Jack Ruby's Girls


Book Description

Stripper, B-girls and naive bus station broads knew Jack Ruby best. Two of the girls who worked for him--felt the sting of his insults and the childlike gentleness of his compassion for all living things--have given a fascinating account about the life in Ruby's Carousel Club in Dallas. And in doing it, they have also told a compelling story about Jack Ruby himself. Diana Hunter and Alice Anderson have put together their stories and the stories of the other Jack Ruby Girls with straightforward honesty. They are sometimes funny. Sometimes tearfully pathetic. And sometimes $exy. More effectively than other writers and reporters who thought they understood Ruby and why he shot the man who killed President Kennedy, these girls give their own penetrating insight into Jack Ruby's character. They offer the most believable explanation yet for his undoing--a compulsion for what he thought of as "class." Ruby died (and the Carousel Club with him) while legal minds were studying what should be done about the death sentence placed on him for a deed he thought should have made him a hero. And even the Dallas "establishment" gets another blast from these tart-tongued girls, when one of their characters sums up the multiple tragedies that happened in Dallas in 1963 by saying: "This goddam town will never know how to embrace the dead in the right way, or how to kiss a ghost goodbye."--From jacket flap




Weird Texas


Book Description

"If your taste extends to the odd side of traveling, [this is your ticket]."--"Booklist."




The Girl Who Shot JFK


Book Description

Beautiful, yet mysterious and deadly, Pilar Rivera is forced into a life of kill or be killed. She has killer good looks and knows how to use them as she stalks and shoots the man who raped her in Havana when she was 16 – and becomes entwined in the crime of the ages. Rumored to be Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban daughter, Pilar is a female Jason Bourne, a woman without a country, loyal only to herself, who will kill for money but charges nothing for revenge. It’s an amazing tale of sex, murder and intrigue, set in the turbulent times of the Cold War, as it moves from Cuba to Russia, New York to Paris, Miami to New Orleans then on to Dallas that notorious day in November. The story swirls around two larger-than-life figures of the 20th century – John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro – along with a parade of iconic personalities: Jackie and Bobby, Marilyn and Sinatra, Che and Raul, Oswald and Ruby, the rat pack, the mob, the CIA and Hemingway. It’s a fast-paced thriller, as told by Jack Ruby, the last man standing, the only person involved still alive – except for the girl who shot JFK.




The Reporter Who Knew Too Much


Book Description

Was journalist Dorothy Kilgallen murdered for writing a tell-all book about the JFK assassination? Or was her death from an overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol, as reported? Shaw believes Kilgallen's death has always been suspect, and unfolds a list of suspects ranging from Frank Sinatra to a Mafia don, while speculating on the possibilities of reopening the case.




Survived by One


Book Description

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.




Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy


Book Description

For fifty years the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been obscured. This book releases us from a crippling distortion of American history. At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history. The brilliant prosecutor of Charles Manson and the man who forged an iron-clad case of circumstantial guilt around O. J. Simpson in his best-selling Outrage Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of writing the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination. This is an achievement that has for years seemed beyond reach. No one imagined that such a book would ever be written: a single volume that once and for all resolves, beyond any reasonable doubt, every lingering question as to what happened in Dallas and who was responsible. There have been hundreds of books about the assassination, but there has never been a book that covers the entire case, including addressing every piece of evidence and each and every conspiracy theory, and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. In this monumental work, the author has raised scholarship on the assassination to a new and final level, one that far surpasses all other books on the subject. It adds resonance, depth, and closure to the admirable work of the Warren Commission. Reclaiming History is a narrative compendium of fact, forensic evidence, reexamination of key witnesses, and common sense. Every detail and nuance is accounted for, every conspiracy theory revealed as a fraud on the American public. Bugliosi's irresistible logic, command of the evidence, and ability to draw startling inferences shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last it all makes sense. Some images in this ebook are not displayed due to permissions issues.




The Girl on the Stairs


Book Description

On November 22, 1963, a young Victoria Elizabeth Adams stood behind a fourth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. She watched as John Kennedy was murdered in the streets below. Then, with a co-worker in tow, she ran down the back stairs of the building in order to get outside and determine what had happened. At that precise moment, her life changed forever. Her actions posed serious problems for the Warren Commission, already grappling with its agenda of naming Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin. If Miss Adams was telling the truth, then she had descended those stairs at the same time Oswald would have been on them as he made his escape from the sixth floor sniper's nest. Yet Miss Adams saw no one. And even though the stairs were old, wooden, and creaky under any weight, she heard no one either. When Miss Adams was called to testify before a Commission attorney, she was quickly discredited, humiliated, and eventually branded a liar. Behind closed doors she pleaded with the government to conduct time tests of her actions if she was felt to have been inaccurate. She begged the government to question her co-workers, particularly the woman who had accompanied her down the stairs, if she was not believed. Instead, she was ignored. And so, knowing the truth of what she had done and now fearing for her life because of it, she went into hiding and became willing to die with that secret knowledge. Intrigued by what little was available about Miss Adams, the author went in search of her. It took him 35 years to eventually find this elusive witness. As his journey progressed, many questions arose about the assassination while others were put to rest. And in the end, the truth of what Miss Adams did was finally discovered. This is an important story, unique in this mess that continues to surround Kennedy's death. It is a story that has been buried for decades. It is an account the government did not want you to hear, and actually fabricated evidence in order to keep you from hearing it. Now, the truth can be told.




A Virtuous Woman


Book Description

A “vivid, unsentimental, powerful” portrait of a Southern marriage by the New York Times–bestselling author of Ellen Foster (Publishers Weekly). “She hasn’t been dead four months and I’ve already eaten to the bottom of the deep freeze. I even ate the green peas. Used to I wouldn’t turn my hand over for green peas . . .” Ruby Stokes has died too young and left her husband, Blinking Jack, behind. With alternating entries from each of them, A Virtuous Woman recounts the tale of their years together in an “exquisitely realised piece of writing” (Elizabeth Buchan, The Mail on Sunday). From their very different backgrounds—Ruby a daughter of wealth, Jack a penniless tenant farmer—to their relationships with their landlord and his family, and the strength they drew from each other in the face of hardship, this story of a marriage is “full of fantastically gritty metaphors . . . A book that will change your dreams” (The Observer). “Gibbons again flawlessly reproduces the humor and idiom of rural eastern North Carolina.” —Library Journal




The Wild and Wayward Tales of Tammi True


Book Description

In the 1960's, Nancy Powell became Tammi True,the burlesque headliner at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. She lived a double life, PTA mom by day and stripper by night. Then Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and everything changed. From Catholic school to the juvenile court system, from a noisy club in Dallas to a quiet farm in the country, Nancy's life is wondrous and wayward, hilarious and heartfelt. Here it is, her world in her own words--in and out of the spotlight, and ready for an encore. [backcover]




The Ruby Cover-up


Book Description