Unless you don't read much true crime, leave this one on the shelf - it's not very good.
The authors present a dozen cases, ranging from 1955 to 1991 (the book came out in '95), and feature crimes in which the perp nearly pulled off the perfect crime. I'm still trying to figure out why someone would write a book like this... I mean, isn't any crime technically perfect until the bad guy is caught?
Let me tell you about some of the cases they chose.
The Lone Wolf: Kazuyoshi Miura, a Japanese entrepreneur, decided to do away with his wife while on a shopping trip in Los Angeles, allowing him to collect on a substantial life insurance policy and return to his playboy single life. After an apparent street robbery ended with the wife shot and dying in a hospital, Miura's girlfriend disappeared. Her body was discovered in California. LA police and Japanese journalists put all the pieces together, and in 1994, Miura was found guilty of murder.
Chop Chop Man: This is the story of Jeffrey Dahmer. I'm not convinced Dahmer pulled off any perfect crimes; it was the ineptitude of the Milwaukee police that allowed him to get away with the 17 murders he eventually confessed to. There are several books out there about Dahmer that explore his case in detail.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips: When flight attendant Helle Crafts disappeared without a trace, her friends were worried that her husband, Richard, killed her. Crafts stated he last saw his wife on November 19, 1986. He filed a missing persons report, and later passed a polygraph and several police interviews. If a snowplow driver had not spotted someone down by the river one night running a woodchipper, Crafts might have pulled it off. Police found tiny fragments of bone, cloth, hair, and mail that were Helle's. Craft had rented the chipper from another town, killed his wife, froze her, cut her up, and ran her through the chipper. This is likely the "true story" that the Cohen brothers based Fargo on.
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