Bestselling true-crime writer Harold Schechter, a leading authority on serial killers, and coauthor David Everitt offer a guided tour through the bizarre and blood-chilling world of serial murder. Through hundreds of detailed entries that span the entire spectrum -- the shocking crimes, the infamous perpetrators, and much more -- they examine all angles of a gruesome cultural phenomenon that grips our imagination.

From Art (both by and about serial killers) to Zeitgeist (how killers past and present embody their times)...from Groupies (even the most sadistic killer can claim devoted fans) to Marriage (the perfect domestic disguise for demented killers)...from Homebodies (psychos who slay in the comfort of their homes) to Plumbing (how clogged drains have undone the most discreet killer), "THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS" is the ultimate reference for anyone compelled by the personalities and pathologies behind the most disturbing of crimes.

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. The necktie murders in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy; Chicago’s Jazz Age crime of passion; the fatal hookup in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; the high school horrors committed by the costumed slasher in Scream. These and other cinematic crimes have become part of pop-culture history. And each found inspiration in true events that provided the raw material for our greatest blockbusters, indie art films, black comedies, Hollywood classics, and grindhouse horrors. So what’s the reality behind Psycho, Badlands, The Hills Have Eyes, A Place in the Sun, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Dirty Harry? How did such tabloid-ready killers as Bonnie and Clyde, body snatchers Burke and Hare, Texas sniper Charles Whitman Jr., nurse-slayer Richard Speck, and Leopold and Loeb exert their power on the public imagination and become the stuff of movie lore? In this collection of revelatory essays, true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes a fascinating trip down the crossroads of fact and fiction to reveal the sensational real-life stories that are more shocking, taboo, and fantastic than even the most imaginative screenwriter can dream up.

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. The necktie murders in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy; Chicago’s Jazz Age crime of passion; the fatal hookup in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; the high school horrors committed by the costumed slasher in Scream. These and other cinematic crimes have become part of pop-culture history. And each found inspiration in true events that provided the raw material for our greatest blockbusters, indie art films, black comedies, Hollywood classics, and grindhouse horrors. So what’s the reality behind Psycho, Badlands, The Hills Have Eyes, A Place in the Sun, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Dirty Harry? How did such tabloid-ready killers as Bonnie and Clyde, body snatchers Burke and Hare, Texas sniper Charles Whitman Jr., nurse-slayer Richard Speck, and Leopold and Loeb exert their power on the public imagination and become the stuff of movie lore? In this collection of revelatory essays, true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes a fascinating trip down the crossroads of fact and fiction to reveal the sensational real-life stories that are more shocking, taboo, and fantastic than even the most imaginative screenwriter can dream up.

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 artefacts that once belonged to notorious murderers. They are objets of fascination to the legion of true crime obsessives around the world. And not merely for fleeting dark thrills, but because they represent a way to better understand those who we typically label monsters in lieu of learning how they actually became one. In Murderabilia, veteran true crime writer Harold Schechter presents 100 murder-related artefacts spanning two centuries (1808-2014), with accompanying stories of various lengths. A visual and literary journey, it presents a history unlike any previously told in the true crime genre, one that speaks to the dark fascination of true crime fans while also presenting a larger historical timeline of how and why we continue to be captivated by the most sensational crimes and killers among us.

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 Age of Innocence as they are today.

Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome "dead" eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sadist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager's bloodlust gave way to another obsession: murder.

Harold Schechter, whose true-crime masterpieces are "well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look" (Peoria Journal Star), brings his acclaimed mix of page-turning storytelling, brilliant insight, and fascinating historical documentation to Fiend -- an unforgettable account from the annals of American crime.

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell's Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first-and worst-mass murders in American history. In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school-one of the most modern in the Midwest-Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history. Maniac is Harold Schechter's gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a "human time bomb" whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

As an infant, Earle Leonard Nelson possessed the power to unsettle his elders. By his teens, his own family had reason to fear him. But no one in the winter of 1926 could have predicted that his degeneracy would erupt into a frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder, and unimaginable defilement.

In May, 1928, a kindly old man came to the door of the Budd family home in New York City. A few days later, he persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Budd to let him take their adorable little girl, Grace, on an outing. Albert Fish appeared to be a harmless, white-haired grandfather. The Budds never guessed that they had entrusted their child to a monster.

To write a poem is to become part of a great conversation with one's literary predecessors, but the poems in this anthology are a special breed, their authors deliberately addressing a particular poem or poet of the past or present. They may be replies, reproofs, updatings, acts of sabotage or adulation; they may argue with, elaborate upon, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their originals. From Raleigh's famous answer to Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd', to Anthony Hecht's 'The Dover Bitch', from Ogden Nash sending up Byron to Mona Van Duyn giving us Leda's perspective on the swan or Annie Finch's 'Coy Mistress' arguing her case with Marvell, these remarkable poems are not only engaging in themselves, but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems which inspired them. Thisconversation of the greats includes Philip Larkin replying to Sir Philip Sidney, Ezra Pound to Edmund Waller, Randell Jarrell to W.H. Auden, Denise Levertov to Wordsworth, Galway Kinnell to Rilke, David Lehmann to Pound, C.K. Williams to Coleridge - and many more.

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 serial killer phenomenon.
Rigorously researched and packed with the most terrifying, up-to-date information, this innovative and highly compelling compendium covers every aspect of multiple murderers--from psychology to cinema, fetishism to fan clubs, "trophies" to trading cards. Discover:
WHO THEY ARE: Those featured include Ed Gein, the homicidal mama's boy who inspired fiction's most famous "Psycho," Norman Bates; Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, sex-crazed killer cousins better known as the Hillside Stranglers; and the Beanes, a fifteenth-century cave-dwelling clan with an insatiable appetite for human flesh
HOW THEY KILL: They shoot, stab, and strangle. Butcher, bludgeon, and burn. Drown, dismember, and devour . . . and other methods of massacre too many and monstrous to mention here.
WHY THEY DO IT: For pleasure and for profit. For celebrity and for "companionship." For the devil and for dinner. For the thrill of it, for the hell of it, and because "such men are monsters, who live . . .
beyond the frontiers of madness."
"PLUS: "in-depth case studies, classic killers' nicknames, definitions of every kind of deviance and derangement, and much, much more.
For more than one hundred profiles of lethal loners and killer couples, Bluebeards and black widows, cannibals and copycats-- this is an indispensable, spine-tingling, eye-popping investigation into the dark hearts and mad minds of that twisted breed of human whose crimes are the most frightening . . . and fascinating.

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.

The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The literary forms they inhabit are just as varied, from the colorful melodramas of old Scottish ballads to the hard-boiled poetry of twentieth-century noir, from lighthearted comic riffs to profound poetic musings on murder.

Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Mark Doty, Frank Bidart, Toi Derricotte, Lynn Emanuel, and Cornelius Eady are only a few of the many poets, old and new, whose work is captured in this heart-stopping—and criminally entertaining—collection.

A professor of American literature and culture, renowned for his true-crime writing, Harold Schechter's Outcry discovers that a killer's instincts never die. When reporter Paul Novak investigates a series of brutal murders, he didn't plan to pry into the legend of Ed Gein, the butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin. But when local lore leads him to the ramshackle home of a bizarre young man and his mother, Paul realizes he's stumbled across Ed Gein's best kept secret

In the tradition of Mary Roach's bestselling "Stiff" and Jessica Mitford's classic expose "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 that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel. Topics include
- Death anxiety-is your fear of death normal or off the scale?
- You can't take it with you . . . or can you? Wacky wills and bizarre bequests
- The hospice experience-going out in comfort and style
- Deathbed and funeral etiquette-how to help the dying and mourn the dead with dignity
- Death on demand-why the right-to-die movement may be the next big thing
- "Good-bye everybody"-famous last words
- The embalmer's art-all dressed up and nowhere to go
- Behind the scenes at your local funeral home
- Alternative burial choices-from coral reefs to outer space
From the cold, hard facts of death to lessons in the art of dying well, from what happens in the body's last living moments to what transpires in the ground or in the furnace, from near-death experiences to speculation on the afterlife, The Whole Death Catalog leaves no gravestone unturned.

Historical fact and startling literary invention converge in this stunning novel by "America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" (The Boston Book Review). Praised by Caleb Carr for his "brilliantly detailed and above all riveting" true-crime writing, Harold Schechter brings his expertise to a marvelous work of fiction in the tradition of Carr's own The Alienist. Superbly rendering the 1830s Baltimore of Edgar Allan Poe, Schechter taps into the dark genius of that legendary author -- and follows a labyrinthine path into the heart of a most heinous crime. He is an aspiring writer, plagued by dreadful ruminations -- a man whose troubled nights are haunted by dreams of his angelic cousin Virginia. He is Edgar Allan Poe, a literary critic known for his uncompromising standards and scathing pen. His recently published attack on the autobiography of Colonel David Crockett, U.S. congressman and celebrated American hero, has brought the indignant frontiersman -- unexpected, uninvited -- to the chamber door of Poe's private sanctum. Neither man is prepared for where this fateful meeting will take them: on a quest for a killer through the city's highest and lowest streets and byways. In a modest boarding house, an elderly widow of sad circumstance has been found murdered by an unknown assailant. On the wall above her bed, scrawled in the victim's blood, is a single, cryptic word. But the meaning of the chilling clue is merely one piece in a complex puzzle that ensnares the writer and the politician in a twisted and deadly game. For the ghastly crimes, each more bizarre than the last, have only just begun. Combining the phantasmagoric voice of Poe's legendary tales with an historian's exactness, Harold Schechter hovers between fact and fiction, horror and passion, destiny and doom, while conjuring historical detail with uncanny precision. Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Poe's death, Nevermore is both a tour de force of narrative suspense and a dazzling secret history of one of American literature's unique and enduring figures.

From renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter comes the riveting exploration of a notorious New York City murder in the 1890s, the fascinating forensic science of an earlier time, and the grisly court case that became a tabloid spectacle.
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 and tackling subjects no one dared address at the time-all in hopes of answering a tantalizing question: What powerfully dark motives could drive the wealthy scion of an eminent New York family to murder?

Praise for "The Devil's Gentleman":
"A heady tale of sin, sex, jealousy and revenge in sepia-toned Manhattan."
"-The New York Times"
"A dark chronicle of ghoulish revenge [and] journalistic sensationalism . . . [a] well-wrought anatomy of a murder and portrait of an age."
"-The Wall Street Journal"
"Schechter peppers his account of one of America's earliest media circuses with peacock characters and deliciously tawdry details. . . . For scandal sweet tooths, this one's a beaut."
"-Entertainment Weekly"
"In the hands of an artist and historian as gifted as Schechter, the material becomes a superbly evocative reconstruction of the fascinating period in American life that gave birth to our media-crazed society."
-"Bomb" magazine
"Well told and powerfully written . . . Through newspaper accounts of the day and memoirs of the principals . . . Schechter brings [a crime] to vivid life."
"-San Antonio Express-News"

Harold Schechter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art--the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor--and finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.

The variety of subjects is dazzling, from movie stars to bit players, from B-movies to Bollywood, from Clark Gable to Jean Cocteau. More than a hundred poets riff on their movie memories: Langston Hughes and John Updike on the theaters of their youth, Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell on Harpo Marx, Sharon Olds on Marilyn Monroe, Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, May Swenson on the James Bond films, Terrance Hayes on early Black cinema, Maxine Kumin on Casablanca, and Richard Wilbur on The Prisoner of Zenda. Orson Welles, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ingmar Bergman share the spotlight with Shirley Temple, King Kong, and Carmen Miranda; Bonnie and Clyde and Ridley Scott with Roshomon, Hitchcock, and Bresson. In Picturehouse Poems, one of our oldest art forms pays loving homage to one of our newest-the thrilling art of cinema.

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 suspicion of murder but escaped. That same month, the half-eaten bodies of five men were discovered near Los Pinos... Packer's guilt was assumed, but the law did not catch up with him until 1883. Initially sentenced to death, he received a 40-year jail term. Paroled in 1901, he lived his last years in Denver. Was Packer the flesh-eating monster of myth, or a wretch who acted out of self-preservation? MANEATER tells his story in page-turning prose and also reveals how recent forensic developments may shed light on Packer's long-assumed cannibalism.

In an era that produced some of the most vicious female sociopaths in American history, Jane Toppan would become the most notorious of them all. AN ANGEL OF MERCY In 1891, Jane Toppan, a proper New England matron, embarked on a profession as a private-duty nurse. Selfless and good-natured, she beguiled Boston's most prominent families. They had no idea what they were welcoming into their homes.... A DEVIL IN DISGUISE No one knew of Jane's past: of her mother's tragic death, of her brutal upbringing in an adoptive home, of her father's insanity, or of her own suicide attempts. No one could have guessed that during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital the amiable "Jolly Jane" was morbidly obsessed with autopsies, or that she conducted her own after-hours experiments on patients, deriving sexual satisfaction in their slow, agonizing deaths from poison. Self-schooled in the art of murder, Jane Toppan was just beginning her career -- and she would indulge in her true calling victim by victim to become the most prolific domestic fiend of the nineteenth century.