Harold Schechter

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first - and worst - mass murders in American history....

In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies....

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children....

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors - and then went back to bed....

In 1860, a sloop drifted into New York Harbor. Not a soul on board - just blood from cabin to deck. Looted coins led to Bowery thug Albert Hicks, the ax slayer who turned his shipmates into chum....

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them....

At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull....

A series of brutal home invasions terrified Los Angeles in 1937. They ended in Chicago a year later with the arrest of African American teenager Robert Nixon, igniting racial tensions in an already appallingly divided city....

During the Depression, economic anxieties found an outlet in a series of child murders that triggered an irrational nationwide hysteria: pedophiliac psychopaths supposedly overrunning the country. Lynch mobs took to the streets....

In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John's rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt's rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary revolver.

From veteran true crime master Harold Schechter comes a unique look into the history of crime told through the dark objects left behind.

Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films....