Marilyn Bardsley

I always wanted a "life of crime" writing and publishing stories about real crimes and criminals and turning that knowledge into thrillers. It began with an addiction to Nancy Drew books, recalling that my parents saw the light shining under my bedroom door hours past my bedtime in elementary school. I came by the addiction honestly. Every night my father read Earl Stanley Gardner, Dashielle Hammett, and the like and kept a library of mystery and thriller paperbacks. By the fourth grade I had graduated from Nancy Drew to my father's collection. Eventually, when it came time to start a career, the prospect of writing for a living didn't seem very practical. I landed a demanding position that quickly evolved into being an editor of five business reference publications. On top of that had I married a man with five school-age children. I already had one child from my first marriage and then one with the new husband. Added to that workload, I enrolled in Case Western Reserve's Graduate School of Business for in their MBA program. It was a very substantial amount of work. It might have seemed that the dream of becoming a writer had been crushed by my responsibilities to my job, family, and education except that when the work day was done and face-time with the kids was complete, my husband and I indulged in our own form of enjoyment -- we wrote stories, screenplays, and books. As we looked at new ideas for books, I remembered hearing about a terrifying unsolved murder case from the 1930s in my city. There were thirteen official victims, almost of all of whom were killed by expert decapitation. What! How truly bizarre is that? At that time the famous Eliot Ness from the Capone era was head of the police and fire department in Cleveland. Ness's inability to solve the notorious case seriously tarnished his reputation. I became obsessed with the case and dragged my reluctant husband into our private investigation. Quite reasonably, he argued that it was unlikely that in the 1970s we could ever find the identity of the killer when it had been a top priority of Ness and the resources of a big city police force. But we did it! It took several years and a huge amount of our time. Our reward was death threats, surveillance, the theft of our manuscript, and a shady lawyer who lied his way onto my office staff to spy on me. Why all this drama four decades later? The answer was that we had inadvertently stepped on an old, buried political land mine. Well, this story had a happy ending even though it took a very long time to happen. In early 2017, I finally published The American Sweeney Todd, the nickname the serial killer gave to himself. I got to know this brilliant man with an extraordinary sense of humor quite well from the mountain of records and documents that I had collected for many years and interviews with his family, colleagues, neighbors, the detectives who followed him, and people close to Eliot Ness. With this intimate knowledge I created the journals of this unusual man whose decades of exhausting work lifted him from abject poverty to a surgeon with great promise but who fell prey to his inner demons and lost it all. For more information and videos, go to MarilynJBardsley.com Marilyn J. Bardsley is the CEO of Crimescape. Crimescape is a collection of compelling full length novels in ebook and print editions and nonfiction crime ebooks by the best true crime authors in the business. Crimescape short nonfiction ebooks are designed to give the reader all the information needed to understand everything relevant to the story. One thing that differentiates Crimescape books from other true crime books is that our authors are selected for their experience in crime investigation, whether as a police detective, investigative reporter, forensics professional or criminal psychologist. Crimescape authors are good storytellers. Follow the expanding list of true crime fiction and true crime ebooks and paperbacks at http://www.crimescape.com/books Marilyn J. Bardsley's bestselling book, After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is in paperback and well as e-book formats. Learn more at http://www.aftermidnightbook.com Marilyn J. Bardsley is the former executive editor and founder of Time Warner's Crime Library, the premier true crime site on the Internet. Marilyn has written extensively on true crime and is an expert on serial killers. She also appears frequently on news programs and documentaries for the History Channel, The Learning Channel and Carolina Public Television. Her feature story on the Atlanta child murders, co-authored with Rachael Bell, was required reading for the police task force investigating the Green River serial murder case. Her most popular feature articles are on Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, the Boston Strangler, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the Son of Sam, Charles Starkweather, Albert Fish, the Hillside Stranglers, John Dillinger, Fred and Rose West, Leopold and Loeb, and Ted Bundy. Marilyn has written full biographies of Al Capone, Eliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Before starting the Crime Library, Marilyn J. Bardsley was a telecommunications marketing executive for several multibillion-dollar companies, including British Telecom North America and MCI. She started up and general managed an electronic messaging business for BellSouth Advanced Networks and provided consulting services to all of the "Regional Bell Operating Companies." Additionally, she was an Internet investment consultant for large Asian multinational companies. Marilyn lives with her husband and Shih Tzu dogs in Savannah, Georgia.