News & Events

Blood Runs Coal by Mark A. Bradley

In the early hours of New Year's Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph "Jock" Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Seven months earlier, Yablonski had announced his campaign to oust the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies. Yablonski wanted to return the union to the coal miners it was supposed to represent and restore the organization to what it had once been, a powerful force for social good. Boyle was enraged about his opponent's bid to take over--and would go to any lengths to maintain power.The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders triggered one of the most intensive and successful manhunts in FBI history--and also led to the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern U.S. history.

 

The Industrialist and the Mountaineer by Ronald L. Lewis

ISBN: 9781943665518

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis's book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called "wars of incorporation," Lewis's powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources.

 

The Cemetery Road Murders by Wes Swietek

ISBN: 9781948901680

Most people who grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky have heard of the so-called Murder Mansion on Cemetery Road. However, many people don't know the reason it was given that macabre title so many years ago. The Cemetery Road Murders is the true story about the seventy-year old murders, the real cast of characters involved, and the courtroom dramas that followed. In the summer of 1948, Dr. Charles Martin and his wife, Martha, are brutally murdered in their stately mansion on Cemetery Road. They happen to be the parents of one recently married daughter -- whose beau is the next door neighbor, disabled, and thirty-eight years older than her. In the days that follow, the confessed killer opens the door to a possible accomplice, a mysterious love triangle, and revenge for unrequited love…or was it?

 

The Murder of Marion Miley by Beverly Bell

ISBN: 9781949669183

Today, the name Marion Miley is largely unrecognizable, but in the fall of 1941, she was an internationally renowned golf champion, winning every leading women's tournament except the elusive national title. This unassuming twenty-seven-year-old woman was beloved by all she met, including celebrities like jazz crooner Bing Crosby. With ambitions to become a doctor, it seemed Marion Miley was headed for greatness. But on September 28, 1941, six gunshots broke through the early morning stillness of the Lexington Country Club. Marion had been brutally murdered. News of her death spread quickly, headlining major papers such as the New York Times. Support flooded in, spurring police in the hunt for her killers. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor less than two months later would redirect public attention and sweep Marion's story to a forgotten corner of time--until now. The Murder of Marion Miley recounts the ensuing manhunt and trial, exploring the impact of class, family, and opportunity in a world where steely determination is juxtaposed with callous murderous intent.

 

A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City by David Dominé

ISBN: 9781643138633

This true crime saga--with an eccentric Southern backdrop--introduces the reader to the story of a murder in a crumbling Louisville mansion and the decades of secrets and corruption that live within the old house's walls. On June 18, 2010, police discover a body buried in the wine cellar of a Victorian mansion in Old Louisville. James Carroll, shot and stabbed the year before, has lain for 7 months in a plastic storage bin--his temporary coffin. Homeowner Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend, Joseph Banis, point the finger at each other in what locals dub The Pink Triangle Murder. On the surface, this killing appears to be a crime of passion, a sordid love tryst gone wrong in a creepy old house. But during the trial a deeper story emerges: the struggle between hope for a better future on the one hand and the privilege and power of the status quo on the other.

 

Murder on Youngers Creek Road by Gary P. West

ISBN: 9781948901499

On January 13, 1975, the enterprising community of Elizabethtown, Kentucky (a few miles from Fort Knox and the gold vault) was rocked with the news that one of their own, Peggy Rhodes--beloved housewife, mother, and grandmother--was killed when a bomb exploded in the family barn. An hour south along I-65 lies Bowling Green, a city known for small town values, a burgeoning industrial complex, the expanding Western Kentucky University campus, and as "Home of the Corvette". However, the city was also just one generation removed from earning the nickname "Little Chicago," a regional hotbed for car thefts, bootlegging, gambling, prostitution--and worse still--bombings and horrific murders. Murder on Youngers Creek Road is the true story of a murder-for-hire gone wrong that involves a well-known automobile dealer, two hit men hired to kill him, and a pair of high-profile business partners. The product of more than two years of research and interviews and writing, this book details one of the most complex murders of the decade and how it brought together two Kentucky towns in an unflattering way. It is a "tale of two cities" mired in the muck of greed, violence and murder, and of local efforts to bring the guilty parties to justice. In the end, both the innocent and the guilty would lose their lives.

 

The WVU Coed Murders by Geoffrey C. Fuller; S. James McLaughlin

ISBN: 9781467146166

Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell, collegiate freshman students at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W. Va., disappear while hitchhiking back from the movies. The news shocks the small community in 1970, and rumors quickly begin to circulate: they were sacrificed by a satanic cult, a serial killer is at work in the college town, or a vicious love triangle went terribly wrong. Then the first note arrives: "You will locate the bodies of the girls covered over with brush-look carefully. The animals are now on the move." The series of handwritten letters drive the local media and law enforcement into a frenzy, even after the bodies are discovered and investigators begin to target subjects of interest: the campus janitor, the deliveryman who beat a woman nearly to death, and the nursing home orderly with the bloody broomstick in his possession. What happened so long ago remains a mystery, and the authors seek to tell the complete story of the murders -- and possibly at last identify their killer.

 

Murder in the Mountains by Michael Crisp

ISBN: 9781450782265

Revisits the slaying of Muriel Baldridge, the 17-year old high school cheerleader, in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.  On the night of her murder on June 27, 1949, Muriel had been at a carnival with several other friends, and was returning home near the iconic Prestonsburg Bridge. She was walking home with the other girls, and they parted ways at the bridge because Muriel said she wanted to take a shortcut back to her home just nearby. Her body was discovered the next morning.  Two hundred yards from her home, Muriel had been beaten to death with a metal pipe.  While 3,500 people attended her small funeral, the town's police force geared up a grueling investigation.  Their leads brought them back home -- after more than 50 people were questioned in relation to her murder, the respected member of the Prestonsburg Board of Education, Lon Moles, veteran C&O freight agent, and  Prestonsburg resident E.K. Dotson, were indicted on Feb. 4, 1950.

 

Criminal Minds:

Part 1:  Criminal Minds: Real Life Crime Thrillers for a Cold Winter Day

Part 2:  Criminal Minds:  True Crime You can Read Online

Part 3:  Criminal Minds:  True Crime from Appalachia and Kentucky

Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? by Robert G. Lawson

The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia by Gerald L. Smith (Editor); Karen Cotton McDaniel (Editor); John A. Hardin (Editor)

A Shot in the Moonlight by Ben Montgomery

Famous African American physicist Charles McGruder III is a faculty member at Western Kentucky University.  In 2010, he led the drive to install a rare telescope site in Africa.   In this interview, he describes what is happening with African American students in STEM fields.   His son, a Harvard doctorate, poses with him and two other scientists from the Gates family at the Rhode Island Black Physicists conference in 2019; McGruder says, "I didn’t meet another Black physicist until I was in my 30s. It was in Africa, and he was African. I want to help change the situation for the next generation."

Berea College was founded in the mid-nineteenth century with the policy of not only sex-integrated education, but racially-integrated education.  It flourished for more than 50 years this way.  In 1904, the Kentucky legislature specifically targeted the "Day Law" to fine the college for its integration policies.   The resulting case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Berea College vs. Kentucky.  There the ruling was upheld: the state legislature could fine Berea College $1,000 per day for each day they remained integrated.   The same justice protested who had also protested 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson; Boyle County native Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."   Berea College was forcibly segregated until 1950.

Born on Chloe Creek in Pike County, Effie Waller Smith was the third child, second daughter, of a family who loved the eastern Kentucky mountains.   One of her favorite places was the Breaks, about which she would write: 

I watched the white and billowy clouds
          That floated lazily
   With sun encircled edges through
          The purple tinted sky.
   I never knew a sweeter look
          Of Nature ever wearing,
   I never saw her more sublime,
          With more grand awesome bearing
   Than when among Big Sandy's "Breaks"
          October last upon
   That long-to-be-remembered day
          I spent with her alone.

Effie Waller Smith's childhood and young adulthood was spent roaming the hills.   Eventually her poetry would be published in  national publications like The Independent, Putnam's, and Harper's, and she published three volumes of her own poetry, as the African American poet "from the Breaks." 

The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Last Call by Elon Green