CHAPTER PROLOGUES:
Long before the term serial killer was coined, an unknown assassin held the Queen City in his thrall from 1904 to 1910. Five women were savagely slain in Cumminsville, earning the district the grisly sobriquet of “the murder zone.”
Like Jack the Ripper, this killer was an elusive phantom. He prowled dim alleys and dank railroad yards in the dead of night, searching for women walking alone who were down on their luck
From 1915 to 1921, three little girls disappeared from the old Mohawk neighborhood. The first was found ravaged and mutilated several days after her kidnapping - the other two just vanished into thin air, as if carried from earth by giant eagles.
Were they all victims of the same fiendish slayer? Or was this just a cruel twist of fate, ensnaring the three angels who never grew up?
Impenetrable mystery still shrouds this classic unsolved murder - standing like the locked door which separated killer and prey. Was the shooting of Frances Marie Brady a botched burglary or cold-blooded murder?
That the pretty victim was to be married within the week only intensified the heartbreak. She was gunned down arriving home from her bridal shower, shot through the heart in front of her devoted sisters, just days away from embarking on a new life.
It was a crime - or was it?
Investigators were divided from the start: Was the young executive they found trussed up inside a bag murdered, or did he take his own life? Armchair detectives have whetted their appetites for years on the Willard Armstrong case, and their conclusions are still locked in conflict.
This strange death was too close to call.
Sliced up in a cheap hotel and left to die thrashing in her own blood, Sophia Baird’s murder exposed the vile underbelly and racist overtones of street life in Cincinnati. Her tragic odyssey is the Queen City’s answer to Hollywood's Black Dahlia case, where a pretty yet naïve girl wanders into an urban jungle and falls victim to the sordid night.
Questionable eyewitness accounts fingered “a Negro” for the crime, but as the years unraveled, the riddle of Sophia's death hinted at a more ominous truth.