(A 117-page True Crime Short with photographs) Between 1968 and 1985, a monstrous serial killer stalked the picturesque countryside around Florence, shooting and mutilating eight couples on moonless nights. The desecration of the women’s bodies was a scene beyond the wildest imaginations of movie scriptwriters. Murder on the New Moon tells the exceptionally bizarre and twisted tale about a city gripped by fear, dozens of suspects, a string of charges and convictions followed by embarrassing acquittals and pardons, and an ever-raging whirlpool of theories, rumors and conspiracy that still divides Italians today. The anonymous assailant, called The Monster of Florence or Il Mostro di Firenze , commands an enduring mystery which includes all the hallmarks and enduring intrigue of Jack the Ripper. Most disturbing of all, he may still be at large…After a quarter of a century of failure, only a brave detective takes the plunge back into the impossibly murky waters of this uniquely baffling case. The politics, egos, rivalries, and conspiracy theories that hampered each investigation still overshadow his new search for the killer. The investigation also links to the 2008 murder of British student Meredith Kercher, for which American student Amanda Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted and then freed. The same Perugian judge who propagated outlandish theories of Satanic sex rituals in that case also used such ultimately baseless hypotheses to falsely accuse many prominent Italians of these serial killings, and even threatened to arrest an American writer planning a book on the case. The story once more proves the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, the story is currently being made into a major Hollywood movie, The Monster of Florence, starring George Clooney, scheduled for a 2013 release.

Johnny Sharp (1969-) is a British journalist and author who writes widely on a number of diverse topics from music to humour to sport and true crime. He is author of the new Kindle ebook Murder On The New Moon (2011) and also wrote the humorous music book Crap Lyrics (2009). His work has also appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites, including The Guardian, Mojo, Bizarre and BBC Online. He can be contacted at johnny@johnnysharp.net

(A 58-page True Crime Short with photographs) When his last victim was found, she was buried in a cave, her dismembered limbs wrapped in plastic garbage bags, her head encased in a block of concrete. The tall blond 21-year-old from the United Kingdom had worked in a Tokyo hostess bar. The killer was a Japanese playboy/real-estate developer with a taste for young gaijin women. He had stalked Tokyo’s sex districts for years, paying for the company of modern-day geishas and then inviting his favorites on dates, drugging them, and raping them while he videotaped what he called his “conquest play.” He eventually became so adept at using date-rape drugs most of his victims never knew what had happened to them.

But something went terribly wrong with the English girl. Investigators would discover that eight years earlier he had killed a young Australian beauty with an accidental overdose of chloroform while raping her. He was finally caught thanks to the bulldog tenacity of the English girl’s father, but the families of his foreign victims never anticipated the odd laws that govern the Japanese criminal justice system. It would take ten years before the case was resolved and the atrocities committed by “the beast with a human face” were fully revealed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veteran crime writer Anthony Bruno has investigated many serial offenders in his writing career, interviewing murderers and the cops and prosecutors who put them behind bars. He has written more than 50 articles for Time Warner’s Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. His publishers include Amazon Kindle, Bantam Dell, Forge, HarperCollins, iUniverse, RuggedLand, and St. Martin’s Press. His full-length book, The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story with Joshua Armstrong, was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Bruno’s book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer is the basis for an upcoming feature film starring Benicio Del Toro and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon as The Iceman. Bruno is currently serving as executive producer for this film.

Bruno also assisted with the film adaptation of his novel, Bad Apple, for Turner Network Television. He acted as consultant to the producers and wrote key scenes.

(A 58-page True Crime Short with photographs) Just when you think you’ve heard it all… An entertaining and at times tongue-and-cheek look into cases of bizarre sexually obsessive behaviors (paraphilias) that had unintended consequences. Each chapter briefly explores the lesser-known fetishes and fixations to the more common ones that unexpectedly led to severe injury, imprisonment and death. Case-by-case accounts provide insight into the circumstances surrounding such infamous incidences as the deaths of INXS singer Michael Hutchence and actor David Carradine, who were believed to have accidently died from auto-erotica asphyxiation, and the more recent Northern Virginia “Serial Butt Slasher” case, where women shopping in malls were brutally stabbed in the behind by an by a suspect identified on a mall video tape. These unusual and often disconcerting accounts seriously challenge the adage “What feels good can’t be wrong.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachael Bell has master’s degrees in both Clinical Forensic and Health Psychology and worked for Time Warner’s Crime Library (previously Court TV) for more than a decade researching, reporting and writing more than 70 in-depth feature stories on major criminal cases, such as O.J. Simpson, the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. She has also worked for more than a decade as a mental health therapist in psychiatric hospitals and forensic institutes in Europe and the United States, specializing in adult, adolescent and teenage male and female sex offenders, as well as with patients with other psychiatric problems. Her vast experience in the realm of abnormal psychology and the legal system has provided her with unique insight into understanding criminal and deviant behaviors.

(A 70-page True Crime Short with photographs) One cold February night, two people on the way home from a satisfying dinner with friends were ambushed by a rain of gunfire from the balcony of their own home. When the killer was finished, both victims lay dying. He stood over the man and then his mother, and fired one last round in each to “end their pain.” The murderer was a family man, a former police officer, and a former Mormon missionary. He then took his terrified wife and screaming daughter, and they ran, shoeless, into the night, initiating a nationwide search for the “armed and extremely dangerous” couple. Their cross-country trail of lies culminated in an episode of the television show America’s Most Wanted and ended in a SWAT-team assault on the other side of the country.

What pressure cooker exploded in that man’s mind that February night? Was it an impulse, the product of an emotional breakdown? Or had he harbored such deep-seated feelings of hate for so long that he carefully plotted this event over decades, working out his alibi far in advance of the court trial he knew would eventually take place?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Veteran writer Elizabeth Engstrom has investigated and written about murder and serial killers, both in nonfiction for Time Warner’s Crime Library and in her own dark fiction. Singled out by People Magazine as one of America’s best mystery writers, her 13 critically-acclaimed books and more than 250 short stories, articles and essays have been well-received in markets around the world. Two movies based on her books are currently in development. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Theology, which gives her a unique view on family dynamics. She is on faculty at the University of Phoenix.

(A 69-page True Crime Short with photographs) H. H. Holmes was a central character in Erik Larson’s hugely successful The Devil in the White City, which is planned as a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Holmes is commonly viewed as a real-life Hannibal Lecter, a devious and cunning serial killer without equal. Holmes used the persona of a successful doctor and entrepreneur to draw untold numbers of young women to his three-story Chicago hotel to experiment on before killing them. Not one to waste, he’d often deflesh the corpses to sell the skeletons to medical schools. He enjoyed trying out methods of murder and watching his victims die. Scientists from his era believed Holmes’ brain would unlock the secret of his perversity, but he denied them the chance to find out. Today, we can figure him out without access to his brain. We know more today about the neuroscience of sadistic psychopaths and we can better understand what his brain – if dissected – would reveal. For the first time, we can look to research findings about killers to decode Holmes’s vile behavior.From Psychopath:

“After the girls died, he’d enjoy viewing ‘their blackened and distorted faces’ before he dug a shallow grave, removed their clothing, and dumped them into it with ‘fiendish delight.’ Holmes considered that ‘for eight years before their deaths I had been almost as much a father to them as though they had been my own children.’

“It is precisely this behavior that most puzzles the ordinary person and draws the researcher’s attention: how can a man torture and asphyxiate children, or burn them and view it as entertainment? How can he ‘befriend’ them for years, knowing the whole time that he will end their lives? How can he describe it as pleasurable? This is the reason the psychopath holds our fascination. It’s why researchers even during Holmes’s era tried extracting criminal brains post-mortem for study. They hoped to locate the seat of disturbed moral consciousness.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who teaches forensic psychology and criminal justice at Pennsylvania’s DeSales University, is unique in having extensive experience in researching and writing about crime and the vampire subculture. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, philosophy and criminal justice. Dr. Ramsland has written over 1,000 articles and thirty-eight books on forensics, serial killers, mass murderers and the popular vampire culture.