The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial

Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long avoided punishment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian Laura James.

With cases from 1850 to 1997, these 32 examples span more than a century, across cultures, ethnicitie...