A fascinating tale of seduction, murder, fraud, coercion—and the trial of the “Minneapolis Monster” On a winter night in 1894, a young woman’s body was found in the middle of a road near Lake Calhoun on the outskirts of Minneapolis. She had been shot through the head. The murder of Kittie Ging, a twenty-nine-year-old dressmaker, was the final act in a melodrama of seduction and betrayal, petty crimes and monstrous deeds that would obsess reporters and their readers across the nation when the man who likely arranged her killing came to trial the following spring. Shawn Francis Peters unravels that sordid, spellbinding story in his account of the trial of Harry Hayward, a serial seducer and schemer whom some deemed a “Svengali,” others a “Machiavelli,” and others a “lunatic” and “man without a soul.” Dubbed “one of the greatest criminals the world has ever seen” by the famed detective William Pinkerton, Harry Hayward was an inveterate and cunning plotter of crimes large and small, dabbling in arson, insurance fraud, counterfeiting, and illegal gambling. His life story, told in full for the first time here, takes us into shadowy corners of the nineteenth century, including mesmerism, psychopathy, spiritualism, yellow journalism, and capital punishment. From the horrible fate of an independent young businesswoman who challenged Victorian mores to the shocking confession of Hayward on the eve of his execution (which, if true, would have made him a serial killer), The Infamous Harry Hayward unfolds a transfixing tale of one of the most notorious criminals in America during the Gilded Age.
In the first book to offer a full recounting of the Star Route maelstrom, which roiled American politics during the 1870s and 1880s, Peters reveals how postal service corruption resulted in a remarkable legal case that featured jury bribery ...
The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis.
This is the story of that decades-long ordeal, one of the oldest known active missing-child investigations, told by a writer whose own research for an article in 1998 sparked new interest in the boys’ disappearance.
In her irresistible, laugh-out-loud debut novel, Lutz introduces Isabel Izzy Spellman, a 28-year-old private eye working for her family's investigative business--a family that puts the fun in dysfunctional.
A portrait of the foremost track coach and founder of Nike describes how he helped contribute to numerous team titles and record achievements while working at the University of Oregon, offers insight into the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and ...
The story of a mayor and his police department run amuck-and of the stunning political collapse that helped launch the Progressive Era.
... Minnie 209–10 Bond, James 5,273 Bose, Hemchandra 206 Bow Street Runners 35, 215 Brabazon, James 254 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 164, 179–86, 183 Aurora Floyd 184 background and early life 179–81, 186 Lady Audley's Secret 177, ...
A collection of short stories featuring previously published Death and the Devil novellas taking place between "Where Death Meets the Devil" and "Why the Devil Stalks Death.
... The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. “Police. Some Information Concerning the Department Which Guards the Peace.” Duluth Evening ...
Laurence Leamer re-creates the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.