Yes, Free Roughead! 
No, he's not a correctional institute inmate wrongfully incarcerated for some horror he didn't commit, you ninny!
He's one of the greatest true crime writers Of All Time.
In addition to Google Books, a few other outfits are putting full-text classic historic crime titles online for one and all for free. The University of Texas' Tarlton Law Library has amassed a decent shelf's-worth that it calls "The Law in Popular Culture Collection," and the crowning jewel is 12 Scots Trials by William Roughead.
The book was originally published in 1913 and includes such gems as the Arran Murder and the Ordeal of Philip Stanfield.
Alas and alack, Roughead seems to have been underappreciated in the U.S. of A. even while alive. The Associated Press once reduced the nearly peerless Scottish student of aesthetic murders to a point of trivia, written up as filler copy in 1951.
His name thus pops up in the Kerrville (Texas) Times, courtesy NewspaperArchive.com:
Even while trivialized in some quarters, Roughead was revered in others. His name occasionally appears in old issues of the Kingsport Times-News of Tennessee, which apparently once had an editor with impeccable taste in murder literature; that newspaper described Roughead in 1945 as one of "the finest writing artists of the British Isles... an erudite Scot who is the present kingpin of the clan."
That's more like it!
But there's one even better in the NewspaperArchive. The legendary California true crime writer Nancy Barr Mavity -- I'll have to properly introduce you some time -- once wrote a review of Roughead's Classic Crimes (still in print) that was worthy of his genius. Here it is, a bit fuzzy, sorry, from her Oakland Tribune, from 1953.
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