Tag Archives: Crime

In My Hands Today…

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Keanu Reeves is Not in Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud – Becky Holmes

One woman’s hilarious and fascinating quest to expose the truth behind the fraudulent Twitter romance. Scammers beware, you have met your match!

Online romance fraud is a problem across the globe. It causes financial and emotional devastation, yet many people refuse to take it seriously.

This is the story of one middle-aged woman in a cardigan determined to understand this growing phenomenon. No other woman has had so many online romances – from Keanu Reeves to Brad Pitt to Prince William – and Becky Holmes is a favourite among peacekeeping soldiers and oil rig workers who desperately need iTunes vouchers.

By winding up scammers and investigating the truth behind their profiles, Becky shines a revealing, revolting and hilarious light on a very shady corner of the internet. Featuring first-hand accounts of victims, examples of scripts used by fraudsters, a look into the psychology of fraud and of course plenty of Becky’s hysterical interactions with scammers, this is a must-read for anyone who needs a reminder that Keanu Reeves is NOT in love with them.

In My Hands Today…

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The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession – Michael Finkel

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms, where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessing remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

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The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter – John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker

The FBI’s pioneer of criminal profiling, former special agent John Douglas, has studied and interviewed many of America’s most notorious killers—including Charles Manson, ”Son of Sam Killer” David Berkowitz and ”BTK Strangler” Dennis Rader—trained FBI agents and investigators around and the world, and helped educate the country about these deadly predators and how they operate, and has become a legend in popular culture, fictionalized in The Silence of the Lambs and the hit television shows Criminal Minds and Mindhunter.

Twenty years after his famous memoir, the man who literally wrote the book on FBI criminal profiling opens his case files once again. In this riveting work of true crime, he spotlights four of the most diabolical criminals he’s confronted, interviewed and learned from. Going deep into each man’s life and crimes, he outlines the factors that led them to murder and how he used his interrogation skills to expose their means, motives, and true evil. Like the hit Netflix show, The Killer Across the Table is centered around Douglas’ unique interrogation and profiling process. With his longtime collaborator Mark Olshaker, Douglas recounts the chilling encounters with these four killers as he experienced them—revealing for the first time his profile methods in detail.

Going step by step through his interviews, Douglas explains how he connects each killer’s crimes to the specific conversation, and contrasts these encounters with those of other deadly criminals to show what he learns from each one. In the process, he returns to other famous cases, killers and interviews that have shaped his career, describing how the knowledge he gained from those exchanges helped prepare him for these.

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The Amish Wife: Unraveling the Lies, Secrets, and Conspiracy That Let a Killer Go Free – Gregg Olsen

In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner’s natural causes. Ida’s husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed.

What really happened to Ida? The dubious circumstances of the tragic blaze were willfully ignored and Eli’s shifting narratives disregarded. Could Eli’s subsequent cross-country journey of death—including that of his own son—have been prevented if just one person came forward with what they knew about the real Eli Stutzman?

The questions haunted Gregg Olsen and Ida’s brother Daniel Gingerich for decades. At Daniel’s urging, Olsen now returns to Amish Country and to Eli’s crimes first exposed in Olsen’s Abandoned Prayers, one of which has remained a mystery until now. With the help of aging witnesses and shocking long-buried letters, Olsen finally uncovers the disturbing truth—about Ida’s murder and the conspiracy of silence and secrets that kept it hidden for forty-five years.

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In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child – Kim Cross

On October 1, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends, while her mother slept soundly in the room next door. This rarest of all kidnappings—a stranger abduction from the home—triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history.

Many Americans remember Polly’s face, which appeared on the national news every night, on the cover of People magazine, and on more than 8 million flyers distributed as far as China. The emotional gravity of Polly’s story touched every agent, police officer, and forensic technician who worked on her case. Many of these investigators have never shared their stories—until now.

New York Times bestselling author Kim Cross has written the first comprehensive account of what happened on that fateful night in October, as well as how the case forever transformed the Bureau’s approach to solving crimes. With unprecedented access to case files, crime scene photos, a videotaped murder confession, and inside sources, In Light of All Darkness follows the investigators who pieced together the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of the kidnapper—and made the victim a household name and a girl who will never be forgotten.