Massachusetts

Name: Murder at Breakheart Hill Farm
Brand: Douglas L. Heath
SKU: 9781467143691
Price: 21.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Ted Williams, lanky body coiled, wallops another rocket at Fenway’s Green Monster. A youthful “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman sprouts up in Longmeadow, while Howard Johnson plants his first franchise in Quincy. An old dune shack teems with life along the Cape Cod National Seashore. Seven hundred schoolchildren pour through Nantucket streets to march against King Alcohol. Whether it is a nostalgic jaunt through Cambridge or a bit of window shopping at Jordan Marsh, our Massachusetts history books catalogue celebrates every corner of Bay State history. [View all Massachusetts books]

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Murder at Breakheart Hill Farm

The Cape Cod Murder of 1899: Edwin Ray Snow's Punishment & Redemption

The Boston Mob Guide

Boston Gentlemen's Mob, The

Murder & Mayhem in Central Massachusetts

Pittsfield's Fosburgh Murder Mystery

Mystery on the Vineyard:

Murder at Breakheart Hill Farm

9781467143691

$21.99

On a dark, rainy night in October 1900, George E. Bailey, caretaker of Breakheart Hill farm, disappeared. He no longer made his daily milk runs to town or stopped at the tavern for his favorite cherry rum. Some suspected foul play right away, as Bailey's "wife" had recently gone to Maine, leaving Bailey alone with his farmhand, John C. Best, who was known to be a drunk and a potentially violent man. Nine days later, when Bailey's dismembered body was fished out of a local pond, all eyes quickly focused on Best. Crowds descended on the farm, and the sensational murder captured headlines in Boston's newspapers. Using official records and newspaper archives, authors Douglas L. Heath and Alison C. Simcox uncover the facts and bizarre circumstances of this shocking tale.

The Cape Cod Murder of 1899: Edwin Ray Snow's Punishment & Redemption

9781596292277

$21.99

On a crisp September evening in 1899, a seventeen-year-old petty thief named Edwin Ray Snow shot and killed a bakery deliveryman named Jimmy Whittemore outside Yarmouth. The gunshots rang out for only a moment, but the effects resounded on Cape Cod for half a century. The idyllic atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Cape Cod was shattered in a flash. Soon after the crime, Snow pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, and was the first person ever to be sentenced to death by electric chair in Massachusetts history. But his compelling story didn't end there, and his redemption--earned through decades of hard time--was as dramatic and uplifting as his crime was heinous. Drawing upon town records, historical documents, correspondence and newspapers of the day, The Cape Cod Murder of 1899 recreates the towns of Dennis and Yarmouth at the turn of the century and examines the details of a murder that shook Cape Cod to its core.

The Boston Mob Guide

9781609494209

$19.99

Boston journalists Beverly Ford and Stephanie Schorow navigate the backrooms and seedy hangouts throughout the real story of Boston's gangster past.

The capture of notorious mobster James "Whitey" Bulger closed an infamous chapter in Boston history, yet the city's criminal underworld has a long and bloody rap sheet that stretches back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Ford and Schorow reveal the underbelly of Boston through profiles of ruthless gangsters like Charles "King" Solomon, the Angiulo brothers, Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi and many more who carried out deadly hits and lucrative heists.

Boston Gentlemen's Mob, The

9781467150910

$21.99

Violent mobs, racial unrest, attacks on the press--it's the fall of 1835 and the streets of Boston are filled with bankers, merchants and other "gentlemen of property and standing" angered by an emergent antislavery movement. They break up a women's abolitionist meeting and seize newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison. While city leaders stand by silently, a small group of women had the courage to speak out. Author Josh Cutler tells the story of the Gentlemen's Mob through the eyes of four key participants: antislavery reformer Maria Chapman; pioneering schoolteacher Susan Paul; the city's establishment mayor, Theodore Lyman; and Wendell Phillips, a young attorney who wanders out of his office to watch the spectacle. The day's events forever changed the course of the abolitionist movement.

Murder & Mayhem in Central Massachusetts

9781467119276

$21.99

The bucolic image of central Massachusetts belies a dark and sometimes deadly past. Grisly crimes and grim misdeeds reach back to colonial settlement in Worcester County, from an escaped slave hanged for rape in 1768 at the Worcester jail to the Sutton choir singer convicted of drowning his wife in 1935. Henry Hammond's 1899 suicide and the others that followed shook Spencer residents to their cores. Some crimes still grip the imaginations of residents, while others have faded from collective memory. Author Rachel Faugno investigates this sinister history.

Pittsfield's Fosburgh Murder Mystery

9781467118279

$21.99

Shots rang out in a prominent Pittsfield family home on the morning of August 20, 1900, ending the life of young socialite May Fosburgh. Who pulled the trigger was unclear, and the scandal captivated attention well beyond the Berkshires. Her brother was a top suspect, but the distraught family claimed an intruder was to blame. Investigators, media and the public struggled to make sense of conflicting details, including suspicious gunpowder residue, as the mystery remained unsolved. Author Frank J. Leskovitz unravels the tale that still lingers in the hills generations later.

Mystery on the Vineyard:

9781596294233

$21.99

In the pre, World War II innocence of small-town America, a dapper off-Islander impresses the locals. Drawn to the prettiest girl, he is upset when an elderly woman tries to break off their romance. In a drunken stupor he murders the troublesome woman. Through an amazing confluence of circumstances, he avoids prosecution. The reclusive, paranoid teacher of the victim attracts the attention of a distracted district attorney who is eager for a sensational trial to promote himself in an impending election. The teacher is arrested and charged with the murder. The looming shadows of war on the international stage capture the people of Martha's Vineyard, and the local murder fades into the murky memoirs of history.