Tresia was murdered on March 21, 1992. She was in her BMW in a gas station parking lot, attempting to use a payphone to call her husband, who was three blocks away in his office building. Three gang members approached her car. One of those killers brandished a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. He then shot her, at point-blank range, through her driver window. The fired shot blew a hole through her driver's window and entered her body (just below her left arm and shoulder), exploding her heart. We were later informed that her husband, only one minute away, in his railroad employment office, drove to the gas station parking lot where Tresia was shot, removed her body from her car, then placed her in his truck, driving her the furthest distance until she died on the way to the nearest hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced DOA in the emergency room. Years of doubt, anger, and grief have crippled my family, leaving us with unanswered questions, hurt, and enormous loss. We felt that no one understood what we were going through. It seemed to us no one cared, and the ones that acted as if they did slowly fell away like leaves on a tree approaching fall season. We felt ostracized and discarded, like we had a disease. Even those who were close to us avoided our family. We felt very alone and isolated. We were suffering. We were grieving. We had no one to tell us what was about to unfold in our lives or how Tresia's murder was going to change the course of our lives. We didn't understand the anger that we were feeling. Each and every task we set out to accomplish seemed to have stumbling blocks in front of them. The Christian family we had once known and grown to love over the years washed away like waves in the sea and disappeared from our memories as well because they did not reach out to us in our time of mourning. This was an added loss to us because we believed they loved us, would be there for us if we ever needed them, and that they cared about us. Instead, they acted afraid, like they did not want to be involved. Some of my former friends acted as though they were thinking my family was cursed, and even stated in our presence that we possibly did something to anger God and that we were being punished, that perhaps God was unleashing his wrath on us. This couldn't have been further from the truth. Murdered without Cause was written with the sole intention(s) of sharing Tresia's story to help others in overcoming their loss of a loved one by murder. This book was also written to restore peace in my family to obtain a sense of closure that we never knew existed and to establish unspeakable justice by assisting survivors. The only way to cope with any loss by murder is to continue to pray and seek God's divine purpose for your own life. By reaching out to you, the survivor of a loved one murdered, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was no book written, in 1992, that could tell us how we were going to feel or what we were going to go through. With this writing, my wish is to guide you through the stages of shock, anger, and grief, so you are able to rediscover a hope that moves you forward out of your sorrow, courage to lift your journey and a vision to claim a new purpose in life.

Tresia was murdered on March 21, 1992. She was in her BMW in a gas station parking lot, attempting to use a payphone to call her husband, who was three blocks away in his office building. Three gang members approached her car. One of those killers brandished a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. He then shot her, at point-blank range, through her driver window. The fired shot blew a hole through her driver's window and entered her body (just below her left arm and shoulder), exploding her heart. We were later informed that her husband, only one minute away, in his railroad employment office, drove to the gas station parking lot where Tresia was shot, removed her body from her car, then placed her in his truck, driving her the furthest distance until she died on the way to the nearest hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced DOA in the emergency room. Years of doubt, anger, and grief have crippled my family, leaving us with unanswered questions, hurt, and enormous loss. We felt that no one understood what we were going through. It seemed to us no one cared, and the ones that acted as if they did slowly fell away like leaves on a tree approaching fall season. We felt ostracized and discarded, like we had a disease. Even those who were close to us avoided our family. We felt very alone and isolated. We were suffering. We were grieving. We had no one to tell us what was about to unfold in our lives or how Tresia's murder was going to change the course of our lives. We didn't understand the anger that we were feeling. Each and every task we set out to accomplish seemed to have stumbling blocks in front of them. The Christian family we had once known and grown to love over the years washed away like waves in the sea and disappeared from our memories as well because they did not reach out to us in our time of mourning. This was an added loss to us because we believed they loved us, would be there for us if we ever needed them, and that they cared about us. Instead, they acted afraid, like they did not want to be involved. Some of my former friends acted as though they were thinking my family was cursed, and even stated in our presence that we possibly did something to anger God and that we were being punished, that perhaps God was unleashing his wrath on us. This couldn't have been further from the truth. Murdered without Cause was written with the sole intention(s) of sharing Tresia's story to help others in overcoming their loss of a loved one by murder. This book was also written to restore peace in my family to obtain a sense of closure that we never knew existed and to establish unspeakable justice by assisting survivors. The only way to cope with any loss by murder is to continue to pray and seek God's divine purpose for your own life. By reaching out to you, the survivor of a loved one murdered, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was no book written, in 1992, that could tell us how we were going to feel or what we were going to go through. With this writing, my wish is to guide you through the stages of shock, anger, and grief, so you are able to rediscover a hope that moves you forward out of your sorrow, courage to lift your journey and a vision to claim a new purpose in life.

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Because there was only evidence to convict Williams for the murders of two men, the children's cases were closed, offering no justice to the families or the country. Baldwin's incisive analysis implicates the failures of integration as the guilt party, arguing, "There could be no more devastating proof of this assault than the slaughter of the children." As Stacey Abrams writes in her foreword, "The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin's writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort." In this, his last book, by excavating American race relations Baldwin exposes the hard-to-face ingrained issues and demands that we all reckon with them.

Charles Manson, Aileen Wuornos, Burke & Hare, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, and other remorseless serial murderers whose crimes made history. From Victorian era graveyards to a rented room in Paris to an isolated Indian farm and the California hills, the shocking murders collected in this true crime anthology span the century and the continents. The motivations are just as varied: sex, greed, bloodlust, hatred, and the sheer thrill of it all. But the more than thirty serial killers profiled here share one perverse trait: they killed without conscience, regret, or shame. Money did it for dapper French ladykiller Henri Landru, homicidal housewife Nannie Doss, Lady Bluebeard Belle Gunness, and Lonely Hearts Killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. Deadly desires moved Green River Killer Gary Ridgway, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, and John Christie, whose Notting Hill home was a burial ground. And rage was the trigger for Edmund Kemper, who used his mother’s head for a dart board, and for nomadic prostitute Aileen Wuornos who turned her tricks into road kill. In crime journalist Nigel Blundell’s criminally fascinating collection, you will meet the loners, outcasts, lethal lovebirds, twisted fetishists, pleasure seekers, body snatchers, and angels of death who are the very definition of cold-blooded.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.