My favorite books about crimes you've never heard of

Talk about dark academia—what about a lecturer at Harvard Medical College murdering a Harvard graduate? Dr. George Parkman disappeared one day and was only found later, in pieces, and some of those pieces were in the medical school furnace. This book follows the case before CSI could help identify a man’s remains. It explores why, exactly, a man with such a promising future would decide to throw it all away—and how a janitor unlocked the solution made more complex by questions of class and new vs. old money.

Helen Jewett was a sex worker living in New York in the 1830s. She worked in a brothel under a matron, which should have been a safe enough situation—she wasn’t out on the street, at least, and others knew when she had clients. Early one morning, however, others in the house wake up to realize there’s a fire in Helen’s room, and that she’s dead. Was it a murder committed by her last client, a man quickly identified as Richard Robinson, or was it a suicide? If she hadn’t died so brutally, we wouldn’t know Helen Jewett’s name, so she’s become another victim only known for her murder. Cohen reminds us that she’s more than just her death.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.

Denis Nilsen was arrested in 1983 because of the body parts found in his flat and then, in the car on the way to the police station, he confessed to more than a dozen murders. He had worked as a police officer himself and set about telling his story as clearly as he could manage it, dismissing his lawyer when Nilsen thought he was interfering. Nilsen, like the more popular Ted Bundy, liked talking, and one of the people he liked talking to was Brian Masters, whom he picked to write his biography. Masters negotiates Nilsen’s troubled life with his own reactions to the murders and to Nilsen himself. This is the book that inspired the miniseries Des, with David Tennant giving a very unsettling performance as Nilsen.

The crime discussed in this book was once so famous that Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew titled his autobiography I Caught Crippen even though he’d also been involved with the Jack the Ripper murders. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American from Michigan—my home state has more than a few notorious citizens—who stood accused of murdering his second wife in London and then fleeing from the police with his mistress. Larson does what he does best, combining a murder case with a history lesson, and weaves in the story of Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless alongside Crippen’s flight from the law. The two converge in the middle of the Atlantic in the sort of exciting tale you’d expect from a Hollywood blockbuster.