Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster
 
FROM SOCIAL OUTCAST TO NECROPHILE AND MURDERER -- HIS APPALLING CRIMES STUNNED AN ERA.
San Francisco, the 1920s. In an age when nightmares were relegated to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and distant tales of the Whitechapel murders, a real-life monster terrorized America. His acts of butchery have proved him one of history's fiercest madmen.
As an infant, Earle Leonard Nelson possessed the power to unsettle his elders. As a child he was unnaturally obsessed with the Bible; before he reached puberty, he had an insatiable, aberrant sex drive. By his teens, even Earle's own family had reason to fear him. But no one in the bone-chilling winter of 1926 could have predicted that his degeneracy would erupt in a sixteen-month frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder, and unimaginable defilement -- deeds that would become the hallmarks of one of the most notorious fiends of the twentieth century, whose blood-lust would not be equaled until the likes of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Drawing on the "gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting" (Ann Rule) that is his trademark, Harold Schechter takes a dark journey into the mind of an unrepentant sadist -- and brilliantly lays bare the myth of innocence that shrouded a bygone era.
 
Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original "Psycho"
 
Murder Was the Least of His Crimes…

The truth behind the twisted crimes that inspired the films Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs…

From Harold Schechter, “America's principle chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (The Boston Book Review), comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, whose ghoulish crimes stunned an unsuspecting nation.

The year is 1957. Photographs would show him across the country: a slight, Midwestern man with a twisted little smile, a man who had lived for ten years in his own world of murder and depravity.

Here is the grisly true story of Ed Gein, the killer whose fiendish fantasies inspired Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho”—the mild-mannered farmhand bound to his domineering mother, driven into a series of gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining. In chilling detail, Deviant explores the incredible career of one of the most twisted madmen in the annals of American crime—and how he turned a small Wisconsin farmhouse into his own private playground of ghoulishness and blood.
 
Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer
 
Lured From The Safety Of Home--Into The Jaws Of Hell

"America's principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers" (The Boston Book Review), Harold Schechter shatters the myth that violent crime is a modern phenomenon--with this seamless true account of unvarnished horror from the early twentieth century. Journey inside the demented mind of Albert Fish--pedophile, sadist, and cannibal killer--and discover that bloodlust knows no time or place....

On a warm spring day in 1928, a kindly, white-haired man appeared at the Budd family home in New York City, and soon persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Budd to let him take their adorable little girl, Grace, on an outing. The Budds never guessed that they had entrusted their child to a monster. After a relentless six-year search and nationwide press coverage, the mystery of Grace Budd's disappearance was solved--and a crime of unparalleled gore and revulsion was revealed to a stunned American public. What Albert Fish did to Grace Budd, and perhaps fifteen other young children, caused experts to pronounce him the most deranged human being they had ever seen.