Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America by Mark A. Bradley

Late in the night of New Year’s Eve in 1969, Jock Yablonski, his wife, and their daughter were brutally murdered in their Pennsylvania farmhouse. He had been defeated by incumbent Tony Boyle in an election for President of the United Mine Workers of America, but he was asking for a Department of Labor investigation of the election and suing the union for fraud. The election was eventually declared invalid and in 1972 Arnold Miller, like Yablonski a reform candidate, defeated Tony Boyle. Two years later, Boyle was convicted of conspiracy to murder Yablonski’s family, becoming the seventh man to be convicted in connection with the murders. "An absorbing, brilliant account of one of the most tragic murder stories in modern labor history, Blood Runs Coal judiciously uncovers the hidden layers of a brutal crime in the last moments of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, and recovers the legacy of the heroic movement for democracy in the coal fields that remains an urgent, powerful, and hopef