The World's Worst Serial Killers


Book Description

A gripping analysis of the world's ten worst serial killers. They have been selected not simply because of their high 'body counts': these killers are the ones who have most terrified the communities on which they preyed, and in some cases changed the history of the nations in which they operated. This collection focuses solely on the true stories behind the very worst real-life serial killers from across the globe.




Serial Killers


Book Description

Charles Manson was the illegitimate child of a teenage prostitute; in 1969, on his orders, eight people were hacked to death in an orgy of violence. Ted Bundy had the power to charm women. With his arm in a fake sling, he used to ask them to help him get his sailboat down off his car, but first they had to go to his house... Joanna Dennehy stabbed her lover Kevin Lee in the heart, dressed him in a black sequin dress, and dumped him in a ditch. To celebrate, she played Britney Spears' 'Oops!... I Did It Again' down her phone and then helped torch Lee's Ford Mondeo. Serial killers are the ultimate outlaws. They step outside not just the law but all human norms. They are fascinating because they are almost impossible to understand. It's comforting to know that all the serial killers featured here are now either dead or behind bars. Nevertheless, this book is not for people of a nervous disposition.




Encyclopaedia Britannica


Book Description

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.




The Big Book of Serial Killers


Book Description

There is little more terrifying than those who hunt, stalk and snatch their prey under the cloak of darkness. These hunters search not for animals, but for the touch, taste, and empowerment of human flesh. They are cannibals, vampires and monsters, and they walk among us. These serial killers are not mythical beasts with horns and shaggy hair. They are people living in society, going about their day-to-day activities until nightfall. They are the Dennis Rader's, the fathers, husbands, church-going members of the community. This A-Z encyclopedia of 150 serial killers is the ideal reference book. Included are the most famous true crime serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez, and not to mention the women who kill, such as Aileen Wuornos and Martha Rendell. There are also lesser-known serial killers, covering many countries around the world, so the range is broad. Each of the serial killer files includes information on when and how they killed the victims, the background of each killer, or the suspects in some cases such as the Zodiac killer, their trials and punishments. For some, there are chilling quotes by the killers themselves. The Big Book of Serial Killers is an easy-to-follow collection of information on the world's most heinous murderers.




Serial Killers: The World's Most Evil


Book Description

One hundred years of the most depraved criminal minds—from H. H. Holmes and Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy, Ian Brady, and Myra Hindley. Their monikers have become part of the true crime lexicon: among them, the Moors Murders; the Hillside Strangler; Killer Clown; Son of Sam; the Love Slave Killers; the Scorecard Killer; and the BTK Strangler. On a scale of evil, they are the world’s worst serial murderers with a propensity for sadism and torture that is beyond the pale. What turned seemingly ordinary members of society into sick slayers? How did they justify their heinous deeds? And how did they get away with murder? For answers, true crime journalist Nigel Blundell looks behind the headlines to delve into the minds of monsters: David Parker Ray an “average working guy” with a torture chamber in his backyard; Fred and Rose West, married serial killers who counted their own children among their victims; Ivan Milat, a ritual killer who hunted backpackers in Australia; Gerald and Charlene Gallego, a sadistic couple who cruised Sacramento with kidnapping and murder in mind; and former Marines Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who videotaped the darkest depths of their depravity in their secluded cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Discover the truth behind the unspeakable crimes in this “anthology of evil . . . you can’t put down” (Dr. Michael Stone, forensic psychiatrist).




Killer Book of Serial Killers


Book Description

The Killer Book of Serial Killers is the ultimate resource (and gift) for any true crime fan and student of the bizarre world of serial killers. Filled with stories, trivia, quizzes, quotes, photos, and odd facts about the world's most notorious murderers, this is the perfect bathroom reader for anyone fascinated with serial killers. The stories and trivia cover such killers as: John Wayne Gacy Ted Bundy The BTK Killer Jack the Ripper The Green River Killer Serial killers around the world And many more Bathroom readers have enjoyed considerable success as a format, selling millions of copies. The Killer Book series brings this format to the rabid true crime audience. Including more than 40 black & white photos, this is a must for true crime fans.




Survived by One


Book Description

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.




The 10 Worst Serial Killers


Book Description




The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers


Book Description

The Encyclopaedia of Serial Killers, Second Edition provides accurate information on hundreds of serial murder cases - from early history to the present. Written in a non-sensational manner, this authoritative encyclopaedia debunks many of the myths surrounding this most notorious of criminal activities. New major serial killers have come to light since the first edition was published, and many older cases have been solved (such as the Green River Killer) or further investigated (like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer). Completely updated entries and appendixes pair with more than 30 new photographs and many new entries to make this new edition more fascinating than ever. New and updated entries include: Axe Man of New Orleans; BTK Strangler; Jack the Ripper; Cuidad Juarez, Mexico; John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Sniper Killers; Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer; and Harold Frederick Shipman.




My Life Among the Serial Killers


Book Description

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