When rumors of a stylishly dressed man robbing stagecoaches and leaving poems behind at the scene of the crime started to hit newspapers in the late 1800s, the culprit Charles “Black Bart” Boles became an instant cultural sensation. Set against the dusty, rugged backdrop of the Old West, Black Bart’s gentlemanly image still persists in […]

  How is it that an industry that makes up $24 billion of the United States’ annual economy and 2.69  percent of its global exports exists almost entirely in the shadows of its society? In Blood Money, investigative journalist Kathleen McLaughlin exhumes the messy business of the blood plasma trade, which in the past two […]

  Survival, as journalist Michelle Dowd describes in her newly released memoir Forager, can sometimes be a trickier concept to understand than it is to achieve. If one is raised in the confines of a religious commune built on the twin pillars of gender-based oppression and violent abuse, such as Dowd was, is it more […]

  In his first published novel, New York public defender and Law&Crime host Brian Buckmire artfully transforms his professional understanding of the criminal justice system into the written experiences of two young, Black students living in Brooklyn — 14-year old soccer star, Reed, and his 12-year old debate champion sister, Olive — as they are […]

  If one wants to evaluate the health and vitality of their community, just take a long, hard look at how it processes its dead. At least that’s what Bruce Goldfarb, former Executive Assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland and self-proclaimed “reformed journalist,”implies in his eye-opening chronicle of the nation’s preeminent forensics lab.   […]

At one point or another, every new doctor must make a decision about which branch of medicine to pursue. For former Chief Medical Officer of New York City and host of HBO’s Autopsy, Dr. Michael Baden, the decision between internal medicine and forensic pathology was a particularly formative one. At a time when forensics was […]

1. Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (by Dr. William Maples) Published in 1995, Dead Men Do Tell Tales was one of the first forensic “tell-alls” of its kind. In a surprising blend of wit and horror, renowned forensic physician Dr. William Maples walks readers through some […]

  You know you’ve got a serious criminal on your hands when Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the former sidekick of mass murderer Charles Manson and aspiring presidential assassinator, admits to being intimidated by them in their shared federal prison. Yet, that’s exactly the kind of impact Ana Montes made on those around her after her decades-long […]

Interview and Book Club Review by Law&Crime’s Stefanie Doucette Roseanne Montillo is the author of Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire’s Wife and the Murder of the Century. Her book chronicles the murder of wealthy banking heir Billy Woodward at the hands of his wife, Ann, in 1955. Before Montillo, the case also fascinated Truman […]

For the epigraph of his posthumously published novel Answered Prayers, Truman Capote chose the very prescient quote by Saint Teresa of Avila, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Though with this quote Capote was giving a nod to the rise and fall of midcentury NYC’s elite – whose illicit secret lifestyles and […]

Written almost a century after the series of murders it investigates took place, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by The New Yorker staff writer David Grann takes on the dual task of archival research and contemporary critique. It attempts to understand the greed and depravity that […]

What happens when a poet attempts to grapple with the unspeakable horrors of their own family tragedy? That’s exactly the literary experiment poet Maggie Nelson embarks upon in The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, which tells the story of her Aunt Jane’s murder in 1969 and the trial to bring her killer to justice […]