Products

On December 11, 1931, chaos erupted behind Leavenworth's limestone penitentiary walls as seven desperate men put months of planning into action. Aided by notorious gangsters Frank Nash, George "Machine Gun" Kelly and Thomas James Holden, they blazed a path to freedom with stolen cars and terrorized hostages. Anyone who could carry a gun and knew the terrain quickly picked up the pursuit. Kenneth LaMaster wades into the flying bullets of first-person accounts, news reports and official FBI files for the full story of the frenzied prison break.

Kansans like to think of their state as a land of industrious, law-abiding and friendly people, and for the most part they are correct. But its history has many tales of murders, cons, extrajudicial killings and other crimes. Its restive frontier attracted menacing characters, such as a cowboy who murdered a man for snoring, the serial-killing Bender family and the train-robbing James-Younger Gang. Although the area was eventually settled, the scandals did not cease. Learn about how a quack doctor nearly won the governorship, a decommissioned nuclear missile silo housed the largest LSD manufacturing operation in American history and more. Author Adrian Zink explores the salacious side of Kansas history in these wild and degenerate stories.