Dead Move & Lethal Journey: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado, 3d Edition, Special 120th Anniversary Double - 2 Books in 1

On Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1892, a young woman (the legendary ‘Beautiful Stranger’) checked into the fabulous Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego, under a false name. She was dazzling and elegant. Staff and guests took for a stage actress or socialite. She was a poor factory girl from Detroit with stars in her eyes. She was also a ‘ruined woman’ (pregnant out of wedlock, condemned by Victorian society). Five days later—in a mysterious mission at the hotel that nobody ever understood until today’s publication of Dead Move by John T. Cullen--she died violently and inexplicably of a gunshot to the head, on the back or beach stairs of the hotel, during one of the century’s most violent ocean storm. Was it murder or suicide, and why? Instantly, her story became a national sensation in the Yellow Press, fueled by rumors of scandal with men in the highest circles.

For the first time ever, penetrate the fog of myth, deception, and cover-up to learn the true story of the Beautiful Stranger. It is a story with not only local, but also national and global implications. Ultimately, it is a tragic and timeless woman’s story, of a ‘ruined woman’ driven to unbearable ends after her betrayal by those she loved and trusted. In death, she was laid out like a fallen princess—a true Victorian Fallen Angel, in the best tradition of the age, as exemplified in Thomas Hardy’s famous tragedy Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Among the important NEW, never before understood discoveries:

(1) the dead woman was not Kate Morgan, as myth and legend would have us believe, but Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Wyllie, whose desperation drove her to commit her fate—regrettably—to the ruthless grifter Kate Morgan;

(2) the crux was a blackmail plot against John D. Spreckels, owner of the Hotel del Coronado, dreamed up by Kate Morgan, using the pregnant Lizzie and the man who ruined her, John Longfield (her foreman, a married man with children, at the bookbindery in Detroit where Lizzie and her sister May worked);

(3) the timing could not have been worse. John Spreckels was in Washington D. C., negotiating with family friend President Benjamin Harrison over the fate of Hawai'i and the Spreckels cane sugar fields on which the vast Spreckels fortune was based;

(4) given the delicate negotiations, and the Yellow Press ready to pounce on any scandal, Spreckels’ agents in San Diego and Los Angeles created a skilful cover-up whose effects are still felt today. The known facts are many, but spread about in a giant puzzle of many pieces, with tantalizing clues, intriguing leads, and baffling dead ends—now solved, once and for all, to the last tiny detail. The muddled myths and confusing legends were not accidental, but part of a deliberate and effective cover-up. Everything discovered by John T. Cullen in the ground-breaking Dead Move has been hidden in plain sight since 1892, had anyone ever stopped to think about the known facts of the case in context of known history.

Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado (3rd Edition) is nonfiction. For the first time, a scholarly research project uncovers the 1892 cover-up by the Spreckels Machine. The fate of the Spreckels empire was at stake. Hawai'i fell to Spreckels’ U.S. corporate rivals just five weeks after Lizzie died, but Spreckels’ Pinkerton-type agents purposely mixed up a muddle to last generations.

This is a historical and scientific investigation that avoids speculative or paranormal considerations. While neutral on the supernatural, this book gives ghost believers a historical baseline for understanding how the ghost legend came to be.

Lethal Journey is fiction—a noirish period thriller.