2024 Releases (24)
Exciting books waiting for your eyeballs.
Richard Wickliffe
Don't Be Home For Christmas
$17.95
Kyle Colbert just wants to go home for Christmas. He savors his train commutes from Manhattan to his idyllic hometown. But as he arrives on Christmas Eve, his family tries to murder him. His neighbors and entire community suddenly want him dead. He can’t run to authorities, since the FBI is also in a deadly pursuit. With a $1,000,000 reward for his “Death or Whereabouts," Kyle is running out of time to discover what's really going on to stop an even greater tragedy.
Ted Clark
Reverberations: 21 Classic 1950s Rock 'N' Roll Songs That Still Reverberate
$19.95
Reverberations: 21 Classic 1950s Rock 'N' Roll Songs That Still Reverberate is a journey through the golden age of rock and roll. This book dives into the stories behind twenty-one iconic songs from the 1950s that have left a lasting impact on music and culture.
From the rebellious energy of "Hound Dog" to the infectious rhythm of "Rock Around the Clock," these tracks defined a generation and continue to inspire artists today. You'll discover how "Tutti Frutti" brought Little Richard's flamboyant style to the forefront and how "Johnny B. Goode" became a rock and roll anthem thanks to Chuck Berry's groundbreaking guitar work.
The Beatles, in their early days, played almost all these songs, showcasing their timeless appeal and influence. Ted Clark's meticulous research and insight offers a fresh perspective on these classics, revealing their origins, the numerous subsequent artists who covered these songs and/or included them on their concert set lists, the movie soundtracks they have appeared on, and why they still resonate with listeners around the world.
The book explores in detail the tremendous impact that songs like “Rock Around the Clock,” “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” “That’ll Be the Day,” and “Summertime Blues” had in the UK. And Clark explains why the artists who sang these songs—Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and Eddie Cochran respectively—are more revered across the pond than they are in the U.S.
Whether you're a lifelong fan of 1950s rock and roll or new to the genre, this book provides a rich and engaging look at the music that started it all. With each chapter, you'll gain a deeper appreciation for the songs that shaped the course of popular music and continue to reverberate through the decades.
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<div class="element-number case-upper"><span class="element-number-term">CHAPTER</span> <span class="element-number-number">1</span></div>
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<h1 class="element-title case-upper">JOHN COLTRANE</h1>
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<h2 class="element-subtitle case-upper">“MY FAVORITE THINGS”</h2>
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<p class="alignment-block-content alignment-block-content-center"><a class="content-external-link text-is-url" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG2dsXV5HI"><b>https://<wbr/>www.<wbr/>youtube.<wbr/>com/<wbr/>watch?<wbr/>v=<wbr/>qWG2dsXV5HI</b></a></p>
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<p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-with-first-letter-j"><span class="first-letter first-letter-j first-letter-without-punctuation">J</span>ohn Coltrane cured my headache. I listened to “My Favorite Things,” and before the cut had finished, my headache was gone. Don't be surprised. People have made all sorts of miraculous claims for Coltrane's music; some even claim to have seen God while listening to Trane. This would have made Coltrane very happy, for that's exactly what he was after— nothing less than the vision of God.</p>
<p class="subsq">Coltrane, nicknamed Trane, didn't start his musical career looking for God. He just wanted to play music. The Vision appeared later. First came the years of struggle. Trane, by jazz standards, was a slow developer. Many who believe he was one of the greatest jazz musicians (if not <i>the</i> greatest) forget how many years it took him to master his art. He was almost 30 years old before most people heard of him, when he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955.</p>
<p class="subsq">A musician who decides on a life in jazz is like the monk who dedicates his life to unending prayer and takes a vow of poverty. You hear about gold records ($1 million in sales), platinum (one million units), and even multi-platinum. A jazz album is a big hit if it moves 10,000 units. And jazz gigs are so few that most musicians have day jobs—sometimes as music teachers but often any sort of work they can get. If they strike it lucky, they might be offered a fairly steady job in a club but often they take whatever there is.</p>
<p class="subsq">A fellow sax player walking into a club in Philadelphia was horrified to see the very studious, shy, almost introverted John Coltrane “walking the bar.” This occurs when a musician, usually a tenor saxophonist, is supposedly gripped with such passion that he loses control of himself, jumps up on the bar and begins to honk and wail on his horn, head bobbing, eyes closed, shuffling from one end to the other, while the drunken patrons yell encouragement. No doubt, Trane needed the bread. Critics write about musicians as artists, which is fair enough. They forget these musicians are also out to make a living. Almost every jazz musician has had his time “walking the bar,” or its equivalent. Musicians say: “You got to pay your dues if you want to play the blues.”</p>
<p class="subsq">John Coltrane spent more time than most paying dues. He spent six or more hours a day practicing. If a musician friend came by his home to visit, Trane would invite him down to the basement to practice for a few hours. He would even practice in his dressing room between sets at a club. When you hear Coltrane and maybe think he plays like a man possessed, you're right. He was on a quest: first for Excellence, then for Beauty, then finally for The Love Supreme.</p>
<p class="subsq">If you want to hear Coltrane's Excellence check out the album <i>Giant Steps</i> or a number like “Chasin’ the Trane.” If you want to hear Coltrane's Beauty, I highly recommend “In a Sentimental Mood” off his album with Duke Ellington or “My One and Only Love” with singer Johnny Hartman. For his Vision, go directly to the album<i> A Love Supreme,</i> which I love supremely. I've taken the easy way out and selected his most famous song, “My Favorite Things.” I believe it illustrates Coltrane's excellence, beauty, and vision.</p>
<p class="subsq">Jazz has always taken music composed in another style and done something different with it—“jazzed” it up. “My Favorite Things” comes from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical <i>The Sound of Music</i>. It's a fine little tune and fits nicely within the context of the overall show, but does it really qualify as the all-time greatest Richard Rodgers composition? Coltrane turned it into a classic. He did this on three levels: sound, rhythm, and interpretation.</p>
<p class="subsq">The sound on “My Favorite Things” is—for want of a better word—haunting. It stays in your head long after the track has finished. This haunting quality comes from Coltrane's choice of performing the number on a then-recently acquired soprano saxophone. In 1960 when Coltrane's version of “My Favorite Things” came out, the soprano was seldom heard. Only a few musicians played it. The most notable was New Orleans jazz great Sidney Bechet, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong’s. After Coltrane, many sax players began using the soprano as a second horn. The soprano produces an “oriental” sound absolutely right for the trance-like meditative mood Trane wishes to convey.</p>
<p class="subsq">However, even before you hear Coltrane's soprano, the rhythm sets you up. McCoy Tyner (piano) and Steve Davis (bass) introduce the number in waltz time. But this is not your ordinary waltz. I had trouble convincing a friend of mine who plays classical music that “My Favorite Things” is really done in 3/4 time. Maybe she was expecting something by Strauss for students at the Arthur Murray Dance Academy. This is no Bavarian oom PAH PAH or Viennese DUM dah dah waltz. Davis on bass acts as the rhythmic anchor. He starts off accenting the first beat but not exactly on the beat. Sometimes he's ahead, sometimes he's behind. After the first few minutes, he moves the accent all over the place. Elvin Jones would probably rather poke a drumstick in his eye than go oom PAH PAH. No sir, Elvin does what he does best—cross-rhythms. He plays clear and for Elvin, known as a power drummer, rather subdued, relying on his cymbal and snare drum with some subtle bass drum accents here and there. Meanwhile Tyner lays out easy-going block chords (chords played simultaneously with both hands). The combination of Davis-Jones-Tyner creates a hypnotic meditative mood. Simultaneously they provide a fluid rhythmic reservoir for Coltrane to float in, pleasant musical waves on a calm, clear lake.</p>
<p class="subsq">And in floats Coltrane. He plays the first 16 bars pretty much the way Richard Rodgers wrote them. Well not exactly because Coltrane plays jazz so the notes don't fall exactly on the beat and since no one is playing on the beat; anyhow, it all blends together. Anyway, you know right off what you're listening to—“My Favorite Things.” And you also know right off this is no ordinary version of “My Favorite Things”; something special is happening. Coltrane is one of the most lyrical ballad musicians in all of jazz. He played only ballads he loved and had the ability to convey that love to the listener.</p>
<p class="subsq">Tyner-Davis-Jones does eight bars of what is now becoming hypnotic rhythm and back comes Coltrane for a repeat of the first half of this 32-bar song. In fact, you won't hear the second 16 bars of the Rodgers melody until the ending of Coltrane's version. After this second statement of the theme, Trane flashes some of his fantastic technique at you for 24 bars. Then two more repeats of the theme where he begins to unwind with a few flurries of notes at the end, after which comes another 16 bars of technique.</p>
<p class="subsq">All this, at its most elementary level, is building and releasing tension. You hear the intro in a minor scale with beats falling every which place and the tension starts rising. What is this all about, you wonder. Coltrane plays the melody in a major scale and you begin to relax. Then the minor scale and cross-rhythms—tension. Statement of the melody— release. Then Trane does some serious BLOWING—tension. Restatement of the melody— release. And so it goes.</p>
<p class="subsq">Coltrane turns it over to McCoy Tyner's piano. Tyner’s job is to put you in a euphoric trance. At one point Tyner plays the same right-hand note for 16 bars while his left hand keeps the chords going. Then 16 bars of moving off that note and returning: up and back, down and back, up and back, up and back, down and back. Tyner builds and builds with his blocks. Builds and builds; four and a half minutes building and building. You're in no state to ask what he's building to. You know he's building to something.</p>
<p class="subsq">Coltrane returns with a fairly straight run-through of the 16-bar melody. And then he lets loose with six minutes of the most beautiful sounds you can possibly imagine. Trane soars, glides, dips, climbs, circles. Flurries of notes, “sheets of sound” (writer Ira Gitler’s term): These come flying at you. Trane does some flat-out amazing interval jumps at triple speed. He plays so wildly, and so wonderfully, it is beyond my limited ability to describe these six minutes in words. I can call it a musical ecstasy. Only once during his solo does Trane restate the theme to remind you that this ecstasy is about “favorite things.”</p>
<p class="subsq">What favorite things? <i>His</i> favorite things. <i>Your</i> favorite things. The things you love. The things that have the most meaning in your life. Somehow Trane knows. And you know that he knows. How can he know? Elvin Jones, many years later, said Coltrane was “... like an angel on Earth. This is not just an ordinary person. I've been touched by something greater than... than life.” It seems to me Trane knows that although our favorite things are different, we all have our favorite things. And this unites us to him and to each other. And realization of this unity of us all is Trane's ecstasy.</p>
<p class="subsq">Finally he plays the entire 32-bar melody and ends it… slowly, beautifully. We come out of our trance and float lightly down to earth. What an experience—all 13 minutes of it. Now you know why “My Favorite Things” is one of my favorite things and how John Coltrane cured my headache.</p>
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Joel Strauss
Noble Sounds
$18.95
Noble Sounds offers a friendly journey into the world of jazz and blues. Author Joel Strauss shares his love for these uniquely American musical styles, guiding readers through their rich history and cultural impact. The book introduces key artists and important recordings, helping newcomers understand what makes this music special.
Strauss writes in a clear, conversational style that's easy to follow. He explains musical concepts without getting too technical, making the book accessible to those without formal music training. Personal stories and experiences add color to the narrative, bringing the music to life.
From Louis Armstrong to B.B. King, readers will meet the legends who shaped jazz and blues. The book explores how these styles evolved over time and influenced other forms of music. Strauss also offers listening recommendations, allowing readers to experience the sounds firsthand.
Noble Sounds is more than just a history lesson. It's an invitation to discover soul-stirring music that has moved people for generations. Whether someone is curious about jazz and blues or wants to deepen their appreciation, this book provides a welcoming starting point for exploring these enduring musical traditions.
Brian Blauser
See the Music
$40.00
Dive into the electrifying world of live music through See the Music, the latest photo book by renowned concert and backstage photographer, Brian Blauser. This stunning collection of photographs offers an exclusive glimpse behind the scenes, capturing the raw, unfiltered moments that define unforgettable performances. From the high-energy chaos of the stage to the intimate, candid shots backstage, Blauser’s lens reveals the passion and artistry that pulse through every concert.
Not only does Blauser share his extraordinary photos, but he also invites you into the stories behind the shots. Through personal anecdotes and behind-the-scenes tales, he shares the unforgettable experiences and vibrant personalities that bring each performance to life.
Whether you're a music enthusiast, a photography lover, or simply curious about the inner workings of live performances, See the Music is a captivating journey into the heart of the music scene. Each page pulsates with the energy found only in live shows and the emotions of intimate moments, making this book a must-have for anyone who treasures the magic of music. Feel the beat, see the artistry, and own the experience with Brian Blauser’s remarkable vision.
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<p class="alignment-block-content-center"><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/OBSESSED-Kindle.jpg?v=1726845910" alt="" /></p>
<div id="chapter-1" class="element element-bodymatter element-container-single element-type-chapter element-with-heading" role="doc-chapter" epub:type="chapter">
<div class="heading heading-container-single heading-size-full heading-format-full heading-alignment-flexible heading-without-image">
<div class="heading-contents">
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<div class="title-block">
<h1 class="element-title case-upper"><span class="element-number-term">CHAPTER</span> <span class="element-number-number">1</span></h1>
</div>
<h2 class="element-subtitle case-upper">ENCOUNTERING THE ZODIAC</h2>
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</div>
</div>
<div class="text" id="chapter-1-text">
<p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-with-first-letter-i"><span class="first-letter first-letter-i first-letter-without-punctuation">I</span>f my family tree were an actual living plant, it might appear as an unbalanced tangle of weird-shaped limbs. It’s not that my ancestors suffered from an excessively high rate of mental illnesses, or represented innumerable unstable families, though those are certainly present. For the most part, the people who make up my ancestry are simply unique individuals with their own idiosyncrasies. I am the product of an odd assortment: champions and charlatans, community pillars and misfits. I have often wished I had an average relative. Just one, single ancestor who could provide a role model to inspire me to some level of normality. Instead, my genealogy expresses itself as a stunted bonsai in sections, and wild, runaway overgrowth in others. Whimsy and eccentricity are everywhere in this obscure corner of the gene pool, such that no standard piece of lumber could be milled from any single branch. Throughout my childhood, I gained valuable lessons as a result of the people who came before me, and who would become my parents, grandparents, and beyond.</p>
<p class="subsq">My own family of origin was unique in its favored topics of conversation. Many families discuss politics and current events. Others talk about friends and neighbors, or whatever is happening in the lives of its members. In my family, while I was growing up, my parents shared interesting tales that have been passed down from generation to generation. They engaged in their fair share of gossip, and even ranted about the government at times. They more often related stories of ancestors they knew, and others about whom they had only heard. I eagerly enjoyed connecting with my roots and discovering my ancient past as I listened carefully to everything that was shared with me.</p>
<p class="subsq">I am, and always have been, an avid collector of interesting and compelling tales. Especially when it does not contain a complete ending, or in which a conclusion is not forthcoming, it will have my undivided attention. The open gestalt tantalizes me.</p>
<p class="subsq">One night at Bark Lake Summer Leadership Camp when I was a teenager, for instance, a fellow camper began to tell a shaggy dog tale, a genre consisting in a long, complex story that ends with a disappointingly dull pun. So great was my joy in listening, that at the end of my fellow camper’s lengthy recitation, I was the only other camper still awake, possibly emblematic of obsessiveness in my personality. Brian, the storyteller, called out to the darkened cabin once his pun had been delivered. It was about 1 a.m., and he had been talking for more than an hour. All the other teenagers were fast asleep, some quietly snoring. I, however, was wide awake. It didn’t even seem to matter to me that the tale went nowhere in the end. It was a story, and even told by a 15-year-old it captivated my imagination enough to put off much-needed sleep and restoration from a long day in the sun.</p>
<p class="subsq">For better and for worse, each of my family stories and each ancestor has played a part in shaping me. They poured content into my character, for as I grew, I learned what was important to my parents—and their parents—what professions were worthy of pursuit, and what lifestyles were unacceptable. My values were therefore forged in part by the light of those who went before me, and the lessons my ancestors learned through their own life experiences helped create the man I am today.</p>
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<p class="ornamental-break-as-text">* * *</p>
</div>
<p class="first first-in-section first-full-width">My beginnings in the Zodiac serial killing case can be traced back to 1987, directly, as well as indirectly to times and places many years earlier with events that even predated my life. In 1987, an innocuous gathering of a few college students—possibly only two—began to discuss the topic of true crime. The words would conspire to shape my future in ways I could never have fathomed. In that interaction, I learned about a serial killer who called himself the Zodiac. In time—and many years would pass before I became fully engaged—I would become obsessed with this one, cruel criminal, ultimately dedicating 11 years of my life in the pursuit of answers to lingering questions. The case became a compelling story that eventually wrapped its tentacles around me, and, at some point, removed my ability to separate myself from it. After initially dipping my toe in the water a few times, one day I took the irreversible plunge, and would not look back.</p>
<p class="subsq">Obsession—the correct word to describe my participation in the Zodiac case—can be described as the state in which someone is overtaken or overwhelmed by another person, idea, or activity in such a way that there is a loss of control over future choices. It can also refer to the object of the obsession—the person, idea, or activity over which someone has lost all control; the word can define an obsessiveness or the target of such obsessiveness. Since no degrees are assigned, there is no clear line drawn to tell us when a hobby has grown into a passion or a passion has devolved to an obsession. How many drinks does it take to move a social drinker into the category of an alcoholic? What is the exact dosage that marks the dividing line between a dabbler in narcotics and a full-fledged drug addict? In actuality, it’s many shades of gray along the descent.</p>
<p class="subsq">Obsession traces a familiar line in my life. I acquired the addictive personality honestly through the example of my family, whether by genetics or behavior. My mother was an alcoholic and died of it in her 70s. Her brother was similarly given to drink, and passed away in his early 50s, alcohol contributing to the early demise of both of the siblings.</p>
<p class="subsq">I am not an alcoholic, as some of my ancestors were. I have never been held hostage to drugs or to drink, and I know my personality too well to allow myself to venture too far down the rabbit hole of casino gambling. I have instead become addicted to a variety of people, hobbies, and activities over the past decades. My overwhelming passion for 11 years, from 2007 to 2018, was the criminal case of the Zodiac serial killer, though this was not my first love.</p>
<p class="subsq">Chess was my passion as a teenager, possibly initiating me into my first bout of obsessive behavior. I was 7 or 8 when I learned the rules from my dad as he instructed my older brother, Andrew. As the second born child, I was shielded from some of the ridicule, criticism, and steep demands that my father expressed in my early years. I incorporated the ancient game into my life as an enthusiastic spectator, without the expectations that were heaped on my brother.</p>
<p class="subsq">I remember asking my dad to play chess one evening when he was home from work. Despite the fact that my mother urged me to approach him, or maybe because of it, my dad yelled at me. He raged that the set was incomplete, a red checkers masquerading as the missing bishop. I didn’t play him that day. I also recall one childhood chess game loss to an adult at a community center in Moosonee, Ontario, one summer during a family vacation. I was around 10 years of age when I boldly asked my opponent for some pointers to improve my game, following my speedy defeat. It may have been the four-move checkmate, the “scholar’s mate,” or some variation of it, to which I had succumbed.</p>
<p class="subsq">In elementary school, I made some friends who were similarly drawn to the game. Classmate Andrew Smith in grade five taught me some strategy that he had learned from a relative or family friend. We often lingered after school to challenge our teacher, Mr. Hikola. We competed in a bicycle-decorating competition for which we taped a chess board and a handful of pieces to the frame of his three-speed. We did not win, but the experience cemented our friendship over the shared hobby.</p>
<p class="subsq">I joined the Scarborough Chess Club, a gathering of young and old men who stared at plastic pieces in a rickety, wooden community hall, and later competed in a few area tournaments during my middle and high school years. I entered an Ontario Open Chess Tournament and a Canadian Open Chess Tournament. In the public competitions, I generally won as many games as I lost. In the final round of one event, my opponent paid me $5.00 to concede an obviously drawn game so he could earn an age-related prize for which I did not qualify.</p>
<p class="subsq">One snowy day in January, when my high school classes were cancelled due to the inclement weather, I took advantage of my freedom and worked through the chess moves recorded in one of the many books I had acquired. (My schoolmates thought it strange that I played the game by myself.) Over time, I built a chess library of more than 50 volumes. I soon began to collect chess sets, specifically one from each country or region of a country I visited, eventually amassing more than 60, including ones made of onyx, ivory, and many different textures and shades of wood.</p>
<p class="subsq">With concerted effort over a decade, I learned to play at an advanced level, nearly achieving the status of Chess Master. I was listed as a top 10 Canadian junior player before I turned 16. When I played a bearded street hustler who wore shabby clothes and loudly broadcast the strength of his “kill-as-you-go gambit” one evening under the watchful eye of my father who had put up $2 for the game, I nearly won. Joe Smolij, a colorful character and fixture of Toronto nightlife, looked me straight in the eye at the end of our open-air match and proclaimed in his thick, Russian accent, “You play like master!” “You play like master!” I was 14 or 15. Later, my father took me to the Café Montmartre, an urban meeting place of chess players. My opponent for the evening, a man who must have been 25 years my senior, forced a draw by a repetition of moves. The game should have been an easy win for me, as I had battled to a large lead. After the game, I exclaimed to my dad, “I’ve never played against the Sicilian Defense in a serious game!”</p>
<p class="subsq">A move to Michigan for college pulled me away from the chess club, and the game I had grown to adore. By that time, I had graduated to another passion that also would grow to another obsession. I would continue to play chess socially, eventually buying an early chess computer and competing with other players online, but never would I pursue the game with the same fierceness and determination. By the time I graduated high school, I was focusing on my spirituality.</p>
<p class="subsq">A series of summer camp positions during my teen years introduced me to Christians who arranged their lives around their faith in Jesus Christ. At the time, I considered church attendance and my Christian school enrollment an important component of my identity, but not something that particularly aroused any passion. I did not question or attempt to understand my inherited beliefs with any depth, but that was about to change for me in the late 1970s.</p>
<p class="subsq">It was the melting pot of Camp Ke-Mon-Oya, a summer scrum of a hundred energetic children and a mixed-aged staff of 30 that challenged any assumptions I had previously held about church. On the scenic property at Lake Chandos, north of Peterborough, Ontario, during long, bright summer days for ten summers in the late 1970s, and 1980s, I rubbed shoulders with, and lived among, Christians from a wide variety of denominations and faiths, including Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, and a few smaller denominations. I feared any disagreement—eager to please everyone at that stage in my life—so I accepted most of what I heard regardless of its source.</p>
<p class="subsq">In addition to scurrying from one area of the lush 260-acre camp property to another as we barked orders at distracted children, we swam, played soccer, and assembled masterpieces in the arts and crafts building. I balanced the challenges of being obedient to the camp rules with the hijinks of raids to the girls’ cabins after dark. It was exciting to develop crushes, begin lifelong friendships, and test the physical and emotional limits of my developing body. The entire process was magnified by the long, sunny days, and the close quarters that foster intense relationships. Throughout the experience, I also learned many ideas about which I had never heard.</p>
<p class="subsq">I witnessed staff members who were excited about spiritual things. They enjoyed reading the Bible, and seemed to want to talk about its stories at all hours of the day or night. As a teenager, I was soaking up new concepts like a dry sponge thrown into dishwater. One autumn, upon my return from the camp’s property, I covenanted to read through the entire Bible because I wanted to know its contents for myself. I also began to read books about the Bible.</p>
<p class="subsq">When I moved to Michigan, I matriculated into the engineering program of Calvin College (now Calvin University) on the strength of my math and science ability. By contrast to my father who had earned his bachelor’s in engineering, I did not last long in the department.</p>
<p class="subsq">I was soon feeling unhappy with my provisional career choice. The loneliness I felt for being a great distance from my family was compounded by a seasonal depression brought on by the cloudy, gray Michigan weather. I recall crying in bed one evening, then wandering about the darkened campus in complete despair. I repeated a mantra to myself, “I am nothing; I have nothing.” I felt desolate and empty. In an attempt to assuage the pain, I carefully memorized the words to Psalm 84. Late one Friday afternoon in drafting class, a group of young people gazed in upon me and my peers from the back of the classroom. They apparently spotted their friend who they had traveled to visit, and began to wave their arms wildly. I noticed them and assumed with a deep longing that their attention was directed at me; they were facing me as they eagerly gestured. It was a sad realization for me that they were looking toward a classmate of mine, beyond me, and likely perplexed by the strange student who was waving back at them. I became keenly aware of how little enjoyment I derived from the solo activity of huddling over a drafting table, or working my way through problem sets in mathematics and physics.</p>
<p class="subsq">When asked what type of engineering I intended to pursue, such as chemical or electrical, on more than one occasion, I answered, “theological engineering,” with tongue firmly planted in my cheek. I was less interested in the subjects taught in my classes, and was drawn instead to dorm bible studies and campus fellowship gatherings. Soon, my passion for theology thrust my academic career in a new direction.</p>
<p class="subsq">I signed up for a four-week interim course in eschatology, the study of “the last things” or “the end times.” In preparation, I gathered and read a pile of library books on the subject before the first class even commenced. The lectures and assignments turned out to be weak and uninspiring, because I had covered far more material in my personal reading than the professor even attempted. Additional, after-class discussions were not much more enlightening. While he taught from a decidedly a-millennial perspective, I had become well versed in numerous theological positions, including pre-millennial and post-millennial.</p>
<p class="subsq">After some soul searching, I switched my major to theology. I was now studying in the classroom the passion I had contracted at summer camp.</p>
<p class="subsq">Upon graduation from Calvin with a B.A. in theology in 1983, I had no specific, long-range plans. I considered teaching at the high school level, or engaging in mission work, but the prospect of both of these left me rather cold. I wrestled with an education class where the professor reminded the class that most teenaged students were not grateful for teachers and their assistance, and made it apparent that teaching in high school would never provide me a meaningful and rewarding career. I meandered for about six months weighing my life options. Writing was already on my mind by this time because I was captivated with films and plays. I wanted to create my own screenplay, but at the time I was not equal to the challenge.</p>
<p class="subsq">In the fall of 1983, I returned to Grand Rapids, Michigan from my parent’s home in Toronto to pursue a relationship, and to write the great American screenplay. Unfortunately, neither went as planned. While biking home from campus one fall evening as darkness enveloped the autumn-tinted trees, a plastic bag containing my written material flew from my hands. Dozens of 3 X 5 treatment cards fluttered away from me and covered an intersection in East Grand Rapids like snowflakes on an open field. It was late enough, and absent of traffic, so that I was able to collect most of the cards without incident. The streaks of dirt across my labor bore witness to me of the poor quality of my writing, and my complete dearth of understanding of what I was attempting.</p>
<p class="subsq">That same fall, I made a decision, and received a “call” from God. I enrolled in seminary to embark on a career as a protestant minister in the Christian Reformed Church, the denomination of my college, and the church of my upbringing since 6<sup>th</sup> grade. I now had the certainty I sought—or so I thought. The rigors of seminary spared me from continued effort on the screenplay, and from great embarrassment had I ever attempted to see it through to completion. My girlfriend and I soon parted ways, a painful renting of boundary-less hearts that took me years to accept.</p>
<p class="subsq">During my study at seminary, I first encountered what was destined to become one of my greatest passions, though 20 years would pass before it would take root in the fertile ground of my imagination. I was pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Calvin Theological Seminary on the same property as my college. In late 1987 or early 1988, I was relaxing one evening with my newest true crime book. My housemate Eric had come up from his basement hermitage to engage me in the living room area where the two of us, and two other students, shared a rented home.</p>
<p class="subsq">It was the custom of the mysterious Eric to emerge from his secluded habitation in the early evening. After a trek to the local convenience store for beer—typically two oversized cans—he would spend the rest of the night plying himself with his purchase until his speech was slurred, and he presumably descended into sleep back down in his basement room. Most nights, he disappeared from sight to enjoy his beer. On occasion, he lounged upstairs to interact with others. I do not now recall whether my odd housemate was also a student, or whether he had already entered the workforce. What I do vividly remember was his eager excitement when he noticed my book.</p>
<p class="subsq">Or perhaps <i>he</i> was the one reading true crime that evening and I was questioning him about his book, which sparked his excitement. The details are dimmed now in the misty corridors of distant memory. However it arose, the topic was of keen interest to the both of us. I would have similar exchanges with many friends and acquaintances over the following decades, but this was one of my first. Since many neither approve of, nor understand, a profound interest in true crime, especially within tight-knit conservative communities, it can be a real joy to find someone who revels in the genre. Today, with the thousands of documentaries and podcasts dedicated to the field, it is much more socially acceptable to be fascinated by, and challenged to understand, the deviant criminals in our society.</p>
<p class="subsq">I shared my reading list with Eric. In that era, I was frequently detouring into the true crime section of bookstores to examine the latest releases. At some point in the conversation, Eric turned to me and asked a question that would change my life forever, “Have you heard of the Zodiac?” (The query may have followed a question about other interesting titles that I could add to my library.) When he learned that I had not, he proceeded to educate me about the San Francisco Bay Area killer of five victims—and possibly many more. I learned the diabolical perpetrator had also written letters to the police, sent ciphers to the press, and had threatened school children with bomb sketches. And he was never caught.</p>
<p class="subsq">I responded with an amalgam of surprise and anger. Not so much because of the appalling deeds—I was by then rather inured to the actions of the most depraved in our society—but because I knew the Bay Area very well and had never heard of the Zodiac.</p>
<p class="subsq">I had just completed a nine-month internship with a medium-sized suburban congregation in Hayward, a Bay Area community to the south and east of San Francisco. I had lost my preaching virginity in the process, even though I did not possess the required preaching license to satisfy the rules of the denominational administrators. Vern, the affable senior pastor under whom I worked at the West Coast church, blithely told me, “It’s a long way to Grand Rapids (the headquarters of the Christian Reformed Church) from here.” Accordingly, during my stay in the region, I delivered a total of five sermons. The disjointed organization of my early efforts, together with my weak delivery as I cowered behind the lectern, left much to be desired. The congregation was very encouraging and infinitely patient.</p>
<p class="subsq">My job description with the church required that I engage with people in the neighborhood. I was the Outreach Pastor, responsible for inviting others to join our worship services, for enfolding new members into the full life of the congregation, and for functioning as a bridge between longstanding families and the church’s newly emerging members. My job enabled me to meet and talk with many, many area residents. Of the hundreds of fascinating and unique Californians I encountered that year, through thousands of conversations, not one single person mentioned to me the name of the serial killer who held court and terrified citizens in every corner of the Bay Area from 1968 to 1974. By 1986, apparently, the murders no longer hung in the air, even as a fleeting memory. The killer was either dead, incarcerated on unrelated offenses, or had moved to greener pastures, as far as most were concerned. No killings had been committed in the prior 17 years, and it had been at least a decade since the last authenticated Zodiac letter arrived by U.S. mail. The fear had evidently dissipated, and was no longer fodder for casual conversation. My position in the church may have made it uncomfortable for others to mention the appalling activities that had tarnished the region’s reputation. They may have falsely assumed that I as a preacher carried no interest in the horrendous actions of a deranged criminal.</p>
<p class="subsq">Now engaging Eric as his speech began to slow, my interest was piqued in a topic that would become near to my heart. The failure of Californians to even mention the events did not deter me from an obsessive quest to engage the crime spree—or from a desire to resolve it. The silence may even have heightened the case’s intrigue.</p>
<p class="subsq">Eric filled me in on as many details as he could recall, and told me about the one publication available at the time. Within three decades of our conversation, there would be three serious motion pictures that would inspire more than 100 books on the subject. The case would spawn television shows, documentaries, podcasts, and magazine articles, in addition to innumerable newspaper stories, a seemingly endless parade of Zodiac products. In the absence of any firm resolution to the case, some believed that anyone’s speculative guess was as good as anyone else’s. The marketplace ensured that any minor piece of circumstantial evidence could and would be packaged by someone bent on bringing a new product to market.</p>
<p class="subsq">Eric’s words penetrated far deeper into my psyche than I realized at the time, and for far longer than I ever would have ever guessed. I was captivated by the details he shared in part because the serial killing case was unsolved. Most of the true crime I was reading at the time covered criminals who had been caught by the time of publication, and whose life was an open book for scrutiny. Following the carefully described details of the murders and the extended investigation, my chosen reading material inevitably lingered long on the tale’s conclusion—an arrest and a successful prosecution usually covered in excruciating detail. The idea of a “modern” high profile-killer that had eluded capture, like Jack the Ripper in London’s East End back in the late 1800s, overtook my imagination. And it had occurred in the United States. And it had happened in California, a region I love.</p>
<p class="subsq">When I finally determined to tackle the case with a conscious and concerted effort in 2007, there were still only a handful of books that even remotely covered the topic, some fictional, the others loose with the case’s facts. I committed myself to reading all that had been written—an exercise that would occupy a few months of my time—and to viewing all the documentaries that had been produced. It took somewhat longer to wade through the hundreds of pages of police reports made available to the public.</p>
<p class="subsq">There have been other passions in my life, but none that ever challenged the huge monoliths of chess, theology, or the Zodiac. I at various times pursued Canadian coins and currency (hoarding the world’s largest collection of 1948 Canadian 10-cent pieces), the acoustic guitar—later, also the electric guitar—and table tennis (ping-pong). I recently found an autobiography I wrote in grade six, which reminded me that I also went through phases of breeding guppies, completing paint by number oil paintings, and learning to play the piano. I also indulged a passion for jogging and competitive long-distance running, which I received from Andrew, my taciturn older brother.</p>
<p class="subsq">One day when I was in grade six, out of the blue, Andrew informed me that he was going for a run with a friend, using a term that I had never heard before: “jogging.” The two had mapped out a course in the neighborhood, and were going to trace its four-mile perimeter. I now suspect that there was a classmate of Andrew’s along the route, some girl who had captured his attention, though I didn’t know about any current love interest, and never saw any young woman that night.</p>
<p class="subsq">When I asked to join them, they warily accepted me, not certain that I could keep up with their pace since I was a full two years younger. The distance proved not to be arduous, and I was barely winded by the time we returned home. It was a great challenge for me to match my brother step for step. In the end, I had succeeded.</p>
<p class="subsq">Andrew and I each began our own regiment of jogging. I assumed that he felt the same joy in the physical activity and the pride of accomplishment that I did, but we never discussed it at any great length. At first, I didn’t track my mileage, or set any goals. Soon, my competitive nature emerged, and over the course of a few years, I bought a bright red jogging suit, received a professional stopwatch for Christmas, and acquired some books about running. I was particularly drawn to the long distances that enabled me to set an easy pace, and lose myself in imagination as I worked through any emotional or intellectual challenges of the day.</p>
<p class="subsq">Soon even very long distances felt comfortable to me. The private elementary school I attended, Immanuel Christian School, which consisted of four classrooms and a couple dilapidated portables, held annual walk-a-thons to help raise tuition money. I spent many hours canvassing our neighborhood to gather sponsors, generous families who would agree to pay even a small amount for every mile I covered. Each fall beginning in grade seven, I ran the entire walk-a-thon course to see if I could complete the distance more quickly than the other participants. It became an annual competition among fellow runners.</p>
<p class="subsq">One year, I was the first person back at the school, having completed the 16-mile course (the distance was also listed as 25 kilometers, as Canada transitioned from the British system to the metric system); the following year, as I tried to match my accomplishment, I made a wrong turn and ran four more miles than required. I had pulled so far ahead of the other runners at the beginning of the course that when I detoured, I was unable hear the shouts of my classmates and the teachers directing me to return. I ran on, oblivious to those who sought to help me. I did not realize that the route had been altered from the previous year. I arrived at the final check point, the school itself, about 15 minutes after the first runners, having covered the few more miles than the “winner.”</p>
<p class="subsq">In high school, at the end of each year, the physical education teacher awarded a small trophy—smaller than a hand and not much bigger than a thumb—to each student who ran 125 miles over the course of the previous school year. It was a ritual designed to encourage physical activity among members of the student body. I dutifully recorded all my jogging sessions, and qualified each of the four years I was enrolled. In my senior year, grade 12, I pushed myself in the final weeks to accomplish the lofty total of 500 miles, four times the necessary distance. Janet, the teacher who awarded the trophies that year, and my colleague at summer camp—we awkwardly transitioned each summer from a teacher-student relationship to that of fellow staff members, then back again—simply announced that some students had run more than the required mileage, some “many more miles.” I was downcast that my name wasn’t specifically mentioned or the details of my effort. I may have hoped to impress my female classmates but I remained anonymous; my long hours unrecognized apart from the tiny trophy that I and a dozen other students were awarded.</p>
<p class="subsq">Three times that school year, I attempted to jog home from my high school, a distance of more than 19 miles. On my first try I only ran for about 10 miles before I acceded to public transportation for the remainder of the journey, hopping on a public bus that was going in the correct direction. I covered 13 miles on my next attempt. It was not until my third and final run that I was successful, and completed the entire 19.5-mile trek without stopping. On one of those runs, one of my school’s buses passed me, a handful of students staring out of the back window as it drove away. I wondered whether the students realized I was bound for Scarborough, and a Plato-like Odyssey.</p>
<p class="subsq">Also in my senior year, I competed in the second annual Toronto Marathon. Partly because I carried no food or sugar—and the checkpoints provided only water—I was only capable of running for the first 20 miles. I walked most of the remaining 6 miles for an elapsed time that exceeded four hours. I was pleased with the certificate that arrived in the mail a few weeks later.</p>
<p class="subsq">That fall, as I began my first semester at Calvin, I sauntered into the office of the track and field coach, hoping to share my running skills with my new school. As I sat in a waiting room and listened to a fellow athlete discuss his strategy for an upcoming event—the runner was worried that two races on the same day would prevent him from posting a good time for the second one, I heard him note, “Sometimes in a second race on the same day, I <i>do</i> run my best time.” When my turn came to speak with the coach, I learned that the upperclassman who had just left competed at a pace that approached a four-minute mile. My times were far too slow to provide any help to the team. I listed my track times, and the coach politely thanked me for visiting.</p>
<p class="subsq">My disappointment in not being fast enough, and the depression brought on by the gray skies of West Michigan, both led me to set aside my sneakers. Running, like table tennis and chess beforehand, had lost a prized place in my life, and was relegated to sporadic eruptions in my usually busy life. But I would never completely forget the tug on my heart that was induced by Eric and his intriguing details of an unidentified California serial killer.</p>
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Mark G. Hewitt DBA
Obsessed: My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer
$19.95
In Obsessed: My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer, Dr. Mark Hewitt invites readers into his gripping journey of unraveling one of America's most enduring mysteries. Dr. Hewitt, an expert on the Zodiac case, shares his transformation from a pastor to a dedicated true crime investigator.
This memoir details Dr. Hewitt's meticulous research, personal encounters, and the profound impact of the Zodiac case on his life. Moving to California reignited his passion, leading him to explore crime scenes and connect with other enthusiasts. His relentless pursuit is not only about the Zodiac but also about understanding the complexities of human nature and the quest for truth.
Obsessed: My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer provides a unique blend of personal narrative and investigative insight, offering readers a compelling look at the determination and challenges faced by those who seek to solve cold cases. Join Dr. Hewitt as he navigates the twists and turns of this enigmatic case, shedding light on his life's work and his unwavering commitment to uncovering the truth.
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<div class="center"><img src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/cover_956e9135-dc74-4170-9f7d-25246355796d.jpg?v=1726351704" alt="You Paid For This by Richard Wickliffe"/></div>
<h1 class="center" id="c3">Chapter One: The SIU</h1>
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<div>Imagine you’re at a neighborhood party. Stan, the nondescript neighbor you never talk to, approaches. Unsure what to say, you attempt, “Hi… Stan. How’s work?”</div>
<div class="indent">“My work?” Stan beams. “I got a great insurance story!” He moves into your space to drone on about his days navigating the rigors of risk management.</div>
<div class="indent">At that point, you either plan to fake a phone call or pray your significant other shouts, “It’s time to heat your casserole.” Anything but being cornered with insurance stories. Is anything more boring than an insurance person talking about their job? After all, it’s a product that’s only used when you’ve experienced a terrible loss—perhaps a car crash, fire, theft, injury, or death. Who wants to dwell on that?</div>
<div class="indent">I’m hoping to change that perception. My decades of combating insurance crimes have revealed a fascinating investigative niche unknown to most of the public. Our cases were filled with creativity, amusement, and sometimes pure evil. And even more significant, the cases financially impacted every one of our lives.</div>
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<div class="indent">For a quarter century, I investigated insurance fraud, based out of Miami—which, as you may or may not know, has had a small fraud problem.</div>
<div class="indent">Former Governor Rick Scott described “Florida’s embarrassing problems” with its insurance system. While describing a $910 million scheme, he coined the term “fraud tax” to describe the financial burden these crimes place on all consumers.<sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-2" id="r1-2">[2]</a></sup></div>
<div class="indent">For the first five years, I investigated a broad range of fraudulent property and injury cases. For the following twenty, I managed diverse teams of insurance investigators for the largest property/casualty insurer in the United States, representing over 9 percent of the market, and a global top-ten carrier based on revenue.</div>
<div class="indent">Not for one moment was the job boring or routine. What other career could possibly lead to dealing with organized crime rings, art and jewelry theft, staged accidents, human trafficking, and faked deaths? We had to investigate without having a badge, a gun, or any real authority. Law enforcement had no duty to help us, though many times our cases intersected. We were the unsung heroes of the company’s SIU (Special Investigation Unit).</div>
<div class="indent">I must pause the swelling orchestra to issue a disclaimer that none of the following statements, narratives, or opinions reflect those of my former company. I will not disclose any confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets or name any specific carrier unless notated, and I have changed the names of parties and companies unless otherwise cited. The described scenarios are all true, and I will discuss how to avoid being a victim of the same crimes in our personal lives.</div>
<div class="indent">So, what is an SIU? It is a division within an insurance company that investigates potentially fraudulent insurance cases. SIUs are at the forefront of the ongoing fight against insurance crimes. Their job is to detect, deter, and pursue actions against fraudulent activities. SIU professionals who investigate insurance crimes are also employed by federal, state, or local law enforcement and anti-fraud organizations such as the NICB (National Insurance Crime Bureau).</div>
<div class="indent">Insurance fraud is probably as old as the carpenters who inflated repair costs after Noah’s flood, but the first formal SIU was established in Massachusetts by Kemper Insurance in 1976.<sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-3" id="r1-3">[3]</a></sup> The primary concern at the time was auto-related fraud. Next, with larger property losses, arson became the focus of most SIU teams. Then came the shift into injury, medical, healthcare, and even organized crime.</div>
<div class="indent">Today, virtually all insurance companies worldwide have established SIU teams to help protect the financial integrity of their businesses. Most states have passed legislation mandating that insurance companies establish SIUs, as well as requiring anti-fraud training, essentially asking the carriers, “So, what are you doing about it?”</div>
<div class="indent">For the state in which I was housed, Florida Statute 626.9891, also known as the Fraudulent Insurance Act, mandated every insurer admitted to the state shall create anti-fraud units to investigate and report fraudulent insurance acts, or contract with a third party to investigate possible fraudulent acts. <sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-4" id="r1-4">[4]</a></sup></div>
<div class="indent">With the creation of SIU teams, carriers needed to staff them with experienced people trained to investigate, take statements, and knock on doors, sometimes in unsavory areas. Therefore, employees couldn’t be easily intimidated and would have to work professionally with attorneys and law enforcement.</div>
<div class="indent">SIU teams also serve as liaisons to law enforcement including local and state police, FBI, fire marshals, Coast Guard, and ATF, as well as attorneys, surveillance experts, forensic analysts, and private investigators. Their relationships with experts in those fields are their greatest assets.</div>
<div class="indent">SIU representatives are not any sort of law enforcement. There are no badges, and they can’t make arrests. They are employees with specialized investigative training who represent the carriers. Many times, fraud is committed by people who aren’t the policyholders, such as medical clinics, unscrupulous attorneys, organized crime rings, body shops, dishonest agents, or our newest class of perpetrator: cybercriminals.</div>
<div class="indent">Regrettably, there’s job security in the field of fraud investigation—and it’s on the rise. According to 2022 data from the Insurance Information Institute<i>,</i> about 75 percent of insurers stated fraud has increased significantly, with an 11-point increase since 2014. <sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-5" id="r1-5">[5]</a></sup></div>
<div class="indent">To keep up, a cottage industry of fraud detection firms has grown at a similar pace. The insurance fraud detection market, an entire industry of fraud analytics, is estimated to be a $912.3 million market in the U.S. alone, expected to grow 13.7 percent from 2019 to 2025.<sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-6" id="r1-6">[6]</a></sup></div>
<div class="indent">Here are some facts to enlighten you on the crisis:</div>
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<div class="margin">Right now, you and every one of your family members are paying over $932 per year in increased premiums just to fund insurance fraud. That’s nearly $3,800 for a family of four.<sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-7" id="r1-7">[7]</a></sup></div>
<div class="margin">Fraud occurs in about 10 percent of all property/casualty losses.<sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-8" id="r1-8">[8]</a></sup></div>
<div class="margin">Non-medical insurance fraud is estimated at $45 billion per year. <sup><a href="ypft_0054.html#n1-9" id="r1-9">[9]</a></sup></div>
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<div class="indent">In the following chapters, I’ll describe various cases, categorized by type and escalating in severity. Most are cases that our SIU teams or I investigated; others are from our colleagues in the industry.</div>
<div class="indent">I’ll begin with routine burglaries, including “art theft on the high seas.” It’ll escalate into arson for profit, the monstrous acts of some arsonists, and even ritual sacrifices gone wrong. Then we’ll move on to organized crime, including the Russian mob’s varied enterprises. I’ll illustrate boat theft schemes and their use in human trafficking. We’ll shift to the rise of illicit medical clinics. Then we’ll recover sunken cars that contain haunting secrets. I’ll explain how not to fake your death, and I’ll conclude with my team’s role in the terrifying Pain & Gain double murder case (complete with robbery, extortion, and torture). I told you there was never a boring day.</div>
<div class="indent">Bottom line: Greed and opportunity continue to increase insurance crimes. Laws and corporate responsibility have hardened the need for SIU investigators as the schemes grow more creative, complex, brazen, and sometimes deadly.</div>
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Richard Wickliffe
You Paid For This
$17.95
Embark on a gripping 25-year journey delving into the author's investigation of insurance crimes in Miami, spotlighting Special Investigation Units (SIU) –an investigative world invisible to most, yet one for which we all pay.
In YOU PAID FOR THIS, Richard Wickliffe takes the reader from routine burglaries to art theft on the high-seas, arson for profit, and even failed ritual sacrifices. He describes a variety of cases he encountered, including the Russian mob and organized crime, boat thefts linked to unconscionable human trafficking, sunken cars that conceal deadly secrets, and the pitfalls of faking one's death. The book culminates with the SIU's involvement in Miami's harrowing Pain & Gain double murder case, featuring kidnapping, extortion, and mutilation.
With an informative yet witty tone, YOU PAID FOR THIS exposes the creative and chilling facets of insurance crimes, cautioning and advising readers on how to protect themselves from potential victimization in their own lives.
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<div class="element-number case-mixed"><span class="element-number-term">Chapter</span> <span class="element-number-number">1</span></div>
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<h1 class="element-title case-mixed">Not Just Another Day…</h1>
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<p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width"><span class="first-phrase">U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier</span> arrived at his desk at approximately eight a.m. on Friday, January 12, 2007. This was going to be the fourth day of the trial for Ed and Elaine Brown of Plainfield, New Hampshire, on felony charges for conspiracy to commit federal income tax violations. The government had a very strong case, and the Browns were representing themselves.</p>
<p class="subsq">A friend sympathetic to their cause, Michael Avery, from the suitably named Outlaw Legal Services of Florida, was serving as a “paralegal.” He had helped Ed and Elaine prepare all their pre-trial motions. He was seated at the defense table to “advise them.” The Browns had rejected any representation by an attorney.</p>
<p class="subsq">It wasn’t going well for the Browns. Ed Brown’s spurious arguments against having to pay federal income taxes were rejected by the court, and his theories on the federal tax laws were shut down by presiding Judge Steven McAuliffe at several points. The government’s witnesses were showing that Ed and Elaine had stopped paying their taxes in 1996 and owed more than $625,000 in unpaid income tax. They were also charged with structuring, the intentional manipulation of financial transactions to evade reporting requirements.</p>
<p class="subsq">As was his custom on getting to the office, Marshal Monier checked in with the control room upon arrival and spoke with the two court security officers manning the cameras and other systems monitoring courthouse activity that day. All was quiet, they said.</p>
<p class="subsq">Marshal Monier and his chief deputy, Gary DiMartino, were both concerned about this trial. The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) had deemed that the trial was “high risk” given that Ed Brown, a self-described “retired exterminator,” had become a leader in the militia group, U.S. Constitution Rangers. Membership in the rangers had grown in the aftermath of federal law enforcement’s attempts to serve arrest warrants at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Chief DiMartino and Inspector Brenda Mikelson had ordered extra courtroom security and intelligence gathering for the trial. They had ensured that court security officers were being extra vigilant in screening people involved with, or attending, the trial in the U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire.</p>
<p class="subsq">Marshal Steve Monier and Chief DiMartino had worked together for the past five years in the District of New Hampshire. Chief DiMartino was a career deputy U.S. marshal who had risen through the ranks to become a chief deputy in the Marshals Service, the number two person in every one of the ninety-four district offices of the USMS.</p>
<p class="subsq">Deputy U.S. marshals are highly trained federal law enforcement officers, not unlike career FBI, ATF, and IRS agents. They apply for open positions in the Marshals Service, take written and physical exams, and are subjected to background investigations prior to being hired. They attend, and must successfully complete, the USMS Academy and other advanced training programs throughout their career.</p>
<p class="subsq">Gary DiMartino began his law enforcement career in a Rhode Island police department before applying for, and beginning, his calling with the USMS.</p>
<p class="subsq">Because he had served in several supervisory positions on both the East and West Coasts during his long tenure with the agency and had taught at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in Glynco, Georgia, he was a highly respected and well-known chief in the USMS. Marshal Monier considered him a very qualified, competent, and professional member of the service and was pleased that when President George W. Bush had nominated him to become the U.S. Marshal for the District of New Hampshire, Gary was his chief deputy.</p>
<p class="subsq">Unlike the deputy U.S. marshals, who form the corps or “backbone” of the USMS, each U.S. marshal (USM) who heads the district offices of the USMS is nominated by the President of the United States and must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before taking the oath of office. This has been the case since the U.S. Marshals Service was created in 1789 by the 1<sup>st</sup> Congress of the newly formed United States government.</p>
<p class="subsq">When the 1<sup>st</sup> Congress of the United States stood up the federal judiciary, they realized there was no agency to enforce court orders, apprehend offenders, or help run the court system. In the Judiciary Act, the 1<sup>st</sup> Congress created the United States Marshals Service, with each marshal in each district to be appointed by the president with the “advice and consent” of the United States Senate.</p>
<p class="subsq">President George Washington swore in the first thirteen U.S. marshals, including the first marshal of the District of New Hampshire, in 1789. The U.S. Marshals Service is our republic’s oldest federal law enforcement agency, with the broadest of authority in enforcing federal law and orders from the U.S. courts. For over 234 years, the U.S. Marshals have done everything from protecting the courts, to taking the census, to protecting the President of the United States.</p>
<p class="subsq">In the twenty-first century, their core mission is the protection of the U.S. courts, enforcing court orders, apprehending fugitives, running the witness protection program, finding missing or abducted children, and taking the lead on enforcing the provisions of the Adam Walsh Act to track and monitor convicted sex offenders.</p>
<p class="subsq">Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice made several legislative and administrative changes to how the work of the USMS was conducted over the decades, and in particular, in the twentieth century. Originally, each U.S. marshal could appoint his own deputies as needed, to carry out orders from the court.</p>
<p class="subsq">As David S. Turk, the official historian of the Marshals Service, noted in his seminal work entitled <i>Forging the Star</i>,<i> </i>“[L]ong after gaining their Old West reputation with personnel such as Seth Bullock, Wyatt Earp, Bass Reeves, Bat Masterson, and Heck Thomas, U.S. Marshals and their deputies followed a winding trail of transition.”?<sup class="main-text-refnote-cue"><a href="notes.xhtml#chapter-1-endnote-1-text" id="chapter-1-endnote-1" class="refnote-marker marker-format-roman-lower endnote-cue roman-lower-i" role="doc-noteref" epub:type="noteref">i</a></sup></p>
<p class="subsq">At approximately nine-thirty on that Friday morning, Chief DiMartino stuck his head into the marshal’s office and said, “Marshal, Ed and Elaine failed to show up this morning for the continuation of their trial.”</p>
<p class="subsq">It was a decisive moment in the long run-up to this point in the case of the <i>United States v. Edward L. Brown & Elaine A. Brown</i>. Their failure to appear was long feared by both Monier and DiMartino.</p>
<p class="subsq">Both had had uneasy feelings about this case, since the district court’s magistrate judge released them on conditions, at their arraignment on May 24, 2006, on the income tax and other charges.</p>
<p class="subsq">Among the conditions of release were that the Browns surrender all weapons to the USMS and the U.S. probation officers who would accompany them back to their Plainfield home. Further, they were to cooperate with, and report regularly to, the U.S. probation officers at the U.S. district court and appear at all future court proceedings.</p>
<p class="subsq">Deputy U.S. marshals and U.S. probation officers drove Ed and Elaine back to their home in Plainfield to remove their weapons that day in May of 2006. Sharp-eyed deputy marshals noted the layout of the Browns’ home on the property, took photographs, and later sketched out the interior layout of the home. This proved to be pivotal in what ensued in the continuing Brown saga.</p>
<p class="subsq">The deputies who went there also told Chief DiMartino that they didn’t believe Ed Brown had surrendered every weapon in his possession to the U.S. probation officers. The property, they reported, was simply too large and the house and outbuildings had too many places where firearms could be concealed.</p>
<p class="subsq">Within a few hours of the morning the Browns failed to appear for the continuation of their trial, the news got worse. The USMS learned that heavily armed militia members and supporters of Ed Brown had gathered at the end of their long driveway leading to their hilltop home in Plainfield. Judge Steven McAuliffe issued warrants for the Browns’ arrest on failure to appear.</p>
<p class="subsq">Initially, at the USMS and the prosecution’s request, the warrants were sealed. Chief Gary DiMartino counseled that the best course immediately was to call the Browns and convince them to return to court for the remainder of their trial. The marshal and Judge McAuliffe concurred, as Gary had carefully established a rapport with Ed and Elaine while they were detained in the Marshals Service’s detention facility at their arraignment in May.</p>
<p class="subsq">“I had faith in Gary’s ability to use his considerable communications skills to convince the Browns that they should return to court to finish the trial,” Monier reported. Instead of immediately attempting to arrest the Browns at their home, where Ed’s armed followers had gathered, he consented to Gary’s suggestion that he try and convince them to return for the remainder of the trial.</p>
<p class="subsq">Gary DiMartino spent the next three days talking with Ed and Elaine via telephone to do just that. The fact that the Browns took every one of his calls over that weekend was a positive.</p>
<p class="subsq">At one point, it looked like the chief would be successful and that both Ed and Elaine would return to the court on Tuesday morning. Elaine was more noticeably willing to do that given the chief’s convincing arguments that this was a financial crime and that they need not take this to any further level.</p>
<p class="subsq">Gary argued that it would be hard for them to continue to mount a defense if they weren’t in the courtroom to do so. The jury, he said, “will only hear the government’s side, and not yours.” As it turned out, Chief DiMartino was only partially successful.</p>
<p class="subsq">Chief DiMartino continued to speak with them directly over the phone throughout the weekend and into the day on Monday, which was a holiday. On Tuesday morning, January 16<sup>th</sup>, Gary had brokered the return of the Browns for the remainder of their trial. Elaine Brown got into the car to return to the courthouse in Concord. At the last minute, however, Ed demurred and refused to get in the car.</p>
<p class="subsq">This was a partial victory for the Marshals Service. While it isolated Ed Brown from Elaine, Ed was not alone. He was left with some die-hard armed militia supporters who shared his belief about the “corruption of the federal government.” Soon thereafter, others joined the group, including members of the “Free State” movement in New Hampshire who, while not professing violence themselves, joined in the discussion about the “overreach” of the federal government into the lives of ordinary Americans. A select number of the New Hampshire Free Staters, who preached an extreme form of libertarianism, supported the Browns.</p>
<p class="subsq">In a letter posted on the internet shortly after Ed Brown’s public announcement that he would not be returning for the remainder of his trial, New Hampshire native William D. Miller wrote on a blog posting, “I am going to see Judge McAuliffe and U.S. Attorney Colantuono and various other officials hanged for treason for these actions.” In response, the U.S. Marshals Service issued a “be on the look-out” (BOLO) to area law enforcement in an attempt to locate Miller.</p>
<p class="subsq">Miller, a New Hampshire resident who was living in Florida at the time, had a history of local law enforcement contacts. He was also an early disciple of Ed Brown and the Constitution Rangers and had been one of Ed’s followers for some time.</p>
<p class="subsq">When Bill Miller learned of the trial, and Ed’s vow to fight any attempt to force him to return to the courtroom, Miller got in his car and drove nonstop from Florida “to protect Brown” at all costs. Miller was armed and ready to take on the role of “chief of staff” to Ed Brown when he arrived in Plainfield, New Hampshire, twenty-four hours later.</p>
<p class="subsq">With Miller’s help initially, Brown made use of the internet, emails, blog postings, and media interviews almost immediately upon deciding that he was going to fight any attempts to arrest him or force him from his property.</p>
<p class="subsq">“I will defend my property, and I am willing to die before going to jail…” Ed Brown told his followers. Apparently, Ed had concluded that he and Elaine were likely to be convicted at the conclusion of the trial. He was publicly critical of Judge McAuliffe and his rulings and, in interviews with the gathering media, called it a “kangaroo court.”</p>
<p class="subsq">Word was quickly spreading through the militia, U.S. Constitution Rangers, and the sovereign citizen communities that things were heating up in Plainfield. Comments on blogging websites and emails about the federal government unfairly targeting the Browns were spreading hourly. Supporters were calling for all good patriots to stand up for them. One message being spread on anti-government websites was titled, “<i>Will Plainfield be another Waco?</i>”</p>
<p class="subsq">Local and state media also began covering the Ed and Elaine Brown story. The <i>NH Union Leader</i>, New Hampshire’s only statewide newspaper, and the <i>Concord Monitor</i>, published in New Hampshire’s capital and widely distributed, and the <i>Valley News</i> (covering the Hanover, Lebanon, and Plainfield region) all took note. The marshal and chief assigned a deputy, who was particularly adept at high tech, IT, and the internet, to begin monitoring all activities related to the Browns. In a call to HQ, they asked that the Investigative Services Division (ISD) and the Intel Unit do the same.</p>
<p class="subsq">On January 12, 2007, Margot Sanger-Katz, a reporter for the <i>Concord Monitor </i>(a prominent New Hampshire newspaper covering the capital city region)<i> </i>wrote one of her first news stories about the Browns’ trial when she reported on the first two days of it. The trial had already gained a local interest amongst the state’s papers and the statewide ABC-affiliated TV station, WMUR-TV 9, as supporters of the Browns demonstrated in front of the U.S. district courthouse.</p>
<p class="subsq">Dave Ridley of Keene, New Hampshire, a member of the “Free State” movement in the state, held a sign reading “Ministry of Torture” in reference to “government-sanctioned torture with taxes.” “That’s why I support Ed,” Ridley told the <i>Concord Monitor</i>. “He’s standing up to the federal government.”</p>
<p class="subsq">Ironically, Sanger-Katz’s article about the trial’s proceedings appeared on January 12<sup>th</sup>, the same day Ed and Elaine Brown both refused to return to the courthouse. The government was close to resting its case against the Browns after the testimony of the lead IRS agent handling the investigation and testimony from several postal service employees about the Browns’ habit of purchasing multiple postal money orders just below the $3,000 limit required for notification to the government of the transaction.</p>
<p class="subsq">According to the government’s witnesses, this “structuring” of money orders is a common method to avoid paying income taxes. Over a two-year period, the Browns purchased more than $300,000 in money orders. Ed and Elaine, according to postal service investigators, would separately each wait in line and purchase a money order for $2,800.</p>
<p class="subsq">At the close of the court’s proceedings on January 11<sup>th</sup>, both Browns told the court that they would begin their defense in the morning, and both told the judge that they planned to testify in their own defense.</p>
<p class="subsq">Both, however, failed to return to court on Friday, January 12<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p class="subsq">On Tuesday, the 16<sup>th</sup> of January, 2007, the day that Elaine agreed to Chief DiMartino’s entreaties to return to court, she also agreed to have a court-appointed attorney, Bjorn Lange, represent her. Michael Avery, the paralegal, continued in his role and sat in on the plea negotiations between the government prosecutor and Attorney Lange.</p>
<p class="subsq">Learning of the plea negotiations, Judge McAuliffe agreed to postpone the couple’s trial for another day when it appeared that Elaine Brown would be willing to reach a deal with the prosecution. That is, if she pled guilty to the extent of her criminal liability and conduct. As a dentist, Elaine Brown earned most of the couple’s income. She also had been charged with failing to collect employment taxes from the staff at her dental office in Lebanon.</p>
<p class="subsq">The judge continued the trial for another day so that the government could calculate what they expected Dr. Brown would pay in back taxes and penalties and the terms of a prison confinement. Elaine was given until ten o’clock the following morning to make a decision on whether to accept a plea deal. If there was no deal, the judge ruled, the trial would continue with or without Ed Brown in the courtroom.</p>
<p class="subsq">Because Elaine had failed to appear on Friday, the judge ordered new bail conditions for her. He ordered Dr. Brown to stay with her son in Worcester, Massachusetts, and not to return to her Plainfield, New Hampshire, home. She was only allowed telephonic contact with her husband, and she was ordered to wear an electronic ankle bracelet so that U.S. probation officers could monitor her whereabouts.</p>
<p class="subsq">The Waco Branch Davidian standoff lasted fifty-one days. When both the Browns failed to appear on January 12, 2007, it set in motion what would become a nearly nine-month standoff, the longest armed standoff in the 234-year history of the U.S. Marshals Service. Would Plainfield, New Hampshire, join the lexicon of American history as another Waco or Ruby Ridge?</p>
<p class="subsq">District of New Hampshire Chief Gary DiMartino, U.S. Marshal Steve Monier, and USMS Chief Regional Inspector Dave Dimmitt were determined not to let that happen.</p>
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Steve Monier
No One Has To Die
$19.95
On January 12, 2007, what began as a felony tax trial for Ed and Elaine Brown in Plainfield, New Hampshire, spiraled into the longest armed standoff in U.S. Marshals history. Refusing to appear in court and surrender to federal authorities, the Browns transformed their home into a fortress, drawing support from militia groups and anti-government activists nationwide.
No One Has To Die offers an in-depth look at the tense and perilous nine month standoff that tested the resolve and tactics of the U.S. Marshals Service. Steve Monier, with contributions from Gary DiMartino and Dave Dimmitt, recounts the meticulous planning and tactical negotiations aimed at resolving the situation peacefully, against a backdrop of rising militia activity and public scrutiny.
This compelling narrative dives into the Browns' extremist beliefs, the challenges faced by law enforcement, and the strategies employed to prevent another Waco or Ruby Ridge. Through detailed accounts and personal insights, the book highlights the importance of communication, patience, and strategy in averting violence and ensuring that no one has to die.
Dave Case
Stand for the Dead
$17.95
The stench of death hung in the air as John Altar studied the massacre and tried to convince himself that his younger brother, Bobby, couldn’t have been part of this. Torn apart by the Civil War, the two brothers had fought on opposite sides, and in defeat, Bobby had fallen in with a group of Confederate raiders when released from a prisoner of war camp. Their mother’s wish was for her wayward son to be brought back to her, and Altar has sworn to do it. But how much had the war changed his brother? Riding into the Dakotas, Altar must face an unsavory lawman with a rapacious posse, rampaging Indians, and finally battle the brutal renegades in a climactic showdown.
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<h1 class="element-title case-upper">ONE</h1>
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<h2 id="subhead-1" class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-upper">FINDING MY FOOTING</h2>
<p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-after-subhead"><span class="first-phrase">I grew</span> up about two miles from Possum Trot, a rural community in Western Kentucky. I was a shy, awkward kid who was not particularly good at sports, nor was I a good student. I was average at best. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school. I just tried to blend in. It was 1970 when I graduated from North Marshall High School. Most of us were just hanging out waiting to see if we would be drafted. My first job out of high school was as a riverboat deckhand. It was good money, but it wasn’t for me. In fact, the job was not the adventure I thought it would be. It wasn’t long before I decided I needed to do something else with my life just in case I wasn’t drafted. I enrolled in a community college where I had to really study and apply myself just to make average grades. I guess this was because I had not learned much in high school.</p>
<p class="subsq">After two years in community college, I enrolled in Murray State University, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I attended one year of graduate school, but I was burned out. I was tired of being so poor and living on student loans. When I finally got my draft notice, I went for my physical and was turned down because I had flat feet.</p>
<p class="subsq">Probably the biggest influence in my life was my practice of Karate while I was in college. I had a knack for it. I would practice every day for hours. I became obsessed. When I earned my black belt in Wado Ryu–style Karate, I started entering tournaments. One of my instructors was Sensei Vic Milner. I became an instructor and taught Karate at the university. I also taught in several local Dojos. I had won tournaments in the black belt division in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. I only lost two times, once in a full-contact event in Alabama and once in a “Battle of Champions.” Some of my students were guards and supervisors from KSP. I had a standing offer as a guard if I ever needed a job.</p>
<p class="subsq">I graduated from college in the Jimmy Carter years while the economy was stalled. There were no jobs. Finally, I decided to give the prison a try. What did I have to lose? I didn’t have any other prospects for a job unless I wanted to go back on a riverboat or go back to graduate school. So I applied for the job and was hired as a correctional officer. I never looked back.</p>
<h2 id="subhead-2" class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-upper">THE BELLY OF THE BEAST</h2>
<p class="first first-after-subhead">My first day at KSP (Kentucky State Prison) was July 3, 1978. And I was nervous. As I rounded the curve and drove down the road from Pea Ridge, there it was, looming like a medieval fortress on the banks of Lake Barkley. The Castle on the Cumberland River. What had I gotten myself into? I could only imagine what convicted inmates might think when they see the Castle for the first time. The prison itself resembles something out of the Middle Ages, with its soaring walls, stone parapets, and heavily guarded watchtowers. An imposing place, with a reputation to match.</p>
<p class="subsq">As I started up the crumbling steps to the main entrance, I heard a grumpy voice say, “HALT! State your business.” I stopped dead in my tracks. The command to halt sounded threatening—as if I might be shot if I didn’t obey.</p>
<p class="subsq">I looked up and saw a middle-aged man peering down at me from the gun tower. I responded, “I am Philip Parker, and I am reporting to work.”</p>
<p class="subsq">“Go ahead,” was all he said. I didn’t know what to think about this first encounter, but I knew I was about to enter a strange, new world.</p>
<p class="subsq">As I approached the front gate, I stepped aside as several uniformed men with shotguns came running from the armory located at just off the top of the steps. Startled, I stepped aside and froze as they passed. I thought to myself, <i>What in the hell is this about?</i></p>
<p class="subsq">I learned later that there had been a mass escape from Four Cell House. My very first day. Three inmates, Joe Craig, James Hatfield, and Charles Murphy, had cut through their cell bars and made their way down the short distance from the opening to the ground using bedsheets fashioned into a braided rope. As with every prison escape, their luck was fleeting; the men were apprehended a few days later. As first impressions go, this was a lot to take in for a new corrections officer.</p>
<p class="subsq">I stood at the entrance, waiting to be ushered in. There was no control center at the time to automatically open prison doors. After the front gate officer keyed the lock, I crossed the threshold and entered the belly of the beast. One of the things I never quite became accustomed to after all my years in the Castle was the smell. The Castle has an odor unlike anything I have ever experienced: an ungodly combination of cigarette smoke, body odor, sewer gas, death, and history. It still smells that way to me. Some five decades later, I still notice that odor as I walk up to the prison gates. Half-jokingly, I always say it is the smell of the Castle Beast, the one that trolls the front entrance, taunting all those who sense its presence.</p>
<p class="subsq">After filling out employment paperwork with two other new hires, we were told to go to the receiver’s basement to get our uniforms. I thought to myself, <i>What the hell is the receiver’s basement?</i> Turns out it was a warehouse in the basement of Five Cell House with an outside entrance. I learned my first lesson on the job: prison workers have their own language to describe the Castle’s twisty, cavernous interior. I knew we had to learn fast or we would not find our way around. KSP is enormous, with five large cell blocks that housed 1,200 inmates in 1978. In subsequent years, two new cell blocks were added, even as the overall population decreased to around 980, because inmates no longer shared cells.</p>
<p class="subsq">With uniforms in hand, the new hires were directed to report to the hospital for a physical. The hospital, I later learned, was a state-licensed facility complete with infirmary beds, a surgical wing, a pharmacy, and an emergency room. But we had no idea how to get there. After wandering around the sprawling prison yard for what seemed like an eternity, one of the older guards took pity on us and pointed to where we had to go.</p>
<p class="subsq">A man in a lab coat with a stethoscope led me into an exam room and asked some standard questions about my health. I filled out a medical history as he listened to my heart and lungs, took my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. I thought he was a doctor. Several weeks later, I saw him in the canteen line and realized the man I mistook for a doctor was actually a convict.</p>
<h2 id="subhead-3" class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-upper">SOMETHING FISHY</h2>
<p class="first first-after-subhead">A “fish” is a term used to describe a newly hired officer or a new inmate who just got off the bus. Why, I don’t know. It is just prison slang. The “fish tank” was a row of cells in One Cell House used to house inmates until they had been given an orientation and a list of the rules. They would also meet the Classification Committee to be assigned a job and a cell.</p>
<p class="subsq">A fish <i>officer</i> is a new hire who has not attended the academy or learned the ropes. These rookie officers are basically useless and treated accordingly. You remained a fish officer until you became familiar with all the ins-and-outs of daily prison operations and earned a small degree of respect. You had to prove yourself, meaning you would not run from trouble and you would back up your fellow officers. You also had to follow orders to the letter.</p>
<p class="subsq">I was hired in with two middle-aged female employees, Betty Blackwell and Rosy Mitchell. In the late 1970s, only a handful of females were hired as correctional officers. It was still a man’s world, but that was rapidly changing for the better. Nora Aldridge was the first female hired as a correctional officer sometime around 1976. Soon after, Judy Groves was hired and had already made sergeant by the time I came aboard. I try to imagine how they must have felt entering such a hostile, male-dominated environment, where danger and violence were the norm. These were courageous and brave women.</p>
<p class="subsq">As the three of us made our way out to the receiver’s basement, we had to traverse a sidewalk just below Four Cell House then Five Cell House. Inmates could stand at the barred windows in the hallways of Five Cell House and look down at the walkway we were on, the cars in the parking lot, and the boat traffic on Lake Barkley. We were about to learn our next lesson.</p>
<p class="subsq">Betty Blackwell, walking next to me on the winding sidewalk, was a middle-aged blond with an attractive figure, and Rosie Mitchell, a middle-aged person of color, strode alongside Betty as we made our way to the receiver’s basement. As we passed under Five Cell House, we could hear a whistle and catcall from somewhere above us on one of the four floors of Five Cell House. “Shake it, baby, shake it!” I was street smart and did not look toward the direction of the voice. Betty reflexively glanced up, however, and that same voice yelled, “Not you, Bitch. HIM.” I thought, <i>Oh my God, they are talking to me!</i> Another lesson for a fish guard.</p>
<h2 id="subhead-4" class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-upper">TRAINING</h2>
<p class="first first-after-subhead">Training consisted of a two-week academy at Eastern Kentucky University, the training center for all correctional officers and police officers in Kentucky. After the academy, we endured a week of firearms training at KSP, followed by on-the-job training. Before could be scheduled for the academy, I had to shadow more experienced officers. I was not allowed to work by myself until I graduated from the academy.</p>
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Philip W. Parker
Guard
from $22.95
Guard: A True Story of Duty, Sacrifice, and Leadership in Kentucky's Maximum Security Penitentiary
In 1978, Philip Parker started his decades-long career as a prison guard at the Kentucky State Penitentiary, a place known as "The Castle" for its medieval look. On his first day, a mass escape set the tone for the dangerous and intense journey ahead. Over the years, Parker faced numerous challenges, from federal court allegations to life-threatening situations, including a dramatic hostage crisis with a notorious inmate.
Parker's memoir takes readers through the emotions and realities of prison life. From handling daily violence and suicides to witnessing murders caused by racial tension and other conflicts, Parker describes the harsh environment of the prison. Guard includes detailed accounts of harrowing events, like the highway crime spree where two of his colleagues were shot.
The book also covers the evolution of the prison itself, from its early days with medieval punishments to modern-day improvements. Parker shares his experiences as a warden, dealing with staff corruption, inmate violence, and the heavy responsibility of carrying out court-ordered executions.
Guard is a vivid and honest account of a life spent managing the worst in human behavior while finding moments of compassion and redemption. It highlights the dedication and resilience required to maintain order in such a challenging environment, and offers a unique perspective on the sacrifices made by those who work in the prison system.
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<div id="chapter-1" class="element element-bodymatter element-container-single element-type-chapter element-with-heading" role="doc-chapter" epub:type="chapter">
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<div class="element-number-block">
<div class="element-number case-upper"><span class="element-number-term">CHAPTER</span> <span class="element-number-number">1</span></div>
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<div class="title-block">
<h1 class="element-title case-upper">THE MURDER OF GINA MARIE TISHER</h1>
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<div class="text" id="chapter-1-text">
<div class="alignment-block alignment-block-align-center">
<div class="text-block">
<p class="alignment-block-content alignment-block-content-center">Friday, January 2, 1976</p>
<p class="alignment-block-content alignment-block-content-center">Whittier, California</p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width"><span class="first-phrase">The rapist knew exactly</span> what he was looking for. He always knew when he had found the right one. Until he found her, he continued to walk aimlessly through the Whittier shopping center. He followed one young woman, but she never left the security of the crowded center. He followed another younger girl and thought she might be the one, but she kept looking back at him nervously. He would stop and look in the shop windows pretending to be interested in the merchandise. Finally, he gave up on her and went back into the parking lot to look for another.</p>
<p class="subsq">He knew he should be at work. He had just gotten the job at the Chevron Station and had promised his common-law wife Mollye he would stay with it this time and not lose this job as he had the others. But when the urge came over him to follow a girl, he could not seem to help himself. He had to do it again, as he had many times before. He couldn’t remember exactly when it started, but it had been going on for a while now. He couldn’t stop. It used to be he could go for weeks before the impulse came over him, but lately, it seemed to happen more often. He couldn't explain why.</p>
<p class="implicit-break scene-break"></p>
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<div class="text-block">
<p class="alignment-block-content alignment-block-content-center"><b>From the transcribed confession of the killer:</b></p>
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<p class="first blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose blockquote-position-first">I was supposed to be at work, but that urge came over me, and something was driving me to go look for a girl. I was talking to myself. I drove around for a long time, and then I was at the Whitwood Shopping Center in Whittier. I was hanging around there a long time also. I was about to give up and go home, and I was walking through a rear exit or something. There was a dry cleaner by a Vons or an Albertsons. It’s a shopping center, and there was a grocery store there, and there are a couple of little businesses there, and there’s a dry cleaner. And she was putting her clothes in [the car] from the dry cleaners, and I walked on by her, and I started to go around her car, and I looked back and she was having a hard time. And I turned around, and I looked, and there wasn’t anybody watching. She had long dark hair. She was wearing a dress, and I think a sweater, nylons, and shoes. She was pretty, young, and I think she was about twenty or twenty-two years old. She was sophisticated looking, but not the kind of sophisticated where they have an air about them. She was driving a newer gold or brown-colored Granada.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, anyway, she was putting the clothes in, and I turned around, and I walked back around her and walked right up to her, and by then she had gotten into the car. I was standing there, and then I turned around, and I walked back behind the car, and just as I got behind it, I turned, and I looked into the back window, and she was just about started up, and she reached around and messed with the clothes again or something and she saw me. I pointed to her left rear tire and said, “Ah, you aren’t gonna get far with that tire like that.” Or something, and she said, “OK.” So, I started to walk away, and I turned around, and I looked at her, and I said, “Did you hear what I said?” And she said, “What?” I was yelling at her or something. I walked back around to the driver’s side of the car, and I reached down, and I kicked the tire or something, and I said, “You’ve got a flat tire here.” She said, “I do?” And she cracked the door open.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">As soon as she got the door open, I pulled the gun out and stuck it in her face. I said, “Scoot over.” She said, “What?” I said, “Scoot over, right now, quick. Don’t give me no shit, just scoot over, scoot your ass over.” And I pulled the door open, and I jumped in, and half pushed her over, and she slid over. I said, “Give me the keys.” She said something like, “What the hell is going on?” I told her, “Just shut up and give me the keys. Put the keys in the ignition.” She put the keys in the ignition, and I started the car up. I think it was about five-thirty or six. Yeah, because the banks were still open until six. I drove out of the parking lot across into a tract of homes due east of Whitwood Center, and I pulled around the corner, and I said, “OK, take all the money out of your purse. You haven’t got any weapons or anything? Knives or guns or anything like that?” She said, “No, I never had one.” “What’s in the back seat?” I asked her. She said, “Laundry.” And I think she had a present or something for someone. I’m not sure. Anyway, she told me what was in the back seat, and she gave me the money she had. I told her it wasn’t enough, and she said they were newlyweds, and they just had a vacation and spent most of their money on vacation or something or other. And I said, “Well, what about a bank account?" She said the car was a rental from the place where her husband works because her car was being worked on or something and that they really didn’t have any money. They spent it on their honeymoon. The only thing she had was ten or twenty bucks that she gave me and her paycheck, her paycheck that she had to cash.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">She showed the paycheck to me, and I jumped on it, and I said, “OK, we’re going to go cash it.” Anyway, she told me what bank she banked at, and I said, “Well, where is one of those?” And she said, “Well, where are we?” And I pulled back out to the main street. I don’t know the name of it, but anyway I saw the name of it, and I told her, and she said, “OK, well, we’ve got to go that way.” And she named the place. I was going to go to a drive-up window or a walk-up window without going inside the bank, and I told her that. She said, “Well, the only one I know like that is my bank. It is on the other side of town or something. It’s a quarter to six now and closes in fifteen minutes so we’ll have to hurry.”</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, I said, “OK, in the meantime, climb over into the back seat and get on the floor.” And it had bucket seats. She got on the floor, and I took off. I was driving with my left hand. I had my gun stuck in the back seat pointed at her in my right hand. I had it stuck between her legs. I took off. I said, “OK, we’re coming to (so-and-so) street, which way?” She said the bank was on Imperial. So, I took what I thought I knew was a shortcut or something. Somehow, we got off on a side street and went all over the goddamn place and didn’t ever come out. We just kept getting deeper and deeper.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">Finally, I told her to get up in the front and show me the way out, and she didn’t know where we were. It was about five minutes to six. She said if we go back to Whitwood Shopping Center the bank there was open. I told her that was no go—that there had to be somewhere, a store or some grocery store or somebody that knew her that would cash it. She said she knew of a place or two that had cashed her checks. I said, “For how much?” “Well, for ten or twenty dollars or for the amount of purchase only,” and that she didn’t know of any place that would take, I think it was a two-hundred-and-forty-dollar check, or something like that, a payroll check. We drove around trying to find a place for a half hour or an hour where she could cash the check, but we never stopped anywhere. And so finally I got pissed off and told her.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">Well, she was in the back all that time. She got back in the back from Whitwood before we took off. So, we took off and drove around and looked at these places. Nothing. I got pissed off. I kept sticking … I had the gun between her legs up her skirt, and I kept sticking it into her, poking her, and poking her with it. I drove off up Hacienda Boulevard up over the hills somewhere. I drove back, and I turned off a side road and went halfway back up it—parked underneath this bank that there was a house up on. I told her to get back up in the front seat. I started asking her questions about her family, and when her husband got home from work, where did her parents live. They live in Anaheim; I think—Anaheim or Santa Ana. Did they have any money to buy her back? No, they didn’t have much money, but her mom had a turquoise necklace that was worth a thousand dollars or something. I told her, “Well, I could only get ten percent on that. That’s only a hundred bucks, and I need five hundred dollars.” She said, well, she thought they had a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. I told her that was still two hundred dollars short.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I turned back north on Hacienda and got going up over the hill, and she said she didn’t know where she could get the money. And so, we got up over the hill, and we started coming down the hill, and I turned right off into the tract of homes again and was driving around in those homes and telling her she had to come up with more money, she had to come up with more money. And she couldn’t do it. I said, “Well, you’ve got to come up with some collateral or something to make up for the money.” “Well, you can have the car,” she told me. I said, “Well, I already planned to take the car. I can get five hundred bucks for it, but I need a thousand. We’re still two hundred and fifty short. You gotta come up with two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of something.”</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, we went around and around and around for a while, and finally, I drove up to the City of Industry. I think that is where we ended up, back there in some factories or something. In the meantime, I had convinced her that she could give me two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of sex, and I’d call it even. I had her unbutton her clothes while I was driving, and somewhere along the line I undid my fly, and I’m beating off while she was undressing, I mean while she was undressing, and I was driving.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I went down in front of this factory and pulled behind it. There was a whole row of factories, and I went down to the last one, and I went behind it and parked. I told her just to open up her dress. I think it was a one-piece dress. I told her to open it up and to just climb in the back seat, and she said the seats recline. I told her to show me how to recline the seat, and she did. I told her to take off her shoes. She took off her shoes. Then she took off her nylons. I know she took off her underclothes anyway, and so I started screwing her in her seat. Her back was on the seat. I kept telling her, “Faster! Faster!” She kept going faster and harder. “I want my money’s worth; I want my money’s worth.” She kept working harder and harder. I was playing with her all the while we were doing that, and she started panting and getting in rhythm. She started liking it. I said, “You really like this, don’t you? Have you ever been screwed in the ass?” She said, “No.” She said, “I think it will hurt.” I said, “No it won’t. Come on.” So, I pulled it out, and she turned over, and she laid across the seat. And I rammed her really hard, and she jerked away, and she said it hurt too much—do it the other way.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, I said, “OK,” and she turned back over. She started going again. I was playing with her tits. We went for about five minutes, and she started coming, and I was chewing on her neck or something. She was saying, “Yeah, yeah,” and I was saying, “Yeah, yeah.” Tighter and tighter. I started squeezing my muscles tighter and tighter, and I kept squeezing my hands tighter and tighter. I just kept squeezing, and she kept squeezing, and it felt good. She kept squeezing harder and harder and harder, and I come. As soon as I come, she stopped. I took my hands off her, and she just lay there. I felt her neck, and she didn’t have any pulse. I felt her wrist, and she didn’t have any pulse. I yanked her off me, and I jumped back over in the driver’s seat. I started the car back up. I tried to get my pants on, but I couldn’t get them on. I jumped out of the car and got dressed, and I got back in the car, and I just kept looking at her, and she was dead, but I couldn’t believe she was dead. I just kept expecting her to do something. But she didn’t do shit, she just laid there.<sup class="main-text-refnote-cue"><a href="chapter-001.xhtml#chapter-1-footnote-1-text" id="chapter-1-footnote-1" class="refnote-marker marker-format-arabic footnote-cue arabic-1" role="doc-noteref" epub:type="noteref">1</a></sup></p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, I put the car in gear and started to drive away, and she fell over against me. I pushed her off me, and I just stopped the car, and I picked her up, and threw her over in the back seat, threw her down on the floor, and I was looking at her, and she didn’t do nothing. I took off, and I drove somewhere. I don’t know. I drove for a while. I drove, and I drove, and I kept looking at her and driving and looking at her and driving, and nothing happened. I finally ended up on some freeway somewhere. I ended up on the Pomona Freeway. Yeah, the Pomona Freeway going east. I had all the windows pulled down, and I was going about eighty-five or ninety. I was sweating and going faster, and I had the tape deck turned up full blast. She just lay there. I saw this sign saying the Orange Freeway, or the 57 Freeway or whatever it is, and I turned onto it, and I thought home, I gotta get home. Oh man, I must have done ninety or a hundred down that freeway all the way home.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I got to what I think was Imperial. No, maybe it was Lambert Road. I pulled off, and I stopped. I tried to collect myself. What was I going to do? I reached back, and she was cold. I was sure she was dead then, and I had to get rid of her.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I pulled off on Lambert Road, on the off-ramp, and I just sat there for a second. I turned the tape deck down. I thought, “I gotta wipe my prints off and get out of here.” I was really pissed because she was dead. I was really pissed! I reached back, and I hit her. I hit her hard on the chest. I hit her right in the sternum because I remember she, ah, gasped or something, and I thought, oh wow, maybe she’s going to come back alive. I remember that I got back on the freeway, and I got to Yorba Linda Boulevard, and I got off there. I turned left, and I went over to K-mart. You know the K-mart on Yorba Linda Boulevard and Placentia?</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">And I drove around the K-mart parking lot for a while, and I parked in there. I just sat for a while, and I smoked a cigarette. Then I tore all the clothes down and the clothes hanger and covered her up. I got out of the car, and I locked it up, and I went into the K-mart, and I bought—what did I buy? Oh yeah, I forgot about the jewelry. I took the jewelry from her when we were parked in Hacienda Heights. She told me it wasn’t worth much, and I told her, “I could get something for it.” It was a wedding ring set. She told me she didn’t know how much her husband had paid for it. I told her it looked like it was worth something. She said there was a green class ring or something. She told me it was jade or an emerald or something and was valuable. So, I took it, and I think she had a watch. I think she had post earrings or something. I took all of that back in Hacienda Heights somewhere.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I went in the K-mart, and I bought something. Shit, I don’t know what the hell it was, and I went back to the auto supply section, and I bought some brake fluid. I remember the brake fluid was something somebody told me about, that brake fluid was good for cleaning things. I thought, well, I’ll clean up the car with the brake fluid. I bought a can of brake fluid, and I know I got something for, I think I bought a toy for Unity, my daughter, a little mouse, or something.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I went back out to the car, I got in the car, and I was going to wipe it down right there. Then somebody drove into the parking lot that I knew that I thought I knew or that they thought they knew me, or I don’t know, and they were driving around and looked at me weird. I thought, “I think I know those people. That must be why they’re driving around me wondering what I’m doing in this nice car.”</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I started the car up, and I hauled ass out of there and went over to Gemco. It was kind of catty-corner. I drove around the Gemco parking lot for a couple of minutes, and I forgot about what I was doing, and then I followed this girl out to her car, and I was going to get out of the car and go rob her or something, but then I remembered that I had to clean that car up.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">So, I drove over by the cleaners and parked in front of a liquor store. The cleaners and the liquor store are by each other in the Gemco parking lot. And I parked there, and I took some kind of rag and dumped brake fluid on it. I spent about five or ten minutes wiping the car down. And I started the car up, and I drove across the parking lot towards Yorba Linda Boulevard, and I stopped again and got the check. I wiped the dash down a couple of times and the steering wheel and a couple of other things down.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">Then I drove around, and I got out of the car again in a garage area of some apartments. I poured some of the brake fluid on a rag. I then tried to stuff the can into her vagina, but when I found it wouldn’t go, I think I stuffed the rag in. I think I wiped down the outside of the car. I know I locked the car up though, and I walked back up the alley towards State College, and I took the can of brake fluid and chucked it up on the roof of one of the carports, and I got to the end of the carports, back to the parking lot where the taco and pizza places are. I had the car keys, and I threw the keys in the trash. Then I thought, I might want them, so I took ‘em back out of the trash, and I chucked ‘em up on the corner of the roof.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">Well, I walked out of there around Shakey’s [pizza restaurant] and started walking. I had cut between the Tic Toc, the gas station, and the pizza place, right through Nutwood, and turned right around the Emporium. I turned right on Nutwood, and I walked along the north side of Nutwood under the underpass, and then I cut across a field or a parking lot. There’s a field and a parking lot there or something, and I cut across it into a fraternity house or whatever that is there. I cut across there and then over to Commonwealth up off of Nutwood Street, then across Commonwealth through some more fraternity houses or something, and came out almost across the street from some type of camping store or, there’s a ski shop there and the Sav-On parking lot, cut across the street behind it, that is on Chapman, then I went behind it, came back around it, went around the front, walked in the Sav-On, and was eating an ice cream or something when I saw Winchell’s over on the corner. I decided to go to Winchell’s instead, so I walked over to Winchell’s.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose">I called Ruby<sup class="main-text-refnote-cue"><a href="chapter-001.xhtml#chapter-1-footnote-2-text" id="chapter-1-footnote-2" class="refnote-marker marker-format-arabic footnote-cue arabic-2" role="doc-noteref" epub:type="noteref">2</a></sup> on the phone from there. I told her that I’d been kidnapped. I said I’d been kidnapped by four black guys that morning, and they dragged me around in the trunk all day and dumped me out in Irvine, and I’d just gotten this far, and that I needed a ride the rest of the way home. I think it was either nine-thirty or ten-thirty. She asked me, “Well, what do you need, an alibi?” I said, “No, I’m telling you what happened.” She said, “What have you been drinking?” I said, “Forget it, Ruby, I’m telling you the truth. Just get in touch with Mollye and tell her I’m on my way home and that I’m OK. I’ll walk from here, and it’ll be a little while till I get home. Tell her not to worry.” She said, “OK,” she’d get in touch with her.</p>
<p class="subsq blockquote-content blockquote-content-prose blockquote-position-last">So, then I called up a Yellow Cab from Winchell’s. Then I went over, and I sat and had a jelly donut and a cup of coffee. While I was drinking the coffee, the taxi pulled up. We went up to Commonwealth. I told him I had three or four bucks or something, and he took me as far as Gilbert and Commonwealth to a McMahan’s gas station and let me off there. It was twenty cents under what I told him I had. That wasn’t what I had, but that’s what I told him. And I got out from there, and I walked home.</p>
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<div id="chapter-1-footnote-1-text" class="refnote footnote marker-format-arabic" role="doc-footnote" epub:type="footnote"><p class="first"><span class="refnote-marker-container" hidden="hidden"><a class="refnote-marker marker-format-arabic arabic-1 refnote-backlink" href="chapter-001.xhtml#chapter-1-footnote-1">1</a> </span>Even in his confession of this cold-blooded murder, Hulbert attempts to minimize his acts by saying that the victim was “starting to enjoy it” and she kept squeezing, when in fact he was strangling her to death. He also fails to mention the fact he bit her breast so severely the criminalist was able to cast the bite after her death. Throughout these interviews, he never showed any remorse or compassion for his victims or their families.</p>
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<div id="chapter-1-footnote-2-text" class="refnote footnote marker-format-arabic" role="doc-footnote" epub:type="footnote"><p class="first"><span class="refnote-marker-container" hidden="hidden"><a class="refnote-marker marker-format-arabic arabic-2 refnote-backlink" href="chapter-001.xhtml#chapter-1-footnote-2">2</a> </span>Ruby Rose Patterson, the owner of the home the suspect was renting in southwest Fullerton, and the woman who had cared for him when he was a child, after the death of his mother.</p>
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Lee DeVore
The Parking Lot Rapist
$15.50
In The Parking Lot Rapist, retired detective Lee DeVore recounts the harrowing investigation that led to the capture of a serial rapist and killer who terrorized Los Angeles and Orange Counties in the 1970s. This gripping true crime narrative begins with the tragic murder of nineteen-year-old Gina Marie Tisher and delves into the relentless pursuit of justice by the Fullerton Police Department.
DeVore provides his insider's view of the complex and meticulous investigation, revealing the strategies, challenges, and breakthroughs that ultimately led to the arrest and conviction of Kenneth Richard Hulbert. Through detailed accounts of key moments, including transcripts of Hulbert's chilling confessions, collaboration with various law enforcement agencies, and the emotional toll on the victims' families, DeVore paints a vivid picture of a community united in its fight against a monstrous predator.
The Parking Lot Rapist is more than just a detective's tale; it is a testament to the dedication, teamwork, and unwavering commitment of an entire police department. This compelling story captures the essence of true crime, highlighting the painstaking efforts and sacrifices made to bring a dangerous criminal to justice.
Whether you are a true crime enthusiast or simply seeking an authentic account of law enforcement's pursuit of justice, The Parking Lot Rapist offers an unflinching look at the resilience and determination necessary to protect and serve.
Michael Cohen
The Golden Age of Sherlock Holmes And His Contemporaries
$15.50
In 1891, a new London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures.
An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured women and men detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and conmen. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before.
Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.
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<h1 class="center" id="c4">LAST CALL</h1>
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<h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc"><i>December 1943</i></h2>
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<div>Private First Class John Rondello closed the door behind him and turned to face the barroom. As he stamped snow from his shoes, he allowed his eyes to scan the smoky dimness before him. The place was small for a soldiers’ bar, barely forty feet across with the actual bar running down the side to Rondello’s right. To his left, scattered indifferently, were eight small, round tables, and he was relieved to see that only two were occupied. The room’s flooring consisted of worn, wooden planks under a sprinkling of pale yellow sawdust, the bare grey walls scarred with sporadic spottings of water damage. An oddly pleasant odor of beer, whiskey and cigarettes wafted in the warm air. A scrawny Douglas fir stood in a corner, its needles already drying, growing brittle against red and green Christmas lights.</div>
<div class="indent">Ten G.I.s stood at the bar, scattered and clumped in small groups along its length, a few looking up from their drinks or conversations as Rondello entered. Two hookers sat at the far end, one sipping without pleasure at a flat looking beer, the other engaged in tee-hee chit-chat with a red-faced soldier of about nineteen.</div>
<div class="indent">More than an hour to kill in this dive, thought Rondello.</div>
<div class="indent">Moving toward one of the empty tables at the rear, he slipped the overseas cap from his head, unbuttoned his green uniform overcoat and tucked the folded cap into his belt. He could feel the appraising eyes of the beer sipping hooker as he crossed the room. Rondello imagined she liked what she saw. He kept his eyes purposely from her and sat at a table with his back to the bar facing a small, snow encrusted window which looked out to the Wrightstown Bus Depot directly across Main Street. He glanced at his Timex. Ten forty. The bus to New York City was due in from Philadelphia after midnight. He sighed and gazed into his watery reflection in the darkened window glass.</div>
<div class="indent">At twenty-three, Rondello was the oldest man in his platoon. His sergeant was only twenty-two, although in many ways he seemed much older. The rest of the guys were eighteen and nineteen with a sprinkling of twenty-year-olds. Rondello had been drafted late, and he knew exactly who to thank for that. Or blame.</div>
<div class="indent">Good old Willie Cosentino, Rondello thought. Willie the Widow Maker. There hadn’t been much Willie couldn’t get done even before the war, but once the conflict produced depression-busting paychecks for everyone and a thriving black market, Willie had grown godlike within the old Brooklyn neighborhood known as Red Hook.</div>
<div class="indent">It was Willie who had arranged Rondello’s gig at the Alimony Prison, a popular Manhattan night club. Sure, he deserved the spot, but hell, there were lots of guys deserving of that job; it was Willie himself who spoke to the owner, an ex-prize fighter and bootlegger who had founded the Alimony Prison as a speakeasy many years earlier and then taken it legit once prohibition was repealed. When Willie spoke, people tended to listen. Willie the Widow Maker had grown up on President Street, just off Fourth Avenue, with another kid everyone called “Allie Boy.” The grapevine wise guys never tired of relating how it had been Willie who suggested a more fitting nickname for a tough kid like Alphonse Capone: “Scarface.”</div>
<div class="indent">“‘Allie Boy’ sounds like one of them new peanut butters they’re selling,” Willie reportedly told Capone.</div>
<div class="indent">Now Rondello smiled at the legend. He had never particularly liked Willie, but had always been pragmatic; if a guy wanted to amount to anything on Red Hook’s mean streets, working for Willie was the best way to do it. And if a guy dreamed of being a big-time singer like Sinatra, he needed someone to grease the wheels a little. Hell, thought Rondello, his Alimony Prison performance was reviewed by <i>The</i> <i>Times</i> just last year, <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>, for Pete’s sake. “Promising young crooner,” they said. “Dark, sensual good looks,” the guy had written. Johnny Rondello was a big hit.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello had been living on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan at the time, just a few blocks from the Alimony Prison’s Greenwich Village location. He was booked there for a long-term engagement. And then came the telephone call from Brooklyn.</div>
<div class="indent">“Hey, Johnny, how ya doing?” Willie had said. “You with any a’ that high class Manhattan tail at the moment?”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello laughed. “No, Willie, not right at the moment. What’s up?”</div>
<div class="indent">“I need you to go take care of sumthin’,” Willie said casually. “Nothin’ heavy, just the usual.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello had stiffened. He’d been hoping these little instances of “taking care” of something were finally behind him. How long, he wondered, would he be in Willie’s unrelenting debt?</div>
<div class="indent">“What’s that?” he asked, forcing a mirroring casualness into his tone.</div>
<div class="indent">“Matty the Milkman. He’s inta me for almost two c’s, and he’s been duckin’ me. Time he gets a little message.”</div>
<div class="indent">“What kinda message?”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie’s chuckle came through the line. “Relax, kid, I know you’re lightweight. Just go and see ‘im, that’s all. Smack ‘im around a little. Warn him next time it won’t be <i>you</i> comin’.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Sure, Willie. I can put a little scare into him. He still live over on Dean Street?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah. He leaves for work at two-thirty in the morning. That’d be the best time to catch him. Give ‘im the whole day drivin’ around in that milk wagon a’ his to think about the position he’s in.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Consider it done, Willie. Anything else ya need?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Well, kid, I got some bad news. My guy at the draft board called. Seems he’s lost his nerve; he thinks the FBI is hidin’ under his friggin’ bed. Says he can’t keep misplacin’ your draft call up notice. He read about ya in the newspaper, the whata-ya-call-it…”</div>
<div class="indent">“<i>The Times</i>?” Rondello suggested.</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, yeah, <i>The</i> <i>Times</i>. He says pretty soon somebody’s gonna start wonderin’ why a gettin’ famous guy like you ain’t humpin’ around shootin’ at foreigners like the other losers. So we gotta get you fixed.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Fixed?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, fixed. By some doctor up on the Grand Concourse, up in the Bronx.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello shook his head and frowned. “Willie, what do you mean, ‘fixed’? I ain’t a Cocker Spaniel, for Pete’s sake.”</div>
<div class="indent">For a moment there was silence on the line. Then Willie laughed. “Oh, I get it. No, Johnny, relax. It’s your ear, just your ear.”</div>
<div class="indent">“You wanna cut my ear off?”</div>
<div class="indent">“No, but now that you mention it, I did cut a guy’s ear off once. With one of my old man’s barber razors.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Willie,” Rondello said, his stomach knotting a bit, “What’s this about <i>my</i> ear?”</div>
<div class="indent">“The doc owes Jimmy Buttons, a friend of mine. Jimmy says no problem, he’ll just squeeze him a little and he’ll help us out on this.”</div>
<div class="indent">“On what, Willie? What are we doing here?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Well, you go see this doctor, he’s a’ ear doctor, and he pokes a hole through your eardrum. Then you go for your draft interview. You tell them at the board, you say, ‘Hey, it’s about time you guys called me. I been waitin’. Where are those Nazis, I’m gonna kill them all.’ Then they say, ‘What a nice boy this one is. Set up his physical.’ You go for the physical, they find the punctured eardrum and bingo! Four-friggin’-eff. It’s back to the Alimony Prison and all them Manhattan Protestant broads you been bangin’, thanks to your buddy, Willie.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello didn’t like the sound of this. “And what am I? Deaf then? A deaf singer? I have to know tone, I have to know pitch, I have to—”</div>
<div class="indent">“Oh, pipe down,” Willie said. “Listen, kid, you ain’t gonna be deaf. Is Sinatra deaf? Can he tone and pitch and whatever the hell? He got the same condition, he’s four-eff just like you gonna be.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello felt himself relax. “Sinatra? Sinatra’s got a punctured eardrum?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Damn right. Probably got it the same way you gonna get yours.”</div>
<div class="indent">And so Willie would make the arrangements. Rondello would be 4-F and skip this war. Sorry, folks, too busy. Maybe next time.</div>
<div class="indent">“One more thing,” Willie said, “you been a little out of touch with the neighborhood lately. You should get to Brooklyn more often. The guys are startin’ to mumble about it.” Rondello thought about “the guys”—the dreamless, imagination-less pool shooters and card players, boozers and bums and skirt chasers, chain-smoking Luckies and greasing back their hair.</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, sure, Willie, as soon as I get some time. Maybe next week sometime if I can—”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie’s voice cracked like a pistol shot through the phone. “No,” he said. “No, kid, not maybe. And not next week. You get here in a day or two, and you do the right thing, act like ya supposed to act, like a man. Don’t get fancy on me, Johnny, don’t play with me.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello paled. “Yeah, sure, Willie, tomorrow’s good. Tomorrow night’s good, after the late show, tell the guys. I’ll see ‘em down at the hangout, okay? Then after that, I’ll walk over to Dean Street and see Matty the Milkman.”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie sounded placated. “Okay.” He paused. “One more thing. I guess you should hear this from me.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello frowned into the phone. “What?”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie’s voice softened. “Your friend. Your friend Bobby. He ain’t coming home, kid. I’m sorry. I just heard about it this morning.” Rondello could feel his head begin to swim. Bobby Arena, his childhood best friend from the neighborhood. Bobby, like Rondello himself, had been a little different, a little smarter, maybe, than the other kids. In their special friendship, Bobby had once confided his deepest, darkest secret: Bobby liked poetry. He liked to read it. He even liked to write it.</div>
<div class="indent">Bobby had flushed red when he told Rondello. “You think maybe I’m like some kind of sissy, Johnny?” he had whispered, his eyes welling with tears.</div>
<div class="indent">“Bobby’s… <i>dead</i>?” Rondello asked.</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, kid. I’m sorry. But he should never have gone and joined up. He got all pissed off after Pearl Harbor, remember? He took it real personal—like those Japs had bombed the Brooklyn Bridge.”</div>
<div class="indent">“How? Where?”</div>
<div class="indent">“How-where what?”</div>
<div class="indent">“How’d he die? Where’d he die? What happened?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Oh. I think he got shot. A place called Tarawa, some island somewheres. Too bad, the kid was okay. And I gotta give ‘im this much. He was tough. Hard as nails.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, a tough guy,” Rondello said dully.</div>
<div class="indent">“‘Arena the Cleaner,’ the terror of Guadalcanal. Every Jap mother’s nightmare. Whata ya gonna do? Nobody gets outta here alive. I’ll see ya, kid.” Willie hung up.</div>
<div class="indent">Two nights later Rondello found himself standing in the second floor walk-up foyer of a battered Dean Street tenement. He dropped his cigarette butt, crushed it out against the black-and-white tiled floor, and he waited.</div>
<div class="indent">Matty the Milkman was forty-two years old. He lived alone in a three-room apartment. Each morning, he woke at one-thirty a.m. and fixed a breakfast of farina, jellied toast, and black coffee. He then donned his white uniform and walked two blocks to the BMT subway on Fourth Avenue. He rode to the sprawling dairy in Long Island City where he would load his milk truck with thick, heavy bottles of cold milk, cream, orange juice, and cardboard boxes of butter. By mid-morning his day’s work was done, freeing him to return to the neighborhood and purchase a racing form. By seven p.m. Matty would retire for six hours of sleep before repeating the same daily routine.</div>
<div class="indent">As Rondello waited, he found himself pondering the pointlessness of such an existence. It was why, he supposed, Matty took his scant earnings and wagered them on horses and baseball or anything offered by the local bookie, an associate of Willie the Widow Maker. Anything, Rondello supposed, to provide some excitement would be preferable to doing nothing. A sad choice made by a sad, lonely man.</div>
<div class="indent">At precisely two-thirty, Rondello saw the apartment door swing open. The foyer where he stood was ten-by-ten-foot square, a steep staircase to the left. An anemic twenty-five-watt bulb was affixed to a far wall, Rondello positioned away from it in shadow. He watched as Matty locked his door and turned toward the stairs.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello stepped forward. He wore a dark trench coat and a black Fedora pulled low on his brow. His hands were jammed into the coat pockets, his shoulders hunched. He had done this before. He knew how to stage it.</div>
<div class="indent">“Hey, Matty,” he said, lightly touching the man’s shoulder, a slight snarl to his voice. “You got a minute?”</div>
<div class="indent">Matty, deeply startled, gave a gasp and turned toward the voice. Rondello stepped closer, manufacturing an evil smile. Matty took a quick step back in fear.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello sneered. “Willie says hello,” he snarled, then lashed out a backhanded slap, catching Matty hard across his right cheek.</div>
<div class="indent">And that was it. John Rondello, aspiring radio star, headliner at Manhattan’s swinging Alimony Prison—now a murderer.</div>
<div class="indent">Matty the Milkman fell backward from the top of the stairwell. Halfway down the steps, his neck broke. When his tumbling body finally slammed onto the tile entryway floor, his skull split with a sickening, wet sounding thud. Dead because John Rondello needed to keep Willie the Widow Maker happy; appease him in order to ensure the continued success of his own career.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello, initially frozen in terror, had finally fled. A death occurring during the commission of a felony is legally classified “felony murder.” It carries the same penalty as first degree murder: life imprisonment or death by electric chair; in mob-related cases the latter usually being the punishment of choice.</div>
<div class="indent">When Rondello told him what had occurred, Willie was displeased but not particularly concerned. “Stuff happens, kid,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just write off Matty’s debt and set you up with an alibi. If the cops ever figure this for somethin’ more than an accident, which I doubt will ever happen, you’ll have three witnesses ready to say you were with them. Forget about this.”</div>
<div class="indent">Now, sitting in the New Jersey bar, Rondello lit a cigarette and tried to force thoughts of Matty the Milkman from his mind. Instead, he thought of Bobby Arena. Poor, pale, skinny Bobby. Sometimes Rondello believed it was Bobby’s secret love of poetry that had propelled him to the Marine Corp recruiting office that December day two years earlier. Bobby Arena, “Arena the Cleaner,” the street guys nicknamed him after Guadalcanal. Bobby had used a flame thrower on the Canal, moving under fire from rat-hole to rat-hole, burning to death the pitiful, half-starved Japanese kids who huddled down in those holes, chained to their machine guns. Bobby had sprayed the liquid fire into the holes then listened for screams. He cleaned them out alright, scores of them, and thus the nickname “Arena the Cleaner,” for the gentle, quiet boy who proved to himself and everyone else that he was no sissy.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello shook his head to clear it of the haunting ghosts and ordered beer from the slight, pimply-faced waitress who had suddenly materialized next to his table. He watched her shuffle away.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>And I’m no different</i>, thought Rondello. What am <i>I </i>trying to prove? Here I sit dressed in this costume waiting to catch a bus from Fort Dix to New York City for thirty days’ Christmas leave. And then what? Europe for sure. Rondello had heard the rumors. He had sized up the situation. The Wehrmacht was collapsing. The Russians were already kicking them back to Germany. An allied invasion was imminent, the glory-seeking generals had figured out a surefire way of getting themselves into the history books. Invade Europe, probably from England and probably soon<i>. God almighty why didn’t I just have my damn eardrum punctured?</i> he thought. <i>What was </i>I<i> trying to prove?</i> His thoughts slipped back to Willie Cosentino’s reaction when he told him he hadn’t gone through with the procedure. While Rondello attempted to explain that which he couldn’t fully understand himself and most likely never would, he had seen the fury ablaze within Willie’s muddy brown eyes.</div>
<div class="indent">“You didn’t do it?!” Willie had screamed. “You stupid moron, you didn’t do it!”</div>
<div class="indent">“Willie, I… I couldn’t. Everybody else is going. I gotta go, too. I don’t know why exactly, maybe for Bobby, I don’t know. It’s just bad luck that I’m draft age in nineteen forty-three and there’s a war going on. I <i>gotta</i> go.”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie reached out a stub-fingered hand covered with coarse black curly hair. He took hold of Rondello’s shirt front.</div>
<div class="indent">“You stupid sucker!” he hissed, his eyes slit and his breath sour and foul. “You just don’t get it. You think they won’t have a war for slum kids to fight in 1953? 1963? 1973? Didja check out Ford’s profits last year? Kaiser’s? General Electric’s? They found their answer, kid, same as we found ours. <i>Our</i> future is dope: heroin. It’s the new bootleg, the future gambling and prostitution, ‘cause that’ll all get legalized someday. But never heroin. That’s <i>our </i>future, and we’re gonna eat up and spit out dead a whole bunch of slum kids with that dope. And Ford and them others, they do the same thing with the same slum kids. War, Johnny, that’s <i>their</i> answer, that’s their future. War.” He pushed Rondello away from him. “Go fight for them, kid. Go get killed. But believe me, if you survive it, you can forget about singin’ in <i>this </i>town. You wanna kiss up to the citizens, kid, you go ahead. But I’ll see you dead before you ever get a job in this town again. You’ll be finished. Now beat it.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Listen, Willie,” Rondello pleaded, “this war, it’s the defining event of my lifetime. Of my whole generation. Twenty years from now, what am I going to say, what do I tell people? Bobby went and died—what do I tell people <i>I</i> did?”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie shook his head. “You ain’t no different from the politicians who started this mess, Johnny. You’re just looking for a place in history, and you’re too damn stupid to see that it don’t make a rat’s ass bit a difference to nobody what you do.”</div>
<div class="indent">“But Willie…”</div>
<div class="indent">“No!” he hissed. “No. Save it. I had big hopes for you, kid. You’re with me or against me. You do this, if you go, you’re against me. End of story.”</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello leaned his head back and brought both hands to his forehead. He slowly massaged his brow before lowering his eyes back to Willie’s stone chiseled face.</div>
<div class="indent">“Why, Willie? Why does it have to be like that?”</div>
<div class="indent">Willie sighed. “You really don’t know, do you?”</div>
<div class="indent">“No. I don’t.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Because, kid, you were gonna make me legit. You were gonna be a star, a big star. On the radio. All the best joints, gigs with the real big-timers—Dorsey, Miller, all a’ them. You were gonna go places I could never go, meet people I could never meet. That’s why I helped you, that’s why I used up favors and promised out favors, leaned on people. You were gonna make it real big, kid, and it would be because a’ me. And then someday maybe I’d live in some big house out on Long Island somewheres, and all my neighbors would have their noses up in the air every time they seen me. But then I’d call on you, Johnny Rondello, the big star, and you’d be right there for me. Maybe sing at my daughter’s wedding even. And all them people, all them white bread bastards, they’d all know I was <i>somebody. </i>They’d know I was somebody <i>big</i>! Somebody they would have to respect.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Willie, please…”</div>
<div class="indent">“No, kid, that’s it. Beat it. You was selling shoes when you came to me for a break, and I set you up in Sally’s club in Flatbush. Remember? You was sellin’ shoes. And if them krauts don’t kill ya first, which I hope they do, then that’s how you’re gonna die—selling shoes.”</div>
<div class="indent">The waitress’ reappearance pulled Rondello from his memories. She set the bottle of Pabst down in front of him.</div>
<div class="indent">“Twenty-five cents,” she said.</div>
<div class="indent">He dropped a dollar on her tray. “And bring me a double shot of J & B, too,” he said, realizing a sudden need for harsh liquor in this throat.</div>
<div class="indent">After she had come and gone a second time, Rondello drank the scotch quickly, washing it down with the cold beer. There had been a time when he avoided hard liquor, fearful of its ravishing effect on his vocal cords, but those days were long gone.</div>
<div class="indent">Now his fear was of the future, a steeped, utter fear, and it was a new experience for him. His future had always seemed so bright, so promising, and now it loomed black and bleak before him. He had been so very much afraid lately. It was hard for him to sleep even after long, grueling days of Advanced Infantry Training. The nights would enhance his terror, and it would creep across him with an icy liquidity, stirring loosely in his bowels, knotting the muscles of his jaw.</div>
<div class="indent">Because he knew what was coming. His imagination had often been cruel to him growing up as he had on the streets of Brooklyn, and now that imagination stabbed at him without mercy. In the senses of his mind, he heard the combat, smelled it, even tasted it. He was just too imaginative for the infantry. It was that simple.</div>
<div class="indent">He sipped at his beer and thoughts of Bobby Arena returned to him. They had grown up together, sharing a magical secret bond of imagination. They dreamed their dreams together, each one separate, different, yet so alike and so sweet. Bobby with his dreams of poetry, Rondello with his dreams of singing, performing, becoming a star on the radio. And now Bobby lay rotting, buried raw and bloody in some distant volcanic ash of a grave, his poetry silent, dead forever on his decaying, maggot-ridden lips.</div>
<div class="indent">The other kids had no idea about the poetry—not Jake or Zoot or Little Danny. Bobby’s eyes had often twinkled with their secret as he and Rondello moved into their teens, cocky and swaggering, exploring the girls, testing the waters…</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello shook the memories from his head and drained his beer. He called to the waitress and sat blank eyed as she brought the second round. He lifted the scotch to his mouth. “For you, Bobby,” he said, and knocked the liquor back into his throat.</div>
<div class="indent">And now it was his own dream which lay dead and gone. Even if he did come away from the war undamaged, which he seriously doubted, there’d be Willie to deal with. Willie the Widow Maker did not make idle threats; he did not change his mind. He had the means to make good his threat to Rondello. If Willie got on the phone to Manhattan, Rondello would be through in New York. Not one club, not the Copacabana, not the Latin Quarter, certainly not the Alimony Prison would touch him with a ten foot pole. Not if Willie said no. Not if they wanted their linens cleaned, their waiters at work, their liquor delivered. No, Johnny Rondello was finished in New York, even if he managed to survive long enough for it to matter. And if he dared re-locate to Chicago or Los Angeles or anywhere, the ultimate threat still existed: Matty the Milkman and that horrible tenement staircase.</div>
<div class="indent">Rondello’s thoughts then turned to his last show at the club. A scout from NBC had been there watching, listening, assessing him. The guy had come away impressed.</div>
<div class="indent">“Call me,” he had said. “When you get out of the service, call me. I really like your style.” Rondello smiled a bitter smile and drank his beer dry. Would the guy still like his style when some bent-nose walked into his office and asked for a special “favor” for “the boys”? When a police detective came in voicing allegations and alluding to murder? No, style wouldn’t be enough then. There were plenty of guys with style, and they would come with no strings attached.</div>
<div class="indent">He called for yet another round and glanced again at his Timex. It was just after eleven, and he was drinking much too fast. He shrugged away the thought. So what? Maybe he’d manage to get some sleep on the bus ride if he were drunk enough.</div>
<div class="indent">He was just finishing off another scotch when the shadow fell across his table. He looked up to his right and saw her standing there. It was the hooker from the bar, the beer sipper. She smiled at him.</div>
<div class="indent">“Hiya, Johnny,” she said. He frowned. They always call a guy Johnny, these bimbos. An unfortunate coincidence in his case.</div>
<div class="indent">“I’m not interested, sister, beat it,” he said, reaching for his beer and dropping his eyes from her.</div>
<div class="indent">She didn’t move. Rondello let five seconds pass then looked back at her face. He saw that she was about his age, slightly younger. She had short, strawberry-blond hair that was almost natural and high cheek bones. Her nose was small and cute, and she had nice green eyes. It came as a surprise to him that she was pretty. He blinked the surprise away.</div>
<div class="indent">“Look, honey,” he said in low, cold tones. He wanted to hurt her, drive her away, make her leave him to his scotch and beer and dead friends and dead dreams.</div>
<div class="indent">“Look,” he repeated, his eyes hard, “it ain’t my problem you’re all dressed up with no one to screw, okay? Just leave me alone. There’s fifteen other guys in here for you to impress. You don’t need me.”</div>
<div class="indent">He could see hurt come into her face and waited for her anger. He had dealt with pushy whores before, ever since he was seventeen and just starting to work the bars and clubs. He knew the routine. He figured now she would curse him and call him queer and then buzz off. But the hurt remained. There was no anger in her eyes. He frowned. What the hell…?</div>
<div class="indent">“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked in a tiny voice, a girl’s voice. “I thought maybe you just didn’t see me when you first came in, but that’s not it. You <i>really</i> don’t remember.” Rondello slid his chair back and looked at her hard. His memory stared back at him blankly as he scanned her features, her mannerisms. She stood still before him almost like a child, clutching her purse against her stomach, eyes wide.</div>
<div class="indent">“Look, sister, let’s not waste each other’s time,” he said, using a softer tone than before. “If this is some kind of hustle, let me tell you, you ain’t in my league. You’re a small-town kid playing dress-up, okay? So if it’s a hustle, you better just forget about it.”</div>
<div class="indent">The girl looked at him, and he could see a slight defiance come into her face. He felt a sudden deepening of his sadness and wondered why and tried to push it away. He knew he was already drunk.</div>
<div class="indent">“I’ll go, Johnny,” she said, and this time he realized she knew his name, he wasn’t just another john to her. “If that’s what you want. But you should remember. You said you would.” She seemed to brace herself then, throwing back her shoulders. “And anyway, I don’t care if you forgot. I almost forgot, too. I woulda forgot except for, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’ Except for that, I woulda forgot, too.” She began to turn from him.</div>
<div class="indent">He reached out a hand, grabbing her arm.</div>
<div class="indent">“Wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. What, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’? What does that mean?”</div>
<div class="indent">She turned to face him again. He could tell that although she was trying not to, she began to smile at him.</div>
<div class="indent">“You sang it for me, Johnny,” she said softly. “You sang ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ just for <i>me</i>.”</div>
<div class="indent">His face remained blank while his thoughts swirled behind his eyes. If he had a nickel for every broad he had sung to…</div>
<div class="indent">The girl slipped her arm from his light grasp.</div>
<div class="indent">“I’ll ne-<i>ver</i> smile a-gain until I smile at you.” She sang slowly and off-key in low tones as he watched and listened. He found himself beginning to remember.</div>
<div class="indent">He stood up slowly. “I’ll never laugh a-gain—what good would it do?” he crooned in a barely audible voice.</div>
<div class="indent">“You’re… Linda, right?” he said. She slapped lightly at his chest. “Lucy,” she said. “Not Linda, Lucy.” She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.</div>
<div class="indent">“Well, hell,” he said, pulling out a chair for her, “don’t get mad. At least I had the right letter of the alphabet.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy laughed and sat down. “I’ll bet that’s better than you usually do,” she said happily.</div>
<div class="indent">Johnny sat and looked across the table at her. Lucy was smiling serenely. It was as though nothing unpleasant had just occurred between them. She appeared totally pleased, completely at peace with being there with him. Rondello called for the waitress, and while Lucy ordered beer, he took the opportunity to remember her more fully.</div>
<div class="indent">Although he couldn’t quite place the face, and indeed the woman across from him could very well be a complete stranger, he had at least recalled the particular event. It had been about two months earlier, while he was in Basic Training. His company had received a twenty-four-hour pass for high performance on the rifle range, and Rondello, like most of the others, headed for this small town nestled just beside the sprawling Fort Dix.</div>
<div class="indent">He remembered drinking quite a lot, something he rarely did. It seemed to him now, thinking back, that he had been trying to drink away his need for a woman. By that point he had been confined to one or another Army post for a long time and was thoroughly sick of unrelenting male companionship. In retrospect, he found his logic questionable; he wondered if it was, in fact, even possible to drink away the need for a woman. It certainly seemed unlikely at best, counterproductive at worst.</div>
<div class="indent">And so he had found a woman, and they had a pretty good time in whatever bar they were in. He felt fairly certain that it hadn’t been this bar, the one they were in now, but he couldn’t be sure. They wound up in a room somewhere, and he vaguely recalled some discussion about price and nature of services. Now he fought to push away the blanketing dark fog on his memory.</div>
<div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said as he watched her sip at a fresh beer, “I’m a little shaky on the details, you know, about that night, but I do remember I had a good time.”</div>
<div class="indent">She smiled around her glass. “So did I, Johnny,” she said.</div>
<div class="indent">Johnny had heard enough tactful chatter from pros to smile at her answer. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll just bet. But what I want to know, if you don’t mind me askin’ is, well… did I <i>pay</i> you?”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “Well, we weren’t exactly on a date, you know. I <i>was </i>working.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Oh,” he said. The information disturbed him. He had only paid for sex once. He was sixteen and he and Bobby had gotten themselves hooked up with two older guys from the neighborhood. He remembered the stark tenement on Pacific Street and the haggard, bleached-out old whore that had taken the four of them. He shuddered. Damn shame he hadn’t been blind drunk <i>that </i>night.</div>
<div class="indent">“Oh,” he repeated and drank more scotch.</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy looked across at him. Her eyes were twinkling. “You really don’t remember much about it, do you?”</div>
<div class="indent">He shrugged. “I do remember singing to you. ‘I’ll Never Smile Again,’ one of my big numbers.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy giggled. “Oh, I shouldn’t even tell you, you’re so silly. But I will anyway.”</div>
<div class="indent">Johnny cocked his head to one side. He could never remember a hooker using the word ‘silly’ before, and it had an innocently appealing ring to it. He suddenly began to worry. <i>How lonely am I? </i>he thought.</div>
<div class="indent">“Tell me what?”</div>
<div class="indent">“Well, you did pay me. Three dollars.” She shook her hair and brushed a strand from her forehead. “And then I paid you. Three dollars.”</div>
<div class="indent">“What?” he asked, his brows arching.</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “It was <i>your</i> idea. You said, ‘I’ll pay you for sex, and you pay me for a song. You’re a pro, I’m a pro.’” She began to giggle. “Then you said, ‘Tit for tat, tit for tat,’ and got all hysterical laughing. You were so <i>silly.</i>”</div>
<div class="indent">He shook his head. “Remind me never to switch to a comedy routine.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy was still giggling. It seemed the more they talked, the more animated her features became, the prettier she seemed to become.</div>
<div class="indent">“You were really nice,” she said. “A real gentleman. At first I was a little scared, you know. When we went into the room, you led me right to the bed and made me sit down. Your hair was all messed up, and you kept muttering about something and then you would laugh. I knew you were from the city, from New York, and some of you guys from <i>New York</i>! Well, I could tell you some stories, believe me. But you turned out to be nice. Really swell. But so <i>silly</i>!”</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, that’s me, nice guy all the way.” He looked at her. “But don’t you get scared lots of times? I mean, with some of these guys?” he jerked his head towards the bar and the sullen, hunched shouldered group of G.I.s. “Some of these guys are really animals, especially these rebel rouser characters from Ole Miss’ or wherever.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy shook her head. “The worst are you New York guys. Believe me, I could tell you some stories.”</div>
<div class="indent">They sat and drank for a while. Johnny could feel a strange conflict developing within himself as he grew more drunk. There was such an easy lack of tension between them; it was so comfortable to sit in silence with her that he ironically found himself beginning to tense up. He didn’t <i>want </i>comfortable silence; it seemed dangerously intimate to him. What he wanted was slick conversation and false bravado, the phoniness he usually brought to his always transient female relationships. It was what kept him free and in charge and out of danger. Yet, he found himself enjoying this. His thoughts suddenly returned to Bobby. He and Bobby had spent much time together in comfortable silence. Sometimes, when they were kids, they would hop on the Third Avenue trolley and ride up to Shore Road and the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. They would climb down the ridge to the edge of the Narrows and sit with their backs against huge rocks and gaze across the flat water to Staten Island. Sometimes they would smoke two-for-a-penny cigarettes, and Bobby would read silently from his battered book of Whitman poetry. When was the last time he had thought about Walt Whitman? It seemed very long ago.</div>
<div class="indent">Now he sat and drank for a while longer before leaning slightly forward across the table toward Lucy. He felt the sudden rush of the beer and scotch envelop him. <i>Damn</i>, he thought, <i>I’m scared and very drunk and lonely and sitting with a whore that could be somebody sweet. Careful, careful, don’t talk, don’t speak.</i></div>
<div class="indent">But he did. He seemed to be observing himself from somewhere off in the corner beside the sad Christmas tree. He imagined Bobby there in the corner with him, amused. “Go ahead, Johnny,” Bobby whispered to him, “go ahead, Buddy, open up. Open up. It won’t <i>kill</i> you.”</div>
<div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said softly, his eyes pleading. “Lucy, I’m scared. Really scared.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy saw the change come over him. She put her glass down. Her face grew serious, yet, at the same time remained oddly soft. “I think maybe you’re pretty drunk, Johnny,” she said into his sad brown eyes.</div>
<div class="indent">“Yeah, okay, I know, I’m drunk. But I am scared, Lucy, scared real bad.”</div>
<div class="indent">She reached out a hand and gently touched his cheek. “I know, baby, I know. All you guys are scared. It’ll be okay. The war can end soon, real soon, maybe even before you get there.”</div>
<div class="indent">He shook his head. “Not without an invasion, Lucy. They won’t let it end without that. It’s what they want, a big, flashy invasion for the newsreels and the history books. These guys, these presidents and generals and premiers and kings, they don’t live for their <i>lives</i>—they live for history, for some scatterbrained idea of immortality. They don’t care about people’s dreams, your dreams, Bobby’s dreams, my dreams. They just care about history, <i>their</i> place in history, nothing else.” Through the banging now suddenly sounding in his head, Johnny could hear an echoing of his words, an echoing of Willie the Widow Maker’s words.</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy didn’t know who Bobby was, but she knew about dreams. She had her own dreams once, and they hadn’t included whoring in some run-down bar in New Jersey.</div>
<div class="indent">She couldn’t think of anything to say that would be comforting and still carry truthfulness. It occurred to her that truth rarely held comfort for anyone anyway; certainly not for her. So she remained silent, taking his hand and rubbing it gently between her own.</div>
<div class="indent">Johnny raised squinted eyes to meet hers. “Lucy,” he said softly. “Do you believe in fate? Some intervention from God or the universe or something—some force that evens up the score? Do you think there’s an ultimate justice to everything, like we all get what’s coming to us?”</div>
<div class="indent">She pondered it, instinctively aware of, without fully understanding, the deep need in him, the sudden importance of her opinion.</div>
<div class="indent">“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “But—from what I’ve seen so far in life—I’d have to guess, no. No—there is no ultimate justice.” She found herself tensing, her throat seeming to close on itself. “No justice at all.”</div>
<div class="indent">He gave a slight head shake. “I’m not so sure about that. I think, maybe… I’m gonna get what’s comin’ to me.”</div>
<div class="indent">“You’ll be okay, Johnny, you’re not going to get killed.”</div>
<div class="indent">He looked deeper into her eyes. “Killed?” he asked as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Killed? It’s okay if I get killed, Lucy. If I get killed, the show’s over, that’s it, goodnight Irene. I can get killed, that’d be okay; I’m not leaving anything behind. But there’s worse things than that, things I’m <i>really</i> scared of. What if they blow my legs off or shoot my arms off? What if they burn me up, Lucy? I saw a guy back in the neighborhood, some kid I never liked, he’d been a tank gunner. They cooked him in that tank like a roast pepper. He came back lookin’ like a monster. He had no eyelids, Lucy, no eyelids! He had to wear special glasses that made him look like a giant house fly.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy felt her eyes tearing up. “I know, Johnny, I know,” she said. “It’ll be alright, you’ll be alright.”</div>
<div class="indent">He sat back in his chair. Johnny could feel his heart racing. He looked quickly at his watch. It was nearly time to go across to the depot, catch that bus, get out of here. Get back to the neighborhood, maybe go see Willie. Yeah, he thought, that was it. Go see Willie. Tell Willie that he made a mistake, what a fool he had been not to listen. Get me out of this, Willie, please get me out of this! All I wanna do is sing, that’s all, I got nothing against the krauts, the Japs, or those Italian clowns! Just let me stay home and sing. The bartender suddenly cleared his throat harshly. “Okay, folks, drink up, drink ‘em up. Last call, this is it, last call. Closin’ time is midnight, and this here is the last call.”</div>
<div class="indent">Johnny looked at Lucy with panic in his eyes. She forced a smile across to him.</div>
<div class="indent">“It’ll be okay, Johnny. You’ll see, it’ll be okay.”</div>
<div class="indent">He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t. I’m not afraid to die, Lucy, ‘cause I’m already dead. My <i>dream</i> is dead. All I got left are my arms and my legs and my eyes, but no dream. Just like Bobby has no dream left. It’s over, Lucy.”</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy felt a flutter of fear and pity in her heart and believed he was right, sensed somehow he knew what was coming. Her eyes over-brimmed with moisture as she leaned across the table and squeezed his trembling hands.</div>
<div class="indent">“It’ll be okay. You’ll have your dreams, Johnny. It’ll be okay.”</div>
<div class="indent">But cool, hip, smooth-talking Johnny Rondello knew better. It wouldn’t be okay. Maybe it had never been okay.</div>
<div class="indent">He pulled his hand away from Lucy’s and drained his beer glass. As he set it down with trembling fingers, he could feel tears running freely down his cheeks.</div>
<div class="indent">Lucy stood and moved to his side. She took hold of his arm and helped him to his feet. He was unsteady, very drunk.</div>
<div class="indent">“Come on, Johnny,” she said gently. “It’s last call. Let’s get out of here.”</div>
<div class="indent">She took a final look around the barroom.</div>
<div class="indent">“It’s last call,” she repeated.</div>
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Lou Manfredo
A Dozen Ways To Die
$17.95
Step into the gritty world of crime and consequence with award-winning author Lou Manfredo's first collection. "A Dozen Ways to Die" offers twelve meticulously crafted tales that span the breadth of American history and the depths of human nature.
From the smoky speakeasies of Prohibition to the neon-lit streets of modern cities, Manfredo's stories peel back the layers of morality, justice, and the human condition. Meet a cast of unforgettable characters: hardboiled detectives, conflicted soldiers, cunning gangsters, and ordinary people facing extraordinary choices.
Among the twelve stories in this collection, "The Alimony Prison" is a Prohibition-era tale of corruption and survival; "Last Call" is a poignant exploration of a World War II soldier's moral struggle; and "Soul Anatomy" is a contemporary story that delves into the complexities of police shootings and ethical dilemmas.
Manfredo's prose crackles with authenticity, drawing on his extensive experience in law enforcement to paint vivid, realistic portraits of crime and its consequences. His unique blend of classic noir sensibilities and modern storytelling creates a collection that is both timeless and timely.
"A Dozen Ways to Die" is more than just a collection of crime fiction – it's a journey through the darker corners of the American experience, where the lines between right and wrong blur, and every choice has a price.
Perfect for fans of Raymond Chandler, Dennis Lehane, and anyone who appreciates finely crafted crime fiction that goes beyond the surface to explore the complexities of the human psyche.
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<h1 class="center" id="c2">Prologue</h1>
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<div class="indent">Jolo, Sulu Archipelago</div>
<div class="indent">The Philippines</div>
<div class="indent">The Battle of Bud Bagsak</div>
<div class="indent">July 15, 1913</div>
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<h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc">Day Four</h2>
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<div>It was like being wide awake and being caught in the middle of a nightmare.</div>
<div class="indent">How many hours had it been?</div>
<div class="indent">He wished he knew. It was as if time itself had stopped.</div>
<div class="indent">The sweat poured out of Jim Bishop so copiously that it felt like a steady stream of water being poured over his face. His eyes burned and he had to keep blinking to try and clear his vision, but it was no use. The cloying moisture clung to his eyelids. His lips tasted the constant saltiness. It was their third trip up the mountain that day, and once again, their advance stalled as the crater came alive once more. One moment it was all green bushes, thick shrubbery, and clusters of trees and temporal placidity, and the next instant it gave way to a surging wave of brown men dressed in red loincloths and accompanying red headbands, their veins bulging out in bas-relief along limbs bound tight by constricting ligatures and vines. The Moros, or the <i>pulajans</i> as the Filipino Scouts called them, seemed to rise up from behind every bush, every tree, virtually from the dark earth itself. The surge of humanity descended from the lip of the crater, brandishing their razor-sharp <i>talibongs</i>. The rhythmic chant, “<i>Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac</i>,” sounded in unison like an advancing drumbeat.</div>
<div class="indent">Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac—Tagalog for Cut-cut, cut-cut, cut-cut.</div>
<div class="indent">And that’s what they did.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim stopped and raised the muzzle of his Winchester 1897 shotgun, racking the slide back and then forward to chamber a round.</div>
<div class="indent">The man next to him, a young lieutenant who’d just arrived in the country two weeks ago, turned and darted to his right toward the cover of a cluster of trees perhaps ten yards away. From the corner of his eye Jim saw the young officer’s foot snare the elongated vine trigger.</div>
<div class="indent">“Sir,” Jim yelled, taking his eye off the enemy for a split second. “Don’t move!”</div>
<div class="indent">But his warning was a millisecond too late.</div>
<div class="indent">The vine trigger snapped and released a twisted branch in a horizontal arc, sending a row of sharpened spikes into the lieutenant’s body with a sickening thump.</div>
<div class="indent">The officer cried out, but the sound was reduced to a pathetic gurgle as he went limp, bouncing off the branch and flopping down onto his back. A trio of gaping holes, already filling with blood, was stitched across the front of his brown uniform shirt. His legs convulsed, like he was still on his feet, still trying to move away, but with each movement more blood and slithering intestines seeped out of his wounds.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim ran to the man, but could tell he was dying.</div>
<div class="indent">He wanted to offer some comfort, some assurance that it would be all right, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie. A few seconds later, he saw that it didn’t matter anyway. Vacuous eyes, still wide open from the shock, stared directly upward, unflinching under the unbearably bright sun as it shone down.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>Dead</i>, Jim thought.</div>
<div class="indent">There was no time for sentiment or mendacious words</div>
<div class="indent">The ominous mantra continued unabated: “Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac . . .”</div>
<div class="indent">The Moros were almost upon them. The sons of bitches were savages, fighting with bows and arrows and spears and traps. They had some guns, but not a lot, and those huge talibong knifes could chop you apart with one solid swing. They gave no quarter, nor did they expect any. Worst yet, they kept the families with them like human shields—old men, women, children. It was sickening.</div>
<div class="indent">Shots rang out to Jim’s left.</div>
<div class="indent">From his kneeling position by the dead lieutenant, he raised the shotgun, aimed at the nearest advancing <i>pulajan</i>, and pulled the trigger. The double-aught buck load ripped into the Moro’s side, tearing a large swath of skin and a hunk of meat away. The Moro stumbled for two steps as his mouth twisted into a scowl, the talibong still raised above his head.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>Damn, these Moros are tough</i>, Jim thought as he worked the slide and chambered another round. The oblong blade caught a glint of sunlight for a moment before descending in an oblique arc.</div>
<div class="indent">The shotgun discharged again and this time the pulagam went down, enveloped in a crimson mist.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim felt the flecks of blood and body tissue dapple his face as the world suddenly went silent for several seconds.</div>
<div class="indent">Another one came at him.</div>
<div class="indent">A shotgun boomed off to his left.</div>
<div class="indent">Larry Rush was next to Jim now, the trail of smoke trickling upward from his shotgun muzzle as the advancing Moro’s head exploded like a muskmelon struck by an axe handle. The man did an awkward, headless pirouette as he went down. Rush chambered another round and moved next to Jim.</div>
<div class="indent">“The lieutenant dead?” Rush asked. He was shouting, but his voice still sounded far away.</div>
<div class="indent">Far away . . .</div>
<div class="indent">If only they could all be far away.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim grunted a response as he sighted in on another rushing Moro and fired.</div>
<div class="indent">Three more advanced from the left. Rush swiveled and blasted one, but the second one did a stutter-step, leaned back, and hurled a long bamboo spear. It sailed toward them. The next instant Rush dropped his weapon and grabbed his thigh as the pointed tip of the spear tore through the inner part of his pant leg. He toppled over, his eyes rolling back into his head.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim turned and fired. The rounds took down the assailant, but two more were closing in on them. He fired once more. One of the oncoming Moros took the hit in the side, but kept advancing, taking three slack steps before collapsing. Jim racked the slide back and then forward, chambering what he knew was his last remaining round, and fired again. The blast hit the closest man. He jerked forward, then curled into a fetal position as he fell to the ground.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>No more ammo</i>, Jim thought, gripping the Winchester’s hot barrel and stock. Despite the overheated metal searing his skin, he managed to bring the rifle up just in time to block the descent of another Moro’s two-foot-long talibong. The solid blade chunked into the wooden slide, splintering it. Jim twisted the rifle free and simultaneously rammed the base of the stock into the Filipino’s face. The man’s jaw jerked out of alignment and he paused just long enough for Jim to kick him in the groin as hard as he could. The Moro grimaced but drew back the large knife, ready to take another deadly swing.</div>
<div class="indent">A split-second burst of fire and smoke whipped between them, and the Moro’s head snapped to the side as a shot rang out. Rush had managed to pull out his long-barreled Colt .45 revolver and fire it. Jim dropped the Winchester and drew his own revolver. Cocking back the hammer, he fired at the next group of advancing Moros. A burst of red blossomed on one man’s upper torso, just under his clavicle, but that didn’t stop him. A diagonal constricting loop of twine bisected the man’s chest, limiting the bleeding and enabling him to keep moving. Jim adjusted his aim, lining up the rear, M-shaped sight on the revolver with the single bar of the tip of the barrel.</div>
<div class="indent">“Keep them damn sights flat across the top,” his drill sergeant had yelled at him in basic training.</div>
<div class="indent">He squeezed the trigger. His next round pierced his adversary’s right eye.</div>
<div class="indent">He fired four more times with undetermined results. The short, sweaty bodies kept coming, like a brown tidal wave capped with red. Jim turned to reach for Rush’s gun but saw his was empty, too.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>The lieutenant</i>, Jim thought. He sidestepped to the right and knelt beside the fallen officer. His fingers scrambled to undo the dead man’s flap holster before feeling a textured grip. He pulled the weapon out and saw it was one of those new 1911 semiautomatic pistols, something only a few of the officers had. They were supposedly sitting in crates in New York Harbor or someplace, their distribution to the troops in the Philippines delayed by yet another layer of bureaucratic inefficiency. It was rumored that a few, a very few, of the officers had managed to sneak a special shipment in, and that was apparently true. The magazine purportedly held seven rounds, but Jim had never fired one.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>No time like the present to learn</i>, he thought as he brought the pistol up, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.</div>
<div class="indent">Nothing.</div>
<div class="indent">In desperation he cocked back the hammer and tried again.</div>
<div class="indent">The next trio of Moros was almost on top of them.</div>
<div class="indent">The hammer clacked down and still the weapon didn’t fire.</div>
<div class="indent">Was it a dud?</div>
<div class="indent"><i>No</i>, he thought. <i>It’s just like a shotgun.</i> <i>There’s no round in the chamber.</i></div>
<div class="indent">Gripping the row of vertical lines on the rear of the slide, he racked it back, felt it catch, and then whip forward.</div>
<div class="indent">The Moro was raising his talibong over Rush’s supine body when this time the Colt’s round pierced the area just under the pulagam’s left armpit. The Moro fell like a marionette whose strings had been abruptly severed. Jim adjusted his aim and fired two more rounds, putting one into each of the advancing would-be killers. He dropped to one knee and frantically searched the dead lieutenant’s pouch for more magazines.</div>
<div class="indent">Suddenly the sound of distant thunder rumbled accompanied by a screaming sound. Another set of rumbles along with more whistles and a burst of explosions echoed further up the ridge, by the mouth of the crater.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>Artillery</i>, Jim thought. <i>Blackjack’s got the 40th zeroed in on them</i>.</div>
<div class="indent">He felt a surge of hope as the area along the lip of the crater, where he knew the last Moro stronghold was, erupted in more roiling clouds of dust.</div>
<div class="indent">The Moro advance suddenly halted, their heads rotating back toward the spiraling dust clouds farther up the hill, their eyes widening in horror.</div>
<div class="indent">Jim knew their families, the women, the children, the elderly, were all up there in this last cotta. They had nowhere left to run. Orders were to wipe them all out.</div>
<div class="indent">A company of Filipino Scouts, their brown uniforms drenched with sweat, streamed forward from the right flank and the left, their rifles barking fire, their bayonets fixed. They’d taken the brunt of the Moros’ attacks before and now they’d regrouped. From the look on their faces, no quarter would be given.</div>
<div class="indent">Nor none expected.</div>
<div class="indent"><i>Thank God</i>, he thought. <i>Maybe this nightmare is going to be over with now.</i></div>
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<div class="center">***</div>
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<div class="indent"><i>Historical Note</i></div>
<div>The final siege then started at seventeen-hundred-oh-five hours. Three hours later it was over.</div>
<div class="indent">Or was it?</div>
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Michael A. Black
Where Legends Lie
$17.95
1913. Veteran Jim Bishop takes a job with a motion picture company that is filming a movie based on a famous western gunfight. As the filming proceeds, Jim begins to wonder what really happened in Contention City, Arizona, those thirty-three years ago.
1880. In the actual Contention City, Sheriff Lon Dayton is contacted by the notorious Dutch Bascom regarding the territorial governor’s proclamation of amnesty for Bascom and his gang. Dayton has no choice but to walk the tightrope balancing the alleged intentions of the outlaws against the promises of the unscrupulous politicians and railroad men who claim to be in favor of the outlaw’s surrender. But are they really?
Dane Cobain
MEAT
$17.95
Veterinarian Tom Copeland takes a job at a factory farm called Sunnyvale after a scandal at his suburban practice. His job is to keep the animals alive for long enough to get them to slaughter.
But there are rumours of a strange creature living beneath the complex, accidents waiting to happen on brutal production lines and the threat of zoonotic disease from the pigs, sheep, cows, chickens and fish that the complex houses.
Suddenly, disaster rocks Sunnyvale and cleaners, butchers, security guards and clerical staff alike must come together under the ruthless leadership of CEO John MacDonald. Together, they’ll learn what happens when there’s a sudden change to the food chain.
Bon appétit.
Dan Harary
FIVE: A Novella
$14.95
Meet Billy Sorrows, the gifted young singer who makes women cry...
An orphan living in 1860s London, Feival Vados, has been taken in by an ogre of a man after the young boy’s parents—famed Hungarian actors—perish in a mysterious fire. When ten-year-old Feival, nicknamed “Five,” is summoned to the deathbed of his charge, the heinous old man orders the young boy to become his sin-eater. What Five learns that day will change the course of his adult life, giving rise to a monstrous thirst that even his own death does not quench.One hundred years later, young Boston native Billy Simon, a music prodigy, makes his way into Manhattan, where he is soon discovered. Through the machinations of his legendary talent agent, Billy quickly becomes a pop music superstar. However, after Billy’s beloved girlfriend is brutally murdered by one of his female fans, he is devastated to his core. Billy’s overwhelming sorrow leads him to commit a series of brutal murders, mysteriously connecting him to the late Feival Vados in ways the gifted singer/songwriter could never possibly come to understand.
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