“Has more than its fair share of violence, sex, debauchery and reversals of fortune . . . But what emerges between the lines are stories of human suffering, stories of class struggle, stories that speak as much to the criminal mind as to the crime itself.”
— Sun Newspapers
More true tales of woe from Cleveland’s crime and disaster expert. The fifth book in John Stark Bellamy’s popular series delivers 26 accounts of Cleveland-area crimes and disasters from 1900 through 1950, including:
The depression-era “Blue Book Murder,” in which a
swank Shaker Heights society party
was interrupted by low-class thugs with deadly intentions;
Truculent barkeep
Thomas Martin, whose idea of a good time was shooting the lunch buckets out of unsuspecting laborers’ hands as they came off their Whiskey Island shifts;
A strange international photo hoax in which Lakewood lad John May Warren became
“The boy with Hitler’s face”
;
Sleepwalking Harry Krause, who dreamt one night of battling a gigantic snake but awoke to the real nightmare:
he had strangled his own beloved mother
in her bed;
The shocking murder of sweet 16-year-old
Beverly Jarosz
in her Garfield Heights bedroom—one of Cleveland’s most baffling murder mysteries ever;
And 20 more local true stories of
courage, fear, deception, treachery, tragedy, violence, and guilt
.
Sometimes gruesome, often surprising, Bellamy’s tales are meticulously researched and delivered in a literate and entertaining style.