Butcher's Work: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age "Bluebeard" who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America. While other infamous homicides from the same eras--the Lizzie Borden slayings, for example, or the "thrill killing" committed by Leopold and Loeb--have entered into our cultural mythology, these four equally sensational crimes have largely faded from public memory. A quartet of gripping historical true-crime narratives, Butcher's Work restores these once-notorious cases to vivid, dramatic life.


Author: Harold Schechter
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 11/08/2022
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.70w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781609388539

About the Author
Harold Schechter is professor emeritus at Queens College, CUNY. Among his more than forty books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America's most infamous serial killers, including Hell's Princess. He is married to the poet, Kimiko Hahn.