We live in a country obsessed with the details of the criminal mind—all the details, from bed wetting to history to methods. A comprehensive guide is assembled here for the first time. Hundreds of entries spanning collectors, collections, methods, college courses, weapons, poetry, songs and art by murderers and the infamous practitioners themselves. Grisly murder has been the subject of story and song, of art high and low for centuries. True crime books have been around since at least the 1600s. The case of Dr. H.H. Holmes, “America’s first serial killer,” was said to have caused as much excitement as O.J.’s trial today. Features few actual photographs but includes baseball-style trading-card drawings from such collections as “Bloody Visions,” “52 Famous Murderers” and artwork by Joe Coleman. If you are the consummate collector, you probably have most of this information, but it is a reference point for further investigation containing quirky details for the voyeur at heart—Ed Gein received requests for locks of his hair, David Berkowitz was a bed wetter. CF

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 341 pages
Illustrated

“In the backwoods of Virginia, he was born to kill… Henry Lee Lucas was schooled in sexual deviance and cruelty by an abusive mother. He soon derived twisted pleasure from torturing farm animals, then savagely slaying them. At the age of 24, his lust for killing led him to take his first human life… his mother’s. In and out of prison until he was 33, this quiet, polite, one-eyed drifter would keep on murdering, and leave in his wake a death toll so staggering that the actual number of victims may never be known… Here is the true story of Henry Lee Lucas’ confessions of murder, rape and mutilation—from the victims he chose by chance to his equally depraved partner, Ottis Toole, and his young niece, Becky, who found love and death in Lucas’ arms. This startling book examines Lucas’ cross-country spree that ended with his arrest in Texas and the gruesome legacy that began when his confessions led Texas Rangers to buried human remains. The investigation became even more bizarre when Lucas began confessing to crimes he didn’t commit—and when a D.A. from Waco claimed that the diabolical killer was entirely innocent.”

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 308 pages
Illustrated

“A full moon, stealthy hunter’s moon, stage-lit a weedy patch of nowhere in Lexington, Kentucky’s gritty, workhorse east end that cool late April night 1986. The theater of death illuminated by its cherub face was the third such horror show Lexington lawmen had rushed to in as many hours. This one shrieked even more of lunacy than the others. Two people were horribly slain, a third was dying of wounds too cruel to believe. Two others had been killed at the earlier sites. All were victims of a furious, maniacal savagery beyond anything the veteran cops had ever seen. Raging, demented, unfathomable violence had visited their city under the full moon’s guiding lamp. Quietly, reluctantly, the investigator had begun to say among themselves the word lunatics.”

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 275 pages

Schechter, the esteemed author of the true-crime classics Deviant and Depraved, has done it once again with Deranged. Having created probing, insightful, meticulously researched biographies of seminal American serial killers Ed Gein and Albert Fish, Schechter has now turned his morbid attentions to the man who was arguably the first serial killer to captivate and horrify the imagination of the American public—Herman Mudgett, a.k.a. the dashing Dr. Harry Holmes. A master poseur, seducer, bigamist, forger, insurance defrauder, get-rich-quick schemer, con artist and deadly Bluebeard, Mudgett committed a string of cold-blooded murders for profit in the early 1890s of such staggering ingenuity and complexity as to earn him the tabloid sobriquet of “villainous arch-fiend.” Embodying the boundless energy of the Gilded Age, Mudgett set to his grisly enterprises with the calculated drive and cunning of a J.P. Morgan, an Andrew Carnegie and a John D. Rockefeller, all rolled into one. An eerie precursor to the Vincent Price character in House of Wax, Mudgett’s homicidal and entrepreneurial excesses even drove him to build his own “murder palace”—a three story Victorian monstrosity on the outskirts of Chicago which featured such ghoulish amenities as a gas chamber, soundproofed rooms, secret stairways and body chutes which lead directly to the hidden dissection/rendering/crematoria facility in the basement! It doesn’t get any weirder or more compelling than this and thanks to Schechter, it doesn’t come any better researched or written either. AD

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 418 pages
Illustrated

“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… The truth behind Grace’s murder was so revolting, so shocking, that it changed American society forever. What Albert Fish did to Grace Budd, and perhaps 15 other young children, went beyond every parent’s worst nightmare. And he did it in a way that caused experts to pronounce him the most deranged human being they had ever seen.”
“A few years ago, I wrote a book called Deviant about the Wisconsin ghoul Edward Gein, who served as the model for Psycho’s Norman Bates. While researching the book, I wrote to Robert Bloch, author of the novel upon which Hitchcock’s classic terror film was based, to ask, among other things, why he thought so many people continued to be fascinated by Gein. Bloch replied, “Because they are ignorant of the activities of… Albert Fish.”—Harold Schechter

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 306 pages
Illustrated

For all the ink that’s been spilled over Wisconsin’s favorite murderer/necrophile, there’s been a surprising paucity of books on the guy. Until Deviant, the only one was an obscure small-press volume written by the judge at his 1968 trial. Kind of surprising for the murderer who inspired Hitchcock’s Psycho (and who makes Norman Bates look positively well adjusted by comparison). But any other book is now superfluous; Deviant is the definitive book on Gein. Schechter covers all the bizarre twists and turns in ol’ Ed’s story—the grave robbing, the bizarre corpse “experiments” and ultimately the murders, with a thoroughness that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. JM

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 274 pages
Illustrated

Enter the twisted, tormented world of pioneering FBI behavioral-profiling expert John Douglas as he recounts his relentless pursuit of America’s most brutal serial killers. The inspiration for the Scott Glenn character in The Silence of the Lambs, Douglas painstakingly studied such serial killers as Edmund Kemper in the quest to develop a set of behavioral profiling tools that could enable cops to pry inside the minds of murderers and catch them before they kill again. Part Sherlock Holmes, part forensic sex-therapist to the damned, Douglas developed insights into the dark recesses of deviant psychology that are nothing short of chilling. Almost equally fascinating is the candid portrait Douglas paints of himself as an obsessive, hard-drinking, workaholic Fed with a sharp eye for miniskirted, go-go-booted coeds, an image that just might leave one with the impression that Douglas’ prowess in entering the mind of the serial killer might not entirely be the result of academic study. AD

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 397 pages
Illustrated

The Pacific Northwest has more than its share of serial murderers, and Robert D. Keppel has been involved in the search for many of them, including Ted Bundy and the elusive Green River Killer, as well as consulting on other high-profile cases including the Atlanta child murders. Once Bundy was behind bars Keppel spent hours interviewing him to gain insight into the mind of a killer who hunted humans. In a tale stranger than The Silence of the Lambs, Keppel describes how while on death row Bundy became an important part of the task force whose job it was to find the Green River Killer, and how he shared important information with investigators right up to the eve of his execution. NN

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 475 pages
Illustrated

“It has long been taken for granted that the first European visitors to American shores either sailed with Columbus in 1492 or with Norsemen like Leif Erikson a full five centuries earlier… Now Harvard professor Barry Fell has uncovered evidence… to replace those legends with myth-shattering fact. Illuminating, authoritative and enhanced with over 100 pictures, America B.C. describes ancient European temple inscriptions from New England and the Midwest that date as far back as 800 B.C. Professor Fell examines the phallic and other sexually oriented structures, found in our own country, that reveal the beliefs of ancient Celtic fertility cults—cults that were virtually destroyed in Europe in early Christian times. Further evidence has been found in the tombs of kings and chiefs, in the form of steles—written testimonies of grief carved in stone.”

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 347 pages
Illustrated

“I desperately tried to convince myself that looks didn’t matter,” says the author. “But beauty was too wonderful to be resented or dismissed. I fantasized more about profiles than sex. And I never stopped wanting to be beautiful. Beauty was not goodness, but a visible purity nonetheless. To be made beautiful, free of all flaws, would be a kind of liberation.” So, it’s off on a liberating journey. “Supermodels, fashion designers, photographers, bodybuilders, Playboy playmates, plastic surgeons, and strippers—these are just some of the new cultural icons” visited by the author as “he searches for roots of the culture of beauty.” Conclusion? Looks aren’t everything, but they can be! And you don’t have to be beautiful to be stupid. GR

Publisher: Pocket
Paperback: 176 pages
Illustrated