The Homicidal Handyman of Oak Park: Morris Solomon Jr.


Book Description

AS FAR AS FITTING THE STEREOTYPES bestowed to infamous chain-link murderers that exist outside African American culture, there was a time when black serial killers were recognized, to some extent, implausible by purported experts who probably cared not to explore the primary nature of the slayers transgressions. Nevertheless, the obscured story of handyman Morris Solomon Jr. has to be one of the most interesting tales untold as it is one of the most horrific yarns in the annals of American crime. The handymans misdeeds, when briefly brought to the publics attention, virtually reminded society that killers continuously come in all colors, shapes, and sizes. Solomon was convicted of killing six young women, ages 16 to 29, in the Sacramento, California, neighborhood of Oak Park between 1986 and 1987. The handymans grisly method of murder left detectives and medical examiners mystified. The identification process of his victims remains was distinctly a laborious assignment, too. The victims drug addicts, prostitutes, and devout mothers were stuffed in closets, hidden under debris, and arguably, one court judge strongly considers, buried alive. In retrospect, the handyman was first accused of murder in the mid-1970s; and authorities suspect him to be linked to four more homicides in Sacramento. Solomon once declared as a Mentally Disordered Sex Offender is now on death row in Northern Californias San Quentin State Prison awaiting execution. The unassuming handymans 18-year reign of terror includes a record of sexual assaults, attempted kidnappings, and separate despicable sex acts performed strictly for humiliation. In The Homicidal Handyman of Oak Park: Morris Solomon Jr., author and journalist Tony Ray Harvey recounts the black serial killers dysfunctional upbringing, atrocious crimes, and hardly noticeable court trial. Harveys book also provides explicit crime scene photos, the history of the death penalty system in the state of California, the city of Sacramentos drug culture in the mid-1980s, and exclusive prison interviews of the mild-mannered handyman.




Inside the Mind of BTK


Book Description

The FBI profiler & co-author of the #1 New York Times–bestseller Mindhunter recounts his role in catching one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Inside the Mind of BTK tells the incredible true story of how FBI profiler John Douglas tracked and participated in the hunt for one of the most notorious serial killers in US history. For thirty-one years a man who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, sexually assaulting and strangling a series of victims, taunting the police with cryptic communications, and bragging about his vicious crimes to local newspapers and television stations. After disappearing for nine years, he suddenly reappeared, complaining that no one was paying enough attention to him and claiming that he had committed other crimes for which he had not been given credit. When he was finally captured, BTK was revealed to be Dennis Rader, a sixty-one-year-old churchgoing, married man with two children. As a leading serial killer profiler for the FBI, John Douglas was first called to consult about the case in 1980 and remained involved with the story and all of its principal players up to the arrest and prosecution. After Rader was arrested, Douglas was granted both an exclusive interview with the killer after his sentencing, as well as access to friends, family, and police. In this page-turning book, Douglas reveals both new information and insight into why Rader did what he did, why he stopped for a mysterious nine-year period, and his current psychological state in custody. Praise for Inside the Mind of BTK “Legendary profiler and bestselling author Douglas (Mindhunter), who pioneered the FBI’s systematic study of serial killers, offers his insights into one of this country’s most chilling killers—Dennis Rader, a seemingly innocuous family man and municipal employee, whose brutal murders terrorized Wichita, Kans., for three decades. . . . While the stomach-turning story of BTK's crimes has been told by others, Douglas's unique professional experience and his exclusive personal access to Rader offers a different perspective, even as the answer to the question of how such a monster comes to be remains elusive.” —Publishers Weekly “Riveting! Douglas and Dodd have focused a laser sight on one of the most fascinating and disturbing serial killers of our time. Their in-depth analysis of BTK’s early childhood, his seemingly “normal” everyday life, and his shockingly well-hidden “other” life deftly explores the nature of evil and how we can better protect ourselves from such cunning predators.” ―Lisa Gardner, New York Times–bestselling suspense author of Hide




The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes


Book Description

Over 800 entries examine the facts, evidence, and leading theories of a variety of unsolved murders, robberies, kidnappings, serial killings, disappearances, and other crimes.




The World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Volume Four T–Z


Book Description

The 4th volume of this comprehensive work features hundreds of serial killers from Sacramento to Soviet Russia—plus numerous unsolved cases. The World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the most complete reference guide on the subject, featuring more than 1,600 entries about the lives and crimes of serial killers from around the world. Defined by the FBI as a person who murders three or more people with a hiatus of weeks or months between murders, the serial killer has presented unique and terrifying challenges to have walked among us since the dawn of time—a fact this extensive record makes chillingly clear. The series concludes with Volume Four, T-Z. Entries include the Terminator Anatoly Yuriyovych Onoprienko; Trailside Killer David Joseph Carpenter; Vampire of Sacramento Richard Trenton Chase; and the Voroshilovgrad Maniac Zaven Almazyan; plus the unsolved cases of the Adelaide Child Murders; the Axeman of New Orleans; the Chillicothe Killer; the Dead Women of Juarez; the Korea Frog Boy Murders; and the Volga Maniac.




When Doctors Kill


Book Description

It would come as no surprise that many readers may be shocked and intrigued by the title of our book. Some (especially our medical colleagues) may wonder why it is even worthwhile to raise the issue of killing by doctors. Killing is clearly an- thetical to the Art and Science of Medicine, which is geared toward easing pain and suffering and to saving lives rather than smothering them. Doctors should be a source of comfort rather than a cause for alarm. Nevertheless, although they often don’t want to admit it, doctors are people too. Physicians have the same genetic library of both endearing qualities and character defects as the rest of us but their vocation places them in a position to intimately interject themselves into the lives of other people. In most cases, fortunately, the positive traits are dominant and doctors do more good than harm. While physicists and mathematicians paved the road to the stars and deciphered the mysteries of the atom, they simultaneously unleashed destructive powers that may one day bring about the annihilation of our planet. Concurrently, doctors and allied scientists have delved into the deep secrets of the body and mind, mastering the anatomy and physiology of the human body, even mapping the very molecules that make us who we are. But make no mistake, a person is not simply an elegant b- logical machine to be marveled at then dissected.




The Moronic Inferno


Book Description

A collection of essays on America by the author of London Fields, Money and Yellow Dog. At the age of ten, when Martin Amis spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, he was excited and frightened by America. As an adult he has approached that confusing country from many arresting angles, and interviewed its literati, filmmakers, thinkers, opinion-makers, leaders and crackpots with characteristic discernment and wit. Included in a gallery of Great American Novelists are Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Amis also takes us to Dallas, where presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is attempting to liaise with born-again Christians. We glimpse the beau monde of Palm Beach, where each couple tries to out-Gatsby the other, and examine the case of Claus von Bulow. Steven Spielberg gets a visit, as does Brian de Palma, whom Amis asks why his films make no sense, and Hugh Hefner's sybaritic fortress and sanitized image are penetrated. There can be little that escapes the eye of Martin Amis when his curiosity leads him to a subject, and America has found in him a superlative chronicler.




Off the Grid


Book Description

Off-grid isn’t a state of mind. It isn’t about someone being out of touch, about a place that is hard to get to, or about a weekend spent offline. Off-grid is the property of a building (generally a home but sometimes even a whole town) that is disconnected from the electricity and the natural gas grid. To live off-grid, therefore, means having to radically re-invent domestic life as we know it, and this is what this book is about: individuals and families who have chosen to live in that dramatically innovative, but also quite old, way of life. This ethnography explores the day-to-day lives of people in each of Canada’s provinces and territories living off the grid. Vannini and Taggart demonstrate how a variety of people, all with different environmental constraints, live away from contemporary civilization. The authors also raise important questions about our social future and whether off-grid living creates an environmentally and culturally sustainable lifestyle practice. These homes are experimental labs for our collective future, an intimate look into unusual contemporary domestic lives, and a call to the rest of us leading ordinary lives to examine what we take for granted. This book is ideal for courses on the environment and sustainability as well as introduction to sociology and introduction to cultural anthropology courses.




Dead Lies Dreaming


Book Description

When magic and superpowers emerge in the masses, Wendy Deere is contracted by the government to bag and snag supervillains in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross' Dead Lies Dreaming: A Laundry Files Novel. As Wendy hunts down Imp—the cyberpunk head of a band calling themselves “The Lost Boys”— she is dragged into the schemes of louche billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Rupert has discovered that the sole surviving copy of the long-lost concordance to the one true Necronomicon is up for underground auction in London. He hires Imp’s sister, Eve, to procure it by any means necessary, and in the process, he encounters Wendy Deere. In a tale of corruption, assassination, thievery, and magic, Wendy Deere must navigate rotting mansions that lead to distant pasts, evil tycoons, corrupt government officials, lethal curses, and her own moral qualms in order to make it out of this chase alive. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom


Book Description

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.




The Representation of Business in English Literature


Book Description

In The Representation of Business in English Literature, five scholars of different periods of English literature produce original essays on how business and businesspeople have been portrayed by novelists, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing to the end of the twentieth century. The contributors to Representation help readers understand the partiality of the various writers and, in so doing, explore the issue of what determines public opinion about business. Arthur Pollard (1922-2001) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hull in Hull, East Yorkshire, England. John Blundell is General Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.