A Harrowing True Story of Survival on the Eiger's Deadly North FaceThe Germans call it the Mordwand. The Murder Wall. The north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps is a vertical mile of unstable limestone, perpetual avalanches, and weather that can turn lethal without warning. Eighteen climbers had already died attempting it. In August 1957, four more went up.They started as two separate teams. Claudio Corti and Stefano Longhi were Italians from Lecco, rely...

The mass murder of almost thirty young boys in Houston may well have been the most heinous crime of the century. How could such a series of murders go undetected for almost three years before being exposed? The Man with the Candy is a brilliant investigative journalist’s story of the crime and the answer to that question.The night David Hilligiest didn't come home was both like and unlike other nights when other Houston boys disappeared between the years 1...

On the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile plunged off a narrow one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. By morning, the car had been found submerged. Inside was the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, twenty-eight years old, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy. The next morning, Senator Ted Kennedy walked into the Edgartown police station and identified himself as the driver.What happened in those hours has never been fully explained. Kennedy himself said his ...

For fifty-seven years, the grizzly bears of Glacier National Park had never killed a human being.That ended on the night of August 12, 1967.In the dark hours before dawn, in two separate locations miles apart, two grizzly bears attacked two young women sleeping at backcountry campsites. Julie Helgeson, nineteen, a seasonal park employee from Minnesota, was dragged from her sleeping bag near Granite Park Chalet and mauled while her companion survived. Michele Koons, also nin...

The prize-winning, bestselling journalist provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of "The Happy Face Killer" in the serial murderer's own words . . .In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of Taunja Bennet, a troubled twenty-three-year-old barfly who had a mild intellectual disability since birth. There was just one problem. They had the wrong people.And the real killer wasn't abou...

Monte Sole - Mountain of the Sun - had the bad luck to lie on the main route of withdrawal of the retreating German armies in autumn 1944. As the allied advance stormed up Italy to the very shadow of Monte Sole, Axis frustration over their retreat and the harassing Italian partisans reached its peak. With full authorization of Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, and with an infusion of dread SS reinforcements, the Germans determined to neutralize Monte Sole. The result was, in Kesselring's c...

Before he was Muhammad Ali, there was the riddle of Cassius Clay.In 1967, Jack Olsen wrote the very first biography of the man who would become the most recognizable athlete on earth. Sports Illustrated's editors called it one of the best sports biographies of all time. More than fifty years later, it remains indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand how Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali — and what that transformation revealed about America.Wh...

"Jack Olsen's particular gift is his ability to illuminate the souls of his characters." Jonathan KellermanJoe Gere said he died on the afternoon his twelve-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared.In September 1985, Brenda Gere vanished from her family's home in Clearview, Washington. From the first moments of the investigation, suspicion fell on Michael Kay Green, a steroid-abusing bodybuilder with a history of violence. But there was no proof, no body, and no answers. Tips p...

Across the vast stretches of the American West, wildlife was being systematically exterminated, poisoned, shot, trapped, and bounty-hunted, for the profit of ranchers and stockmen, with the full cooperation of government agencies. Hardest hit were the great predators: wildcats, wolves, eagles, bears, and mountain lions. And above all, the coyote.Shrewd, wily, solitary, and adaptable, the coyote had survived everything the West could throw at it until modern chemistry and federal po...

"A giggle, a crunch of gravel, a single wave of a grimy hand, and her only child was gone."One cool April day, Mike Pritcher visits the home of his estranged wife, Lael, and takes their five-year-old son, Ace, for an overnight outing. He doesn't bring him back. When Lael calls the police, they tell her it's a domestic matter. When she calls her lawyer, he tells her she has the right to snatch Ace back. That's about it.So that's what she sets out to do.What follows i...

In 1968, Jack Olsen wrote what Sports Illustrated would later call the most significant series of stories in the magazine's history.Published across five consecutive issues beginning July 1, 1968, "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" shattered the comfortable myth that American sport was a level playing field, a rare arena where race didn't matter and Black athletes had found true equality. Olsen proved it was a lie.Black collegiate athletes were recruited for their speed ...

For more than a year, Jack Olsen embedded himself in the world of big-city police. He rode with them on their beats, visited them in their homes, walked with them into bars and back alleys and onto what he called "the killing grounds of this most dangerous of occupations."What he found became Night Watch.Watch Commander Packer Lind is 37 years old, burly, dedicated, and trying to hold his precinct together. His officers are a ragtag collection of bruisers, smart-alecks, and...