Quotes from Harold Schechter

And there was something else about him that quickly became evident, a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin

Had the aging widow been murdered by a jewel thief or by the strangler who had been prowling the Pacific Coast for months, preying on unwary landladies?

Then, as now, white America was largely indifferent to even the most shocking crimes, as long as they were restricted to the black community.

The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims.

Another problem is that it's not always easy to distinguish between a killer's MO and his signature. Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges—"whatever he gets his rocks off on," as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it—whereas the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it's often hard to make such hard-and-fast distinctions.

At forty-eight, she was still a strikingly handsome woman with thick, dark hair, almond eyes, a soft, full-lipped mouth

When you consider that most of these guys are angry, ineffectual losers who feel they've been given the shaft by life, and that most of them have experienced some sort of physical or emotional abuse... it isn't surprising that one of their main fantasy occupations is police officer.

For the most part, serial murder is a sex crime, a fact that accounts for its distinctive features. The classic pattern of serial murder is a grotesque travesty of normal sexual functioning.

Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become the single most famous serial killer message of the century: "For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.

Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass)—along with street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts—are what criminologists call "targets of opportunity": people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays much attention when they go missing.

In short, their unspeakable acts are a source of supreme pleasure to serial killers, who achieve the highest pitch of arousal—even to the point of orgasm—by inflicting savage harm on other human beings. Because doing terrible things feels so good to them, serial killers try not to get caught, so they can keep on enjoying their atrocities for as long as possible.

The term "target of opportunity" is also used to describe victims who are randomly slain by a serial murderer simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I am what you have made me and the mad-dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society. - Charles Manson

If serial murder is, in essence, a sex crime, mass murder is almost always a suicidal one. In blind, apocalyptic fury, the mass murderer has decided to go out with a bang and take as many people with him as possible. Typically, once the bloodbath is over, the mass murderer will either end his own life or provoke a fatal shoot-out with the police ("suicide by cop," as it is called).

The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology as old as the species itself.

The virtuous man is contempt to dream what the wicked man really does.

Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer's favorite books or movies must deal with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of the Bible.

According to the FBI, a serial killer is anyone who murders three or more victims with a significant interval of time between each homicide.

Virtually nothing is known about the early life of Andrew Philip Kehoe, the man his neighbors would later dub "the world's worst demon."1 Philip Kehoe had already sired six daughters before Andrew came into the world on February 1, 1872. As the first son, Andrew occupied a special place in the family: the "long sought" male heir who was both "enthroned" by his parents and burdened with the highest expectations of a proud, stern, and demanding father.2

By all accounts, Kehoe displayed a marked mechanical bent in his earliest years. Like countless boys his age, he seemed particularly fascinated with electricity. One neighbor would recall the young Kehoe as an inveterate tinkerer who "devoted his talents to constructing electrical devices which he installed on his father's farm.

Though such depictions of Kehoe as a kind of junior Thomas Edison who eventually turned his "inventive genius" to evil purposes were wildly exaggerated, it is clear that he possessed exceptional mechanical skills. Records show that he was "at the head of his high school physics class."6

It was a time when formaldehyde was routinely prescribed for the common cold, arsenic for asthma, strychnine for headaches, morphine for diarrhea—and mercury for everything from anemia to yellow fever.

Also, from the more serious discussions that took place at these meetings, Kehoe is likely to have derived many of his lifelong views on civic matters. One issue in particular would come to dominate his thinking to ultimately catastrophic effect: the question of the disposition of county taxes to pay for the public education system.15

It should be said that not all psychopaths who team up to commit serial murder are examples of a folie à deux. Individually, for example, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were already serial killers before they joined forces. Strictly speaking, the term only applies to two or more people who, however criminally inclined, would never have taken the plunge into full-blown serial homicide had they not been emboldened by an enthusiastic partner.