From the horrific Enoch Brown Schoolhouse Massacre of 1764 to settlers who hunted local tribes for a bounty, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, has long had a violent and bloody history. As more people came to the region, murder and mischief of every kind only multiplied. Local author Joseph David Cress explores the dark side of history, from little-known cases such as that of Sarah Clark--who became the first woman hanged in the county after she poisoned a family to dispatch a romantic rival--to high-profile crimes like the shocking 1955 courtroom slaying that left one person dead and three injured. Join Cress on a hair-raising walk down Hell Street as he investigates the underbelly of Cumberland County.

The unsolved 1878 murder of a young woman walking home from Hanover and a lethal 1901 love triangle in Chanceford Township that led to murder by strychnine are but two incidents in York County's history of deadly deeds and misdoings. While the 1969 York Race Riots are the most infamous instance of mayhem in the county, the strangest is perhaps the Hex Murder that left a North Hopewell Township powwow doctor a practitioner of the local folk magic dead at the hands of those trying to lift a curse. Follow author Joseph David Cress on the lonely country roads and harsh city streets as he goes on the trail of the body snatchers, hooligans and black widows of York County, Pennsylvania.

Herkimer County is steeped in history, from the settlement of the Mohawk Valley by Palatine German settlers to the flood of western migration with the opening of the Erie Canal. But the region also boasts an infamous history of high-profile homicides and crimes. Roxalana Druse murdered her abusive husband and became the last woman to be hanged in New York in 1887. The death of Grace Brown on scenic Big Moose Lake became one of the most famous cases in the country in 1906, inspiring author Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy. Psychological tests of intelligence were admitted into court for the first time in an acquittal of sixteen-year-old Jean Gianini in 1914. Caryl Hopson and Susan R. Perkins collect these historic narratives of murder and mayhem in Herkimer County.

“A chilling chronicle of local true-life murders that reach back into the long-forgotten seamy history of Worcester County” (Vitality Magazine). The bucolic image of central Massachusetts belies a dark and sometimes deadly past. Grisly crimes and grim misdeeds reach back to colonial settlement in Worcester County, from an escaped slave hanged for rape in 1768 at the Worcester jail to the Sutton choir singer convicted of drowning his wife in 1935. Henry Hammond’s 1899 suicide and the others that followed shook Spencer residents to their cores. Some crimes still grip the imaginations of residents, while others have faded from collective memory. Author Rachel Faugno investigates this sinister history. Includes photos!

"Murders and other crimes in Ulster County, NY"--