There are few people alive who are so cruel, so heartless and so undeniably evil that they will kill again and again. Yet at any one time, there are between 25 and 50 active serial killers in the USA, and their chilling crimes have fascinated us since the days of Jack the Ripper. Here you will discover how these heartless killers committed their gruesome deeds, what motivated them to kill and how, eventually, they were caught.
This collection features more than 50 compelling stories, including:
- Ed Kemper, who dismembered the bodies of his victims once he had finished with them;
- Ted Bundy, who abducted, raped and brutally killed more than 30 women;
- Charles Manson, who led a cult of mayhem and murder;
- Jeffrey Dahmer, who stored a human head in his freezer;
- Randy Kraft, who was pulled over for drunk driving with a body in the trunk of his car;
- Alexander Pichushkin, who aimed to kill a person for every square on the chessboard.
Al Cimino is a journalist and author who specialises in history and crime. His books include Great Record Labels, Spree Killers, War in the Pacific, Omaha Beach, Battle of Guadalcanal and Battle of Midway. Al was brought up in New York City and now lives in London.
Jo Durden Smith was a reporter, researcher, then producer-director at Granada TV and an executive-producer at Alan King Associates in London. He then left for North America to take up a career as a freelance writer, contributing to well-established journals such as The Village Voice in the United States and Macleans in Canada. Jo has continued to write for magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States, Britain and Russia. He is also the author of a number of books (Sex and the Brain with Diane de Simone, A Long-Shot Romance, The Essence of Buddhism, Mafia: The Complete History of a Criminal World) and a maker of documentaries for TV.
Paul Roland is the author of more than twenty books including recently Investigating the Unexplained, Crime Scenes, In the Minds of Murderers, The Complete Book of Ghosts, The Crimes of Jack the Ripper, The Nazis and the Occult, and Hauntings. He is currently researching a history of the Third Reich. Paul has been a freelance feature writer and reviewer for many UK publications for over twenty-five years and a regular contributor to The Mail on Sunday, Kerrang and Total Film.
John Marlowe is a crime writer who lives in Ontario. The author of
The World's Most Evil Psychopaths and
Evil Wives he is currently working on an annotated edition of the 1950 pulp exposé
Montreal Confidential.
Charlotte Greig graduated with an MA in Intellectual History from Sussex University, and started freelancing as a writer and editor for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including NME and the Guardian. In 1989 she wrote her first book, and since then has written four more and contributed to several others. In addition to lecturing and broadcasting, she has built a reputation as a specialist in popular music. She is also a musician, and lives in Cardiff, Wales.
