Quotes from Harold Schechter

Kehoe was eighteen when his mother, Mary, died from a long, progressive illness, described in contemporary reports as a "disease of the nervous system." Her obituary eulogized her as a "charitable and sympathetic neighbor as well as a generous and cheerful giver

It's not just extreme deviance that distinguishes the fantasy life of psychopaths but their overpowering urge to translate their sickest fantasies into fact. The most extravagant erotic daydreams of normal people always run up against what Freud called "the reality principle.

Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of sexual homicide. "My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns," Ressler has written. "These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.

Sadistic pleasure isn't just about the infliction of pain. It also has to do with the assertion of power—the lust to dominate, to reduce a victim to a state of total submission.

To the villagers of Bath, the new man in town seemed like an unusually clever, capable, and accommodating fellow, always ready to lend a hand and ask nothing in return.

He was especially willing to put his mechanical skills to use for the benefit of his neighbors.

In my psychological studies," Jones explained, "I have observed that religion is not restraining in a moral see. Religion is not the same as ethics. Religion in its fanatic state may be a passion devoid of morality that will take any means to an end.

A little chloral in a glass of beer or coffee brings quick death. So does a well directed blow with a hammer or hatchet.

By contrast, Andrew Kehoe's appalling deed—an unholy blend of school massacre, terrorist bombing, and suicide attack—was seen not as a symptom of societal breakdown but as a sheer aberration, the singular act of a midwestern madman. As such, it provided the public with a brief frisson of horror before being relegated to obscurity. Decades would pass before its true relevance became clear, as a precursor of our own era's worst nightmares.

A freelance gangster and thief" (as Herbert Asbury describes him in his classic work The Gangs of New York), Hicks embarked on his criminal career at the age

As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity trial is to "separate the mad from the bad." American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often reluctant "to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.

For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few defense lawyers attempt it. In the last hundred years, barely one percent of all felons brought to trial in this country have resorted to this tactic. And of that tiny minority, only one in three has been found NGRI ("not guilty by reason of insanity").

As for serial killers, "Only 3.6 percent have been declared incompetent for trial or cleared by reason of insanity," according to one expert. Even a severely delusional psychotic like Herbert Mullin—who believed he could ward off an apocalyptic earthquake by slaughtering strangers—was deemed "sane by legal standards" and convicted of murder.

In the 1950s—when, according to one national poll, juvenile delinquency ranked higher on the list of public concerns than open-air atom-bomb testing—postwar anxieties about the burgeoning adolescent culture found expression in the mythic figure of the switchblade-wielding teenage punk. The serial killer, a symbol of the darkest impulses of the unleashed id, emerged as a cultural obsession during the sexually freewheeling era of the 1970s.

In the years immediately following the end of the Great War, approximately fifty thousand one-room schools were replaced with these "fine upstanding structures—schools that in every way compare[d] with big-city institutions." By 1922, there were roughly "12,000 of this new type of school in the United States." Indiana alone had more than one thousand; Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota more than nine hundred, four hundred, and three hundred, respectively.6

Those on the other side of the debate argued forcefully that consolidated schools—with their advanced curriculums, professionally trained teachers, and classes extending through high school—were the only means of affording farm children the kind of educational opportunities available to their urban counterparts. In the end, after two years of bitter struggle, the proponents of consolidation prevailed in Bath when the township voted to fund a new school.10

The official dedication of the Bath Consolidated School building, attended by about 250 people, took place on Tuesday, November 14. Speeches were made, commemorative poems written specially for the occasion were recited. Following the program, guests "were invited to light refreshments served in the Home Economics room" and given a tour of the building by members of the high school junior class.14

To the members of the school board—who, in early 1923, rewarded him with a two-year extension of his contract, with an annual $200 raise15—Huyck's demonstrated success as an administrator derived in large measure from his absolute self-assurance and comfort with exercising authority.16 Those same qualities would also make Huyck the target of one deeply unstable man's deadly and implacable hatred.

Still, in attempting to locate the root causes of serial murder, researchers have identified three major warning signs that are often found in the backgrounds of these criminals. These three behavioral red flags—often referred to as the psychopathological triad—are enuresis (bed-wetting), pyromania (fire-starting), and precocious sadism (generally in the form of animal torture).

In our own time, when child abduction has become epidemic and even our milk cartons are imprinted with the faces of the missing, that truth has been confirmed with dismaying regularity.

Earle was the single exception to this rule, the only other adult she seemed fully at ease with. Of course, having just turned twenty-two, he was a child by comparison to the aged Mary.

By the mid-1920s, psychoanalysis had become all the rage among urban sophisticates. After diverting themselves with humorist Robert Benchley's "All Aboard for Dementia Praecox!

a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin

Fifty-eight years after he was first jailed for the most heinous crimes ever committed by a juvenile, Jesse Harding Pomeroy was free at last.