The Grand Dragon of the KKK brutally rapes and murders a woman aboard a train as dozens of passengers do nothing to aid her. A bootlegger shoots his much older and wealthier wife and tries to frame the chauffeur but fumbles the job: the wife is able to tell the police who committed the crime before she meets her untimely demise. A 22-year-old is decapitated by her dental school boyfriend after she tells him she is pregnant.
Even the most sensational and scandalous crimes can disappear into history, the spine-chilling tales forgotten by subsequent generations. Murders that Made Headlines reveals some of these extraordinary but forgotten true events that captured the public's attention in the course of the last 200 years. Jane Simon Ammeson recounts the astonishing and sometimes bizarre stories of arsenic murders, Ponzi schemes, prison escapes, perjury, and other shocking crimes that took place in the Hoosier state. When we think of bygone eras, we often imagine gentile women, respectable men, simpler times, mannerly interactions, and intimate acquaintances, but Murders that Made Headlines reveals the notorious true crimes lurking in our history.