Old Whiskey and Young Women: American True Crime: Tales of Murder, Sex and Scandal, a book by Ohio University alumni R. Marc Kantrowitz, comes out in October.
Kantrowitz, Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, is serving as a Glidden Visiting Professor at Ohio University in Fall 2015.
Kantrowitz earned a B.A. degree in History in 1972 and an M.A. degree in Political Science in 1974 from the College of Arts & Sciences at Ohio University.
He is using the book in HIST 3070: Famous Trials in American History, a history course that explores some of the nation’s most significant and fascinating legal cases and trials that captured the country when they occurred.
About Old Whiskey and Young Women: “Murder and mystery, society, sex and suspense were combined in this case in such a manner as to intrigue and captivate the public fancy to a degree perhaps unparalleled in recent annals,” Kantrowitz says. Ohio vs. Sheppard, 165 Ohio St. 293, 294 (1956). While this should no longer occur in a criminal trial, it can in a book. And this is the book in which it does. Here, some of the most notorious legal cases in American history are explored. What they have in common is that they titillated, if not repulsed, the entire nation when they first occurred. What they still have in common is that, for the most part, they are today nearly totally forgotten. From the unfair framing for murder of America’s most famous comedian, to America’s first capital case involving an older woman and her much younger lover murdering her husband, to Mad Harry Thaw, the wealthy and mad son of a steel magnate, killing America’s foremost architect over a beautiful woman, all come to life in gripping detail and drama. And meet the real Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose mother fixation and real life gruesome crimes far outmatched those of any fictional character. This book brings to life these notorious characters and many more from the rich pages of history.
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