True Crime Tales From The Hudson Valley

In November 1930, the entire Germond family was murdered on their family farm in Stanfordville. 

The details of that night and the subsequent investigation are outlined in “Hudson Valley Murder & Mayhem,” a new book by Andrew K. Amelinckx that features 11 true crime stories that span 300 years in 11 Hudson Valley counties — including the Stanfordville tale in Dutchess County and an outline of the Austerlitz Cannibal in Columbia County.

 Amelinckx, who lives in Catskill, N.Y., moved to the area with his wife in 2006.

“I was happily surprised to discover just how much of a rich history this region has — but there is also a dark undercurrent that I thought was really interesting,” he said.

Amelinckx, who currently writes for Men’s Journal and Modern Farmer, is the former crime and courts reporter for The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass. He was also a crime reporter for the Register-Star in Hudson. His work at those two newspapers led to his fascination with true crime stories and his first book, “Gilded Age Murder & Mayhem in the Berkshires.”

For the Hudson Valley book, Amelinckx picked his topics by looking through the archives of major newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, to discover which local crimes were “shocking or weird” enough to make it to the pages of national news.

“I didn’t want the stories to be ones people were necessarily familiar with and had been told over and over again,” he said. “Some I stumbled upon at the library looking through microfilm. The one for Ulster County, I had just come across it and it was such an interesting story that I wanted to write about it.”

Once he had a lead on a story, he dove into any reports he could find. “Court cases are basically an oral history of the crime,” he said, noting that Ancestry.com was a “tremendous help” to find details that wouldn’t be in a news story.

Amelinckx’s stories in “Hudson Valley Murder & Mayhem” are narrative nonfiction, a tool  he utilized to avoid making the tales too dry.

“I have always liked reading history that has conversational elements to it,” he said. “Whenever I was able to find enough evidence to say, ‘yes, this is what this person thought at the time,’ I’d add that in.”

Amelinckx is fascinated by all of the stories he featured in the book, but he says one of the most interesting tales focuses on the Lizzie Halliday case in Sullivan County in the 1880s and 1890s. She left a trail of bodies in her wake, including two strangers, her husband and a nurse.

“All of these tales have something to teach us,” he wrote in the book’s introduction, “and the characters — once real, living, breathing humans — have been given a second chance to tell their side of the story from beyond the grave.”