True Detective Magazine Jan-18 Back Issue

The death of brave former Birmingham estate agent and one-time Michael Sams captive Stephanie Slater last September was a poignant moment. Here was a woman who had shown incredible courage during more than a week incarcerated against her will by an evil, one-legged killer. By Stephanie’s own admission, her ordeal at the hands of Sams in January 1992 ruined the next 20 years of her life. But did it, as a devastated close friend of Stephanie’s commented when news of her passing emerged, actually play a part in her death from cancer, aged 50?

America’s Most Evil – Spurned Lover Killed 87 recalls the black day in 1990 when so many lives were lost at the Happy Land social club in the city’s Bronx district. All were victims of one man, Julio Gonzalez, who set the venue on fire as a petty act of revenge. Extraordinarily, his heinous act happened to fall on the same date – March 25th – as another devastating fire, in 1911, that killed 146 New Yorkers.

Read these cases and many more in True Detective January...