Quotes from Harold Schechter

the Norwegians of Chicago were widely regarded as a frugal, industrious, and upstanding people, who enhanced the moral character of the metropolis.

Outraged at having the site of the tragedy transformed into what one observer called a "mass murder amusement park," an angry mob tore down the barricade, "and everyone was then free to visit the death spot without charge or restraint.

the worst rioting in the city's history when a mob of ten thousand citizens, outraged over the lenient sentence given to one of the killers, ransacked the courthouse and set it on fire in March 1884.

Several Indiana communities seemed seized by a perverse envy. When rumors spread that "a new 'death farm' where Mrs. Belle Gunness buried many of her victims" had been discovered near Warsaw

Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, newspapermen covering highly publicized murder trials rarely failed to comment, generally in tongue-clucking tones, on the large number of women who flocked to these proceedings and often made up the majority of spectators. That ordinary housewives and mothers should evince such eager interest in gruesome and salacious crimes seemed a shocking violation of every prevailing belief about the so-called gentler sex.

Well, I think there is always a conflict between the sexes. Women want to dominate men, but men shouldn't let them do that.

Belle Gunness was a lady fair In Indiana State. She weighed about three hundred pounds, And that is quite some weight. That she was stronger than a man Her neighbors all did own; She butchered hogs right easily, And did it all alone. But hogs were just a sideline She indulged in now and then; Her favorite occupation Was a-butchering of men.

When the emotions are dead, a woman is not affected by any of the natural feminine feelings of horror, fright at the sight of blood, or pity that ordinarily influence a normal person. Because her emotions were dead, she could carve a body to pieces, gather up all the piteous dismembered parts, throw them into a gunny sack, carry them out on her back in a moonlit night, dig a grave in the yard, and throw the troublesome bundle into the hole without a tremor.[4]

Mrs. Belle Gunness, the grim widow of La Porte, Indiana, with her castle of death and her yard filled with graves

Why do so many—not all, but many—run to see a crashed plane, or a train, or two autos with numerous dead about? Why? What is it? Weariness of humdrum and commonplace? Love of change? Horror of the same thing happening to themselves? Or is it something evil in them? In us? Do we like to see other people suffer when we ourselves are safe and don't suffer? Are we really just evil or a mixture of good and evil, whether we want to be or not?

Dr. Henry Cotton, a figure straight out of a horror movie.

I referred to the innate human need for what psychologist Arie Kruglanski was the first to label "cognitive closure," which he defined as "the individual's need for a firm answer to a question and aversion to ambiguity."[ 3]

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

the body was revealed to be lying wholly perfect in a liquor resembling mushroom catchup. Someone tasted the preservative and found that it tasted like 'catchup, and of the pickle of Spanish olives.

even worse, fall prey to the malicious hill-spirits who shrink cows to the size of mice and drive them away to a mysterious subterranean realm.[ 17]

To one outraged commentator, the mad "scramble of 15,000 people" to the site of such "appalling and atrocious" crimes was a sad commentary on the moral state of supposedly civilized man—"galling, incontrovertible proof that the race is still but a little removed from a stage of actual savagery."[

There are two very different types of "psychos": psychopaths and psychotics. Most serial killers fall into the first category, though some belong to the latter.

Technically, psychopaths aren't legally insane. They know the difference between right and wrong. They are rational, often highly intelligent people. Some are capable of great charm. Indeed, the scariest thing about them is that they seem so normal.

The most striking feature of the psychopathic personality is his utter lack of empathy. He is incapable of love, incapable of caring, incapable of feeling sorry for anyone but himself. Other people are simply objects to be exploited and manipulated for his own profit and pleasure.

The solution presented itself in a flash of inspiration. He would sacrifice Ethel. The internal pressure generated by her murder would be so intense that he "would be liberated from all the bonds of mortality and would arrive at the stage of Redeemer."15

Parsimonious by nature, the "aged spinster" (as the newspapers would soon be describing her)

On Monday, November 29, nineteen-year-old Eugenia Dennis, billed as the "Amazing Girl Psychic," arrived from Kansas for a week-long engagement at Seattle's Coliseum Theatre. Miss Dennis' telepathic powers had brought her international renown. No less a celebrity than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had proclaimed her "the eighth wonder of the world.

According to psychiatrists, the loathing such killers feel for their mothers becomes projected onto all females, resulting in what crime writer Stephen Michaud calls "malignant misogyny." Women come to be seen as noxious, disgusting creatures that deserve whatever horrors are inflicted on them—a sentiment chillingly expressed by "Hillside Strangler" Kenneth Bianchi, who steadfastly defended his atrocities.

There's little doubt that America is the world's leading producer of serial killers, though any true measurement has to take into account the sheer size of our population. The FBI estimates that there are between thirty and fifty serial killers at large in our country at any given time. That might seem like a shockingly high number, but in a nation of more than 280,000,000 people, it's a minuscule percentage.