Crime Does Not Pay #60

Verne Miller starts as a small-time embezzler in 1920s Detroit, but a prison sentence only hardens his resolve—he emerges as a ruthless "machine gunner" who becomes the hired muscle behind a series of violent crimes across America's heartland. After moving to Chicago and recruiting a crew for bank robberies, Miller's brutal tactics and willingness to betray his own partners make him increasingly dangerous, drawing the relentless attention of the FBI. This is the true-crime account of how a petty criminal became a feared national menace, until federal law enforcement decided to even the odds.

When a reader challenges the editor to set the record straight about Jesse James, Crime Does Not Pay launches a hard-hitting chronicle of how a young man's violent upbringing and allegiance to Quantrell's Raiders led him down a path of bank robberies, train heists, and bloodshed across the frontier. Tracing Jesse's evolution from farm boy to outlaw—from his brutal early days to his emergence as the leader of the James gang—this story cuts through the romanticized versions that Hollywood has peddled to audiences. It's a sobering account of how one man became a criminal, not a hero.

A misunderstanding between crooks spirals into bloodshed when hot-tempered Keene and his gang of liquor store robbers cross wires with a rival crew over a safe job gone wrong. As bodies pile up and fingers point inward, the real enemy closing in isn't the gang itself—it's the law, waiting to collect what's left of them.

In 1886 France, a woman of extraordinary strength takes over an old house to run a tavern, terrorizing her husband and brother with violent outbursts and drunken rages—until the night they're found dead under mysterious circumstances. Convicted of murder despite her claims of innocence, she rots in prison while the house itself seems cursed, claiming victim after victim with no clear cause. As death continues to stalk anyone who enters, the question becomes: did Madame Druaux truly kill those men, or is something far stranger at work in that accursed place?