Anthony Flacco

Jerry Clark

Documents the harrowing murders committed by decorated war veteran Gordon Stewart Northcott on his chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles between 1926 and 1928, describing the traumatic experiences of his nephew, Stanford Clark, who was held captive and forced to participate in at least 20 killings.

Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville Murders

The Road Out of Hell

Lunga è la notte

Ed Palattella

No crime is as synonymous with America as bank robbery. Though the number of bank robberies nationwide has declined, bank robbery continues to captivate the public and jeopardize the safety of banks and their employees. In A History of Heists, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella explore how bank robbers have influenced American culture as much as they have reflected it. Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, and Patty Hearst are among the most famous figures in the history of crime in the United States. Jesse James used his training as a Confederate guerrilla to make bank robbery a political act. John Dillinger capitalized on the public’s scorn of banks during the Great Depression and became America’s first Public Enemy Number One. When she held up a bank with the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst fueled the country’s social unrest. Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella delve into the backgrounds and motivations of the robbers, and explore how they are as complex as the nation whose banks they have plundered. But as much as the story of bank robbery in America focuses on the thieves, it is also a story of those who investigate the heists. As bank robbers became more sophisticated, so did the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies. This captivating history shows how bank robbery shaped the modern FBI, and how it continues to cultivate America’s fascination with the noble outlaw: bandits seen, rightly or wrongly, as battling unjust authority.

Bank Robbery in America

A History of Heists

On the Lam is a detailed history of fugitives in the United States. The authors explore how law enforcement officials and others, including bounty hunters and bail-bond workers, have tracked fugitives over the past two centuries. They also examine how fugitives have influenced American history and the American criminal justice system.

A History of Hunting Fugitives in America

On the Lam

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.” She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania, Diehl-Armstrong’s hometown. Diehl-Armstrong’s life unfolded in an enthralling portrait; a fascinating interplay between mental illness and the law. As a female serial killer, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was in a rare category. In the early 1970s, she was a high-achieving graduate student pursuing a career in education but suffered from bipolar disorder. Before her death, she was sentenced to serve life plus thirty years in federal prison. In Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella examine female serial killers by focusing on the fascinating and tragic life of one woman. This book also explores mental illness and forensic psychology and provides a history of how American jurisprudence has grappled with such complex and controversial issues as the insanity defense and mental competency to stand trial. The authors’ account shows why Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was unlike any other criminal – man or woman – in American history. Accounts of Diehl-Armstrong’s travails – her difficult childhood, her murder trials, her hoarding – are interpolated with chapters about mental disorders and the law.

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Describes a 2003 bank robbery in Erie, Pennsylvania in which a seemingly innocent pizza deliveryman, with a time bomb around his neck, was forced to rob a bank and how the FBI discovered that he was in fact a co-conspirator.

The Untold Story of America's Most Shocking Bank Robbery

Pizza Bomber

The New York Times–bestselling author’s “haunting, compassionate, and terrifyingly true” story of a man breaking free from his notorious past (Gregg Olson, New York Times–bestselling author of Starvation Heights). From 1926 to 1928, Gordon Stewart Northcott committed at least twenty murders on a chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles. He held his nephew, Sanford Clark, captive there from the age of thirteen to fifteen. Sanford would be Northcott’s sole surviving victim. Forced by Northcott to take part in the murders, he carried tremendous guilt all his life. Yet despite his youth and the trauma he endured, Sanford helped gain justice for the dead and their families by testifying at the trial that led to Northcott’s execution. These shocking events inspired Clint Eastwood’s film The Changeling. But in The Road Out of Hell, acclaimed crime writer Anthony Flacco uses revelatory new accounts from Sanford’s son to tell the complete, true story. Going beyond the film’s narrative, Flacco recounts not only Sanford’s nightmarish captivity, but also the inspiring life he led afterward. In dramatizing one of the darkest cases in American crime, Flacco constructs a riveting psychological drama about how Sanford was able to detoxify himself from the evil he’d encountered, offering the ultimately redemptive story of one man’s remarkable ability to survive hell on earth and emerge intact.

Jerry Clark

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