Dead Move & Lethal Journey - Kate Morgan & the Haunting Mystery of Coronado: 3rd Edition - Special 120th Anniversary Double - Full Text of Dead Move and Lethal Journey (Paperback)

Who is the famous ghost said to haunt the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego? What is the truth behind the enigma surrounding her violent and mysterious death at the hotel in 1892? For the first time ever, the truth is revealed -- hidden in plain sight for over 120 years, due to a highly successful cover-up in 1892 to protect the reputation of hotel owner John D. Spreckels, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the United States during the late Gilded Age. What were the national and global implications of the blackmail plot in Coronado? Who was the Beautiful Stranger? Why did she come to Spreckels' hotel and register under a false name? Why did she died of a gunshot to the head, five days later, on the back stairs of the hotel? The mystery became an overnight, national sensation in the Yellow Press. The national telegraph network was the Internet of its day. Daily, even hourly, breathless reports issued from Coronado. Repressed Victorian readers were titillated, and couldn't get enough, when rumors of scandal and her alleged liaisons with men in the highest places leaked out. Was she murdered to silence her for what she knew? Was her husband a violent gambler, as myth has long maintained, who used her to lure gullible male victims to card games aboard luxurious transcontinental railroad cars? The truth, as finally revealed in John T. Cullen's painstaking, completely logical analysis, is far stranger than fiction. There are no paranormal effects here -- just cold, objective logic. All that we know has lain hidden in plain sight for over 120 years -- we just need to put the puzzle pieces together in their obvious, correct combination. When you have a puzzle of many pieces, and you put it together in the only way that they can possibly all fit, it can confidently be asserted that the puzzle has been solved. The author has discovered the intricate but logical (and only possible) solution to this very old true crime, a police case that went cold long ago because it was meant to. Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado, Third Edition, is a scholarly, nonfiction historical analysis that relies only on known facts to draw the inevitable conclusions that should have been obvious in 1892, to an objective observer not blinded by Spreckels' newspapers and agents. The coverup left us a confused, muddled, illogical tangle of myths and legends. It was a maze of known facts, tantalizing clues, and baffling dead ends--because it was designed that way. While Kate Morgan and her accomplices were at John Spreckels' Hotel del Coronado, attempting to pull off a doomed and ill-timed blackmail conspiracy, the target of that conspiracy -- John D. Spreckels, scion of the great Hawai'i sugar fortune -- was in Washington, D.C. fighting for Hawai'i's continued national sovereignty, the monarchy which stood in the way of foreign corporate interests, and his father's vast sugar plantations. A breath of scandal could have doomed Spreckels' delicate and desperate negotiations (even while Claus Spreckels, his father, was conducting last minute shuttle diplomacy between San Francisco and Honolulu). The Beautiful Stranger -- the tragic dead woman in Coronado -- was not Kate Morgan, as legend has long suggested. Instead, she was a poor, beautiful runaway from Detroit, a shopgirl named Lizzie Wyllie. She was a 'ruined' woman, having been made pregnant by her shop foreman, John Longfield. Together, they fell into the clutches of a ruthless grifter from Iowa, named Kate Morgan, who had a bizarre master plan for extracting a lot of money from the distant Mr. Spreckels. Kate and John escaped, while John Spreckels was shielded by the long-told lies this book dispels, and Lizzie became, in her death, that great, contradictory Victorian ideal of womanhood -- the Fallen Angel. Lethal Journey replaces the old dramatization in the book. It is a noir, period thriller you will not be able to put down.