Take a trip back in time to revel in the scandal, murders, infidelities, financial misdeeds, and just plain bad behavior from Colorado's past.Public respectability does not always translate into tidy private lives, and our interest in the naughty behavior of the rich and famous will never be satisfied. Former Denver Post reporter Dick Kreck takes us back through Colorado's history to show that the foibles of people—rich or poor—remain the same. Included are sociali...

Started by Italian brothers from North Denver, the high-profile Smaldone crime syndicate began in the bootlegging days of the 1920s and flourished into the 1980s. Connected to notorious crime figures, politicians, and presidents, Clyde Smaldone was the crime family's leader. Through candid interviews and firsthand accounts, Dick Kreck reveals the true sense of what it meant to be a Smaldone, not only the corrupt but also the virtuous. Dick Kreck retired from The Denver Post after thirty-ei...

On May 24, 1911, one of the most notorious murders in Denver's history occurred. The riveting tale involves high society, adultery, drugs, multiple murder, and more, all set in Denver's grand old hotel, the Brown Palace.

Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.

The public has always had a fascination with true crime, from the Victorian era to the present day. This collection presents 4 classic true crime books in one volume. Three are by Wenzell Brown, who worked with troubled teenagers in New York, turning their stories to stories for his books. Ones is by Martin M. Frank, who worked as an Assistant District Attorney, bringing his experiences to book form. Included in this volume:TEEN-AGE TERROR, by Wenzell BrownBEDEVILED, by Wenz...

On November 14, 1912, house detectives at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago discovered the body of a woman in room 409 on a blood-soaked mattress. The labels in her clothing led police to Cincinnati, where friends and relatives identified the belongings of Mrs. Emma Kraft, a highly-respected widow who had recently taken up with a much younger man of dubious reputation, one John B. Koetters, known about town as "Handsome Jack." A nationwide manhunt was on, but it took several months for the fug...

True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism“Reporters love murders,” Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. “In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden.” Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violenc...

The account of the murder of Diane Whitmore Pikul describes how her wealthy and violent Wall Street husband murdered her and then won custody of her children while under indictment for her murder.“A young mother, so full of promise, is killed by the ‘perfect’ husband. Sheila Weller takes a domestic tragedy and reveals every nuance so that we see the compelling anatomy of a murder in slow motion, from the dynamics of a marriage to the crime itself, to its chilling a...

When the married veterinarian Dr. David Roberts, a renowned expert on exotic cattle and distributor of a line of patent medicines for pets and farm animals, approached the spinster schoolteacher Grace Lusk about helping him edit a textbook on cattle, he sparked a three-year illicit relationship that ended in the killing of the doctor's wife. The veterinarian and the school teacher would travel separately to hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee while working on the cow book and would take long r...

Eleven stories of deadly doings in Missouri by "a standout writer of terse, staccato prose and vivid details" ( The Omaha Reader).Missouri has a bloody history dating back to frontier days—not just in St. Louis or Kansas City but in small towns and rural hamlets where one local summed up how Missourians prefer to handle conflicts: You shoot, you shovel, and you shut up. In this book, David J. Krajicek recounts eleven true tales of shocking and inf...

"Looks at the twists and turns in the investigation, possible perpetrators . . . as well as some of the good that eventually came out of this tragedy" ( Wauwatosa Patch).In 1925, the peaceful Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa found itself involved in mystery and horror. Eight-year-old Arthur 'Buddy' Schumacher Jr. was last seen by three of his friends after they hopped off a freight train they'd jumped to get a ride to a nearby swimming hole. For seven weeks, ...

On a late May morning in 1993, a mother and daughter were found murdered in their home in northeast Washington, D.C. Within a matter of days, an arrest was made. For the victims’ family and friends, and for a prosecutor obsessed with justice—the harrowing impact of the crime was just beginning...