Kansas

From railroad towns like Ladore to cow towns like Newton and Wichita, southeast Kansas pulsed with rowdy activity during the late nineteenth century.

The unruly atmosphere drew outlaws, including the Dalton Gang, and even crazed serial killers the likes of the Bender clan. Violent incidents, from gunfights to lynchings, punctuated the region's Wild West era, and the allure of the frontier also attracted the everyday people whose passions sometimes spawned bloodshed as well. Award-winning author Larry E. Wood explores thirteen of these remarkable episodes in the criminal history of southeast Kansas.

Kansans like to think of their state as a land of industrious, law-abiding and friendly people, and for the most part they are correct.

Kansas history has many tales of murders, cons, extrajudicial killings and other crimes. Its restive frontier attracted menacing characters, such as a cowboy who murdered a man for snoring, the serial-killing Bender family and the train-robbing James-Younger Gang. Although the area was eventually settled, the scandals did not cease. Learn about how a quack doctor nearly won the governorship, a decommissioned nuclear missile silo housed the largest LSD manufacturing operation in American history and more. Author Adrian Zink explores the salacious side of Kansas history in these wild and degenerate stories.