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Little Artie Shawcross bullied classmates, insulted teachers, started fires, tortured animals, and roved the woods of New York's hardscrabble North Country with imaginary friends, talking in a high squawk. He also scored top grades, excelled in sports and shared his money and toys with the children who ridiculed him. From the second grade on, he was subjected to psychiatric examination, regularly confounding the experts. Years later, while serving in Vietnam, Arthur John Shawcross wrote bloodcurdling letters about his battlefield ordeals, then returned to Watertown to commit a string of arsons and burglaries. He served two years in prison, was paroled to his respectable parents - and murdered a boy and a girl. Back in the penitentiary, he proved as enigmatic as ever. Some counselors saw him as a Frankenstein monster, beyond hope, irredeemable. To others he was a troubled young man who could be saved. No two psychiatrists seemed to agree. Shawcross served fifteen years, then conned a parole board into an early release. He settled in Binghamton, but angry citizens learned of his bloody history and ran him out of town. After two smaller communities turned him away, desperate parole authorities finally smuggled the child-killer into Rochester in the dead of night - neglecting to alert the local police. Soon the corpses started turning up, locked in winter ice, covered by reeds in swamps, floating in streams. The homicidal pedophile had changed his M.O., this time murdering diminutive women. As the body count grew, Rochester streets swarmed with police, and still the serial killer managed to snare his tenth victim, then his eleventh. Amazon.com Accounts of more famous serial killers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer may have ghoulish entertainment value, but I agree with writer Darcy O'Brien that this meticulously factual study of child sex-murderer Arthur Shawcross "comes closer to capturing the psychology of a serial killer than anything else I've ever read." The strength of this book (semi-finalist for a 1994 Edgar Award) comes first from the quality of the materials--including first-person interviews with the killer's wives, girlfriends, co-workers, police officers, therapists, and even a prostitute who "played dead" for Shawcross--and second, from Olsen's ability to weave the information into a highly readable story that reveals, above all, the ineffectiveness of our system of rehabilitation and parole. From Publishers Weekly An experienced and skilled writer, Olsen ( Predator ) proves himself equal to the formidable task of studying serial killer Arthur Shawcross. Born in 1945 in upstate New York, Shawcross was perceived as different even in childhood (his classmates dubbed him "Oddie," and elementary school officials called for mental health evaluations). In the early '70s he murdered two children and was sentenced to up to 25 years in prison; he served less than 15 years before he was paroled in 1987. He was difficult to place--townspeople drove him out as soon as his past became known. After three such episodes, parole officials sent him surreptitiously to Rochester, N.Y., where he killed at least 11 prostitutes. He was arrested in 1990 and eventually sentenced to 250 years in prison. During the trial, he claimed that he had been physically and sexually abused by his mother (untrue, the authorities concluded) and that he had committed horrible atrocities in Vietnam (probably untrue). He did not fit the classic pattern of the sociopath, nor did he seem either schizophrenic or paranoid. It remained for psychiatrist Richard Kraus to hypothesize that physiology was the basis for Shawcross's behavior--he diagnosed Shawcross as suffering from a metabolic ailment known as pyroluria and an abnormal genetic constitution. Told by Olsen with contributions from others affected by Shawcross's crimes, the story is a triumph of true-crime writing.
A classic from “the dean of true crime” (The Washington Post)—now with a new foreword—this 1983 masterpiece tells the incredible story of a Spokane, Washington serial rapist who was exposed as the handsome, privileged son of one of the city’s most elite families. For more than two years, a rapist prowled the night streets of the homey, All-American city of Spokane, Washington, terrorizing women, sparking a run on gun stores, and finally causing one newspaper to offer a reward—the calls taken by the distinguished managing editor himself, Gordon Coe. In March 1981, luck and inspired police work at last produced an arrest, and Spokane shuddered. The suspect was clean cut and conservative…and Gordon Coe’s son. For eighteen months, Jack Olsen researched the cases of Fred and Ruth Coe to try to learn not only what happened within that family, but how and why. He interviewed more than 150 people and built up a portrait not only of that extraordinary family, but of the mind of a psychopath. And searching the memories of the women in Fred Coe’s life, he unearthed a most horrifying question: What is it like to love and live with a man for years—and then discover he is a psychopathic criminal? In this “gruesomely spellbinding” (Glamour) examination of the mind of a psychopath and of the women—and men—who were his victims, Olsen delivers “a harrowing portrait…It has become fashionable with books about vicious crimes to compare them to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Finally there is a book that deserves the comparison” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).
Jack Olsen, "the master of the true crime book,"* now gives us an incisive, probing look into the creation and development of the criminal mind, as well as a shocking case of justice gone awry. From childhood, McDonald Smith took to heart the lessons drummed into him by antisocial relatives and peers. As a teenager, unburdened by conscience or pity, he experimented with child abuse and bestiality, then moved on to larceny, stickups, incest, and, finally, rape. Warned by a "witch" that he was about to be arrested, he fled Los Angeles for Seattle and the Northwest -- already the breeding ground of predatory monsters like Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, and the Green River Killer. There, for years, he stalked the women of Seattle, seeking his prey on the dark streets and in the quiet homes, then returning to his wife and family: too careful -- and too clever -- to be caught. By fall 1980, Mac Smith's luck still held. A respectable young businessman named Steve Titus found himself charged with one of Smith's most sadistic rapes in a nightmarish case of mistaken identity and injustice. The idealistic Titus was certain that the American system of justice would clear him -- right up to the day that a jury of his peers returned a verdict of guilty as charged. While Mac Smith continued to terrorize the women of Seattle, Titus lost everything: his reputation, his job, his loved ones, his freedom. It was only when a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter answered Titus's pleas for justice that the terrible truth emerged: a truth that was darker than anyone imagined. Predator is a gripping work of true crime reporting: Jack Olsen doing what he does best. It is a searing study of violations: of women, of justice, of power, and of the human spirit. *Jonathan Kellerman Review: With careful reporting that sticks close to the facts, Jack Olsen tells stories that seem straight out of crime fiction, and yet are all the more compelling for being true. This book focuses on three men--a criminal who preyed on women, a carefree partygoer who was wrongly convicted of the predator's crimes, and a reporter for the Seattle Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for tracking down the truth. It's supposed to be a rare event in the U.S. judicial system that someone this innocent gets screwed this badly. Even if it only happened to one person every decade, it would still be a horrible thing. And the smiling rapist, described as having a sweet "Jesus-like" countenance, knowingly allowed that to happen. Olsen not only delivers a real page-turner, but he ties up all the loose ends before the book's memorable and satisfying finale.
Author K.D. Lewis recounts the evolution of the serial killer father he met late in his life. Armed with newly discovered information about his father's past and current debased life, Lewis seeks to explore and understand his own struggles with mental illness that likely plagued both his parents and may have ultimately destroyed him. Son of a Killer has it all- love, loss and liberation of every kind, including the final confrontation of a killer who may have set his son free in unimaginable ways.
The chilling true story of the Spahalski brothers, who looked alike, acted alike—and killed alike . . . Robert Bruce Spahalski and Stephen Spahalski were identical twins. Same hair, same eyes, same thirst for blood. Stephen was the first brother to kill—by viciously bashing in storeowner Ronald Ripley’s head with a hammer. Unlike Stephen, Robert didn’t stop with just one victim. With the cord of an iron, Robert strangled prostitute Morraine Armstrong during sex. With his bare hands, he choked his girlfriend Adrian Berger. He brutally bludgeoned to death businessman Charles Grande. Even his friend Vivian Irizarry didn’t escape his lurid killing spree. Robert ultimately confessed to the four murders in vivid detail. But police suspected there were many more. The twins’ twisted story became even more bizarre as the true nature of their sick psyches came to light. In Killer Twins, through extensive interviews, Michael Benson reveals for the first time the horrific details of Robert Spahalski’s life and crimes in a disturbing look at the inner workings of a homicidal mind.
A new, affordable paperback edition of one O’Neill’s late masterpieces Eugene O’Neill’s last completed play, A Moon for the Misbegotten is a sequel to his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Moon picks up eleven years after the events described in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as Jim Tyrone (based on O’Neill’s older brother Jamie) grasps at a last chance at love under the full moonlight. This paperback edition features an insightful introduction by Stephen A. Black, helpful to anyone who desires a deeper understanding of O’Neill’s work.
From February 1988 until his capture nearly two years later, convicted child killer Shawcross terrorized the city of Rochester, New York, with his spree of savage slaughter. The gruesome details of his crimes shocked the court, but paled before the facts about his abused early childhood and his tour of duty in Vietnam where he first tasted human flesh. Photographs.
The war between society and the antisocial personality has long been a subject of fascination, and few have explored it as thoroughly as award-winning author Jack Olsen. In his national best seller Son: A Psychopath and His Victims, Olsen studied a psychopathic rapist who found the perfect protective coloration in jogging shoes and sweats. In this book, the story of Claude Lafayette Dallas, Jr., Olsen takes on perhaps his most challenging assignment -- explicating the curious relationship between a homicidal young "mountain man" and those who saw in his colorful ways the embodiment of the cowboy mystique of the West. On a snow-blown day, Dallas killed two game wardens who entered his trapping and poaching camp in ldaho's Owyhee Desert. The cold-bloodedness of Dallas's crime shocked the West. Stained with his victim's blood. he confessed to a companion, "This is Murder One for me." Then Claude Dallas vanished into the wild and rugged mountains that had sheltered him for so long. For fifteen long months he was the subject of an international manhunt until the FBI and a drawling country sheriff joined forces to run him to earth in a rain of bullets. Only then did lawmen learn about the network of friends who had helped him elude capture. To some of Dallas's rustic neighbors the deadly progression from cowboy to poacher to killer seemed justifiable, even admirable. Clanking around the bars and barrancas of the high desert country in his hand-filed spurs and well-oiled guns, Claude Dallas had brought a strange new madness to the mythology of the West, a madness that even a jury of his peers found nostalgically seductive in a sensational trial. Claude Dallas came within a whisker of going free. Only Jack Olsen, through painstaking research into Dallas's background and exhaustive on-the-scene interviewing, could unravel such a rat's nest of contradictions and confusions and create so compelling a portrait of the killer whose bloody deeds might have been foreordained from childhood. From Publishers Weekly Claude Dallas Jr. was raised in Upper Michigan and Ohio by a father whose philosophy was "give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man." After high school, the young man went to the rugged border area of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada and worked as a cow-puncher and handyman on several ranches. But his dream was evidently to become a 19th centurystyle mountain man and so he turned to poaching, often killing animals even though he had no need for the meat. In 1981, he killed two game wardens in front of a witness. On the run for 15 months, he was eventually captured in a shootout and found guilty of manslaughter in a singularly bizarre trial. From Library Journal ``Give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man,'' Claude Dallas, Sr., is quoted as saying in this book about his son, Claude Jr., a self-made cowboy, trapper, and ``mountain man'' who was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two Idaho game wardens. Claude Jr. was well-liked by many, including a sympathetic jury which rejected possible first or second degree murder verdicts. Was it a case of self-defense or outright murder? Olsen, who last wrote the popular `` Son'': a psychopath and his victims ( LJ 11/15/83), skillfully presents his viewpoint in a readable tale more reminiscent of Old West traditions than of the 1980s. Recommended.
In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on the "The Dating Game," one of America's most popular television shows at the time. Handsome, successful, and romantic, he was embraced by the audience—and chosen as the winner by the beautiful bachelorette. To viewers across the country, Rodney seemed like the answer to every woman's dreams. Until they learned the truth about his once and future crimes... Ten years before his TV appearance, Rodney was charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of an eight-year-old girl. In the decades that followed, he would be accused of seven murders—and, as new DNA evidence continues to be uncovered, the list may grow. The case is so disturbing that it's been documented in several news outlets, from People magazine and USA Today to 48 HoursMystery and Dr. Phil. The Dating Game Killer is the shocking true story about the dark and twisted man.