Books in True Crime series

,p>More than one hundred years after the unidentified killer ended his crime wave interest in his story remains immense. Strong enough to merit numerous walking tours around London’s East End, plus a well-trodden museum popular with tourists and locals alike. Public interest in him has, if anything, grown over time rather than faded into the fog of our memories. Hundreds of books have been published on his actions, many seeking to provide the definitive truth about who the killer was, from a member of the Royal Family to aristocrat, wealthy industrialist and on to common cutthroat. A catalog of films exists about him. For example, that master of the mysterious and High Priest of Horror, Alfred Hitchcock, based his early 1927 piece, The Lodger: A Story of a London Fog, on the Ripper story.Inside you’ll read aboutJack the Ripper: the Stuff of Nightmares or the Sweetest Dreams?The Covetous SuspectA Suspect of ConvenienceThe Aristocratic ConnectionMurders A PlentyThe Forgotten OnesThe Making of a MurdererAnd much more!Documentaries, magazine articles and so forth are still written. This book, we hope, will be different to most. It is not going to try to name the killer; to do so would be mere speculation. Instead, we will cover the major aspects of his actions and try to identify the reasons behind them. We will consider some of the most common suspects, and one or two of the less well-known ones. Who knows, by the law of averages and the millions of hours that have been put in by authors, investigators and criminal historians across the globe, there is a fair chance we may hit upon the culprit.

Albin Ludwig was furious. He had caught his wife, Cecilia, with other men before; now, after secretly following Cecilia one evening in 1906, Albin was overcome with suspicion. Albin and Cecilia quarreled that night and again the next day. Prosecutors later claimed that the final quarrel ended when Albin knocked Cecilia unconscious with a wooden potato masher, doused her with a flammable liquid, lit her on fire, and left her to burn to death. Albin claimed self-defense, but he was convicted of second-degree murder. Newspaper coverage of the dramatic crime and trial was jarringly explicit and detailed, shocking readers in Indiana, where the crime occurred. Peter Young of the South Bend Times wrote that the murder’s “horrors and its shocking features . . . have never before been witnessed in Mishawaka.” The story was front-page news throughout northern Indiana for much of a year. For several generations, the families of both Cecilia and Albin would be silent about the crime―until Cecilia’s great-grandson, award-winning journalist Gary Sosniecki, uncovered the family’s dark secret. As he discovered, wife beating was commonplace in the early 20th century (before the gender-neutral term of “domestic violence” was adopted), and “wife murder” was so common that newspapers described virtually every case by that term. At long last, The Potato Masher Murder: Death at the Hands of a Jealous Husband unearths the full story of two immigrant families united by love and torn apart by domestic violence.