Upcoming Book Projects
by Richard C. Lindberg
Heartland
serial killers:
Belle Gunness, Johann Hoch and Murder for Profit in Gaslight Era
America
Rich’s next book, Heartland serial Killers: Belle Gunness,
Johann Hoch and Murder for Profit in Gaslight Era America,
profiling Gunness and Hoch, two early 20th Century serial killers
who placed advertisements in the lonely hearts columns of ethnic
newspapers advertising for desperately lonely men and women to marry…swindle…and
ultimately murder, will be published by Northern Illinois University
Press in DeKalb, IL, in March of 2011. Belle Gunness carried out
her bloody work in a rural farm house outside of LaPorte, Indiana
from 1900-1908. Hoch, the lesser known fiend, was an apprentice
to Dr. H.H. Holmes, the "master of murder castle" (more famously
known as the "Devil in the White City") in the Englewood neighborhood
of Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair. Hoch struck off on his
own after his mentor, H.H. Holmes, was captured and hanged. Hoch,
this squat, balding killer married 35 women in his time – about
ten of them ended up in graves once their dowry and insurance policies
were safely in his hand. Hoch and Gunness were contemporaries but
they did not work together, nor did they know each, but if they
had, one would have cancelled out the other.
The
Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life
Richard toured central Sweden in July 2001, re-visiting
the homeland of his father, his grandparents, and twenty cousins
who gathered for a reunion of the Lindberg cousins at the
picturesque Ronneby Brunn, a beautiful resort hotel located
in the coastal province of Blekinge.
|
|
A gathering of the Lindberg cousins in Bromolla Sweden. Rich and Chuck flank Tekla Perrson, their father's only surviving sister who helped translate the bundle of letters that unraveled old family mysteries that form the basis of Richard's manuscript, The Whiskey Breakfast. |
|
|
Richard and his brother Chuck lay flowers at their father's gravesite, outside of Ronneby, Sweden during a family reunion in July, 2001. |
In 1987 Richard journeyed to rural Sweden for the first time to bury the cremation
ashes of his stern and unknowable immigrant father in the
family plot in Ronneby. Oscar Lindberg, a restless man of
endless contradiction, died in Chicago in 1986 at the age
of eighty-nine, leaving to his youngest son the bare outline
of a book and a raft of unanswered questions.
Richard returned to the historic town in 2001 to continue his
family research and explorations of old family mysteries forming
the premise of a moving personal memoir about his father's sudden
decision to flee the country with only the clothing on his back.
Oscar Lindberg sailed from Göteborg's "America Pier" in October
1924, clutching a doctored passport and traveling under an assumed
name in order to re-settle in Chicago's North Side Swedish community.
The title of the book is The Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family
My American Life. The manuscript has been completed after nearly
a decade of research and writing. The University of Minnesota Press
has scheduled the book for a fall 2011 release as a part of their
Scandianvian Studies Program.
|
