Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse PDF Author: Sarah Tarlow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319779087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse

Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse PDF Author: Sarah Tarlow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319779087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

The Bodies Left Behind

The Bodies Left Behind PDF Author: Jeffery Deaver
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416595619
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A signature Jeffery Deaver. A cat and mouse chase that will leave you breathless.

Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819299
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Executing Magic in the Modern Era

Executing Magic in the Modern Era PDF Author: Owen Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319595199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.

Fred & Rose

Fred & Rose PDF Author: Howard Sounes
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504043790
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The definitive account of one of Britain’s most notorious killer couples, who loved, tortured, and slayed together as husband and wife. Updated with a new afterword from the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrests From the outside, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, looked as commonplace as the married couple who lived there. But in 1994, Fred and Rose West’s home would become infamous as a “house of horrors” when the remains of nine young women—many of them decapitated, dismembered, and showing evidence of sexual torture—were found interred under its cellar, bathroom floor, and garden. And this wasn’t the only burial ground: Fred’s first wife and nanny were unearthed miles away in a field, while his eight-year-old stepdaughter was found entombed under the Wests’ former residence. Yet, for more than twenty years, the twosome maintained a façade of normalcy while abusing and murdering female boarders, hitchhikers, and members of their own family. Howard Sounes, who first broke the story about the Wests as a journalist and covered the murder trial, has written a comprehensive account of the case. Beginning with Fred and Rose’s bizarre childhoods, Sounes charts their lives and crimes in forensic detail, constructing a fascinating and frightening tale of a marriage soaked in blood. Indeed, the total number of the Wests’ victims may never be known. A case reminiscent of the “Moors Murders” committed in the 1960s in Manchester by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—as if Hindley and Brady had married and kept on killing for decades—Fred & Rose “is a story of obsessive love as well as obsessive murder” (The Times, London).

The WVU Coed Murders

The WVU Coed Murders PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Fuller
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439673969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Some said that the killer couldn't be a local. Others claimed that he was the wealthy son of a prominent Morgantown family. Whispers spread that Mared and Karen were sacrificed by a satanic cult or had been victims of a madman poised to strike again. Then the handwritten letters began to arrive: "You will locate the bodies of the girls covered over with brush--look carefully. The animals are now on the move." Investigators didn't find too few suspects--they had far too many. There was the campus janitor with a fur fetish, the "harmless" deliveryman who beat a woman nearly to death, the nursing home orderly with the bloody broomstick and the bouncer with the "girlish" laugh who threatened to cut off people's heads. Local authors Geoffrey C. Fuller and S. James McLaughlin tell the complete story of the murders for the first time.

True Crime Stories of Western North Carolina

True Crime Stories of Western North Carolina PDF Author: Cathy Pickens
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 143967616X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Explore the international headlines and the little-known crimes, the solved and the wrongly solved, in these tales of the North Carolina mountains. Western North Carolina is known for mountain vistas and wild, rocky rivers, but remote wilderness and quaint small towns can have a dark side. Learn the truth behind the famous murder ballad Tom Dooley. Delve into the criminal history of moonshine, and the tales of two unexpected bombers in idyllic Mayberry. Crime writer Cathy Pickens brings a novelist's eye to Western North Carolina's crime stories that define the sinister--and quirky--side of the mountains.

Criminal Bodies in the West

Criminal Bodies in the West PDF Author: Melissa Schrift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100075152X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This book explores the cultural meanings of the criminal body in the west through historical and multidisciplinary frameworks, examining both how the criminal corpse was viewed as a repository of power and how it held significant cultural meaning as material relic. Authors situate the criminal body at different historical junctures to examine ways in which the criminal corpse was displayed and managed for social, political, magical and medicinal powers and purposes. They explain how this legacy persists in significant ways in the contemporary west, primarily through the commodification of criminal bodies in popular and public displays. The role of notorious criminal bodies in contemporary culture also reverberates in political and scientific realms in which criminal bodies often carry symbolic meanings related to ambivalence over interpretations of death. Drawing on examples from history as well as more contemporary criminal bodies, the book will be of interest to those studying death and criminology, and show how the criminal body can retain an iconic status in the collective memory of the living. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

Devil's Knot

Devil's Knot PDF Author: Mara Leveritt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471131076
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Based on a true story, this edition of Devil's Knot will tie-in to a major motion picture starring Academy Award winners Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth. This riveting portrait of a small Arkansas town recounts the all-too-true story of a brutal triple murder and the eighteen-year imprisonment of three innocent teenagers. For weeks in 1993, after the grisly murders of three eight-year-old boys, police in West Memphis, Arkansas, seemed stumped. Then suddenly, detectives charged three teenagers - alleged members of a satanic cult - with the killings. Despite the witch-hunt atmosphere of the trials and a case that included stunning investigative blunders, the teenagers, who became known as the West Memphis Three, were convicted. Jurors sentenced Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley to life in prison and Damien Echols, the accused ringleader, to death. The guilty verdicts were popular in their home state - even upheld on appeal - and all three remained in prison until their unprecedented release in August 2011. In Devil's Knot, award-winning investigative journalist Mara Leveritt presents the most comprehensive, insightful reporting ever done on this story - one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American legal history. In-depth research, meticulous reconstruction of the investigation and close-up views of its key participants unravel the many tangled knots of this endlessly shocking case.

A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse

A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse PDF Author: Richard Ward
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137444010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment. The chapters 'Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse' and 'The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.