True Con Artist

We all know Sydney is full of corruption and crime, but none of us expected to read about a Sydney businessman being shot in the back of his head, in his driveway, in front of his nine-year-old son, in Cremorne. Nor that the order would come from a Point Piper millionaire. Kate McClymont is Australia's best-known investigative journalist. Kate and McGurk received intel that he was going to be 'hit'. Before the two could meet, McGurk was murdered.

On the 24th of February 1994, police knocked on the door of an aging house in the English town of Gloucester. They'd come to serve a search warrant in the case of a missing girl - the daughter of the house's inhabitants. What they uncovered would shock the world: decades of child abuse, an underground torture chamber, and a burial ground containing the bodies of the spent victims of the torture - including that of the missing daughter.

Vier erschütternde wahre Kriminalgeschichten in einem Band von bestsellerautor Ryan Green.

Marie Empress was an English singer, dancer, male impersonator, and comedienne who performed in vaudeville and theater around the world at the turn of the 20th century. She achieved her greatest success as an actress in early American motion pictures, circa 1910-1917, and was known as "the sublime vampire woman." She was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, and for a short period, her star was very bright. But her life, like her sudden appearance on the world stage in 1910, and her disappearance less than a decade later, is cloaked in mystery.

Eddie Tipton went to prison in 2017 for masterminding the biggest lottery fraud in U.S. history. In a twisting and bizarre tale, he somehow mixed a cocktail of greed, Bigfoot hunting, deception, cybercrime, and a love of hot dogs on his way to a felony conviction after he and several accomplices scored a series of jackpots from rigged drawings but fell short on the biggest "score" of them all. It's a wild story of greed and misplaced confidence, and a study in public officials whose determination survived a nearly cold trail.

Explore the fascinating and frightening world of conspiracy theories and organized crime with this two book bundle. Get to the bottom of conspiracies and crime groups that have helped “shape” the world we know today, in one way or another. Book #1: Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories has 20+ conspiracy theories that all get to the bottom of what really happened. Book #2: Organized Crime: True Crime. Learn about the most influential and famous organized crime groups in the world.

As a premier antiques dealer in Savannah, Jim Williams had it all: style, culture, charisma, and sophistication. But three decades of hard work came crashing down the night he shot Danny Hansford, his wild young lover. Jim Williams stood trial four times over the next decade for premeditated murder. While Clint Eastwood's movie - starring Kevin Spacey and Jude Law - and the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt portrayed the natives of Savannah as remarkably decadent, exotic characters, they missed the surprising dark side of Jim Williams himself.

Minnie was just 16 when she stood trial for the wrongful death of her first husband, a successful businessman and politician almost 40 years her senior. Despite overwhelming witness testimony that the Creole beauty from New Orleans had purchased the arsenic that killed him, Minnie's own testimony brought the entire courtroom to tears. She was acquitted. Minnie returned to New Orleans with James Walkup's fortune, but she still didn't have enough cash for her liking, so she successfully targeted, seduced, and murdered two more wealthy older men while evading justice in the courtroom.

Had fate dealt Harold Henthorn an unimaginably cruel hand? Or was he a murderer? Harold Henthorn wanted to do something special for his wife, Toni, on their 12th wedding anniversary. But the romantic hike he planned ended with her broken body lying at the bottom of a steep cliff. In the aftermath of Toni's shocking death, grief wasn't the only thing shared by her friends and family. So was suspicion. Nearly 20 years before, Harold's first wife had also died under mysterious circumstances.

Like many aspiring writers, David Breithaupt had money problems. But what he also had was unsupervised access to one of the finest special collections libraries in the country. In October 1990, Kenyon College hired David Breithaupt as its library's part-time evening supervisor. In April 2000 he was fired after a Georgia librarian discovered him selling a letter by Flannery O'Connor on eBay, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. Breithaupt had been browsing the collection, taking from it whatever rare books, manuscripts, and documents caught his eye.

1982: Oregon businessman Phil Champagne, age 52, dies in a tragic boating accident off Lopez Island. He is survived by one ex-wife, four adult children, an octogenarian mother, and two despondent brothers. Phil didn't know he was dead until he read it in the paper. All things considered, he took it rather well. So did Phil's brother, Mitch, the beneficiary of a 1.5 million dollar policy on Phil's life.

At 23, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was.

Cassie Chadwick, one of history's most successful con artists, was a master of the trade. She swept from town to town, assuming new identities and running new swindles at each railroad stop. In the dusk of the Gilded Age, years after the robber barons had amassed their fortunes, she was amassing her own. Using her wits and a series of forged documents, Cassie convinced prominent men from Cleveland to New York City that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. The con made her impossibly rich.

In November 1974, British MP and former cabinet minister John Stonehouse walked into the sea off a beach in Miami and disappeared, seemingly drowned. Then he was found—on the other side of the world, in Australia—and his extraordinary story began to come to light: a Labour cabinet minister and a devoted family man, also in a long-term affair with his secretary, and a spy for the Czech State Security agency, who had committed fraud and attempted to fake his own death to escape catastrophic business failures.

This is the inside story of the largest tax-evasion case in U.S. history, told through exclusive interviews with the agents and prosecutors who built the case. It unfolds like a spy thriller: encrypted messages, undercover stings, a lawyer's suicide on the eve of trial, a billionaire's brazen dementia defense, and a mysterious death that left billions in limbo.

Marilyn Sheppard, four months pregnant and mother of a toddler son, was bludgeoned to death in her Bay Village, Ohio, home in the early morning of July fourth, 1954. The cause of death was 27 blows to the head with a heavy instrument. Who took her life so brutally has been the subject of much controversy and debate for nearly half a century.

After her mother's untimely death, Clara Schwartz became distant, withdrawn. Her father, a renowned DNA researcher, lived in a farmhouse outside Leesburg, Virginia, where in December 2001 he was fatally stabbed by what seemed to be a ninja-style sword. Police arrested Kyle Hulbert, a troubled teen - and aspiring vampire. Kyle was Clara's friend, one of a circle obsessed with role-playing games.

A shocking exposé of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. In mid-2015 Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world's largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017 VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming.

It’s a total crime wave: A mini encyclopedia of true crime, packed with stories of killers, cons, survivors, forensics and more! More than 200 stories of killers, con artists, master thieves, and brazen kidnappers—and strong survivors, detectives, forensic breakthroughs, and legal minds on...

This novel take on the history of wine reveals that, whether by adding toxic sweeteners or passing off counterfeit bottles, wine fraud is abundant—and as old as wine itself. Vintage Crime will intrigue even the most sated of wine drinkers with its juicy tales of deception, raising interesting questions along the way: what counts as wine, why do we drink it, and what makes a wine truly authentic?