Criminal Bodies in the West

Criminal Bodies in the West PDF

Author: Melissa Schrift

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-21

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 100075152X

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This book explores the cultural meanings of the criminal body in the west through historical and multidisciplinary frameworks, examining both how the criminal corpse was viewed as a repository of power and how it held significant cultural meaning as material relic. Authors situate the criminal body at different historical junctures to examine ways in which the criminal corpse was displayed and managed for social, political, magical and medicinal powers and purposes. They explain how this legacy persists in significant ways in the contemporary west, primarily through the commodification of criminal bodies in popular and public displays. The role of notorious criminal bodies in contemporary culture also reverberates in political and scientific realms in which criminal bodies often carry symbolic meanings related to ambivalence over interpretations of death. Drawing on examples from history as well as more contemporary criminal bodies, the book will be of interest to those studying death and criminology, and show how the criminal body can retain an iconic status in the collective memory of the living. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse PDF

Author: Sarah Tarlow

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 3319779087

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This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Great Crimes of the West

Great Crimes of the West PDF

Author: Peter Fanning

Publisher:

Published: 1929

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13:

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Fanning was on the San Francisco Police Department for 37 years. The book discusses earlier times, e.g. Vigilance Committee, Black Bart, and more recent police activity during Fanning's career.

Fred & Rose

Fred & Rose PDF

Author: Howard Sounes

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1504043790

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The definitive account of one of Britain’s most notorious killer couples, who loved, tortured, and slayed together as husband and wife. Updated with a new afterword from the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrests From the outside, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, looked as commonplace as the married couple who lived there. But in 1994, Fred and Rose West’s home would become infamous as a “house of horrors” when the remains of nine young women—many of them decapitated, dismembered, and showing evidence of sexual torture—were found interred under its cellar, bathroom floor, and garden. And this wasn’t the only burial ground: Fred’s first wife and nanny were unearthed miles away in a field, while his eight-year-old stepdaughter was found entombed under the Wests’ former residence. Yet, for more than twenty years, the twosome maintained a façade of normalcy while abusing and murdering female boarders, hitchhikers, and members of their own family. Howard Sounes, who first broke the story about the Wests as a journalist and covered the murder trial, has written a comprehensive account of the case. Beginning with Fred and Rose’s bizarre childhoods, Sounes charts their lives and crimes in forensic detail, constructing a fascinating and frightening tale of a marriage soaked in blood. Indeed, the total number of the Wests’ victims may never be known. A case reminiscent of the “Moors Murders” committed in the 1960s in Manchester by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—as if Hindley and Brady had married and kept on killing for decades—Fred & Rose “is a story of obsessive love as well as obsessive murder” (The Times, London).

Bodies in the Back Garden - True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

Bodies in the Back Garden - True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home PDF

Author: Nigel Cawthorne

Publisher: Kings Road Publishing

Published: 2014-08-07

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 178418179X

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For the killer, there is always the problem of getting rid of the body. Muswell Hill murderer Dennis Nilsen famously cooked the corpses of his victims in Cranley Gardens and flushed them down the lavatory, only to be caught when the sewers blocked up. But his first twelve victims were disposed of in the back garden of his previous home in Melrose Avenue. Fred and Rosemary West buried the bodies of three of their victims in the back garden of the House of Horrors at 25 Cromwell Street.Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer began his murderous career scattering human remains in the backyard of his parents' home in Bath, Ohio. Convicted killer Peter Tobin went back on trial after two more bodies were found in the back garden of his former home in Margate. And grisly granny Dorothea Puente murdered lodgers at her boarding house in Sacramento, California, dispatching them to the backyard while continuing to cash their Social Security cheques.This book explores these and many other cases that suggest that, whatever the motive for murder, the back garden is a convenient place to dump the corpse. The Mexican drug cartels use it. So do drug dealers in London and sex killers in France. Benjamin Laing, who killed a father and daughter to steal a ?7,000 car, went one step further, burying the bodies of his victims in the back garden of his girlfriend's house in Abbey Wood. She called the police. His crime, she decided, had come just a little bit too close to home.

Hell's Half-Acre

Hell's Half-Acre PDF

Author: Susan Jonusas

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1984879855

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One of NPR's "Books We Love" New York Times Book Review's "The Best True Crime of 2022" "Rich in historical perspective and graced by novelistic touches, grips the reader from first to last.”—Wall Street Journal A suspense filled tale of murder on the American frontier—shedding new light on a family of serial killers in Kansas, whose horrifying crimes gripped the attention of a nation still reeling from war. In 1873 the people of Labette County, Kansas made a grisly discovery. Buried by a trailside cabin beneath an orchard of young apple trees were the remains of countless bodies. Below the cabin itself was a cellar stained with blood. The Benders, the family of four who once resided on the property were nowhere to be found. The discovery sent the local community and national newspapers into a frenzy that continued for decades, sparking an epic manhunt for the Benders. The idea that a family of seemingly respectable homesteaders—one among the thousands relocating farther west in search of land and opportunity after the Civil War—were capable of operating "a human slaughter pen" appalled and fascinated the nation. But who the Benders really were, why they committed such a vicious killing spree and whether justice ever caught up to them is a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Set against the backdrop of postbellum America, Hell’s Half-Acre explores the environment capable of allowing such horrors to take place. Drawing on extensive original archival material, Susan Jonusas introduces us to a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been previously missing from the story. Among them are the families of the victims, the hapless detectives who lost the trail, and the fugitives that helped the murderers escape. Hell’s Half-Acre is a journey into the turbulent heart of nineteenth century America, a place where modernity stalks across the landscape, violently displacing existing populations and building new ones. It is a world where folklore can quickly become fact and an entire family of criminals can slip through a community’s fingers, only to reappear in the most unexpected of places.

Darker than Night

Darker than Night PDF

Author: Tom Henderson

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1429997087

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In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies embark on a hunting trip from suburban Detroit to rural Michigan, unaware they would soon become the hunted. Darker than Night tells the chilling true story of the mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects–the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness's account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.

Vice, Crime, and Poverty

Vice, Crime, and Poverty PDF

Author: Dominique Kalifa

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0231547269

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Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates—part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties—as well as our desires. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. He examines how the myth of the lower depths came into being in nineteenth-century Europe, as biblical figures and Christian traditions were adapted for a world turned upside-down by the era of industrialization, democratization, and mass culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience. While the social conditions that created that underworld have changed, Vice, Crime, and Poverty shows that, from social-scientific ideas of the underclass to contemporary cinema and steampunk culture, its shadows continue to haunt us.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist PDF

Author: Radley Balko

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1610396928

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A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart. Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system -- a relic of the Jim Crow era -- failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.

International Criminal Law and Its Enforcement

International Criminal Law and Its Enforcement PDF

Author: Beth Van Schaack

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781609304621

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This casebook provides comprehensive treatment of international criminal law in a problem-oriented way. It draws widely from the jurisprudence of the various international and hybrid criminal tribunals, United Nations bodies, regional human rights institutions, domestic courts, alternative or traditional courts, and transitional justice institutions. Its focus is on the core international crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC, supplemented by chapters on the standalone crimes of torture and terrorism. This edition includes substantially more material from the International Criminal Court, including revised materials on the crime of aggression, and an entire chapter devoted to the creation and structure of the ICC.