Jenny Ashford is a horror, true crime, and paranormal writer, graphic designer, and podcaster. Her most recent books are a three-volume true crime compilation collectively known as The Faceless Villain: A Collection of the Eeriest Unsolved Murders of the Twentieth Century. Volume One was published in 2017, Volume Two in 2018, and Volume Three in 2019. Her other books include four paranormal nonfiction books: The Unseen Hand: A New Exploration of Poltergeist Phenomena, The Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist (with Tom Ross), House of Fire and Whispers: Investigating the Seattle Demon House, and The Rochdale Poltergeist (both with Steve Mera); as well as three horror novels, Red Menace, Bellwether, and The Five Poisons; two short story collections, Hopeful Monsters and The Associated Villainies; and a graphic novel, The Tenebrist. A second edition of The Associated Villainies was published in 2019, featuring four new stories, an enhanced print layout, and an audio book version. A second edition of The Five Poisons was published in 2020. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Nightmare Collective, History Is Dead, 2012AD, ChimeraWorld #3, and ChimeraWorld #4. Her horror blog, Goddess of Hellfire, contains writing news, short stories and articles, and her reviews and opinions on horror films and books. She also co-hosts a podcast with Tom Ross called 13 O'Clock, on which they discuss true crime, unexplained mysteries, paranormal weirdness, horror movies and books, food, and other fun, creepy topics. They recently collaborated on a 13 O'Clock cookbook. Jenny's graphic design work can be seen on everything from books and business cards to posters and packaging. She runs an online store called Gravecake selling products with her designs, and also has a board-and-card game concern called Giallo Games, which produces games based around the beloved Italian horror/crime genre, among many other themes.
It was New Year’s Day of 1902 in a rural town called Towitta, in South Australia. Thirteen-year-old Bertha Schippan and her twenty-four-year-old sister Mary were spending the evening at the family farm alone. Their parents, Matthes and Johanne, were visiting relatives, and their three brothers were away working on other nearby farms. Sometime around ten … More Bertha Schippan
At a little after six a.m. on the morning of August 9th, 1976, trucker Martin Durant noticed the fully-clothed dead bodies of a man and woman sprawled alongside a remote unpaved track between Interstate 95 and Lynches River Road in South Carolina. Each victim had been shot three times with a .357 caliber revolver: once … More Pamela Buckley and James Freund: Sumter County Does
On the morning of September 12th, 1976, a body was discovered near the back gate of a cemetery off Dogwood Road in Woodlawn, Maryland. The victim was a young woman between the ages of fifteen and thirty, who had been beaten, savagely raped, and then strangled to death. Police determined that she had been killed … More Margaret Fetterolf: Woodlawn Jane Doe
In the summer of 1976, a forty-six-year-old hotel manager in Australia would check into a fancy hotel and never check out. Rex Keen lived in Bowen on the coast of Queensland, but on August 9th, 1976, he traveled to Brisbane to attend the Queensland Royal Show, which he did every year. Another thing he did … More Rex Keen
It was July 10th, 1976, and twenty-year-old Debra Bennett had just been evicted from her apartment in Madison, Wisconsin. She had only been living there for about seven months, having moved from her native Ridgeway, but apparently she had failed to come up with the rent, and neighbors saw her packing up her things and … More Debra Bennett
Shirley Finn was, in 1975, a notorious figure in Perth, Western Australia. Though she had come from a respectable middle class family and seemingly had a bright future ahead of her, an ill-advised sexual encounter with an older boy at the age of fourteen saw her spirited off to a strict Catholic reform school, where … More Shirley Finn
Twenty-two-year-old Judy Lord lived in an apartment in Concord, New Hampshire with her seventeen-month-old son. On the evening of May 19th, 1975, Judy was in the crowd that had gathered to watch a volleyball game taking place in the common area of her apartment complex. She reportedly returned to her home at approximately ten-thirty p.m. … More Judy Lord
It was January 5th, 1988, and a maid entering room 227 at the Marco Polo Hotel in Miami was shocked to find the remains of what appeared to be a teenage boy lying in the bathtub. The victim was white, between the ages of ten and twenty-one years old, stood around five-foot-six and weighed approximately … More Dade County John Doe
On April 13th, 1992, a decomposed body was recovered from a ditch parallel to Interstate 90, only five miles from the border between Wyoming and Montana. The victim—still unidentified and referred to as Sheridan County Jane Doe—was white, between sixteen and twenty-one years old, standing about five-foot-five and weighing one-hundred-ten pounds. She had shoulder-length brown … More Sheridan County Jane Doe
On the afternoon of March 1st, 1992, a truck driver named Barbara Leverton, who had pulled over to the side of Interstate 80 in Sweetwater, Wyoming to change out her fuel tanks, beheld the appalling sight of a naked, frozen corpse lying face down at the bottom of a slope off the roadside, near an … More Bitter Creek Betty
Crime Immemorial 