Harold Schechter - Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer

Praise for Harold Schechters true-crime accounts, well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look.*

FIEND
The Shocking True Story of Americas Youngest Serial Killer

A memorably gothic tale.... True-crime lovers will not want to miss it.

Publishers Weekly

[Schechter] blends his research into a seamless story, fascinating in its horror, as well as its ability to turn the century-old characters into real people.... In Fiend, Schechter succeeds at reminding us that modern times dont have a monopoly on juvenile terror.

Amazon.com

BESTIAL
The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

[An] essential addition.... 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

Meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed, and above all riveting.... Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.

Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

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

Ann Rule

DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of Americas Most Fiendish Killer

Reads like fiction but its chillingly real....

The Philadelphia Inquirer

DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho

[A] grisly, wonderful book.... Scrupulously researched.

Film Quarterly

THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS
By Harold Schechter and David Everitt

The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.

The Boston Book Review

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

Denver Rocky Mountain News

And praise for Harold Schechters historical crime fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe

THE HUM BUG

A riveting excursion.... Poe and his times come across with wonderful credibility and vitality.

Booklist

Evocative....

Kirkus Reviews

Schechter effectively conveys the climate of New York at a time when people were easily suckered by Barnums tricks.

Library Journal

NEVERMORE

In this gripping, suspenseful thriller, Harold Schechter does a splendid 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.... Keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.

The New York Times Book Review

A literary confection.... A first-rate mystery.

Booklist

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 Baltimore Sun

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For Kimiko

femme fatale

The cursed crimes of the secret poisoner

We must confess are the worst of all,

You bless the hand that smooths your pillow,

But by that hand you surely fall.

You put your trust in those about you,

When you lie sick upon your bed,

While you are blessing they are wishing

The very next moment would find you dead.

Nineteenth-century broadside ballad

F OR A PERIOD OF EXACTLY ONE YEAR, BEGINNING IN late 1989, a string of male motorists in central Florida ended up dead in the woods after picking up a roadside hooker named Aileen Wuornos. At the time of her arrest, Wuornoswho had led an extraordinarily brutalized life from childhood onclaimed that she had only been acting in self-defense. All seven of the victims, she insisted, had viciously attacked her. For the sake of her own self-preservation, shed been forced to shoot each of them repeatedly with a .22-caliber semiautomatic, empty their pockets, steal their cars, and dump their corpses in various junkyards, vacant lots, and remote wooded areas.

Needless to say, prosecutors saw things very differently, portraying Wuornos as a cold-blooded predator who murdered partly for money but mostly for the sheer joy of it. The jury agreed, and Wuornos earned immediate infamy, not just as a homicidal maniac, but as something far more monstrous and alarmingthe first woman serial killer in our nations history.

Besides a death sentence (carried out, after much delay, in October 2002), this dubious distinction brought her the kind of celebrity we bestow on our most notorious criminals. Not long after her conviction, the first of several made-for-TV movies about her case hit the airwaves, and she has since been the subject of everything from a critically acclaimed documentary (Nick Broomfields Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer ) to assorted Court TV specials. All of these works have treated her as a figure of considerable significance in the annals of crime: Americas First Female Serial Killer. There is, however, a serious problem with this label.

Its completely untrue.

In spite of the popular belief that sociopathic violence is a strictly male phenomenon, the fact is that women have always accounted for a sizable proportion of humanitys most prolific and reprehensible multiple-murderers. It is only in recent years, however, that serious attention has begun to be paid to the subject of female serial killers, in studies like Patricia Pearsons When She was Bad (1997) and Michael and C. L. Kellehers Murder Most Rare (1998). The subject of my own book is a woman born in 1854exactly a century before Aileen Wuornos was conceivedwho conforms in every respect to the classic pattern of the psychopathic sex-killer. A true Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, she possessed a professional competence and affable charm that made her a valued companion to a large circle of people, who trusted her with their very lives. Beneath her jovial exterior, however, there lurked a being of genuinely monstrous drives and appetitesan implacable sadist who derived intense, sexual pleasure from watching a succession of innocent victims perish slowly at her hands. Jane Toppan was her name, and though degrees of evil are difficult to gauge, the sheer malignancy she embodied was, at the very least, equal to that of her better-known male counterparts.

The question, then, inevitably arises: How is it that when people hear the term serial killer, they immediately think of menJohn Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, et al.? And why are they surprised, if not incredulous, to learn that women have been among the most deadly of all serial killers?

As is often the case, the problem is largely one of semantics. The term serial murder itself is a relatively recent coinage, dating back only a few decades. Definitions vary, but the most useful comes from the National Institute of Justice, which describes it as a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually... by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time, ranging from hours to years. Quite often, the motive is psychological, and the offenders behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.