Traveling to Indulge Your Passion for True Crime

True crime is all the craze these days, but it might surprise you to learn that dark tourism in general is trending, with people indulging in travel to cemeteries (necro tourism), jails (prison travel), and paranormal travel (ghost tours, etc.).

To cater to this growing hunger for dark tourism, in Level Best Books is releasing Vacations Can Be Murder: A True Crime Lover’s Travel Guide of New England by award-winning travel journalist, Dawn M Barclay. It will be the first of a multi-volume series covering the U.S. and beyond that should interest those who study crime and punishment and want to see ”where it all happened.”

This first volume will cover Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Topics within each state will include:

• Major crimes in the state and where those crimes were committed, down to the street name (but not the exact street number for private houses)
• More books to read about those crimes
• Haunted restaurants and hotels
• Restaurants and hotels with a crime or punishment connection
• Crime museums and other attractions
• True crime and ghost tours
• Where the criminals are jailed
• Where the bodies are buried
• Easy-to-follow itineraries that bring all the different pieces together in a logical way
• Resources for victims of such crimes

The book concentrates on locations of well-known crimes, as well as ones that might be unfamiliar to the average tourist. Take Connecticut. Few people know about Amy Archer-Gilligan, who may have killed as many as 100 victims in the early 20th century. Gilligan ran the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in the Hartford suburb of Windsor, where countless older residents were bilked out of money and then poisoned by arsenic, including the murderer’s own husbands.

Other locations tied to Archer-Gilligan include Newington, where she and her first husband, James Archer, lived with John Seymour until he died and then transformed the home into Sister’s Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly. In 1917, she was convicted of the murder of Franklin Andrew and sentenced to death by hanging. but that sentence was later reversed on a technicality. The play Arsenic and Old Lace is loosely based on her story.

In Newtown, the November 1986 murder of Danish flight attendant Helle Crafts by her husband inspired the woodchipper scene in the movie, Fargo. Her husband, Richard Crafts, a philandering airline pilot with a temper, used one to dispose of his late wife’s body. At the time, they were pursuing a divorce.

The “Woodchipper Murder,” as it was called, was the first in which a murder conviction in the state of Connecticut was handed down without locating a corpse. The evidence they did find sufficed: proof of purchases for a freezer, a chainsaw, and a woodchipper rental, and witness statements of grapefruit-sized blood stains on a bedroom carpet, later removed. A chainsaw was later recovered in Lake Zoar, covered in hair and blood that matched Helle’s.

The first trial, held in New London, ended with a mistrial due to one juror who wouldn’t vote. When the case was retried in Norwalk, Crafts was found guilty and sentenced in 1990 to serve 50 years in state prison. He was released early for good behavior, however, and was last reported living in a homeless shelter for veterans in Bridgeport.

Moving on to Redding, talk about a landlord from hell. When Geoffrey Kent Ferguson had rent issues with three of his tenants who lived at his Redding rental house, first he tossed their belongings on the lawn and stole $3,000 worth of their belongings. When they pressed charges, he shot all three tenants and two of their friends on April 18, 1995 before setting the house – and the tenants – on fire.

One tenant survived and fingered Ferguson for the crime. He was convicted to life in prison without possibility of parole and committed suicide in 2003 after spending four years behind bars.

Finally, William Beadle and his wife, Lydia, moved from London to Connecticut in 1730 and then to Wethersfield in 1773. By 1776, they were a family of six, with one son. Ansell, and three daughters – Elizabeth, Lydia, and Mary.

Beadle made his fortune in Wethersfield as a merchant and enjoyed an elite social life. But his fortunes turned during the American Revolution, when he deigned not to charge more for his wares as the continental paper currency lost value. He didn’t take well to his new, less privileged life, and after three years of contemplation, when Congress devalued the currency to 1/40th of its March 1780 value, he decided that neither he nor his family should face life without the security of wealth.

On December 10th, he sharpened his large carving knife, and early the next morning, after sending the maid away, he axe-murdered his wife as she lay sleeping in their bed, slit her throat with his knife, and placed a handkerchief over her face. Then he did the same to each of his four children, laying the girls on the floor side by side before slitting their throats. Tracking their blood on his shoes, he went down to the lower level, sat in a Windsor chair, picked up two pistols, and blew his own brains out.

The book details the locations of these and many other crimes throughout New England, along with where the victims are buried and much, much more. Interested readers can join the mailing list on the VacationsCanBeMurder.com website to get updates, as well as get a taste of the content. There’s also a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/truecrimetravelguides.

It will be available starting March 25th from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshops.org, and all major book distributors in both e-book and paperback format. The Amazon preorder link is https://a.co/d/5IYC6Cg.