| Ken Englade's Non-fiction Books |
| Everybody's Best Friend (St. Martin's Press, 1999) |
At first, there was no indication of foul play.
When 29-year-old Stefanie Rabinowitz, an up-and-coming Center City lawyer
who lived with her husband, Craig, and their infant daughter on Philadelphia's
storied Main Line, was found dead in her bathtub it looked like an accident.
Then, the police started digging. What they discovered was that Stefanie,
rather than drowning after suffering an apparent stroke, had been strangled.
Suspicion quickly centered on Craig, who had told investigators there had
been no one else in the house that night. As one officer put it: "Stefanie
was dead and the baby was pretty much off the hook." Why Craig, seemingly
a successful entrepreneur, would have wanted his wife dead, remained a
puzzle for the police to solve. This is the investigators' story: How Craig's
life was peeled back layer-by-layer to reveal a person totally different
from his public perception.
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| Hot Blood (St. Martin's Press, 1996) |
It is a mystery rivaling the disappearance of
Jimmy Hoffa. On a cold February day in 1977, candy heiress Helen Brach
vanished after checking out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Her body was never found and the details of her fate were never established.
Thirteen years later, a federal prosecutor in Chicago decided to re-open
the case. His five-year investigation snagged one man -- a smooth con who
specialized in fleecing elderly women -- who played a part on Brach's apparent
murder, and it exposed a startling scandal in the rich show horse industry.
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| Blood Sister (St. Martin's Press (1994) |
Jack Wilson was an eccentric but popular and
rich ophthalmologist in Huntsville, Alabama, married to an ambitious, money-loving
woman who had caught his eye while working as a husband-hunting nurse in
a city hospital, an institution where she was known among the doctors and
staff as "Blow-job Betty." When Jack was beaten to death investigators
began looking more closely at Betty and her beauty-queen twin sister, Peggy.
Eventually, police accused the women of plotting Jack's murder and hiring
a mentally confused ne'er-do-well to carry it out.
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| To Hatred
Turned
(in paperback, A Dark and Deadly Love) (St. Martin's Press, 1993) |
Successful Dallas contractor Larry Aylor saw
only happiness on the horizon. After a troubled marriage to his childhood
sweetheart, Joy, Larry was about to be divorced so he could marry a beautiful
brunette named Rozanne, who he had met when he agreed to build a house
for her and her husband, a prominent kidney specialist. Virtually on the
eve of their mutual divorces and planned marriage, Rozanne was fatally
attacked in her home while her four-year-old son napped in an adjoining
room. Investigators determined that the killing had been planned by a vengeful
Joy, but before they could arrest her she fled to France where she lived
in blissful anonymity until her identity was revealed after a minor traffic
accident. This story is told mainly from the point of view of the two scrappy
lawyers who represented the killer-for-hire, a quiet salesman with no history
of violence.
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| A Family Business (St. Martin's Press, 1992) |
It is a subject most people don't want to know
anything about: what happens to the body of the deceased once it is wheeled
into the funeral home to be prepared for burial. This book examines the
distasteful, gruesome practices carried out in a respected Pasadena mortuary
-- how the greedy family scion "harvested" bodies for their parts, stealing
and selling lungs, hearts and gold teeth. It also chronicles the suspected
murder of a rival funeral home operative who investigators suspect was
murdered with a common but highly lethal flowering shrub: oleander.
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| Deadly Lessons(St. Martin's Press, 1991) |
Pam Smart was a pretty and popular official in
a New Hampshire school district, a public relations expert assigned to
help high school students develop a promotional video. On May 1, 1990,
Pam's husband, Greg, an affable insurance salesman following in his father's
footsteps, was brutally killed in the couple's townhouse. An investigation
revealed that Greg had been killed by two teenagers, one of whom admitted
to being seduced by Pam and coerced to commit murder.
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| Murder in Boston (St. Martin's Press, 1990) |
The world knows about the deception perpetrated
by Charles "Chuck" Stuart following the puzzling murder of his pregnant
wife, Carol. A black man did it, claimed Chuck, who was seriously wounded
in the incident that occurred in a seedier section of Boston. Later, investigators
claimed that there was no black man involved, that Chuck had made that
up to cover his own involvement. However, before Chuck could be tried his
body was fished out of the water beneath the Tobin Bridge. Allegedly, he
committed suicide so he wouldn't be convicted of killing his wife. Although
the case of Carol Stuart's murder is ostensibly closed, many questions
remain about the deaths of both Carol and Chuck. Authorities have never
released the autopsy report on Carol, which would clarify some of the ambiguities
about her fatal wound. And, to some, including the author, it is still
questionable whether Chuck killed himself. Does a man leave a wake-up call
with the motel switchboard so he won't oversleep his leap off a bridge?
|
| Beyond Reason(St. Martin's Press, 1990) |
Derek and Nancy Haysom were well-known in Lynchburg,
Virginia, where Nancy's family had been prominent for decades, and in Halifax,
Canada, where Derek, a South African, ran a successful steel mill. On a
particularly warm day in March, 1985, Derek and Nancy were stabbed and
slashed to death in their Virginia retirement home. It was months later
before suspicion settled on the Haysom's young daughter, Elizabeth, a 20-year-old
student at the University of Virginia, and her nerdy 18-year-old boyfriend,
Jens Soering, a fellow student and the son of a German consular official.
By then, though, Elizabeth and Jens had disappeared. Police were certain
they had fled aboard, but they had no idea where to begin looking. Long
after the killing, authorities in Bedford County, Virginia, had a telephone
call from puzzled detectives in suburban London. "Do you know anything
about the murder of two people in your area in 1985?" the English police
asked. "Because if you do, we think we have in custody two young people
who may have been involved."
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| Cellar of Horror (St. Martin's Press, 1989) |
It was a crime gruesome almost beyond belief.
A Philadelphia eccentric named Gary Heidnik was charged with murder two
of the four black women he had been keeping captive in his basement for
months, raping them, torturing them, feeding them dog food and, allegedly,
the flesh of the victims. Heidnik, a best mentally unstable, was forthright
about his motive: He planned to use the women to breed a master race.
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