Kill For Me
Release Date: September 7, 2010

His Target
Aspiring model Sandee Rozzo's big mistake was being kind to Timothy "Tracey" Humphrey. After Rozzo refused the 'roided-up' ex-con's advances, she described how he imprisoned, raped, and brutalized her for two days. When the courageous woman pledged to testify against him, Humphrey knew he had to silence her-

His Weapon
That's when he turned to 19-year-old Ashley Laney. She had fallen in love with Humphrey, her personal trainer, and would do anything for him. On their wedding night, he made a strange request-one that would end with eight gunshot wounds and a dead body.

His Scheme
The police knew Humphrey was the likely suspect, but he had an alibi for the time of the shooting. How could they prove that, even if he didn't pull the trigger, he was the manipulative psychopath behind Sandee's murder? It would all come down to a prison escape, a manhunt for a killer, and an explosive trial.

-One of our most engaging crime journalists. -- Dr. Katherine Ramsland
-Phelps gets into the blood and guts of the story -- Gregg Olsen

Case seen on 48 Hours
Includes 16 Pages Of Shocking Photos

The Devil's Rooming House
Release Date: April 1, 2010

A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace.

The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England. (Read More)

Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America's First Spy
Release Date: September 16, 2006

The first biography in nearly a century of the legendary Revolutionary War patriot and our country’s first spy.

Few Americans know much more about Nathan Hale than his famous last words: “I only regret that I have one life left to give for my country.” But who was the real Nathan Hale?

M. William Phelps charts the life of this famed patriot and Connecticut’s state hero, following Hale’s rural childhood, his education at Yale, and his work as a schoolteacher. Even in his brief career, he distinguished himself by offering formal lessons to young women. Like many young Americans, he soon became drawn into the colonies’ war for independence, becoming a captain in Washington’s army. When the general was in need of a spy, Hale willingly rose to the challenge, bravely sacrificing his life for the sake of American liberty.

Using Hale’s own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground. From the confrontation in Boston to the battle for New York City, readers experience what life was like for an ordinary soldier in the struggling Continental army.

In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the life of Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot. (Read More)

Failures of the Presidents: From the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq
by M. William Phelps and Thomas J. Craughwell
Release Date: September 1, 2008

THE NATIONAL TREASURY CRIPPLED.
COUNTLESS LIVES RUINED.
WHOLE NATIONS DESTROYED.

Everybody makes mistakes, but when an American president blunders the result can be catastrophic.

This in-depth look at presidential decision-making processes gone wrong reveals the policies and courses of action that seemed promising at the time, but turned out to be the worst decisions American presidents have made. The stories featured here altered the course of the nation’s history, and in some cases changed the history of the world for the worse.

Every chapter takes the reader inside the White House as the president confronts troubles at home and threats from abroad and explains the problems and choices the president faced, what he hoped to achieve, and why his decision went horribly wrong, including:

• The war that cost 20,000 American lives, reduced the U.S. Capitol and the White House to smoking ruins, and achieved none of the president’s goals.
• The relocation plan that sent a clear message to former Confederates that the federal government had abandoned the millions of newly freed slaves.
• The half-hearted invasion that led the world to the brink of nuclear war.
• The failed burglary and the bungled cover-up that forced a president from office.

Failures of the Presidents is a gripping and horrifying history of presidential directives—most well intended but some arguably not—resulting in terrible disaster. (Read More)

Death Trap
Release Date: March 2, 2010

Trap Them and Kill Them . . .
A loving father and his new wife set out to pick up his kids for a scheduled weekend visit—but never suspected they were walking into a death trap.

Drag Them and Burn Them . . .
A handwritten note instructed Alan and Terra Bates to enter the backdoor of his ex-wife’s Alabama home. A day later their charred bodies were found hundreds of miles away, wrapped in blankets, in a burned-out car’s trunk on a desolate Georgia road.

Two Victims. Four Bullets Each.
At Jessica McCord’s house, law enforcement found windows covered in blankets, a cache of weapons and ammunition, carpets torn up, new tile on the floors—a couch gone. Then they learned about the nasty divorce and bitter custody battle that had landed Jessica in jail. Upon release, Jessica swore, “Somebody is going to pay.” With her new police-officer husband, Jessica became the prime suspect in this brutal double murder . . .

Cruel Death
Release Date: July 1, 2009

Erika Sifrit was once a high school basketball star and an honor student. Then she married Navy SEAL Benjamin Sifrit. Some say Erika was abused by 'B.J.' Some say she pulled his strings. But by the time they reached Ocean City, MD, Erika was packing a gun in her Coach bag and was caught the grips of a new American death ride. In the sun-kissed, sea-swept resort town, a loving couple crossed paths with Erika and B.J. Sifrit. Shortly thereafter, Erika was wearing a bloody wedding ring on her necklace, while what remained of two dismembered holiday makers was buried in a Delaware landfill, and a modern-day "Bonnie and Clyde" story was being written - a lurid tale of madness, money, sex and murder. (Read More)

Deadly Secrets
Release Date: February 2, 2009

BEHIND A VEIL OF TRANQUILITY…
In the lovely town of Pleasant Valley in upstate New York, the maple trees were ablaze with fall’s blood-red color. The air was crisp. And a woman named Susan Fassett left her weekly choir practice at a church – when a killer emerged from the shadows and mercilessly gunned her down…was a realm of sexual depravity where murder was the last sin.

Stunned, the police immediately suspected Susan Fassett’s husband and surrounded his home. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Susan Fassett had been living a secret life, lost in a world of dominance, lesbian sex, betrayal – and a depraved plan for murder. After detectives untangled a web of secrets and corruption hidden in plain sight, the town of Pleasant Valley would be rocked again when a shocking trial exposed the whole sordid truth… (Read More)

Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Release Date: November 29, 2008

COLD STORAGE
In May 2003, an Arizona man who had purchased dozens of sealed boxes at a self-storage facility's auction of unclaimed property made a horrifying discovery: the bodies of three plastic-wrapped infants, one of which had become mummified over the years. As the investigation ensued, police immediately traced the babies to one Dianne Odell, 50, a Pennsylvania mother of eight living children, who admitted the babies were hers, claimed that they'd died of natural causes, but had kept the bodies hidden away in boxes for over twenty years before abandoning them.  (Read More)

Murder in the Heartland
Release Date: June 2006

On December 16, 2004, a Nodaway County, Missouri, 911 operator received a frantic call from the mother of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett. The eight-months-pregnant mom-to-be, Bobbie Jo, had been found lying on her family room floor bleeding profusely and barely breathing. Most disturbing of all, her baby was gone.

Only 187 miles away in Melvern, Kansas, Bobbie Jo's killer, Lisa Montgomery, dressed the baby she'd brutally kidnapped in a Winnie-the-Pooh outfit and called her husband to say that she'd given birth to a baby girl she called Abigail. While televisions blared the nation's first Amber Alert for an unborn child, Lisa proudly showed off "her" new baby at church and a local diner, duping many while arousing the suspicions of others. And that was only the beginning of one of the most unthinkable events in American history, one that shocked the nation and left two Midwestern communities reeling in the crime's aftermath.

Now, investigative journalist and acclaimed author M. William Phelps delivers a definitive literary investigation of this compelling story, one that is as suspenseful as it is heartbreaking. Working with the exclusive cooperation of Lisa Montgomery's ex-husband, Carl Boman, Lisa's children and mother, law enforcement officials, friends, relatives, and neighbors, Phelps reveals what really happened that fateful day in December and traces the tortured history of sexual abuse, abandonment, and desperation that planted the seeds of a potential sociopath destined for "moral insanity." Here is the true story of the frantic search for a baby born under the most horrific conditions imaginable, of the lucky break that led to the killer, of Lisa's family's fears about her mental health, and of the shock waves that still linger in two small American towns that will never be the same again.

Like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Murder in the Heartland takes an unflinching look at an American tragedy, exploring its terrible trajectory with unparalleled courage, insight, and compassion. (Read More)