Ohio

The last Public Enemy No. 1 of the Depression era, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis reportedly compiled a record of fifty-four aliases, fifteen bank robberies, fourteen murders, three jailbreaks and two kidnappings.

His criminal career came to an end when J. Edgar Hoover and his famed G-Men apprehended the man they wanted more than any other in New Orleans. From there, Karpis found himself confined on Alcatraz Island, where he spent nearly twenty-six years - more than any inmate in the prison's history. Historian Julie Thompson tells the true story of Karpis's life and career, a riveting tale taking readers from rural Kansas and Ohio to the bustling streets of the Big Easy and into the bleak innards of "the Rock."

Steubenville Ohio, a mecca of murder was nicknamed "Little Chicago" with gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging running rampant for over one hundred years.

Steubenville's Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurrence. Law enforcement seemed to turn a blind eye, and cries of political corruption were heard in the state capital. This scenario replayed itself over and over again during the past century as mobsters and madams ruled and murders plagued the city and county at an alarming rate.

Uncover the full extent of mayhem and madness locked away in one of history's most notorious maximum-security prisons.

As animal factories go, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the worst. For 150 years, it housed some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States, including murderers, madmen and mobsters. Peer in on America's first vampire, accused of sucking his victims' blood five years before Bram Stoker's fictional villain was even born; peek into the cage of the original Prison Demon; and witness the daring escape of John Hunt Morgan's band of Confederate prisoners.

What started as an institution to reform young and non-violent criminals became one of the most infamous prisons in American history.

Before 1884, most first-time offenders between the ages of 16 and 30 were housed in the Ohio Penitentiary, where they were likely to be influenced by hardened criminals. That changed when the Ohio Legislature approved the building of a reformatory, a new type of institution that would educate and train these young men. Since its opening in 1896, the reformatory expanded its training programs and became a self-sustaining institution - the largest of its kind in the United States. By 1970, the reformatory had become a maximum-security prison filled with the most dangerous criminals in the U.S., with a death row but no death chamber. It closed on December 31, 1990, but preservation and restoration efforts are ongoing, and it continues to be as infamous today as in its heyday, appearing in numerous television shows and feature films, including The Shawshank Redemption.

Award-winning crime writer Jane Ann Turzillo recounts the stories of Ohio's most notorious vixens, viragoes and villainesses.

The Buckeye State produced its share of wicked women. Tenacious madam Clara Palmer contended with constant police raids during the 1880s and '90s. Only her death could shut the doors of her gilded bordello in Cleveland. Failed actress Mildred Gillars left for Europe right before World War II. Because she fell in love with the wrong man, she wound up peddling Nazi propaganda on the radio as "Axis Sally." Volatile Hester Foster was already doing time at the Ohio State Penitentiary when she bashed in the head of a fellow inmate with a shovel. The sinister Anna Marie Hahn dosed at least five elderly Cincinnati men with arsenic and croton oil and then watched them die in agony while pretending to nurse them back to health.

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.

Award-winning true crime author Jane Turzillo brings together the strippers, gangsters, robbers, shady politicians, and more from Cleveland's rough and rowdy past.

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.

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.

Wicked Akron, Ohio takes the reader on a journey through the seedy underbelly of the city's history.

Akron is known as "the rubber capital of the world'? and home to Goodyear. But look beneath those tires and you will find dirt…a lot of dirt! Explore Akron's darkest days, when citizens burned city hall to the ground and members of the Ku Klux Klan called the shots from the schoolhouse to the courthouse. Meet a grave robber who became a political leader, a mobster who ordered police murders and a beloved bootlegger turned bail bondsman. Say hello to Frank Hurn, a flashy, frenetic, fast-talking con man who was looking for suckers to invest in the Vulcans, an NFL team he promised to bring to Akron. From city saloon to suburban hideout, this is an alternative history lesson of the sometimes dicey coexistence of the well-heeled and the workers, men and women who lived big lives during Akron's fledgling days as a canal port, its pre-Depression heyday and zenith as a Midwestern industrial success story.

Author Kymberli Hagelberg, an award-winning journalist and native Northeast Ohioan, takes the reader on a morbidly-entertaining tour of the shadowy corners of Akron's history. With stories including mobsters and body snatchers, con men and Klansmen, plagues and fires, there is truly something for fans of local history and true crime stories.