Richard O Jones: 11 books

The tongues of Ina, Illinois, were already wagging about the friendship between the Reverend Lawrence Hight, the local circuit-riding Methodist preacher, and the pretty young housewife Elsie Sweetin when their spouses turned up dead from similar sudden illnesses just a couple of months apart in the...

On November 14, 1912, house detectives at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago discovered the body of a woman in room 409 on a blood-soaked mattress. The labels in her clothing led police to Cincinnati, where friends and relatives identified the belongings of Mrs. Emma Kraft, a highly-respected widow who...

Here's a true crime story that is too bizarre to be believed. In 1921, the Roseburg, Oregon, dentist Dr. Richard M Brumfield tried to fake his own death by putting the dead body of the local hermit, Dennis Russell, in the flaming wreckage of Doc's roadster--after he removed the man's teeth and set...

Although it wasn't yet summer, the temperature climbed into triple digits on June 3, 1925, and Lloyd Russell could not sleep that night. He lived with his mother and his brother's family in a modest three room bungalow on Progress Avenue in a neighborhood call Prospect Hill. Despite the bountiful...

George said that he was taking his mother to a train in the fall of 1883 when they were overcome by two robbers at the end of the lane at the edge of his farm. In the course of the robbery, he claimed, the robbers killed his mother, and buried her in a ravine on George's property. He fetched a shovel...

When the married veterinarian Dr. David Roberts, a renowned expert on exotic cattle and distributor of a line of patent medicines for pets and farm animals, approached the spinster schoolteacher Grace Lusk about helping him edit a textbook on cattle, he sparked a three-year illicit relationship that...

Before he could bleed out, his family discovered the bloody, bloody scene, and rescued the beleaguered coal man. He said his only regret is that he didn't kill his meddling mother-in-law, too. This "novelette" length true crime story details the family quarrel that led to the gruesome crime and the delivery of turn-of-the-century justice.

The Rev. S. Althea Berrie of Muskogee, Oklahoma, was no stranger to controversy. In 1932, the handsome hymn writer found himself facing charges of heresy after preaching that Santa Claus was an affront to the Child in the manger. Much deeper trouble was in store when his wife wife, Fannie, died after...

He was working at a small shop in Northern Ohio shaving an undertaker when the sheriff arrived to arrest him. The barber said he was not Charlie King the fugitive but J.W. Thomas. He couldn't remember where he'd been the last year. This novella length true crime history shows how a wily police chief...

Before the dust settled on the 1917 case, there would be accusations of murder, an exhumation of the body, three trials, one hung jury, a prison break and a scandal that rocked Southwestern Ohio.

Career convict and con artist Ed Hubbard and his accomplice Willie Roberts, a young and attractive prostitute, set out to play a long game against the farmer Pleas Burns, who owned a spread on the Spring River in Arkansas. But Willie grows tired of waiting and pressures Hubbard to “fix the old man.”...