Wanted Comics #36

Clyde Norton is a brilliant courtroom lawyer with a golden voice and sharper instincts—but his hunger for quick money and prestige makes him easy prey when mobster Al Bowie walks through his office door looking for legal muscle. As Norton trades his ethics for fat paychecks, he becomes the underworld's go-to mouthpiece, using theatrics, bought witnesses, and legal tricks to spring guilty clients from the noose. But his climb into Bowie's inner circle carries a price he never quite calculated.

Detective Lieutenant Dundy is closing in on Big Ed Beckett, a hot car kingpin, after an underworld informant is gunned down—but without a weapon recovered at the scene, the case against him looks shakier than his lawyer insists it should be. When a dying man confesses to the murder in a suicide note, it seems Beckett's conviction is assured, until Dr. Philip Gage of the police crime laboratory takes the stand with a startling discovery about the note's origins. A tale of forensic ingenuity that hinged on handwriting pressure—the kind of scientific detective work that became a classic reference in police manuals.

Harry Dumaine is a compulsive gambler drowning in debt to a dangerous creditor—and when his wife Martha threatens to leave him, he hatches a scheme to frame her death as suicide and collect her insurance. As the police investigate, Dumaine's carefully laid plan begins to unravel, revealing the twisted desperation of a man willing to commit the ultimate betrayal. Based on an actual criminal case, this is a brutal portrait of greed and deception from the true-crime files.

William Kenneth Wagner, a dangerous fugitive known as "the Kill-Crazy Gunman," escapes from a Mississippi jail in 1940 with one burning goal: revenge against the sheriff who imprisoned him. What follows is a brutal chronicle of violence, recapture, and repeated escapes as Wagner leaves a trail of blood across multiple states, always slipping through the fingers of law enforcement. This is a cautionary true-crime account of a killer whose hunger for vengeance and inability to be contained kept him one of America's most wanted men.

A slick confidence man named Lew Collins runs an immigration swindle targeting hardworking foreign-born Americans desperate to reunite with their families—exploiting their hopes with promises of expedited passports he can never deliver. When his young accomplice Steve Racek, guilt-stricken over conning his own impoverished neighbors, begins to crack under the moral weight of the scheme, Collins must decide how far he'll go to keep the operation running and his partner in line.