True Child Crime

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

In 1974, at the age of 14, I was abducted, beaten and raped in my hometown of Lincoln, Rhode Island by a recidivist, pedophile predator. He was arrested and indicted but never went to trial. He never went to trial because he was brutally beaten to death in the streets of Providence before his court date. Thirty-eight years after his murder, no one has ever been charged with the crime. Men in My Town is my personal story. It's a gripping suspense novel with a storyline that includes characters based on real people, real places and real events. It's a story about men in my neighborhood, men who watched over me during the time between my assault and my assailant's murder.

In this true crime story, an Australian serial killer seeking to avoid justice leisurely boards a ship and flees to San Francisco. But members of an Australian police force board a faster one to await his arrival.

The bodies are piling high - 36 unsolved gangland murders at last count - and FBI Supervisor Hans Bauer has to do the unthinkable: put tough, independent Special Agent Frank Murray back on the squad he was twice kicked out of, Organized Crime. Mafia Kingpin Nick Scarponi is back from prison and orchestrating the bloodiest reign of mob killings in Philadelphia history and Frank Murray, who tossed Scarponi in the can three years earlier, is his number-one target. The taunt, tense, visually gritty story grabs you by the throat.

Cowboy stories and movies about the Wild West are full of amazing characters. Yet many of the lawmen we think of as heroes were anything but - some were violent scoundrels and outlaws themselves. Among all the lawmen of the frontier, one man stands out as a true hero: Bass Reeves. In his day, Bass Reeves was the most successful federal marshal in the United States. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew his gun first. He rounded up hundreds of outlaws and was shot at countless times but was never hit. Bass Reeves was born into slavery.

It was a warm summer morning on January 26, 1966, when the three Beaumont children left their suburban home to celebrate Australia Day at the beach. The children regularly made the trip by themselves, so their mother felt at ease providing them with bus fare and sending them on their way while she visited and had lunch with a close friend. However, she would return home that afternoon to find that the children had still not returned. That morning would end up being the last time she saw her three children.

Mary Bell’s name to this day is infamous in Newcastle upon Tyne. Aged only 11 in 1968, she murdered two young boys, one aged three and one aged four, in Scotswood, an area of the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. In both instances, Mary Bell told the victim that he had a sore throat, which she would massage to make them better before her hands became tighter when she would strangle them to death.