Daisy de Melker

Daisy de Melker PDF Author: Ted Botha
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1776192788
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Mother. Nurse. Gold-digger. Cause célèbre. When Daisy de Melker stood trial in 1932, accused of poisoning her son and two husbands, the public couldn't get enough of her. Crowds gathered outside court baying for blood, and she waved to them like a celebrity. Against the backdrop of Johannesburg in its golden age, a booming metropolis of opulence and chaos nicknamed the 'City of Gold' and the 'University of Crime', she had quietly gone about her sinister business while around her sensational crimes grabbed the headlines. There was the marauding Foster Gang, which left at least ten people dead; a dashing German hustler; a local Bonnie and Clyde; an innocent student walking in Zoo Lake park at the wrong time and a man who escaped death row to become one of South Africa's most revered authors. These interlinking stories are told in the style of a thriller and with riveting, kaleidoscopic detail. In Daisy de Melker, Ted Botha weaves together a fantastic cast of killers and con men, detectives and lawmen, journalists and authors – even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Herman Charles Bosman – to depict a grand and desperate city. For almost twenty years Daisy hid in the shadows but when someone finally spoke up about the suspicious deaths around her, it led to a trial like nothing the City of Gold had ever seen and spread her name across the world.

Daisy de Melker

Daisy de Melker PDF Author: Ted Botha
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1776192788
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mother. Nurse. Gold-digger. Cause célèbre. When Daisy de Melker stood trial in 1932, accused of poisoning her son and two husbands, the public couldn't get enough of her. Crowds gathered outside court baying for blood, and she waved to them like a celebrity. Against the backdrop of Johannesburg in its golden age, a booming metropolis of opulence and chaos nicknamed the 'City of Gold' and the 'University of Crime', she had quietly gone about her sinister business while around her sensational crimes grabbed the headlines. There was the marauding Foster Gang, which left at least ten people dead; a dashing German hustler; a local Bonnie and Clyde; an innocent student walking in Zoo Lake park at the wrong time and a man who escaped death row to become one of South Africa's most revered authors. These interlinking stories are told in the style of a thriller and with riveting, kaleidoscopic detail. In Daisy de Melker, Ted Botha weaves together a fantastic cast of killers and con men, detectives and lawmen, journalists and authors – even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Herman Charles Bosman – to depict a grand and desperate city. For almost twenty years Daisy hid in the shadows but when someone finally spoke up about the suspicious deaths around her, it led to a trial like nothing the City of Gold had ever seen and spread her name across the world.

Daisy de Melker

Daisy de Melker PDF Author: Lènor Tancred
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780620382496
Category : Serial murderers
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Family Secrets

Family Secrets PDF Author: William A. Stricklin
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN: 1480981559
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
Family Secrets By: William Stricklin Family Secrets discloses the darkest secrets over a thousand years. This nonfiction book is evidence that the writer’s family may be firmly founded on the five strong pillars of murder, betrayal, greed, lust, and incest and has far more than its fair share of family secrets. Research over half a century has created this book not to be put down: a pregnant nun; the secret library in the Strickland Manor where Catherine Parr, Queen of England and Henry VIII’s sixth wife, locked prohibited books away from the castle in order to keep her head from being chopped off; regicide of a boy king by his stepmother; a hunting trip in which Stricklin’s forebear puts a hunting javelin between the shoulder blades of his best friend… then hastily married his gorgeous wife fourteen days later; a ménage during a coronation dinner including a new bride and new mother-in-law; abduction of Stricklin’s two-day-old maternal great-grandmother during a Comanche raid and the saga of her escape from slavery; and the murder trial of Katie Stricklin who used arsenic to poison her family.

Blood on Her Hands

Blood on Her Hands PDF Author: Tanya Farber
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 186842927X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Murder has always fascinated us, and when women are the masterminds, the intrigue grows exponentially. Not only are female murderers much rarer than male killers, but their crimes usually also involve a more sophisticated type of plotting. In Blood on her hands, award-winning journalist Tanya Farber investigates the lives, minds and motivations of some of South Africa's most notorious female murderers, from the poisonous nurse Daisy de Melker, to the privileged but deeply disturbed Najwa Petersen, to the mysterious Joey Harhoff who died before revealing where the bodies of her victims (including her own niece) were. Farber sets each case against the backdrop of the different eras and regions of 20th and early 21st century South Africa the women operated in. Her writing style is lighter than the subject matter might suggest and Blood on Her Hands will keep you reading until late at night – probably with your light on. The women featured also include: Dina Rodrigues, Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron, Marlene Lehnberg, Chane van Heerden and Celiwe Mbokazi.

Serial Killers Around the World

Serial Killers Around the World PDF Author: Dirk C. Gibson
Publisher: Bentham Science Publishers
ISBN: 1608058425
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Serial Killers Around the World: The Global Dimensions of Serial Murder compiles serial murder case studies from several countries - from Australia to Great Britain, and from Japan to Pakistan. The author has covered accounts on a wide array of serial killers including some well known felons namely Jack the Ripper, The Butcher of Mons, Martin & Marie Dumollard, as well as some of the lesser known serial slayers such as Daisy DeMelker, Yoshio Kodaira, Javed Iqbal and many more. The book highlights six dimensions of each case: the killer(s), the serial murders, other crimes, communication, the investigation and trial and punishment of the accused. Readers, both general and aspiring criminologists alike, will find Serial Killers Around the World an interesting resource for critical information on serial murders committed in nations around the world.

The Ghost That Closed Down The Town

The Ghost That Closed Down The Town PDF Author: Arthur Goldstuck
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 0143529323
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Arthur Goldstuck made the world of South African urban legends his own with four best-sellers during the 1990s. Now he returns to this landscape, but from a very different angle: looking at the extent to which ghost stories are really urban legends - stories spread by word of mouth (and the media) as absolute truth, but falling short on evidence and reality. In exploring ghost stories as urban legends, Goldstuck makes a fascinating discovery: the ghostly beliefs of each culture across South Africa have had a profound impact on the supernatural beliefs of every other cultural group in the country over the past four centuries. The result is the story of the South African ghost: a unique and complex character that reflects a turbulent history and a harsh existence and sheds a fascinating light on the nature of supernatural experience throughout the world. For instance, what do the Flying Dutchman and the Uniondale Ghost have in common? Why do the ghosts of so many of the country's fallen soldiers wander the earth seeking their forbidden lovers? How do our religious beliefs affect the way we see ghosts? How many ghosts of Daisy de Melker are really out there? Arthur Goldstuck has some of the answers in a book that challenges much conventional thinking about the supernatural.

The Love Song of André P. Brink

The Love Song of André P. Brink PDF Author: Leon de Kock
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1868427935
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
The Love Song of André P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source – running to a million words – Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road. De Kock's biographical study of the author who came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature not only synthesises the journals but also subjects them to searching critical analysis. In addition, the biographer measures the journals against additional sources, both scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimony of Brink's friends, family, wives and lovers. The Love Song of André P Brink subjects Brink's literary legacy to a bracing scholarly re-evaluation, making this major new biography a crucial addition to scholarship on Brink.

Maverick

Maverick PDF Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 1415206724
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
From Africa’s first black movie star to a stylish commie revolutionary, showgirls and soccer stars, writers and poets, activists, artists, a pop princess, a prophetess and a cold-blooded killer, Maverick explores the riveting, true tales of women who broke with convention. Updated, expanded, and now with photographs, this edition of Lauren Beukes’s first book casts light onto the fascinating lives of some of South Africa’s most famous – and notorious – women.

Bullet in the Heart

Bullet in the Heart PDF Author: Beverley Roos-Muller
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1776192753
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
'A precious and rare publication ... The moving stories of love, longing and suffering provide valuable new insights into tumultuous times that helped shape South Africa.' – Max du Preez It is nine months this evening since I last saw the light in my own house, when I had to tear myself away from all that is dear to me. And today is also my little son's birthday. Oh, how I long for home. So wrote Michael Muller in 1901 as he gazed at the lights of Cape Town from a ship bound for Bermuda, after months of internment in a British POW camp in Simon's Town. The camps were full, so Boer prisoners were being sent to other parts of the empire. Michael's brothers, Chris and Pieter, were exiled to Ceylon while Lool was held in the Green Point camp in Cape Town. Remarkably, three of the brothers kept diaries, the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. The scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the legendary Magersfontein battle, the rain-dashed pages written by Lool in Colesberg, and the angry words penned by Michael about his treatment at Surrender Hill have the urgency of men determined to go on record. When Beverley Roos-Muller began to explore writing about the Boer experience of the war, she read the tiny diary of Michael, grandfather of her husband, Ampie Muller. It led her to the discovery of the other diaries and many more documents. She also records the brothers' difficult return home and examines the consequences for South Africa of the bitterness this strife evoked. This is a beautifully told account of the fellowship of four brothers in war, their capture and eventual recovery.