Harold Schechter - Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer

Acclaim for

HAROLD SCHECHTER,

Americas principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers

(The Boston Book Review)

BESTIAL

The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

Yet another essential addition to Schechters canon of serial murder history.... Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.

The Boston Book Review

Bestial spare[s] no graphic detail.... Reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing.... Provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killings sake.

Amazon.com

[A] deftly written, unflinching account.

Journal Star (Peoria, IL)

DEPRAVED

The Shocking True Story of Americas First Serial Killer

Must reading for crime buffs. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.

Ann Rule, bestselling author of... And Never Let Her Go

A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer.... Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.

Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

DERANGED

The Shocking True Story of Americas Most Fiendish Killer

Reads like fiction but its chillingly real.... What Albert Fish did... would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

DEVIANT

The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho

[A] grisly, wonderful book.... A scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.

Film Quarterly

THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS

by Harold Schechter and David Everitt

[A] grisly tome.... Schechter knows his subject matter.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Praise for Harold Schechters masterful historical novel featuring Edgar Allan Poe

NEVERMORE

Caleb Carr and Tom Holland are going to have some competition for turf in the land of historical literary crime fiction.

The Boston Book Review

Authentic... engaging.... Schechter manages at once to be faithful to Poes voice, and to poke gentle fun at itto swing breezily between parody and homage.

The Sun (Baltimore)

A page-turner.... Deftly recreates 1830s Baltimore and brings Poe to life.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

[A] tantalizing tale full of tongue twisters and terror.... A literary confection to be read, discussed, and savored by lovers of puzzles and language, this is also a first-rate mystery.

Booklist

Schechter... recounts the legendary authors brush with real-life homicide as one of Poes own protagonists wouldwith morbid, scientific rapture... plenty of suspense and nicely integrated background details.

Publishers Weekly

Wonderful.... I highly recommend Nevermore. I had more fun with this book than any I have read in a long time.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Schechter does a good job of re-creating Poes phantasmagoric style.

San Antonio Express-News

In this gripping, suspenseful thriller, Harold Schechter does a spendid job of capturing the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. Im sure my late, great cousin would have loved Nevermore.

Anne Poe Lehr

Schechters entertaining premise is supported by rich period atmospherics and a plot that keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.

The New York Times Book Review

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For my friends

Miklos, Lisa, Andrei, and Alex

The imagination of mans heart is evil from his youth.

Genesis 8:21

The level of actual violence as measured by homicide... has never been lower.... It may seem that we live in violent times, but even the famously gentle Bushmen of the Kalahari have a homicide rate that eclipses those of the most notorious American cities. All appearances to the contrary, we who live in todays industrial societies stand a better chance of dying peacefully in our beds than any of our predecessors anywhere.

Lyall Watson, Dark Nature

T he longing for a bygone agefor a time when life was slower, sweeter, simpleris such a basic human impulse that it often blinds us to the fact that the good old days were a lot worse than we imagine.

Living at a time of pervasive pollution, we yearn for those delightful preautomotive days when the air was free of car exhaustforgetting that the streets of every major nineteenth-century city reeked of horse piss, manure, and the decomposing carcasses of worked-to-death nags. Reading about the pathetic state of public education, we grow teary-eyed for the age of the Little Red Schoolhousecompletely unaware of the deplorable conditions of nineteenth-century classrooms (according to one authoritative source, a survey of Brooklyn schools in 1893 listed eighteen classes with 80 to 100 students; one class had 158). Affronted by the nonstop barrage of media violence, we pine for a return to a more civilized timeconveniently forgetting that, a hundred years ago, public hangings were a popular form of family entertainment, and that turn-of-the-century penny papers routinely ran illustrated, front-page stories about axe-murders, sex-killings, child-torture, and other ghastly crimes.

Clearly, there is some abiding human need to imagine the past as a paradisea golden age of innocence from which we have been tragically expelled. But a dispassionate look at the historical facts suggests that there are few, if any, contemporary problemsfrom gang violence to drug use to tabloid sensationalismthat didnt plague the past. And often, in more dire and insidious forms.

For those Miniver Cheevys among us who are convinced that they inhabit the worst of times, one irrefutable sign of present-day degeneracy is the terrifying rise in vicious juvenile crime. And in truth, the past few years have witnessed a string of particularly savage murders committed by children. The whole world was aghast in 1993 when two ten-year-old British boys named Jon Venables and Robert Thompson abducted three-year-old James Bulger from a Liverpool shopping center, then led him to a remote stretch of railroad line, where they tortured him to death before placing his mangled remains on the tracks to be cut in half by the next passing train.

More recently, our own country has been shaken by a rash of staggeringly brutal teen homicides. In the span of just a few months during 1997, two adolescent thrill-killers lured a pair of pizza delivery men to an abandoned house in rural New Jersey and gunned them down for fun; an ex-altar boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend butchered a middle-aged man in Central Park; an eleven-year-old schoolboy selling door-to-door candy for his P.T.A. fund-raiser was raped and strangled by a fifteen-year-old neighbor; seven Mississippi high-schoolers were gunned down by a rampaging classmate (who began his murder spree by knifing his mother to death); and a fourteen-year-old Kentucky boy mowed down eight members of his high school prayer group with a .22-caliber Luger handgun. In March 1998, just three months after the Kentucky massacre, a pair of schoolboy snipersages eleven and thirteenambushed their classmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing four female students and a teacher and wounding nine other children.