Harold Schechter

Now with a new afterword read by the author. From the author of “top-drawer true crime” (Booklist) books comes the definitive account of Ed Gein—the man whose shocking crimes inspired Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. The year was 1957. To his Wisconsin...

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....

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them....

During the Depression, economic anxieties found an outlet in a series of child murders that triggered an irrational nationwide hysteria: pedophiliac psychopaths supposedly overrunning the country. Lynch mobs took to the streets....

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies....

A series of brutal home invasions terrified Los Angeles in 1937. They ended in Chicago a year later with the arrest of African American teenager Robert Nixon, igniting racial tensions in an already appallingly divided city....

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...

In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it....

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors - and then went back to bed....

Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films....

In 1860, a sloop drifted into New York Harbor. Not a soul on board - just blood from cabin to deck. Looted coins led to Bowery thug Albert Hicks, the ax slayer who turned his shipmates into chum....

At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull....

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...

From veteran true crime master Harold Schechter comes a unique look into the history of crime told through the dark objects left behind.

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...

The wayward son of a revered Civil War general, Roland Molineux enjoyed good looks, status, and fortune - hardly the qualities of a prime suspect in a series of shocking, merciless cyanide killings. Molineux's subsequent indictment for murder led to two explosive trials and a sex-infused scandal...

A monster preyed upon the children of 19th-century Boston. His crimes were appalling - and yet he was little more than a child himself. When 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. "The Boston Boy Fiend" was...

A story from the anthology Masters of True Crime, which spans murder cases from the beginning of the 20th century to today....

Beekman Place, once one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan, had a curious way of making it into the tabloids in the 1930s....

In the tradition of Mary Roach's best-selling Stiff and Jessica Mitford's classic expose The American Way of Death comes this meticulously researched and refreshingly irreverent look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor...