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“A compelling narrative that moves crisply through the murder, the lynching, and the cover-up by silence that local residents thereafter affected.”—The Journal of American History

On a warm August night in 1911, Zachariah Walker was lynched—burned alive—by an angry mob on the outskirts of Coatesville, a prosperous Pennsylvania steel town. At the time of his very public murder, Walker, an African American millworker, was under arrest for the shooting and killing of a respected local police officer. Investigated by the NAACP, the horrific incident garnered national and international attention. Despite this scrutiny, a conspiracy of silence shrouded the events, and the accused men and boys were found not guilty at trial. More than 100 years after the lynching, authors Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser bring new insight to events that rocked a community.

This is the horrifying tale of the random crime spree that shocked residents of southwestern Pennsylvania in 1979.

During the winter of 1979, southwestern Pennsylvania was rocked by a series of sensational murders, sparking a thirty-year criminal justice saga. A week of brutal, seemingly random killings culminated in the provocation and fatal shooting of Patrolman Leonard Miller, an officer new to the town of Apollo's police force and only twenty one years old. Little more than a year later, two men were convicted of the rash of homicides and sentenced to death-- yet both are alive today. Incorporating details of the central characters' personal lives as well as the state's court system, criminologist Michael W. Sheetz here relays the awful story of the so-called ""kill for thrill"" crime spree with the drama of a novelist and the insight of an officer of the law.

On July 12, 1926, Frances Bowermaster McBride, a forty-year-old divorcee, called off her affair with twenty-seven-year-old Norman Morrison. Driven into a rage, Morrison tracked Frances to her home in Carlisle's East End, where she sat on the porch with her three-year-old daughter, Georgia, on her lap. Morrison shot and killed Frances before turning the pistol on himself. Morrison lived but was blinded. Young Georgia fell to the pavement unharmed. Eventually standing trial, Morrison was convicted of first-degree murder. Historian Paul D. Hoch goes beyond the conviction as he traces the later lives of Morrison and Georgia McBride as she came of age in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Hoch spins a tale of murder, perseverance and, ultimately, redemption.