THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY’S MOST HEINOUS!Hollywood’s make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can’t hold a candle to real life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the seri...

AMERICA’S MOST COLD-BLOODED!In the horrifying annals of American crime, the infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and Berkowitz are writ large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and hypnotized by their monstrous, murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who’s gotten ink for spilling blood, there’s a bevy of all-but-forgotten homicidal fiends studding the bloody margins of U.S. history. The law gave them their just desserts, but now the ...

An in-the-room account of John Colt's scandalous nineteenth-century murder trial from "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" ( Boston Review).In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John's rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt's rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary revolver. ...

In the tradition of Mary Roach’s bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford’s classic exposé The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched, refreshingly irreverent, and lavishly illustrated look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about ...

From renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter, whom The Boston Book Review hails as “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers,” comes the riveting exploration of a notorious, sensational New York City murder in the 1890s, the fascinating forensic science of an earlier age, and the explosively dramatic trial that became a tabloid sensation at the turn of the century.Death was by poison and came in the mail: A package of Bromo Seltzer had been anonymo...

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America. While other infamous homicides from the same eras—the Lizzie Borden slayings, for example, or the “thril...

From the true crime author of Murderabilia, a geographic telling of some of the most notorious but lesser-known murders for each US State.Filled with hundreds of entries organized by location, 50 States of Murder is a lively and chilling work of storytelling and an authoritative survey of the homicidal history of the United States—perfect for any true-crime obsessive. Certain crimes are impossible to imagine happening anywhere but where they did: ...

An unputdownable true crime story set in the pulp-fiction obsessed world of 1930s America.On Easter Sunday 1937, Bob Irwin – a handsome, failing sculptor with a history of depression and psychopathic episodes – commited a grisly triple murder. Creeping back to the flat of his ex-landlady in a swish New York borough, Irwin killed her, her lodger, and her stunning daughter Ronnie with an ice-pick, an apparently motiveless homicide that would shock the entire country.Firmly in...

An in-the-room account of John Colt's scandalous nineteenth-century murder trial from "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" (Boston Review).In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John's rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt's rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary r...

From veteran true crime master Harold Schechter comes a unique look into the history of crime told through the dark objects left behind.The false teeth of a female serial killer from 1908, the cut-and-paste confession of the Black Dahlia killer, the newly cracked cipher of the Zodiac killer, the shotgun used in the Clutter family murders, which were made famous by Truman Capote's true crime classic In Cold Blood—these are more than simple artifacts that on...

In February 1874 Alfred Packer staggered out of the Colorado mountains and into the Los Pinos Indian agency. Snowbound and lost, he claimed to have been abandoned by his five companions. But behind the wilderness grime he looked rather well fed. And he had in his possession a skinning knife...When questioned, Packer confessed that four of the group had survived by eating two who had died of exhaustion; later he killed another in self-defence, eating him also. Packer was arrested on...

In this historical murder mystery Harold Schechter revisits the chilling world of Edgar Poe and the Mystery Museum. During the sweltering summer of 1845, the savage murder of two girls shocks the citizens of Manhattan.  Edgar Allen Poe, despite the grisly subject matter of his own writings, is just as shaken by these horrendous bloody crimes as the panic-stricken public.  Suspicion of the killer’s identity immediately swirls around Chief Wolf Bear, one of the human attra...