The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, livre ebook

Small Town Charm With Deadly Consequences

“In her new true crime book, and the second in her original series, acclaimed author and anthology editor Mitzi Szereto shows us that the real monsters aren’t hiding in the woods: they’re in our towns.” ―January Magazine

#1 Bestseller in Heists & Robberies and Forensic Psychology

A collection of non-fiction accounts by international writers and experts on small town true crime shows readers that the real monsters aren’t hiding in the woods, they’re inside our towns.

Small towns aren’t always what they seem. We’ve been told nothing bad happens in small towns. You can leave your doors unlocked, and your windows wide open. We picture peaceful hamlets with a strong sense of community, and everyone knows each other. But what if this wholesome idyllic image doesn’t always square with reality? Small towns might look and feel safe, but statistics show this isn’t really true.

Tiny town, big crime. Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more,The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Townscontains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story―they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe. Discover how unsolved murders, kidnapping, shooting sprees, violent robbery, and other bad things can and do happen in small towns all over the world.

If you enjoyed Mitzi's last book in the series, The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers, and true crime books like In Cold Blood, Murder in the Bayou, and The Innocent Man, then you’ll love The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns.

THE BEST NEW TRUE CRIME STORIES: SMALL TOWNS

Contributors include Alexandra Burt, Christian Cipollini, Edward Butts, Deirdre Pirro, and Tom Larsen.

The Summer of “the Fox”

by Mark Fryers

In 1984, as a six-year-old child, I moved to a small town in the south of England, where I would remain for the next twenty years. As I began school and met the neighborhood children, it became clear that I had moved into the aftermath of a tantalizing mystery (at least to a child with little life experience). I was offered glimpses, some true anecdotes, and wild schoolyard rumors that forged a mystery in my mind about an elusive figure known simply as “the Fox.” The Fox evaded capture and outwitted the police―almost like a comic-book hero. He was an enigma. As I grew older and gradually pieced together the truth of the situation, the romance faded and the true terror of the Fox’s reign was borne unto me, creating further complex puzzles and mysteries. He has haunted me ever since. But for those who were present that previous summer, the events on the small town and its outlying locales are indelibly inked as a summer of confusion and fear.

The market town of Leighton Buzzard, about forty miles north of London, is set in the picturesque Bedfordshire countryside not far from the Chiltern Hills, and apart from a blip in the 1960s when the “Great Train Robbery” took place nearby, it did little to trouble the headline writers of national newspapers for many years. That was until that fateful summer in 1984, where it stood at the nexus of a “triangle of fear.” The aforementioned “Fox” was a petty criminal, burglar, and sexual predator. Like his namesake, his cunning nature allowed him to go undetected in a reign of terror that lasted from March of that year in a triangular crime zone that straddled the borders of the three English home counties of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, until his eventual arrest in September.

The long, hot summer of 1984 initially promised to be no more eventful than those that preceded it. Leighton Buzzard largely stood apart from the events of the nuclear protests at Greenham Common and the fallout of the miner’s strike that continued to dominate national headlines that year. Indeed, the most it threatened were those with pollen allergies as the rapeseed plants covering the countryside in a pleasant undulating yellow neared their harvest. Even when the Fox began his crime spree, there was little to suggest the scale of terror that was to later blight Leighton Buzzard, and the sleepy villages and hamlets that bordered it. Although a pattern of similar crimes emerged, there was also, at least initially, little to suggest a serial attacker on the loose.

Who Killed Gabriele Schmidt: The True Story and the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder

by Alexandra Burt

June 1983. Fulda, Germany. Gabriele Schmidt, a five-year-old girl, is murdered. That day, I happen to be close to the scene of the crime, a quarter of a mile away, the way the crow flies. Not until decades later, after I finally locate the few articles that exist online, do I realize I was seventeen, almost an adult, but I felt so much more vulnerable, and I could have sworn I was much younger.

She disappears while playing in a courtyard of her house shared by multiple tenants. The abduction occurs in broad daylight with people bustling about, the yard visible from numerous windows, but no one sees or hears anything. Her body is found later that night. The search for the killer is swift and thorough, but yields no culprit and, though occasionally over the next twenty years the case is resurrected by the media, it never sends appropriate shockwaves beyond the town. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as nuclear destruction haunts my dreams. And now there is a killer on the loose.

The details of the brutality and the violence inflicted upon Gabriele Schmidt are mostly guesswork. Officials are tight-lipped, and there is a deep and unsettling mystery surrounding her case; no press conferences, no minute details leaked to the media, and not a single newspaper beyond the local Zeitung picks up the story. I cringe when I call her “a story.” She’s so much more than that. Gabriele Schmidt won’t have her first day of school; she won’t ever learn to ride a bike, make friends, or fall in love; and her entire life will remain unlived. In the decades to come, the details of her murder are confined to less than a dozen online articles, while similar crimes are picked up by international newspapers. She all but died and took the story of the murder with her.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.