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With an eye for bizarre, macabre detail, Keven McQueen tracks down seventeen true crimes and unsolved mysteries in this collection of historic Hoosier homicides.

This grim collection of tales includes unimaginable incidents like the Indianapolis businessman whose car contained suspicious hams and the man who handed his new bride a drink of carbolic acid. It also reveals the tragedy of Gary's beautiful Arlene Draves, killed by her football player boyfriend, as well as a surprisingly comic courtroom revelation by Hammond's Hazel McNally that cleared her of all charges.

Author Keven McQueen is an instructor in the Department of English at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of twelve books on biography, history, folklore, ghost lore, natural disasters and historical true crime.

Nettie Herskovitz was wealthy and widowed. Her suitor, Harry Diamond, was a dashing young bootlegger a decade and a half her junior. At first she resisted his advances, but soon the two were married with an infant daughter. Disinterested in a domestic life, Diamond shot Nettie on Valentine's Day 1923 while riding in their Hudson sedan. He tried to pin the crime on the fleeing chauffeur, but Diamond made a mistake. Though mortally wounded, Nettie lived long enough to identify her attacker to police and change her will. The sensational Diamond murder became tabloid fodder--a Roaring Twenties story of roadhouse floozies, illegal booze, orphaned children, trust funds and legal acrobatics.

Hear tales from the Circle City's murderous underbelly, from poor Silvia Likens, who was tortured for months by her foster mother and eventually discovered dead, to Carrie Selvage, whose skeleton was found in an attic twenty years after she disappeared from a hospital bed in 1900. Discover how housekeepers found Dorothy Poore stuffed in a dresser drawer on a July day in 1954 and the curious story of Marjorie Jackson, her body was discovered clothed in pajama bottoms and a flannel robe on her kitchen floor, and police found $5 million hidden around her house in garbage cans, drawers, closets, toolboxes and a vacuum cleaner bag. Join local historian Fred Cavinder as he recounts the gruesome tales of Indiana's capital city, from mystery to murder.

Prepare to take a tour of some dark, strange moments of southern Indiana's history.

From the scheming wife who wanted her dull husband out of the way to make room for a young love affair and the husband who stomped his wife to death because she wouldn't stop singing an irritating song, to the man who murdered an entire family to pay off some farming equipment and the case of a mistaken-identity murder, author Keven McQueen relates the sinister (or not so) motives and gruesome details of nine murders that occurred in southern Indiana between 1880 and 1912. With a detailed, if macabre, look at each story as well as the ambiguities surrounding the criminals and punishments, McQueen illuminates the darker side of Hoosier history.