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  My Life Among the Serial Killers...

  Helen Morrison, Harold Goldberg

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  In this memoir, a forensic psychiatrist chronicles her work with more than 80 serial killers and her thoughts on what compels them. 
   
  Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is more than that. She is one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers’ psyches in ways no profiler ever has before. 
   
  In My Life among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims’ body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their Gloucester “House of Horrors”; and Brazil’s deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade. 
   
  Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims—and the spouses and parents of the killers—to gain a deeper understanding of the killer’s environment and the public persona they adopt. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H.H. Holmes of the late nineteenth-century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties. 
   
  Through it all, Dr. Morrison’s goal has been to discover the reasons serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you. 
   
  Praise for My Life Among the Serial Killers 
   
  “A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.” —Kirkus Reviews 
   
  “A profoundly enlightening book. Morrison provides startling insights into what factors breed serial killers, and she avoids the broad generalizations that make other books of the topic seem slick and superficial. . . . This is an absorbing, disturbing book that makes it clear just how much we have yet to learn.” —Booklist

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  Pure Murder

  Corey Mitchell

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  "We gotta kill 'em. They know what we look like."On a hot summer night in Houston, two teenage girls-bright, beautiful, success-bound friends-took a shortcut home from a friend's apartment to make their curfew. They never reached their homes. The next morning, the families of the two girls began a frantic search, organizing friends and neighbors and posting thousands of fliers across the sprawling city. But not until an anonymous 911 call four days later were the bodies of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena finally recovered. Their killers were soon rounded up-a brutal, unrepentant gang of teenage boys whose convictions should have put them behind bars for life. But in the halls of justice, nothing is ever a sure bet . . .

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  Wicked New Orleans - The Dark...

  Troy Taylor

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  The author of Haunted New Orleans digs up NOLA’s long and lawless history—from pirates and prostitutes to mobsters and murderers.    Since as early as the 1700s, New Orleans has been a city filled with sin and vice. Those first pioneering citizens of the Big Easy were thieves, vagabonds, and criminals of all kinds. By the time Louisiana fell under American control, New Orleans had become a city of debauchery and corruption camouflaged by decadence. It was also considered one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a reputation of crime and loose morals. Rampant gambling and prostitution were the norm in nineteenth-century New Orleans, and over one-third of today’s French Quarter was considered a hotbed of sin. Tales in this volume include that of the notorious Axeman who plagued the streets of the Crescent City in the early 1900s and Kate Townsend, a prostitute who was murdered by her own lover, a man who later was awarded her inheritance. Troy Taylor takes a look back at New Orleans’s early wicked days and historic crimes.   Includes photos

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  Ma Barker and the Barker-Karpis...

  Charles River Editors

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  Among America’s most infamous “Public Enemies,” perhaps the most unique and controversial was Kate Barker. With her prominent, hawk-tipped nose and plump, doughy face, framed by a classic dark curly coif and frilly day dresses to match, Ma Barker was as non-threatening as they come. Nary a second glance was given to this grandmotherly figure by those who crossed her path, perhaps at most a polite tip of the hat. Of course, as the age-old adage goes, appearances are often deceiving. According to the FBI and portrayals in popular culture, not only was Ma Barker a crass, greedy, and highly manipulative individual who coaxed her sons into the abyss-like vortex of criminality, she was the matriarchal mastermind of one of the most notorious gangs of the Dirty Thirties era.  
  	The Ma Barker Gang, as they were so branded, wasn't a typical band of small-time crooks. Quite the contrary, the unorthodox family-run enterprise was, as described by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, “the most vicious, cold-blooded crew of murderers, kidnappers, and robbers in recent memory.” The gang was as accomplished – and dangerous – as it was elusive, and between 1930 and 1933 alone, they made off with an estimated $3 million. In their heyday, the gang boasted some 25 members, and through it all, the Barker boys remained its core members. Blood, as per the Barker code, would always be thicker than water. 
  The obvious novelty of the alleged gang leader's identity aside, the disturbing fates of the Barker brothers and many of their associates served as a cautionary tale about the dangers and delusions that ensue when one becomes consumed by unbridled avarice and arrogance. But why were the Barker brothers, once innocent young lads, steered so far off the path of righteousness? What was the true depth of Ma's involvement in the gang's laundry list of despicable crimes? How did the once untouchable gang's winning streak culminate in such catastrophic disaster? 

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  Jack the Ripper & the London Press

  L. Perry Curtis

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  “Breaks new ground in its examination of the role of newspaper reporting during the police hunt for the first notorious serial killer.”—Reviews in History   Press coverage of the 1888 mutilation murders attributed to Jack the Ripper was of necessity filled with gaps and silences, for the killer remained unknown and Victorian journalists had little experience reporting serial murders and sex crimes. This engrossing book examines how fourteen London newspapers—dailies and weeklies, highbrow and lowbrow—presented the Ripper news, in the process revealing much about the social, political, and sexual anxieties of late Victorian Britain and the role of journalists in reinforcing social norms.   L. Perry Curtis surveys the mass newspaper culture of the era, delving into the nature of sensationalism and the conventions of domestic murder news. Analyzing the fourteen newspapers—two of which emanated from the East End, where the murders took place—he shows how journalists played on the fears of readers about law and order by dwelling on lethal violence rather than sex, offering gruesome details about knife injuries but often withholding some of the more intimate details of the pelvic mutilations. He also considers how the Ripper news affected public perceptions of social conditions in Whitechapel.   “The apparently motiveless violence of the Whitechapel killings denied journalists a structure, and it is the resulting creativity in news reporting that L Perry Curtis Jr describes. His impressive book makes a genuine contribution to 19th-century history in a way that books addressing the banal question of the identity of the Ripper do not.”—The Guardian

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  Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths...

  John J. Eddleston

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  True-life tales of bloody killings and brutal crimes wind through the dark past of this historic town on the Thames.   John J. Eddleston’s latest selection of notorious criminal cases takes the reader through a sequence of sensational episodes that have marred the history of Reading. His book, based on original research, recalls many grisly events and sad or unsavory individuals whose fate has hitherto been forgotten. Among the shocking crimes he reconstructs are those of the baby-farmer Amelia Dyer, the unsolved murder of Alfred Oliver, the suffocation of Beatrice Cox, the red Mini murder of June Cook, and the attempted murder of a family of five. This chronicle of the dark side of Reading’s long history will be fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the town’s rich—and sometimes gruesome—past.  

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