Shortly after NYPD Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes publicly criticized the London police for failing to capture Jack the Ripper, he received a letter purportedly from Jack himself saying New York was his next target. Not long after, Byrnes was confronted by his own Ripper-style murder case in the death of Carrie Brown, a.k.a. “Old Shakespeare,” a colorful character who worked as a prostitute and had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. People were worried that Jack might have actually come to America…

Queen of the Con tells the true story of Cassie Chadwick, a successful swindler and “one of the top 10 imposters of all time,” according to Time magazine. Born Betsy Bigley in 1857 in Canada, she first operated as Madame Devere, a European clairvoyant, and in 1890 was arrested for defrauding a Toledo bank of $20,000. In the mid-1890s, while working as a madam in Cleveland, Cassie met and married a widowed physician with a coveted Euclid Avenue address.

Thomas Riha vanished on March 15, 1969, sparking a mystery that lives on 50 years later. A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Riha was a popular teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a handsome man, with thick, graying hair and a wry smile.

After his disappearance, the FBI and the CIA told local law enforcement and university officials that Riha was alive and well and had left Boulder to get away from his wife. But, as Eileen Welsome convincingly argues, Riha was not alive and well at all. A woman named Galya Tannenbaum, she concludes, had murdered him.

In 1875, an Irish-born Baltimore policeman, Patrick McDonald, entered the home of Daniel Brown, an African American laborer, and clubbed and shot Brown, who died within an hour of the attack. In similar cases at the time, authorities routinely exonerated Maryland law enforcement officers who killed African Americans, usually without serious inquiries into the underlying facts. But in this case, Baltimore’s white community chose a different path. A coroner’s jury declined to attribute the killing to an accident or self-defense, the state’s attorney indicted McDonald and brought him to trial, and a criminal court jury convicted McDonald of manslaughter.

After creeping out of bed on a frigid January night in 1832, teenage farmhand Abraham Prescott took up an ax and thrashed his sleeping employers to the brink of death. He later explained that he’d attacked Sally and Chauncey Cochran in his sleep. The Cochrans eventually recovered but—to the astonishment of their neighbors—kept Prescott on, somehow accepting his strange story.

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.

Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long avoided punish­ment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian Laura James. With cases from 1850 to 1997, these 32 examples span more than a century and cross cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic status. But all were so beautiful, as James demonstrates, that they got away with murder.

In the summer of 1885, ex-convict George Graham bigamously married Cora Lee, foster daughter of nationally known temperance revivalist Emma Molloy, and the three took up residence together on the Molloy farm near Springfield, Missouri. When the body of Graham’s first wife, Sarah, was found at the bottom of an abandoned well on the farm early the next year, Graham was charged with murder, and Cora and Emma were implicated as accessories. As Larry E. Wood notes, this sensational story made headlines across the country and threatened Mrs. Molloy’s career as a prominent evangelist and temperance revivalist.

At first glance, the 1932 Easter morning murder of Salvatore “Sam” Antonio had all the trademarks of a gang-related murder. Shot five times, stabbed a dozen more, Antonio was left for dead. His body was rolled into a culvert south of Albany, New York. It was only by chance that the mortally wounded Antonio was discovered and brought to the hospital. He died in the emergency room without ever naming his assailant.

As Ted Bundy was to the 20th century, so Carlyle Harris was to the 19th. Harris was a charismatic, handsome young medical student with an insatiable appetite for sex. His trail of debauched women ended with Helen Potts, a beautiful young woman of wealth and privilege who was determined to keep herself pure for marriage. Unable to conquer her by other means, Harris talked her into a secret marriage under assumed names, and when threatened with exposure, he poisoned her.