Harold Schechter

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 that shocked the nation. Bringing to life Manhattan's Gilded Age, Schechter captures all the colors of the tumultuous legal proceedings, gathering his own evidence...

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. In this book you'll meet Robert Irwin, "The...

A monster preyed upon the children of nineteenth-century Boston. His crimes were appalling-and yet he was little more than a child himself. When fourteen-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 imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree-the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime-were as relevant in the so-called...

"The shocking true story of one of the twentieth century's most prolific female serial killers."--Book jacket. Belle Gunness engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908 she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her La Porte, Indiana 'murder farm.' Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they...

Offers a chilling account of the murderous career of Jane Toppan, a proper New England matron and seemingly devoted nurse who poisoned more than one hundred people during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital in the 1890s.

"From veteran true crime master Harold Schechter comes Murderabilia, a 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...