The 1980s were a time of notorious serial killers—Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, Samuel Little—but also of advances in forensics that helped lead to their capture. The serial killer became part of our common cultural consciousness in the 1970s and, in the decade that followed, the FBI confronted even more incomprehensible crimes and their perpetrators. This engrossing collection of illustrated true-crime profiles details the unthinkable exploits of a rogue’s gallery that includes—in addition to Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, and Gary Ridgway—Samuel Little and Joseph James DeAngelo, serial murderers whose criminal legacies are still making headlines today.
The 1980s were the apex of a time that is known as the "Golden Age of the Serial Killer." This fifth book in the Profiles in Crime series features the most notorious murderers of that decade. Some are infamous, including Jeffrey Dahmer, who consumed his victims' remains, and Aileen Wuornos, who helped establish the presence of women as serial killers. Others, less well known but equally deadly, include Dorothea Puente, who preyed on the elderly, and Robert Christian Hansen, who killed at least 17 women around Anchorage, Alaska.
From Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy and David Berkowitz, the 1970s were a time of notorious and brutal serial killers. Find out more about them, along with some you may never have heard of. The Co-Ed Killer, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and Dating Game Killer—in many ways, terrifying serial killers were as synonymous with the 1970s as Watergate, disco, and the oil crisis. This fascinating collection of profiles presents the most notorious as well as lesser-known serial murderers of that decade. Beyond Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz, it includes more obscure killers like Coral Eugene Watts, known as “The Sunday Morning Slasher,” who killed 80 women; Edmund Kemper, the "Co-Ed Killer"; and Rodney Alcala, who is believed to have killed between 50 and 130 people between 1971-1979. Profiles will include: Rodney Alcala: The Dating Game Killer David Berkowitz: The Son of Sam Kenneth A. Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr: The Hillside Strangler Ted Bundy John Wayne Gacy: The Killer Clown Coral Eugene Watts: The Sunday Morning Slasher Vaughn Greenwood: The Skid Row Slasher
Fans of Mindhunter and true crime podcasts will devour these chilling stories of serial killers from the American "Golden Age" (1950-2000). With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers. In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. From Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer, our fascination with these classic serial killers seems to grow by the day. American Serial Killers gives true crime junkies what they crave, with both perennial favorites (Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer) and lesser-known cases (Melvin Rees, Harvey Glatman).
Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.
On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.
"In this work of nonfiction, Elon Green reports on a series of baffling and brutal crimes. The victims of the serial murderer dubbed the 'Last Call Killer' were all gay men, and Green tries to shine a light onto their complicated lives and the queer community in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s as well. Peter Stickney Anderson was the first of the known victims"-- Adapted from the publisher's description.
From the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters comes an in-depth examination of sexual serial killers throughout human history, how they evolved, and why we are drawn to their horrifying crimes. Before the term was coined in 1981, there were no "serial killers." There were only "monsters"--killers society first understood as werewolves, vampires, ghouls and witches or, later, Hitchcockian psychos. In Sons of Cain--a book that fills the gap between dry academic studies and sensationalized true crime--investigative historian Peter Vronsky examines our understanding of serial killing from its prehistoric anthropological evolutionary dimensions in the pre-civilization era (c. 15,000 BC) to today. Delving further back into human history and deeper into the human psyche than Serial Killers--Vronsky's 2004 book, which has been called the definitive history of serial murder--he focuses strictly on sexual serial killers: thrill killers who engage in murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and necrophilia, as opposed to for-profit serial killers, including hit men, or "political" serial killers, like terrorists or genocidal murderers. These sexual serial killers differ from all other serial killers in their motives and their foundations. They are uniquely human and--as popular culture has demonstrated--uniquely fascinating.
A chilling account of the murders of two hunters in rural Michigan—a mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies from Detroit embark on a hunting trip to the Michigan wilderness, unaware they will soon become the hunted. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects—the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness’s account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.
There are two parts to every crime story: how they did it and why they got caught.This book is about the second part, and how it changes the way we catch serial killers. No two stories about the capture of a serial killer are the same. Sometimes, the killers make crucial mistakes; other times, investigators get lucky. And the process of profiling, hunting, and apprehending these predators has changed radically over time, particularly in the field of criminal forensics, which has exploded in the last ten to 15 years. Laser ablation, video spectral analysis, cyber-sleuthing, and even DNA-based genetic genealogy are now crucial tools in solving murders, including the recent capture of the so-called Golden State Killer. This book in the new Profiles in Crime series tells the history of forensics through the “capture stories” of some of the most notorious serial killers, going back almost a century. The killers include: Rodney Alcala, a serial rapist and murderer sometimes called “Dating Game killer” for his appearance on that TV show. No one knows the exact number of his victims. Takahiro Shiraishi, the suicide killer from Zama, Japan, who dismembered nine victims and stored their bodies in his refrigerator. Aileen Wuornos, one of the rare female serial killers. She shot seven men in Florida and was turned in by an accomplice. Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” and Bobby Joe Long, both identified by survivors Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), who both made mistakes Ludwig Tessnow, who killed several children in Germany, and was caught through new methods in forensic investigation that could distinguish human from animal blood
