"The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers." Synopsis: "What drives a serial killer to commit shocking and heinous acts? Is this a modern phenomenon? How do these monsters among us choose their victims? These questions and many more are answered within... From killer couples to black widows, cannibals to torturers, Harold Schechter presents remarkable in-depth case studies of homicidal psychopaths and maniacs, both well-known and obscure, including: Jack the Ripper... H.H. Holmes... John Wayne Gacy... Belle Gunness... Jeffrey Dahmer... over one hundred profiled killers." Illustrated (black & white.)

The Serial Killer Files

Harold Schechter

Ballantine Books

Deviant

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Hodder&Stoughton Ltd

The Serial Killer FilesHarold SchechterTHE 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 ofmadness

The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

Random

Tongue in cheek advice about how to act like a man is accompanied by examples of virile and effeminate behavior

The Manly Handbook

Humor & Entertainment

David Everitt

Humor

Berkley Trade

Ever since childhood, Edgar Allan Poe has seen things that are not there, heard voices others cannot and felt utterly at home in the realm of human darkness. In Harold Schechter’s intriguing, suspenseful, and delightfully wicked mystery series, Poe makes the perfect hero to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre.The Tell-Tale Corpse begins as Poe pays a visit to his old friend P. T. Barnum, who implores the wordsmith to travel to Boston to secure for Poe’s wife an urgent medical cure–and to acquire some particularly garish crime-scene evidence for Barnum’s popular cabinet of curiosities, the so-called American Museum. The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shopgirl. Once in Boston, Poe makes an immediate deduction: The sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killings–the center of a single, shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity.Several deaths later, Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation, with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott, who has literary ambitions of her own–and whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wife’s health falters and a city panics, Poe pursues a strange circle of suspects. He must now see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie together seemingly unrelated cases–and the truth that lies behind a serial murderer’s ghastly disguise.From a cameo by the narcoleptic Henry David Thoreau to a charming portrait of the four Alcott sisters at home in Concord, The Tell-Tale Corpse brings to life nineteenth-century New York and Boston and a world of intellectuals, charlatans, discoverers, dupes, daguerreotypists, and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle, the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow genius–a genius not of words but of death.

The Tell-Tale Corpse (Edgar Allan Poe Mysteries)

Ed Gein's gruesome and horrifying murders were basis of a motion picture, for a town's publicity, and for the death of his female victims

Deviant: The Shocking and True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

Pocket

Film Tricks: Special Effects in the Movies

H. Quist

Start Collecting Comic Books

Comics & Graphic Novels

History & Price Guides

Diane Pub.

Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

Pocket_Books

The macabre story of H.H. Holmes, turn-of-the-century architect of the infamous "Castle of Horror", whose labyrinthine interior, leading to a cellar equipped with acid vats, crematorium, and dissecting table, became an unspeakable domain of torture and murder.

Depraved

GALLERY BOOKS

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Books by Harold Schechter