“Guy is not only a historian but a longtime police officer in Ohio, bringing firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system” to the Phantom Killer tale (Crime Capsule). Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, and Steubenville hoped that its reputation as “Little Chicago” would end with it. That hope was short-lived when, eight weeks later, the Phantom Killer made his midnight debut. Under the glow of a full moon, in the mill yards of Steubenville’s Wheeling Steel Plant, the killer ambushed a rail worker, shooting him five times. The Steubenville Police Department, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and Wheeling Steel Mill Police joined forces in the New Year to find the Phantom before he took another victim. The strongest of millworkers on the midnight shift began to arm themselves, wondering who would be next. As the investigation wore on, Steubenville was once again thrust into the national spotlight as the Phantom’s reign of terror continued. Local historian Susan M. Guy delves into one of the city’s most infamous crimes.

This true crime history chronicles more than a century in the life of a small Midwestern city with an outsized reputation for violence and vice. Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging have been going on in Steubenville for well over century. In its heyday, the city’s Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurrence. This revealing history chronicles the rise of Steubenville’s prodigious underworld from the 1890s to the modern day. By the turn of the century, Steubenville’s law enforcement seemed to turn a blind eye, and cries of political corruption were heard in the state capital. This scenario replayed itself over and over again during the past century as mobsters and madams ruled and murders plagued the city and surrounding county at an alarming rate. Newspapers nationwide would come to nickname this mecca of murder "Little Chicago."

Bibliography: p. 128.

In the summer of 1957, a young Holmes County farmer was gunned down in cold blood. There was little to distinguish this slaying from hundreds of others throughout the United States that year except for one detail: Paul Coblentz was Amish. A committed pacifist, Coblentz would not raise a hand against his killers. As sensational crimes often do, the "Amish murder" opened a window into the private lives of the young man, his family and his community--a community that in some respects remains as enigmatic today as it was more than half a century ago. Authors of Wicked Columbus, Ohio's Black Hand Syndicate and others, David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker unravel the intricacies surrounding one of Ohio's most intriguing murder cases.