Murder by the Numbers: Harold Schechter’s 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. We are continuing our theme of murder in America today. Yesterday, we did a show with the Alabama—the Birmingham, Alabama-based writer, Matt Kessler. His new book is called The Wire Glass—not The Wire Glass, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South. It's a book about the tragic murders of two young, American women, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett. A man called Coley Lewis McCraney is in jail for the murder, although, my sense is that Matt Kessler isn't convinced he is the murderer. Anyway, speaking of murderers and murder, we're moving on to our guest today, Harold Schechter. He's one of America's leading crime historians, the author of many books about one kind of murder or another. His new book is called Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime. Many of you will be also familiar with his, last book, 50 States of Murder: An Atlas of American Crime. So, Harold knows American murder crime as well as anyone. He's joining us from Queens in New York where he lives. Harold, congratulations on the new book. Have to ask you, as this, leading historian of American crime and murder, Why, Harold? Isn't it rather miserable to be endlessly writing and studying about such terrible things?

00:02:18 Harold Schechter: Well, I've been doing it for so long that I wouldn't say that I'm inured to it because I am still capable of getting very upset when I read about certain crimes. But, you know, I've come to learn something about the outer limits of human behavior. I—I've always been interested going back to my graduate school days a while ago in different kinds of aberrant psychology, as well as why we're so fascinated by these kinds of stories. So, yeah, I mean, I—when I first began doing this, especially in my early books, it was often very difficult for me to read about some of the atrocities that I was describing. But, again, you know, I tell people it's probably very much like the experience of first-year medical students who, the first time they have to dissect a cadaver, will go running out of the room and be sick. And then after a while, they're eating lunch while they're doing it.

00:03:39 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm not sure if I could ever eat lunch after watching or seeing a cadaver, but I've never gone to medical school. Harold, your book covers a lot of different murders, including, the first recorded murder in colonial America by a man called John Billington. We'll get to Billington in a second and some of these early murders. But is there something unique about America and murder? The murder rate—is the murder rate has historically—and you're the expert here. Is the murder rate in the United States, or it's been much higher than other countries, or is that a delusion? Is that something that people just assume but isn't true?

00:04:31 Harold Schechter: No. No. It's quite true. I mean, I just got back, for example, from a trip to Iceland, and the murder rate there is virtually nonexistent.

00:04:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You wouldn't get a job, Harold, in Iceland. You'd have to come up with another profession.

00:04:47 Harold Schechter: Completely. You know, I met, a retired policeman, a retired—I guess he was a homicide cop. Anyway, I asked him, do you have serial—have you ever had serial killers in Iceland? And he said, oh, yeah. And I guess when? It was, like, 1325.

00:05:07 Andrew Keen: And he probably killed two people.

00:05:09 Harold Schechter: Yeah. Well, it was some kind of Viking guy. But, yeah. No. I mean, compared to many, many other countries. And one of the obvious reasons, as many people have pointed out, is just the availability of, firearms.

00:05:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, in terms of this first recorded murder, I'm not sure we can blame it on the I—NRA, can we?

00:05:33 Harold Schechter: No. We cannot. But, you know, first of all, our cul—we're not very far removed from the time when our country was a savage wilderness. You know, I grew up—I'm a baby boomer. I grew up in the 1950s when American television was filled with westerns, and the movie theaters were filled with westerns. I once did a count. In 1957, there were 37 westerns on prime-time TV. And that always seemed like the mythic past to me, you know, growing up in the 1950s. But it was only seventy years or sixty years before I was born. I mean, that's how close we are to that kind of frontier violence. Wyatt Earp was still alive when John Ford made a movie about him [ed.: Earp died in 1929; Ford said he had met him in Hollywood, but Ford's Earp film, My Darling Clementine, came out in 1946]. So—and the—you know, with the Puritans as well, I mean, Billington came over here on the Mayflower with the Mayflower pilgrims, and they all had, you know, they all had weapons. Billington committed his [unclear] with a fowling piece, and, you know, we know the sordid history of your—white Europeans colonizing the country by wiping out the native population. So, you know, that level of violence and gun violence is, you know, it's very close to who we are now in terms of our evolution as a culture.

00:07:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I take your point, and you're certainly not the first or the last person to give that explanation. But if you were to compare the United States, for example, with Australia, similarly colonized by white Europeans in Australia. I was just there a few months ago. Went to lots of museums showing the origins of Australia, which everyone who first settled there, if that's the right word, settled, were criminals of one kind or another. Not all of them were murderers, but Britain at the time, exported its crime, I guess, in part to the United States, but mostly to Australia. So I don't know what the numbers are in Australia. I'm sure there are more murders in Australia than there are in Iceland, but I'm guessing that Australia is closer to Iceland, the United States, in terms of its murder rate. So do—is it cultural? Harold, I don't wanna blame everything on you, but there is a peculiar fascination with murder in this country that's manifested itself in all the true crime stuff in the nature of so many television series. You yourself have written, shows for some of the more successful series. What is it about Americans that make them so fascinated with murder?

00:08:39 Harold Schechter: That—I don't think that is a specifically American phenomenon. Talking about Iceland, I was recently reading an article that murder mysteries, very violent and gory murder mysteries, have become incredibly popular in Iceland. And part of the problem that, authors face, when they're trying to, set these murders in their country is—well, murders just don't happen. But, you know, the fascination with violence and murder and crime is really an age-old and universal phenomenon. So, you know, it's one thing to talk about how the gun is almost a totemic object in our culture, which again—and it—it's enshrined in our constitution, the right to firearms. That's one thing. But in terms of the fascination with reading crime stories or the fascination with, you know, indulging in gory spectacles of one kind or another, that is a universal age-old human phenomenon, which I believe is rooted in the fact that, the human species has evolved from a very, very violent species of primate. You know, the philosopher William James talks about the carnivore within. In evolutionary terms, you know, we're just not that far removed from these levels of savagery. I actually tend to be a—you know, I'm a glass-is-half-full kinda guy. And I see that it's actually a sign of our increasing civilization that we are satisfied now with seeing virtual representations of violence as opposed to in the not-too-distant past where—although even as I say this, I guess I have to modify it. But, you know, public executions, you know, were a main major form of popular entertainment.

00:10:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And speaking of pub—public executions—again, in the United States, beginning in the 1930s, the last public execution held was, I think, in Tennessee [ed.: the last US public execution was of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936]. It attracted 20,000 people, like a college, football game these days. And, Pete Hegseth is trying to reintroduce public execution for a murderer, a man who killed a number of servicemen. Lots of press about that recently. The pope even criticized, the death penalty that an American pope after Hegseth's announcement. So, again, coming back to America, I—I'm not sure most countries can boast, if that's the right word, of 20,000 people showing up for public executions. It's a spectacle, has historically, up until the 1920s [ed.: 1930s; see above] when they last held these things, was it something that Americans really enjoyed watching public execution?

00:12:02 Harold Schechter: Well, again, I mean, if you read about public executions in England in the 1700s or the 1800s. Read about—I'm just writing now, about a Frenchman, named Martin Dumollard, who many people regard as the first French serial killer. He was known as the, Servant Girl Murderer because he would lure these young domestics out into the countryside and kill them. When he was executed, so many people showed up at the village, to watch him guillotined. Three times the population of the entire city came to that execution. And this is France in, forget the exact year, 1862, I think. So, again, there's nothing unique about Americans flocking to see these kinds of bloody spectacles. During the, Reign of Terror in Paris, you know, every time there was a mass execution, it would draw enormous crowds. And not only that, but there would be tradesmen selling guillotine earrings to the women and little toy guillotines to the kids that they could take home and then decapitate squirrels with. So you're really talking about a human phenomenon, not specifically American one. It manifests itself differently in America, but it has to do with who we are as a species.

00:13:38 Andrew Keen: I know you've passed on your obsession with crime and murder to your daughter. Did you ever get her a pair of guillotine earrings?

00:13:47 Harold Schechter: Well, I didn't need to. I mean, you know, she grew up, again, surrounded by various kinds of artifacts, that over the course of my long career, I somehow have accumulated.

00:14:06 Andrew Keen: Coming back to the US, I take your point on the popularity of public executions, [unclear] country. I mean, it seems to have this parallel world of criminality, obsession with crime of one kind or another, and the church and a very strict morality. Is this connected in terms of your Murder by the Numbers, these—in this new book, 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime? Are they also moral tales? Are you telling them morally, and were they always appreciated in moral terms in America, which frowned in its own peculiar way in—on immorality and at the same time is marked by, an unusual amount of murders.

00:14:55 Harold Schechter: Yeah. Well, I tried—I mean, what I'm doing when I write my book is taking a great deal of documentary evidence and converting it into what I hope will be a very readable narrative. But you're right that there has often been, and again, this is going back to the time of the New England Puritans, this kind of, you'd almost have to say, hypocritical, quality to a lot of the true crime literature that's been produced, which presents itself as offering these moral lessons, while at the same time, serving mostly to titillate the readership or the audience. So the primary form of true crime literature that existed back in the 1700s, and it began to be produced very early, was what was called the gallows sermon. And the gallows sermon, which would be printed after public execution, would contain, supposedly the last, statement of the executed prisoner, in which he repented [unclear], found God, and so on and so forth. It was meant to be, again, sort of an edifying piece of literature. But at the same time, they always invariably included very, very detailed, vivid accounts of the crimes, for which the person was being condemned. So—and again, this has continued throughout the centuries. You find it in, a lot of twentieth century true crime literature, nineteenth century true crime literature. You know, it's often—it's offered under the guise of moral edification, even while appealing to the public appetite for this kind of morbid titillation. I myself hope—I mean, I don't try to draw moral lessons from the cases that I write about.

00:17:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Moral titillation is a nice way of putting it, Harold. Coming back to the—I'm not sure if you're familiar with Kessler's new book, The Wiregrass. I think you'd be intrigued by the murder of these two young white women by supposedly a black man, although, he's certainly not convinced that, McCraney is guilty. In many of the murders in the book and in your understanding of American criminal history, is it marked both by some sort of obsession with sexual criminality. It's believed that these two women may have been raped. There was a lot of sexual titillation about it. And, of course, the racial element, the idea of all black men being criminals, being murderers, and certainly the complex narrative of black men murdering white women.

00:18:15 Harold Schechter: Oh, I'm sorry. And the question is?

00:18:17 Andrew Keen: The question is, in Murder by the Numbers, are there lots of chilling tales of black men murdering white women, or is that, again, a trope, something that's exaggerated?

00:18:33 Harold Schechter: I don't remember all the contents of the book, but, yeah, I mean, there are several—at least one case, that I remember discussing, that had to do with that. I think, you know, if you re—pick up any day's newspaper from anywhere in the country and really from any day of any year, you will discover that there's some horrible murder takes place. And most of those, you know, they're instantly yesterday's news. So in a way, there has to be some other element, again, titillating element, that makes a story ultimately, let's say, deserving of coverage an entire book. Certainly, racism figures into many, many notorious American murder cases. Well, for example, Jeffrey Dahmer pretty much preyed on minority victims because he knew that the police would be less likely to investigate those disappearances. You know, stuff like that happens all the time. In terms of the sexual element, you know, sex and violence are what, you know, the nor—the, let's say, moral law-abiding everyday citizen, seeks out in this entertainment. If you look at popular culture in general, 95% of it is sex and violence. And, you know, you'd have to say, or at least I would say, that is because underneath our civilized veneer, you know, there still exists this, you know, this very, very primitive craving and these very, very primitive impulses towards sex and violence that needs some kind of gratification. Ideally, vicarious gratification.

00:20:42 Andrew Keen: So—you see yourself then as a popular entertainer? You mentioned popular entertainment.

00:20:47 Harold Schechter: Well, look. I mean, yes. I mean, I don't really think of myself as an entertainer, but it is all entertainment. Right? I mean, this podcast is entertainment. You know? I mean—

00:21:01 Andrew Keen: Well, I guess it depends how you define entertainment. I mean, I hope it gets people thinking as well. I mean, if the—if thought is entertainment, then I guess we're all entertainers.

00:21:13 Harold Schechter: Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, entertainment can certainly get people thinking. You know, popular—I mean, Bruce Springsteen gets me thinking. You know, if you back in the day listened to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," that's meant to get you thinking. So there's no contradiction between entertainment and thinking. You know, but it is, you know, all the true crime documentaries on Netflix, you know, the Ryan Murphy series and so on and so forth. Yeah. They're entertainment. They're what people turn on to watch when they get home from work, you know, to, be distracted for a few hours.

00:21:57 Andrew Keen: I guess the best thing, man, is artists who get you thinking about murder. I know in your book, you have a section on Lee Harvey Oswald. There's a wonderful song "Murder Most Foul" by Bob Dylan, which sees the JFK assassination in Dallas in more complex terms. Is the Harvey—the Lee Harvey Oswald chapter, is that somehow encapsulates our fascination with murder and also our obsession with conspiracy?

00:22:35 Harold Schechter: Well, certainly with conspiracy. Excuse me. I mean, I think primarily, it is the conspiracy element that has given it such long life. I mean, you know, after all, there have been other presidential assassinations. I mean, the Lincoln assassination has obviously been written about ad infinitum. You know, nobody seems particularly fascinated with the assassination of John Garfield—not John Garfield, President Garfield. But, yes, I think the endless conspiracy theories that have been woven around the Kennedy assassination, really account for its grip on the popular imagination.

00:23:28 Andrew Keen: I'm guessing that Hollywood's been pretty good for your industry, for the popular entertainment industry driving obsessions with murder. I just saw Scarface, and I know you have—the Brian De Palma version, which features a very lightly veiled, fictionalized version of Al Capone [ed.: the Capone-based film is the 1932 Howard Hawks original; De Palma's 1983 remake recast the story with a Cuban drug lord]. I know you feature Capone himself in—I'm—when we're describing Capone, I don't think of using the word murder, although maybe that would be the right way of doing it. How would you describe Capone and his place in American popular culture and the role in which Hollywood has perhaps fantasized guys like Capone. We had the, actually, we had the great film historian, David Thomson on the show a few months ago, and he's written a new book suggesting that Hollywood has stoked our obsession with violence. He doesn't blame everything, of course, on Hollywood, but he see—certainly sees a kind of symbiotic relationship between popular fascination with crime and criminality and guys like, Capone and, of course, other Mafia leaders, and the reality of violence in America?

00:24:50 Harold Schechter: Well, I'm a great admirer of, Mr. Thomson, but I would have to take issue with his point of view. You know, if you look back, for example—look, American outlaws have always been mythologized in American culture. And every time a new medium of popular entertainment comes along, it turns to, you know, those kinds of violent murderers in order to sell to the public. So that in post-Civil War era, for example, there's things called dime novels. And dime novels were these very, very cheaply produced works of fiction, many of which, if not the majority of which, had to do with outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid and the Daltons [unclear], or, you know, frontiersmen like Daniel Boone. And they were wildly—not only were they incredibly violent, especially for the time, but people—I wrote a whole book about them. I mean, not to promote my own work, but I wrote a book about called Savage Pastimes, A History of Violent Entertainment [ed.: published as Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment]. And what I pointed out is that, you know, again, every time a new medium of mass entertainment is invented, the main subject immediately comes stories about action and violence. And at the same time, immediately, all these self-appointed moral watchdogs come along that blame those works on the supposed uptick of violence, particularly among American youth. You know, I wrote a book about, a juvenile serial killer named Jesse Pomeroy. It's a book called Fiend. Pomeroy was known as the Boston Boy Fiend. He was a, you know, he was an adolescent sexual psychopath who ultimately spent his whole life in prison. And when he was arrested, all these people came forward and claimed he had been corrupted by reading too many dime novels. You know, when the movies were invented—when movies were first invented, I dug up all these newspaper articles where people were blaming, certain supposed surge of juvenile crime on, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery. You know, the same thing happened with radio. Same thing happened [unclear] TV, with speaking of Capone, you know, shows like The Untouchables. So, you know, there is no evidence whatsoever that watching these kinds of narratives, whether film or dime novels or violent TV shows, has any effect on the level of homicide in the US or anywhere else?

00:27:56 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's an interesting argument, and it's an argument, I guess, against censorship. Before we went live, we talked a little bit about my hometown, San Francisco. You said you've been spending some time here researching some—a serial murder here, of course. And we mentioned that where you were staying in San Francisco was around the corner from where Hitchcock's Vertigo was shot. Great movie about a real murder, or at least a fictional murder. A lot of people thought that Hitchcock changed everything with Psycho, but in that very explicit way of dealing with murder. I—I'm guessing you would disagree that the Psycho didn't really make much difference one way or the other.

00:28:40 Harold Schechter: Well, I mean, he certainly changed American cinema. You know, I mean, Psycho was a prototypical what came to be called slasher movie. But—and I remember when, Bret Easton Ellis came out with American Psycho. Very disturbing book. And he came under savage attack, you know, mostly from women and feminists because it was supposedly gonna inspire all these hideous crimes, you know, against women. You know, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out. There wasn't like a sudden surge of chainsaw massacres in the United States. You just don't know really what's going to set off some kind of latent homicidal maniac. You know, I mean, Charles Manson ordered his—you know, the Tate massacres after listening to the Beatles' White Album. You know, you couldn't ask for a more benign piece of popular entertainment than that. The guy who shot John Lennon seemed to identify with Holden Caulfield, you know, the saintly character created by Salinger.

00:29:54 Andrew Keen: And the guy who almost assassinated Reagan was obsessed again with a fictional movie character out of Taxi Driver.

00:30:03 Harold Schechter: Yeah. Who is portrayed as a hero. But, you know, I'd have to say that if there's a single book that has inspired more killers, it—it's the Bible.

00:30:21 Andrew Keen: Oh, you're gonna get into trouble with that one.

00:30:24 Harold Schechter: I know. I'm not getting into trouble. And I only mean that I—I've written about many, many psychopaths who are obsessed with the most violent passages in the Bible, of which there are many. And, you know, I can point to more instances of psychopathic killers who felt they were doing the work of God or who felt again that they were following, you know, some of the, particularly Old Testament, you know, some of the Old Testament stories, you know, than any other material.

00:31:07 Andrew Keen: Going back to, Al Capone, I think one thing—correct me if I'm wrong. I'm guessing that he didn't read the Bible. I'm not sure if he could even read. He certainly was a smart guy in his own way, but a bit of a thug, certainly a man of great violence. How should we be remembering Capone? How does he get into the book? Why does he deserve to be remembered?

00:31:31 Harold Schechter: Well, again, there are these various outlaw types throughout American history who have achieved this mythic status. You know, it's often because, like with—as with Manson, they seem to embody or personify certain kinds of lawless currents, in the culture at that moment. You know, so Capone—you know, it's hard to imagine the boot—the 1920s bootlegging era without Capone. He seems like the living incarnation of the heart and soul of that.

00:32:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, in a way, he's not that far from Gatsby.

00:32:10 Harold Schechter: No. Not at all. And, you know, he was a very charismatic character. There's no question about it. So, you know, again, as with somebody, Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp. You know, Wyatt Earp, who was a lawman, but he was also at the same time, at different points in his life, engaged in various criminal activities. You know, these figures, for one reason or another, take on this mythic status, and stories about them continue to be told and retold and reimagined and so on and so forth. Same thing is true with Lizzie Borden, who is a subject now of a recent, TV series.

00:32:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I guess there's a political dimension here to Capone too that everybody knows—or most people who know anything about him know that he—eventually, the feds got him not on murder, but on his failure to pay taxes. So there is, especially in the American libertarian tradition, I'm guessing, Harold, a cat and mouse game between criminal murderer and the state, and sometimes maybe it's Jesse James or even Al Capone. They come out, if not looking as the heroes, certainly more heroic than the bumbling state.

00:33:32 Harold Schechter: Well, I think also that on some level, you know, we admire these figures, as you're, I think, suggesting, you know, who live outside the boundaries of normal morality. You know, all of us, again, law-abiding citizens, on some level feel oppressed or constrained by the limitations that are imposed on us by society. And there's a part of us that has a secret admiration for people like this. Of course, at the same time, we always want the story to end with their punishment, which relieves us of any guilt we might feel in empathizing with them. You know, but outlaws have always exerted that kind of fascination.

00:34:32 Andrew Keen: And maybe that's why Vertigo is such a memorable film because the outlaw, the criminal, didn't get caught. Coming back to Lee Harvey Oswald, we live, again, I don't need to tell you, Harold, in an age of all—one kind of conspiracy theory or another, it seems to dominate the internet. The internet didn't exist in 1963 when he supposedly assassinated JFK. What's your theory of all this? As I said, Dylan in his "Murder Most Foul" seems to suggest that maybe, Oswald wasn't the only killer. What do you conclude? And what's interesting about him? He doesn't seem a particularly interesting character. Certainly doesn't have the charisma of a Capone.

00:35:19 Harold Schechter: Well, I have always felt, and, you know, if—I'm certainly capable of admitting that I'm wrong. I have always felt that it was the act of Oswald by himself. I think that it—it's so hard for us to grasp that such a world-changing event could be produced, you know, by this nonentity in this, you know, not exactly accidental way, but, you know, if—there are so many contingencies involved.

00:36:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's so—I'm sure you've been to Dallas and gone to the museum and everything. I mean, it—it's very shabby given the world's historical consequences of what happened.

00:36:15 Harold Schechter: Yeah. I mean, I think people, you know, it—it's just too hard to—it's much more satisfying to turn it into some elaborate story, you know, that offers some kind of rational explanation instead of having to deal with, you know, the utter irrationality of it all.

00:36:40 Andrew Keen: The sadness. Do you, long—viewers and listeners to the show know I have particular interest in JFK's brother, Bobby Kennedy, who was, of course, also assassinated in June 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan. Does he get into the book, or is he not interesting enough?

00:36:57 Harold Schechter: I think Sirhan, Sir—you know, one thing is as soon as I finish writing a book, I pretty much forget most of the contents because I'm already researching my next book. I think, Sirhan Sir—

00:37:11 Andrew Keen: Maybe now. Maybe, Harold, next time, we'll interview you about your next book rather than your previous one.

00:37:19 Harold Schechter: Anyway, yeah, I sort of think Sirhan Sirhan might have made it into the book, I—but I can't be absolutely certain.

00:37:26 Andrew Keen: Is he no more or less interesting than someone like Oswald in the sense that he committed this world-historic crime, but in himself isn't a particularly interesting character?

00:37:37 Harold Schechter: Well, again, you know, when Son of Sam was on the loose, he was corresponding with a famous New York journalist, Jimmy Breslin, who was writing that time for the Daily News. And after Berkowitz was arrested, Breslin said, he was a nobody until murder made him somebody. And the same is true, obviously, of people like, Oswald. You know, they're essentially nonentities. Although, Oswald, you know, did have some interesting stuff in his background, no question about it. But, you know, they're not especially fascinating charismatic characters. What gives them their ultimate status and significance is, you know, especially in Oswald's case, having transformed the world really forever since 1963. And, you know, the ramifications of Kennedy's assassination is so vast, you know, that you can't possibly grasp them. And they were all, you know, they were all created by this guy taking a shot out of this warehouse window, after he failed to assassinate, you know, some right-wing military guy.

00:39:07 Andrew Keen: We've spoken so far mostly about men. You mentioned, Borden. In the news these days, of course, is the story of Christa Pike, a murderer who was sentenced to death in the, in Tennessee. They didn't pull it off. I don't quite know what that tells us about Tennessee. I'm not sure if Christa gets in the book, Harold, but our female murderer is different. Are they smarter, craftier, more, if not more violent, crueler, or can we not really make gender generalizations?

00:39:52 Harold Schechter: Well, there are certain gender differences for sure. By the way, I only—going over the book recently, I discovered that one of the numbers, that is contained is 276. And 276 turns out to be the number of botched executions in the United States between 1900 and 2010 [ed.: the 276 figure, from Austin Sarat's Gruesome Spectacles, covers 1890–2010]. So in that sense, there's nothing unique, about this, very, very, unfortunate recent case. But, yeah, I mean, I became interested—you know, for a long time, the received wisdom was that there are only male serial killers. But in doing my research, I discovered that there's been a lot of female serial killers. It's just that they committed their crimes differently from the way men did. Male serial killers—you know, serial murder is basically a sex crime. I mean, the term was invented to describe a certain kind of sexual homicide. You know, and, you know, all the most infamous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Hillside Stranglers, on and on and on. You know, these were all extreme sexual sadists who derive their very sick pleasure from abducting and torturing helpless victims. So, you know, that became what serial murder was called. But the, you know, the male serial killers, there's a kind of—well, there have been many, many female serial killers. In fact, a woman I wrote a book about named Jane Toppan, who ultimately confessed to 31 murders, was for a long time included in the book of—Guinness Book of World Records as America's most prolific serial killer until she was displaced by John Wayne Gacy, who murdered, as I remember, 37 [ed.: Gacy was convicted of 33 murders]. It's just that female serial killers tend to commit their crimes differently from male serial killers. You know, male serial murder tends to be a very phallic aggressive act. Somebody who'll pick up strangers, you know, then slash them and torture them in different ways. Female serial killers are no less sadistic, but in our history, not only here, but also in England and other countries, have tended to commit their crimes with poison. Female serial killers are almost always poison murderers. So—and, you know, part of my argument is, you know, this sort of this quaint Arsenic and Old Lace, well, I don't know if any of your audience will remember Arsenic and Old Lace, but, kind of a quaint Victorian quality that attaches itself to the thought of, you know, these female prisoners. But actually, the deaths that they meted out were often incredibly cruel and sadistic, in many ways worse than the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper. You know, Jack the Ripper dispatched his victims very swiftly. All of the horrible mutilations he perpetrated were done post-mortem on their corpses. Whereas a lot of these female serial killers take incredible pleasure in prolonging the deaths of their victims, you know, stretching out, you know, doling out the poison in small amounts and watching them die slowly. Plus, whereas the victims of male serial killers tend to be strangers, victims of opportunity and so on, female serial killers almost always prey on family members and children and acquaintances. So, yeah. I mean, there have been a lot of female serial killers. It's just that they tend to, as I say, perpetrate their crimes in a different way.

00:44:18 Andrew Keen: Interesting. And, of course, many of the great fictional writers on crime and murder, females, Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell comes to mind. And this probably is an unfair question, Harold. Most of my questions, of course, are unfair, but this one in particular, because you're such an authority. But do you have a favorite in this new book, Murder by the Numbers? 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime, although, you know, there are probably more in the book. One who comes to mind. Do you have a favorite murderer? H. H. Holmes comes to mind. I know you have a particular interest in him. I don't know much about him, a nineteenth century serial killer. Or are they all favorites in their own ways of yours?

00:45:10 Harold Schechter: Well, again, I wouldn't use the word favorite. It's hard to say. I mean, certainly, my second true crime book, Deranged, was about the man that I and many other people would consider the most heinous serial murderer, a guy named Albert Fish, who back in the early twentieth century, spent his whole adult life roaming around the country and committing these horrible torture murders on children. He's certainly not my favorite. You know, I wrote the book that I believe brought the figure of Ed Gein, into widespread public awareness. That was my first true crime book, Deviant. You know, and Gein is has always been a very, very fascinating figure to me and remains so. So, yeah, I—when I write my books, you know, it's not a matter of the number of victims or the horribleness of the crimes. You know, there has to be a story there. As I said, every day you open the newspaper and there's some extraordinarily horrible crime that has been committed.

00:46:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder if, the most interesting murders are the people we don't know, the people who haven't been caught. Should we admire them, or are they just lucky?

00:46:48 Harold Schechter: Well, I don't know. We won't know till they are caught if they are.

00:46:51 Andrew Keen: Is there in particular when it comes to these Murder by the Numbers, Harold, one case that hasn't been resolved? They haven't found the murderer that you'd like to find, or you even suspect someone who hasn't been brought to court, brought to justice? Yeah. I mean, you probably don't wanna man—name them because you might get into trouble. Or even get murdered by them.

00:47:15 Harold Schechter: God forbid, dude. Oh, sorry. No. I mean, you know, Murder by the Numbers uses murders as a kind of springboard as a way of discussing different aspects of crime. So for example, number two, is devoted to the phenomenon of what's called, murder by two people. It mentions a number of cases. You know, the—which originally was a term coined by a French psychologist to describe a kind of shared psychotic delusion. But it's come to mean this very, very criminal partnership between two people who are very intimately involved, one of whom tends to be this domineering psychopath, the other a kind of slavish follower. You know, the, 1920s thrill killers, Leopold and Loeb, or even the, having a brain freeze from it. The Columbine killers would be examples. So, you know, in my—in number two, even though I refer to these various cases of folie à deux, you know, I don't deal in-depth with any particular one. So what I'm saying is that in the book, a lot of the numbers have less to do with specific crimes than with various phenomena related to the crimes.

00:49:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The folie à deux brings to mind Hitchcock's movie, The Rope, which was resolved, which had a very strong homosexual subtext. I'm guessing given that your murderers and criminals always are on the edge, there is—we talked about male-female sexuality, but there is also a homosexual quality to some of these murderers.

00:49:31 Harold Schechter: Absolutely. Well, The Rope was based on the Leopold and Loeb case, as was his famous movie Compulsion [ed.: Compulsion (1959) was directed by Richard Fleischer, not Hitchcock]. But, yes, there often is a homoerotic element, to these cases. There's no question about it.

00:49:48 Andrew Keen: Finally, I gotta ask this question, Howard [as spoken: Harold]. I—again, excuse me for these rather dimwitted questions. But I saw a piece on you which said that you're a man with two unique personalities. Now I know you've never committed any murders, but you spent your life studying them, writing about them, making television shows about them. Could you ever imagine an—another version of Harold Schechter who was a murderer? Do you sometimes have dreams or nightmares where you're the murderer rather than analyzing the murderer?

00:50:25 Harold Schechter: Look. I think the answer to the question—and I think it applies—well, it does apply to all of us. You know, when I was in graduate school, I did my doctoral dissertation, using the psychology of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. And Jung, this concept has kinda become popularized now, but Jung talks about the shadow. The shadow is that part of ourselves which is so abhorrent to our sense of who and what we are that we don't even wanna know that it's there. And it's basically, you know, all the antisocial impulses that—of sex and murder and violence and so on and so forth. But Jung says, the meeting with oneself is at first the meeting with oneself [ed.: Jung's line ends 'the meeting with one's own shadow']. You know, in order to know yourself and in certain ways to just somehow deprive the shadow of a lot of energy, you have to admit to it as an aspect of yourself. You know, I've had this discussion with many people, some of whom get very offended when I say it. You know, often when there are these monster moms, as the tabloids come to call them, like Andrea Yates or whoever, you know, who have murdered their kids, they'll be, you know, they'll be these 24/7, shows of the trial on Court TV or whatever. And, you know, and the bulk of the audience tend to be women. And, you know, if you ask most audience members who are fascinated and obsessed with these crimes, you know why it is, they'll give you one rationale or another. From my point of view, what's really going on is people like that are enacting these dark forbidden fantasies of mothers, you know, who sometimes feel like killing their children. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure what article you're referring to. You know, but all of us have these double sides. You know? Yeah.

00:52:41 Andrew Keen: I mean, as—so I guess as, when Socrates reminded us that philosophy is knowing thyself, it has a—some chilling undertones, Harold.

00:52:52 Harold Schechter: Absolutely. So in answer to your question, like everybody else in the world, there have been times in my life where I've flown into such rages, you know, that, you know, I don't know if I would kill somebody, but I'm certainly capable of hurting them. But, no, I don't feel that I would be—well, you know, if I were in a situation where my wife or my kids or whatever, you know, if they were being threatened in some way, then I would hope I would be able to muster a violent response that would save them. But other than that, I don't see myself as committing murder.

00:53:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I can't imagine you, Harold, flying into a rage. You seem very gentle, but maybe not. The new book is out, Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime. Thank you so much, Harold, for coming on the show and dealing with my rather tasteless questions. I much appreciate it.

00:54:00 Harold Schechter: No, not at all. Questions are great. Appreciate it. [unclear] me on anytime. Thank you.