The Crime Archives


Book Description

At once horrifying and fascinating, The Crime Archive is a rogue's gallery of murderers, hitmen, gang leaders, and kidnappers. This gripping foray into the criminal underworld details a variety of offenses--from serial killings to drug smuggling, localized rampages to international headlines. Includes rare facsimiles of documents that led to the capture and conviction of these criminals and more than 100 photographs.




The Crime Book


Book Description

Investigate 100 of the world's most notorious crimes, including the Great Train Robbery, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the murders of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Were the perpetrators delusional, opportunist, or truly evil? Find out what really happened and how the cases were solved. Discover conmen with sheer verve, such as Victor Lustig who "sold" the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers in 1925, adrenaline-fuelled escapes, and mind-bending exploits of pirates, kidnappers, and drug cartels. The Crime Book demystifies malware, cybercrimes, and Ponzi schemes and sets out the terrifying ploys of mass murderers from 16th-century Elizabeth Báthory who drained young girls' blood to the more recent exploits of Rosemary and Fred West. Like a virus, crime mutates and adapts. The Crime Book explains how pivotal moments in history opened up new opportunities for criminals, such as the smuggling of alcohol during the American Prohibition era. It also charts developments in justice and forensics including the Innocence Project, which used DNA testing to exonerate wrongly convicted convicts. It examines how the forces of law and order have fought back against crime, explaining ingenious sting operations such as tracking down the jewel thief Bill Mason and the final capture of murderer Ted Bundy. With a foreword from bestselling crime author Cathy Scott, The Crime Book is an enthralling introduction to humanity's darker side. Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.




In Crime's Archive


Book Description

This book investigates what happens to criminal evidence after the conclusion of legal proceedings. In its 'afterlife', criminal evidence continues to proliferate in cultural contexts; often arousing the interest of journalists, scholars, curators, writers or artists.




Indecent Advances


Book Description

Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime American Masters (PBS), “1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads” One of CrimeReads’ “Best True Crime Books of the Year” “A fast–paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look–see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post–World War I.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle Stories of murder have never been just about killers and victims. Instead, crime stories take the shape of their times and reflect cultural notions and prejudices. In this Edgar Award–finalist for Best Fact Crime, James Polchin recovers and recounts queer stories from the crime pages―often lurid and euphemistic―that reveal the hidden history of violence against gay men. But what was left unsaid in these crime pages provides insight into the figure of the queer man as both criminal and victim, offering readers tales of vice and violence that aligned gender and sexual deviance with tragic, gruesome endings. Victims were often reported as having made “indecent advances,” forcing the accused's hands in self–defense and reducing murder charges to manslaughter. As noted by Caleb Cain in The New Yorker review of Indecent Advances, “it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth–century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.” Indecent Advances is the first book to fully investigate these stories of how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.




Scene of the Crime


Book Description

This collection contains never-before-published images of seminal LAPD cases, including the Black Dahlia murder, the Onion Field case, the Watts riots, the Manson murders, and more. Captions are culled from original police logs and newspaper accounts.




Crime, History, and Hollywood


Book Description

In order to gain a better understanding of how criminal justice history is presented in major motion pictures, ten such films were selected for Crime, History, and Hollywood. The films were selected as good representations of criminal justice subject matter, mostly centered on specific crimes, their investigation, and courtroom outcomes. Films made across a wide range of times were also selected, and ones that represented American history from the mid-1800s (Amistad) and into the 1970s (All the President's Men). The most important aspect of the film selection was that they were based on actual historical events. While films such as the Shawshank Redemption and Twelve Angry Men are excellent criminal justice films, they are not based on true historical crimes or events. Each film (chapter) will open with an introduction to the historical event and film. The authors will then present the true historical events that the film was based on. Next, they will present a review of the film's narrative and how Hollywood portrayed the historical event. It should be noted here that the viewing of the film would best complement this section of each chapter. Then a review of the historical accuracy of each film will be reviewed, mentioning the various types of historical inaccuracies employed in each film. Finally, each chapter will present a conclusion in regard to the accuracy of the film, a list of books for further reading on the topic, and the endnotes. "Their passion for history shines through their writing, which is clear, engaging, and efficient....an important contribution to criminological studies of crime films..." -- Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books "[The] book creates a wonderful path for discussion and connection." -- Lee Ayers, Criminal Justice Review 39(4) PowerPoint slides are available to professors upon adoption of this book. Download sample slides from the full 17-slide presentation here. If you have adopted the book for a course, contact bhall (at) cap-press (dot) com to request the PowerPoint slides.




In Crime's Archive


Book Description

This book investigates what happens to criminal evidence after the conclusion of legal proceedings. During the criminal trial, evidentiary material is tightly regulated; it is formally regarded as part of the court record, and subject to the rules of evidence and criminal procedure. However, these rules and procedures cannot govern or control this material after proceedings have ended. In its ‘afterlife’, criminal evidence continues to proliferate in cultural contexts. It might be photographic or video evidence, private diaries and correspondence, weapons, physical objects or forensic data, and it arouses the interest of journalists, scholars, curators, writers or artists. Building on a growing cultural interest in criminal archival materials, this book shows how in its afterlife, criminal evidence gives rise to new uses and interpretations, new concepts and questions, many of which are creative and transformative of crime and evidence, and some of which are transgressive, dangerous or insensitive. It takes the judicial principle of open justice – the assumption that justice must be seen to be done – and investigates instances in which we might see too much, too little or from a distorted angle. It centres upon a series of case studies, including those of Lindy Chamberlain and, more recently, Oscar Pistorius, in which criminal evidence has re-appeared outside of the criminal process. Traversing museums, libraries, galleries and other repositories, and drawing on extensive interviews with cultural practitioners and legal professionals, this book probes the legal, ethical, affective and aesthetic implications of the cultural afterlife of evidence.




Evidence and the Archive


Book Description

This collection explores the stakes, risks and opportunities invoked in opening and exploring law’s archive and re-examining law’s evidence. It draws together work exploring how evidence is used or mis-used during the legal process, and re-used after the law’s work has concluded by engaging with ethical, aesthetic or emotional dimensions of using law’s evidence. Within socio-legal discourse, the move towards ‘open justice’ has emerged concurrently with a much broader cultural sensibility, one that has been called the "archival turn" (Ann Laura Stoler), the "archival impulse" (Hal Foster) and "archive fever" (Jacques Derrida). Whilst these terms do not describe exactly the same phenomena, they collectively acknowledge the process by which we create a fetish of the stored document. The archive facilitates our material confrontation with history, historicity, order, linearity, time and bureaucracy. For lawyers, artists, journalists, publishers, curators and scholars, the document in the archive has the attributes of authenticity, contemporaneity, and the unique tangibility of a real moment captured in material form. These attributes form the basis for the strict interpretive limits imposed by the rules of evidence and procedure. These rules do not contain the other attributes of the archival document, those that make it irresistible as the basis for creative work: beauty, violence, surprise, shame, volume, and the promise that it contains a tantalising secret. This book was previously published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Law Journal.




The Crimes of Dr Gramshaw


Book Description

Dr Gramshaw was a successful family doctor in Yorkshire for thirty-five years, until his final desperate actions brought his professional and personal life crashing down around him. This is a fascinating and shocking story of love and lust, success and deceit, crimes and lies, adultery, bigamy and insanity.




Archives and Records


Book Description

This open access book addresses the protection of privacy and personality rights in public records, records management, historical sources, and archives; and historical and current access to them in a broad international comparative perspective. Considering the question "can archiving pose a security risk to the protection of sensitive data and human rights?", it analyses data security and presents several significant cases of the misuse of sensitive personal data, such as census data or medical records. It examines archival inflation and the minimisation and reduction of data in public records and archives, including data anonymisation and pseudonymisation, and the risks of deanonymisation and reidentification of persons. The book looks at post-mortem privacy protection, the relationship of the right to know and the right to be forgotten and introduces a specific model of four categories of the right to be forgotten. In its conclusion, the book presents a set of recommendations for archives and records management. Mikulas Ctvrtnik, Ph.D. visiting assistant professor at Charles University in Prague, and assistant professor at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem. Author of several monographs, including Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft: Der tschechische Historiker Zdenek Kalista und die Tradition der deutschen Geistesgeschichte published in Germany; his latest book discusses intellectual history in the context of European historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries.