Bringing new research from true crime writers, scholars, and media practitioners around the world, this book offers fresh perspectives on how women read, write, and are portrayed in true crime stories across different platforms, including documentaries, podcasts, and TikToks. The genre of true crime is flourishing, and it is overwhelmingly consumed by women. Despite this, there is much we do not know about how women consume true crime and are represented in true crime stories of various kinds. This edited volume helps to fill this gap in our knowledge. Across ten chapters and using a variety of study methods, including creative practice, interviews, surveys, archival research, and case studies, the book reveals the multifaceted ways that true crime matters to women and suggests areas of future research. It also offers new insights on a diverse range of topics, such as racial identities, fraudsters, activism, victimisation, and deviance, as well as highlighting major cases from past to present which have influenced criminal justice responses. True Crime and Women is intended for researchers and students of criminology, literary studies, gender studies, media and journalism studies, and rhetorical studies, as well as media practitioners and writers.

"Petrie expertly puts details into historical context and annotates each chapter with newspaper and court documentation. Written in 2000 but even more intriguing as the 100th anniversary of the crime approaches, this thorough account will appeal to fans of true crime." --Publisher's Weekly (3-7-2016) "Petrie vividly re-creates the circumstances and aftermath of an early 20th-century murder in this true-crime book. Exhaustive detail and flawless re-creations make for real suspense in this nonfiction tale."--Kirkus Reviews (10-2-2015) This book is the non-fiction account of the events which encompassed a murder and trial at the turn of the century in Ossipee, New Hampshire. When Florence Small's smoldering body rose to the surface of the basement water, local folks immediately suspected her husband of the crime. Frederick Small was an outsider, a Boston man, who had moved to Ossipee Lake to semi-retire. There was a deep distrust of "city fellas up there behind the Ossipees," in 1916 and perhaps this suspicion was warranted. But how could Frederick have been responsible for a murder and a fire that happened 7 hours after he had left for Boston on a business trip? The sensational trial that followed was unlike any previously experienced in Carroll County. And although everybody from the Boston area to Portland, Maine, had an opinion, nobody anticipated the decision the jury would reach. The unrest on the ill-fated property remained even in 1956, when Anna Foley's unsuspecting son and daughter-in-law felt the effects of the events of 1916 one August night while vacationing on the property.

This book comprises details, not only interesting to every person concerned for the welfare of society, but useful to the world in pointing out the consequences of guilt to be equally dreadful and inevitable. The author noticed that in most of the works published before its release, little attention was paid to the ultimate moral or beneficial effects to be produced by them upon the public mind; and that while every effort is made to afford amusement, no care was taken to produce those general impressions, so necessary to the maintenance of virtue and good order. The advantages of precept are everywhere admitted and extolled; but still more effectual are the lessons which are taught through the influence of example, whose results are but too frequently fatal. The representation of guilt with its painful and degrading consequences, has been universally considered to be the best means of warning youth against the danger of temptation; the benefits to be expected from example are too plainly exhibited by the infliction of punishment to need repetition; and the more generally the effects of crime are shown, and the more the horrors which precede detection and the deplorable fate of the guilty are made known, the greater is the probability that the atrocity of vice may be abated and the security of the public promoted.

If you like first person accounts of true crime stories, you will love this book. I invite the reader to follow me through my investigation of the Leslie Barry murder; the trial of Art Anzures for the murder; the evidence that led me to my 3 suspects; how my investigation of the Barry murder led me to the defense of Angelo Buono in the Hillside Strangler case; and what happened in my personal life as a result of my attempts to expose the systematic cover-up in California V. Angelo Buono. The single most important clue in the case came from the statement of a 14 year old boy on the night of the Barry murder. I wasn't at the crime scene that night, but would read the statement in police reports a week and a half later. When I read it, I was astonished that the police seemed to be showing no interest in this remarkable 16 word statement from a friend of the victim. The cops ignoring evidence that could help crack a case that had baffled them for 18 months, caused me to wonder if they were so stupid they couldn't connect these two simple dots or if something more sinister was going on. A dozen books or more have been written about the Hillside Strangler case, and taking a cue from the books, screenwriters have used the case in movies and TV cop shows to lend an air of credibility to their fictitious story lines. The Irony hasn't escaped me that these writers are using a fiction to give credibility to a fiction. However, these movies and cop shows have kept the myth that Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono were the Hillside Stranglers alive. I've heard rumors that in recent years the LAPD destroyed all the evidence from their Hillside Strangler investigation. If these rumors are true, you can bet the farm that it wasn't done to save space, but to protect the guilty. I've reduce that statement by the 14 year old boy to 4 words and made it the title of this book. A Crossing of Paths is the true story of the Hillside Strangler case.

The real-life stories collected here reflect not only the myriad ways in which a law can be broken, but also the countless ways in which crime — whether in the news or close to home — can be experienced. In these diverse and compelling narratives, award-winning journalists investigate the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the unsolved lynching of Claude Neal; an identity thief finds herself confronted by one of her victims; a triple homicide rattles a high school swim team; a young adventurer supports her travels by smuggling Peruvian pre-Columbian artifacts; a woman struggles to live free of the ex-boyfriend who kidnapped and tortured her; and more. While appealing to true crime audiences, this unique mix of personal essays and award-winning long form newspaper narratives will also appeal to creative writing and journalism programs, as well as to readers of memoir and crime fiction.