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This shocking, but thought-provoking, analysis of some of the world's worst serial killers looks at their early years in an effort to understand - why? Why do human beings turn into killing machines? Are they born to kill or are they trained to kill? Is there really a 'demon seed' within certain individuals that ensures they are destined to commit serial homicide from conception? The authors have spoken with killers all over the world in a quest to understand what makes them go bad. They were, a...

Two notorious antebellum New York murder cases--a prostitute slashed in an elegant brothel and a tradesman bludgeoned by the brother of inventor Samuel Colt--set off journalistic scrambles over the meanings of truth, objectivity, and the duty of the press that reverberate to this day. In 1833 an entirely new kind of newspaper--cheap, feisty, and politically independent--introduced American readers to the novel concept of what has come to be called objectivity in news coverage. The penny press wa...

In 2001, Robert Durst, heir to a two-billion-dollar fortune, was arrested for shoplifting. He was also on the run from a murder indictment-and suspected in the disappearance of his wife, Kathie. What transpired between Kathie's disappearance and the routine arrest was a 19-year, cross-country mystery of multiple identities that raised some baffling questions about one of the country's most prominent men.

In which pub was the notorious murder that led to the Kray twins becoming Britain's most feared gangsters? Where is the hostelry in which Jack the Ripper's victims drank? How did Burke and Hare befriend their victims in a Scottish watering hole before luring them to their deaths? What is the name of the pub where the Lord Lucan mystery first came to light? And how did a pub become the scene of the murder that led to Ruth Ellis going to the gallows? For centuries, the history of beer and pubs ha...

On a cold, windy December night in 1926, hell was unleashed on a tenant farm near Farwell, the last Texas town before the New Mexico border. Prone to the bottle and fits of rage, the burly man with the smiling blue eyes was in no mood to quarrel with his third wife over his bootleg whisky and sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. He went from room to room in the house, killing his wife and each child with primitive cutting tools and his bare hands. By the time he concluded his bloody work, he had ta...