John Gilmore

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitu Elizabeth Short, known even before her death as the "Black Dahlia," has over the decades transmogrified from L. A.'s "crime of the century" into an almost mythical symbol of unfathomable Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. It is somehow fitting that author John Gilmore should be the one to unravel the multilayered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying as it begins to take its place in the collective memory, somewhere next to Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, a cautionary tale about the pretty girl who came to Hollywood to be a movie star and wound up in a dirt lot, hacked in two. The Black Dahlia murder--unlike such earlier headline-grabbing cases as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the Lindbergh kidnapping--was the first case to command the attention of post-war America with its stark carnality. In hard-boiled yet haunting prose, Gilmore tells several previously unrevealed stories at once, each filled with its own bizarre elements through which the book transcends the true-crime genre and becomes literature. One is the tale of victim Elizabeth Short, small-town beauty queen with big hopes who seemed to float through her tragically futile life as an alluring yet doom-laden enigma. Severed also unfolds the tangled inside story of the police investigation and the remorseless Hearst-stoked press hoopla that paralleled it. Gilmore reveals the twisted psychology and down-and-out life story of the murder suspect--as well as the startling circumstances of the suspect's "indirect confession" wherein he fingers his female-impersonator pal as the purported killer. Severed is the first non-fiction book to offer a documented solution to the Black Dahlia case as endorsed by law enforcement and forensic science experts. In the just over 50 years since the murder, the terms serial killer and behavioral profiling have moved from FBI jargon to essential archetypes of the American cultural landscape, crossing the nebulous bounds of streaming series, book, and blockbuster movie. Now that the reader can put a face to Elizabeth Short's killer through Gilmore's relentless spade work, the spectral luster of this most spectacular "unsolved" murder in American crime history seems not diminished but enhanced. Ultimately, John Gilmore boils down its undying allure to this haiku-like equation: "The pale white body severed in two and left for the world to view, and her name: Black Dahlia."

This book discusses the origins of the boom, the impact of the issues raised by boom growth in sweetwater county, Wyoming, as well as the strategies for the management of boom town growth.

This book discusses the origins of the boom, the impact of the issues raised by boom growth in sweetwater county, Wyoming, as well as the strategies for the management of boom town growth.

For almost a thousand years, a prehistoric people living on the Greek islands carved highly stylized sculptures of the female body in marble. The Cycladic figurines, with their folded arms and blank faces, inspired Picasso and Modigliani, but continue to baffle archaeologists. No one knows what they mean or why they were buried with the dead. The Broken Notebooks is the story of one man's search for answers. Moved by their austere beauty, haunted by loss, his journey takes him from museums in London and Athens to looted graves on the hillsides of Greek islands, from meetings with marble workers and archaeologists to solitary encounters with his own past. The Broken Notebooks is a daring, unsettling novel - a montage of fact and fiction, reflections, readings, and voices. It's also a deeply personal meditation on death, failure, loss, and our place in a crumbling world.

GNU tar creates and manipulates archives which are actually collections of many other files; the program provides users with an organized and systematic method for controlling a large amount of data. The name "tar" originally came from the phrase "Tape ARchive", but archives need not (and these days, typically do not) reside on tapes.

COLD-BLOODED is the classic account of the murder of three young girls by Charles Schmid, Jr., teen-age idol of the lower depths of Tucson, Arizona in the Hot-Rodder mid-60s-a lost city surrounded by a bone-dry ocean of rocky deserts. Lover to many scrawny, broken girls, Schmid a champion gymnast--turned-half-baked philosopher and ultimately a lonely boy disguising an emptiness so vast that he sought to fill it by seeing how far he could go. "Racing through life at a million miles an hour," he wrote, Schmid claimed he sought the thrill of "Death's closeness" and finally reaching for the thrill of "that ultimate experience." COLD-BLOODED gives the reader a step-by-step account of the series of events which led Schmid to "killing for the thrill of it," from finding out what he always suspected, but dreaded-that he was nothing but an orphan, unwanted by his real mother the day he was born-to his strange, chaotic relation with a girl he described as being a "wreck, looking for it to happen," which led to his final killings. A high-profile murder case at the time, Schmid's trial became a launching pad for superstar defense attorney F. Lee Bailey and a sick inspiration to still-incarcerated Charles Manson. Drawn from author John Gilmore's first-hand encounters, COLD-BLOODED contains a wealth of information on Schmid, including extensive interviews describing the way his view of the world, and interviews with his teenage hangers-on, who describe at length what a larger-than-life phenomenon "Smitty" became for them. This is an intimate portrait of the seething, desperate-for-action teenage scene of the mid-1960's, through a focus on Schmid who pushed everything further that his contemporaries, allowing us to see the pitiful and frightening aspects of these aberrant, chronic runaway children, heirs to an empty culture and a rootless society.