SEPARATE LIVES: As a pioneer woman educator, Mary Rippon received wide acclaim for her teaching, but in order to keep her position, she hid both her husband and child behind a Victorian veil of secrecy. Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon, reveals the lifelong conflicts between this extraordinary woman's public and private lives.
     Readers will follow Mary from her small midwestern hometown to the great centers of culture in Europe. In January 1878, after several years of education in Germany, France, and Switzerland, the soft-spoken-twenty-seven-year-old woman was welcomed at the newly opened University of Colorado in the small frontier town of Boulder, Colorado. The growth of her lengthy career paralleled the early growth of the university where she worked her way up from the first female faculty member to the university's first female professor, eventually chairing the department of German language and literature.
     Modest and unassuming, Mary Rippon taught in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia where she shielded her womanly emotions from the public. Hidden romance and familial responsibility spanned two continents. "Miss Rippon," as she always was called, was a professional woman who became a mother in an era when these two roles could not be combined.
     The author's purpose is not to tarnish Mary's well-deserved reputation, but rather to uncover the human side of a woman whose circumstances clashed with the mores of her times. Her life was her own, as free as her wildflower garden –– an anomaly in an otherwise structured world.

     SOMEONE’S DAUGHTER: In 1954, two college students hiked along a creek outside of Boulder, Colorado, when they stumbled upon the body of a murdered young woman. Who was this woman? What had happened to her?
     The initial investigation turned up nothing, and the girl was buried in a local cemetery with a gravestone that read, “Jane Doe, April 1954, Age About 20 Years.”
     Decades later, the author formed a partnership with law enforcement and forensic experts and set in motion the events that led to Jane Doe’s exhumation and eventual identification, as well as the identity of her probable killer.
     This updated edition includes an epilogue with new information on how the mystery finally was solved.

     SEE ALSO, “WEB OF DEATH EPISODE #2, BOULDER JANE DOE,” STREAMING ON HULU.

     BLONDE TIGRESS: Beginning in 1933, Eleanor Jarman was sensationalized by the press as the “blonde tigress” and “the most dangerous woman alive.” But a closer look at her life shows that she was an otherwise ordinary woman who got caught up in a Chicago crime spree, then was convicted as an accomplice to murder and sent to prison. In 1940, Eleanor escaped and managed to live out her life as, perhaps, America’s longest-running female fugitive.
      Following the murder of an elderly shopkeeper, readers are given a front-row seat for Eleanor’s arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, and subsequent prison years –– all documented with recently unearthed primary-source police records, court transcripts, and prison files. Woven in are comparisons and contrasts between Eleanor’s and her escape partner’s criminal histories, as well as speculation on their lives on the lam. Whether Eleanor deserved her sentence, or whether it was too harsh, is left for the reader to decide.
     In Search of the Blonde Tigress sets the mystery and intrigue of the wanted woman into historic context. It also includes her family’s plea, in 1993, for Eleanor to come forward and apply for clemency. Most revealing at the time was Eleanor’s alias. With that information (and considering that Eleanor, born in 1901, is certainly now deceased, the author documents her search for Eleanor’s remains –– right up to a visit to her likely grave.