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Death & Destruction in the Queen City

Cincinnati's history is rife with reprehensible crimes and great tragedies. In 1874, a brutal murder caught the attention of a strange and notorious journalist who turned the crime into a legend. In the 1930s, Cincinnati resident Anna Marie Hahn became Ohio's first female serial killer and the first woman executed in its electric chair--but she isn't the only serial killer to have darkened the dangerous streets of the city. Murderers are not the only monsters. Microbes did the dirty work in 1849 and 1919, and Mother Nature herself turned killer in 1937 when the Ohio River lethally overflowed its banks.

Explore stories of murder and catastrophe as author and history lecturer Roy Heizer leads this dark journey into the sinister side of Cincinnati.

The author of Michigan's Haunted Lighthouses shares tales of disaster and misfortune on the Great Lakes.

Losing one's life while tending to a Great Lakes lighthouse sadly wasn't such an unusual occurrence. Death by murder, suicide or other tragic causes--while rare--were not unheard of. Two keepers on Lake Superior's Grand Island disappeared one early summer day in 1908, their decomposed remains found weeks later. A newly hired and some say depressed keeper on Pilot Island in Wisconsin's Door County slit his own throat after a consultation with a local butcher about the location of the jugular vein. A smallpox outbreak in the late 1890s led to the tragic death of a lighthouse hired hand on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Join author Dianna Stampfler as she uncovers the facts (and debunks some fiction) behind some of the Great Lakes' darkest lighthouse tales.

Known for friendly people, traditional family values, and the Packers, Green Bay is a big city with a small-town feel. But resting beneath its welcoming demeanor is an underbelly of wickedness that has been there from its very formation. /

The city’s downtown district rests atop one of Wisconsin’s oldest burial sites, and the west side was the location for the state’s second recorded hanging, which was at the time the punishment for murder. And the city’s beloved football team once drafted one of America’s worst serial killers./

Compiling stories of stolen skulls, underground gangs, and crimes so horrendous and shocking they made national news, Timothy Freiss reveals a side of Green Bay few have seen./ 

From the author of Lost Milwaukee comes an exploration of the criminal side of the Cream City.

Milwaukee saw its share of violence as it transformed from frontier village to modern metropolis. The city was barely established when an argument over a bridge linking east and west was nearly settled with cannon fire. A local developer killed his estranged wife, severed her head, and burned it in the furnace of the apartment building he built. A wronged woman murdered her lover on a busy downtown street and was found innocent by a sympathetic jury. Another woman lethally poisoned her family and laughed about it in the press.

From a robbery in which the bandits got away by stealing a streetcar to the attempted assassination of President Theodore Roosevelt, local historian Carl Swanson uncovers dramatic true stories of villainy and murder from Milwaukee's long-forgotten past.

Scott County is one of the oldest counties in Iowa. It is where the Blackhawk Treaty was signed and where the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River was built. But Scott County has also been witness to many shameful deeds. Travel down Utica Ridge Road, where young Grace Reed paid the ultimate price for spurning the affections of a local farmer. Enter the bedroom of Margaretha Nehlsen, who poisoned her children with chocolate candies. Hear the tale of Harry Hamilton, a former policeman turned career criminal who played a key part in perhaps the most infamous bank robbery in Scott County history. Come and explore these stories and more with author John Brassard Jr. as he guides you through the darker side of Scott County history.

Ride Ohio's rails with some of the bravest trainmen and most vicious killers and robbers to ever roll down the tracks.

The West may have had Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, but Ohio had its own brand of train robbers. Discover how Alvin Karpis knocked off an Erie Railroad train and escaped with $34,000. Learn about the first peacetime train holdup that took place in North Bend when thieves derailed the Kate Jackson, robbed its passengers and blew the Adam's Express safe. Make no mistake--railroading was a dangerous job in bygone days.

Explore the investigative intricacies and courtroom drama of crimes of passion, greed, and revenge in Stark County, Ohio.

Rendered in painstaking detail, accounts of high-profile killings and courtroom intrigue filled the pages of Stark County's early newspapers. The triple hanging of three teenage boys in 1880 seized the attention of the entire community. When George Saxton, notorious womanizer and President McKinley's brother-in-law, was shot dead on the front lawn of his widowed lover in 1898, the whole nation looked on. For the brutal slaying of his wife, James Cornelius became the first local prison inmate executed in the electric chair in 1906.

Using contemporary local newspaper accounts, Kim Kenney, author of Canton's Pioneers in Flight and coauthor of Stark County Food tells the story of eight Stark County murders, unfolding the grisly details while honoring the lives cut short by violence.