A Tragedy in Posorja: When “People’s Justice” Goes Horribly Wrong
Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic
“I Kill for God”
Mitzi Szereto
The Summer of “the Fox”
Mark Fryers
Who Killed Gabriele Schmidt: The True Story and the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder
Alexandra Burt
Bullets and Balaclavas: The Long, Cold Orkney Shooting
Charlotte Platt
The Black Hand and Glass Eye of Earlimart: A Killer’s Perspective
Christian Cipollini
Crime Has Come to Penal!
Iris Leona Marie Cross
The Voodoo Preacher
David Brasfield
“La Bella Elvira”: Murder in the Tuscan Hills
Deirdre Pirro
The Doctor, the Dentist, and the Dairyman’s Daughter
Paul Williams
In the Home of the Cannibal
Joe Turner
Nameless in Van Diemen’s Land
Stephen Wade
References for “The Summer of ‘the Fox’ ”
About the Editor
About the Contributors
Small towns. We imagine peaceful, close-knit hamlets untainted by the dangers of the big city. We conjure up postcard images of picturesque town squares, parades down Main Street, bake sales, church socials. Words such as safe, friendly, and wholesome come to mind. Life is unhurried in small towns. Everyone has time to stop and chat. There’s a strong sense of community, a sense of trust. These are places where people look out for each other. Small towns symbolize the values of the past, the “good old days” when neighbor helped neighbor and people and property were treated with respect, and no one had to worry about locking doors.
Unlike the anonymity of big-city life, everyone knows each other in a small town. People’s lives are open books: their histories, tragedies, scandals, and joys known to all. In the words of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): “The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” Indeed, it’s hard to keep a secret when everyone knows your business, though some do, especially secrets of a darker variety.
Because sometimes the postcard image is tarnished by a dirty fingerprint.
Small towns might give the impression of being safe, but are they really? According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some towns in the USA with lower populations have a higher violent crime rate than large urban areas such as Detroit, Michigan. In fact, violent crime is actually on the increase in some smaller American rural communities, even rising above the national average. Statistics Canada has also reported similar findings. And it appears that these statistics aren’t exclusive to North America either; small towns in other countries have shown similar patterns as well. So, is the small-town ideal simply a myth?
The sad fact is, criminality can be found wherever human beings can be found. Be it spree killings, drug violence, sexual assault, vigilante justice, juvenile delinquency, property crime, robbery, or murder, bad things can and do happen in small towns all over the world—and they have for generations. No place is immune.
The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns brings together all-new accounts of true crime from around the globe and from various time frames. The international group of writers in this anthology have scraped off the small-town veneer to get to the real story behind the idealized postcard image. In this book, we learn about the crimes and the individuals who commit them. But we also learn about the impact these crimes have had on their communities, often leaving behind an unwanted legacy that, even with the passage of time, is still in place today.
I invite you to immerse yourself in this second volume in my true crime series. I’m sure you will come away from the experience with some fresh insight into the stories behind the headlines, as well as discover true crime cases you might never even have heard about. My contributors and I have worked together to make this book a worthwhile successor to The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers. I look forward to continuing the series and providing true crime readers with the best original content the genre has to offer!
Mitzi Szereto
I remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame. A few stray locals eyeballing us suspiciously as we rolled down the main street, windows down, past the disused bank where they found the acid-filled barrels.
Where they found the bodies.
December 1999. It lingers in the memory. Roasting hot. Like Australian summers always are. A dry, scorching, unforgiving, relentless heat. I was moving from the Australian capital city of Canberra, back across the desert 3,718 kilometers (2,310 miles), to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia.
Just for fun, I decided to forgo the airlines and drive my car across the Nullarbor Plain, that vast, flat, empty, dry expanse that divides our major cities, east and west. My Perth-based buddy Scott flew across and came along for the ride. I mapped it out as a comfortable nine-day drive, stopping every night to rest and refuel.
The subsequent peripatetic journey went off without a hitch, bar one punctured tire, which I changed on the edge of the desert highway, while Scott kept watch to make sure a passing road train didn’t dissect my legs as they jutted out from under the car.
We took a few detours here and there to do some sightseeing. One such detour stands out to this day.
South Australia has an unfair reputation as the serial killer capital of Australia. It is their misfortune to have experienced quite an eclectic collection of serial murders over the decades. Perhaps none more bizarre than the ones that ended in the tiny northern town of Snowtown, population 467 (according to the last national census taken in 2016), some 152 kilometers (ninety-four miles) north up the A1 National Highway from the quaint capital city of Adelaide, known as the “city of churches.”
The case broke and made national and global headlines in May 1999. Eight murder victims found