PSYCHO U.S.A. -Harold Schechter

round two. Name something that's not boring, laundry, a book club, computer solitaire. Huh oh, sorry, we were looking for chumbuck casino.

hypnotized by their monstrous murderous acts. But for every celebrity psychopath who's gotten ink for spilling blood, there's a bevy of all but forgotten homicidal fiends studying the bloody margins of US history. Spurred by prophet passion, paranoia, or perverse pleasure, these killers, the Witch of Staten Island, the Smutty Nose Butcher, the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell, and many others, span three

centuries in a host of heroing murder methods. These demonic denizens may be long gone to the gallows, but this insidiously irresistible slice of Gothic Americana will ensure that they'll no longer be forgotten. The book that we're featuring this evening is Psycho USA, American Psycho Killers You've Never Heard Of, with my special guest journalist and author and professor Harrow Checkter. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Harold Checkter.

This is a great.

the killers that you're talking about span three centuries. So tell us what when the term coin the phrase or the term was coined serial killer, and what were they called before that, and what were they called centuries ago?

picked up a little later by another British writer. It it didn't really, you know, become widely used until the nineteen eighties when the FBI Profiling Unit began to employ that term. You know, there's some controversy over exactly who coined it, but in any case, it's you know, it's a relatively recent term, but it's a recent term for

an age old phenomenon. I mean, it goes back way beyond the three centuries that my that my book covers, you know, it's probably really as old as our species itself. There's actually a very illuminating book I read years ago

by a Harvard anthropologist named Richard Wrangham. The book is called Demonic Males, and it traces the origins of male violence in the human species, you know, back to our primate ancestors, and you know, chimpanzees with whom we share something like ninety nine point nine percent of our DNA. You know, we share more d A with chimpanzees, and chimpanzees do with gorillas are as. It turns out, I hadn't realized this until I read the book. You know,

frighteningly violent creatures who commit the kinds of atrocities. Really, you know that we associate with things like serial killers. So you know, I'm sure you have, you know, found that kind of crime going on all throughout human history and possibly even prehistory. In the past, serial murderers were known by a variety of names. You know, there was a point at which they're called lust murderers, which I think actually is a very very in a way, a

more expressive and even accurate term than serial murder. You know, back in the Middle Ages, they were referred to as lichen thropes because the kind of butchery they committed was so extreme that, you know, people thought that these were human beings too, literally turned into wolves when they were committing these kinds of crimes. You know, somebody like Chickatillo for example, you know, it would be a modern example

of that kind of killer. Back in the nineteen thirties, there was no distinction made between serial murder and mass murder. I wrote a book about Albert Fish for example, you know, arguably the most heinous serial killer in the annals of US crime, cannibal pedophile who is preying on children, back in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and it was interesting to me that in the newspaper stories of the time when he was arrested, they were just using the term

mass murder. Of course, now a distinction is made between serial murder, which again is basically a sadistic sex crime, and mass murder, which is, you know, a kind of apocalyptic, suicidal explosion of violence in which a person just takes out a bunch of people at one time.

tend to be suicidal. You know, they've reached somehow the end of their life, even this guy who didn't actually end up committing suicide or being killed by the cops, as obviously his life was all over. And you know, they're basically going out with a bang. I mean, that's it's this one time deal. Whereas serial murderers, again it's basically a sadistic sex crime. You know, these are people who derive this extremely perverse pleasure from inflicting pain and

torture on their victims. And you know the pattern of serial murder tends to follow the pattern of sexual behavior. You know, a period of fantasizing about committing this act. You know, finally this overwhelming impulse to do it you know, trolling for a victim or picking up a victim, you know, perpetrating this act. Then this cooling off period which basically just parallels, you know, the kind of period that follows a normal person sexual release, and then the build up again of the impulse.

I mean, one of the things that interests me is given the very depressing number, you know, horrific crimes that take place all the time. Why is it that's such a tiny number of crimes enter into the cultural mythology. I mean it's not necessarily you know, the you know, the the the awfulness of the crime itself. I mean Leopold and Lobe, for example, you know, committed this one kidnapping murder, which you know, as terrible as it was just purely as a crime, was no more horrendous than

many other kidnapping murders of children. So there are these other elements, you know, these other elements that you know, that turn these crimes into these huge phenomena. And anyway, I was very interested to discover in my researches, you know that again in America, because I was living myself to American criminals, you know, going all the way back

to the seventeenth century. Periodically there would be these crimes, and again they would generate lots and lots of attention, and you know, and frequently, you know, the newspapers would describe them as you know, the worst, you know, most monstrous crimes in the annals of history, and you know, the time of the century and so on and so forth, you know, and yet you know, they're forgotten very very quickly. So that's what I started researching for this book.

into the common mythology, but just because he was never apprehended, so.

very big contributing factor. But I mean there are other, you know, very infamous cases like the Cleveland Torso killer or the x Man of New Orleans in which the perpetrator hasn't been caught, and they haven't quite achieved you know, the kind of cultural statuses other crimes have. So I mean there is you know, I mean, it's it's difficult

entirely to pinpoint all the reasons. You know, there's something about, you know, the particular story and the way it strikes a kind of chord at the time, partly because I think it tends to embody certain kinds of anxieties and issues that are very, very prominent. For example, Leopold and Lobe, you know, as a kind of quintessential jazz age crime.

There was so much obsession at the time about what they used to call the flaming youth who are completely out of control, and somehow Leopold and Lobe, you know, seem to be the living incarnations of this cultural fear, you know, in the same way Charles Manson, you know, it's like every you know, parents' worst nightmare of the drug crazed hippie, you know. So anyway, yeah, yeah.

pretty much remain the same. You know, these are sexual psychopaths who, for whatever reason again you know, derive you know, they achieve kind of you'd have to say, almost ecstasy in torturing and exerting this power over their victims. And again I think that's just a perennial phenomenon, you know. I mean, one could say, I suppose in certain cases, you know, there are technological changes in terms of the

kinds of weapons they might use. But otherwise, you know, I mean, you know, for example, there are some killers I cover who would find their victims through classified ads in these lonely hearts, you know, newspapers and stuff, you know, nowt they'd use the internet, you know, but basically it's the same thing.

thirties equivalent of match dot com and so on. And he would, you know, he was presentable enough, he obviously, would create these false identities and present himself as a well to do widower and ingratiate himself with these women and then lure him lure them to this, you know, basically torture chamber that he had constructed on a piece of property in a little village called Quiet Dell, and trap them in the basement and subject them to various

tortures and kill them. I mean, in one case he killed a woman and both her children, and in another case he killed one other woman that he had lured there and his crimes. You know, eventually friends of the victims became very suspicious about the disappearance of these people, and he was tracked down and tried. It was a very, very again notorious case that was covered nationally, and you know,

he was ultimately executed. One of the things that's always interesting to me and that I deal with in the book is back in the old days, almost invariably popular or ballads would be written about these crimes. Yeah, and you know, sometimes as in the case of Harry Powers, who's also named his real name apparently was Hermann Drenth. He was actually an emigrat from Belgium. Harry Powers was his adopted American name, although he thought he snared his

victims under a variety of other pseudonyms. But you know, his actual sheet music that exists for some of these ballads that are written about them.

You know, instant true crime books, you know, people dealing in what is now called murder abelia, you know, collecting souvenirs of crime scenes and souvenirs of notorious criminals. So again, you know, it's a plus a change nothing really, you know, it's a Bible says there's no new thing under the sun, and that relates to you know, the public purient interest you know in these kinds of sensational crimes.

hundreds and hundreds of female serial killers. In fact, I've been in contact recently with a gentleman who's been compiling history of it, and he's come up with astonishing number of cases internationally. But what's interesting is that it's true that there is no such thing as the culture critic Camille Pogley has said, there's no female Jack the Ripper, But that doesn't mean there are no female serial killers.

It just means that female serial killers tend to commit their crimes in a very different way than male serial killers. Or to put it another way, you know that kind of you know, mutilation murder that we associate with Jack the Ripper or you know, other males serial killers of that type, that's a very very male form of serial murder.

Lydia Sherman, you know, personifies a particularly female form of serial murder, which is to say that she and others like her, you know, tend to mittle murder strangers the way many many serial killers, male serial killers do. In fact, most serial killers do, you know, They tend to murder family members, friends, people they have some kind of emotional intimate relationship with. And they also do not indulge in that kind of penetrative phallic penetrative, you know, using a

knife or you know whatever, mutilation murder. What they tend to do is poison their victims. And Lydia Sherman, you know, was a very very prolific poisoner, you know, who bumped off a bunch of her husbands. I can't remember offhand exactly how many of her children and step children she killed, but you know, it's a very pressive number and began. She was only one of several what they called American

borges at the time. There was another one, Sarah Jane Robinson, and both Lydia Sherman and Sarah Jane Robinson were followed by a nurse named Jane Toppin, who, until John Wayne Gacy's crime spree, was considered to be the most prolific serial murderer in American history. She killed about thirty one people, again by poison. The other thing to keep in mind is, in many respects, dying by dying at the hands of one of these female poisoners was much more horrific, you know,

than dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper. You know, you associate Jack the Ripper with these horrendous mutilations, but

the mutilations were all performed post mortem. He actually killed his victims very very swiftly, whereas people like Lydia Sherman and Jane Toppin and Sarah Jane Robinson, you know, arrived extreme perverse sexual pleasure from doling out very slow, agonizing death to their victims, you know, watching them die over an extended span of time, sometimes bringing them very very close to death by administering certain combinations of poisons and

then pulling them back so they could toy with them more. And Jane Toppin, for example, confess to when she finally decided it was time for one of her victims to die, she would administer the fatal dose and then get into bed and embrace the person while they were dying and have an orgasm while the person was undergoing their death. Ros. So you know, it was a classic case again of sexual sadistic serial murder, but done in this female form, so quite evil. Yeah, yeah, evil.

after raping a young relative of his. But you know, the thing about Lapage, you know that was very interesting to me is you know, another case of a nineteen totally obscure, nineteenth century killer who was a classic serial sex murderer. You know, he stalked this young girl, he abducted her, dragged her into the woods, killed her, mutilated,

mutilated her body, beheaded her, excised her volva. You know, it's you know, again a killer, not on the scale of somebody like Andre Chicicatillo, but a similar kind of crime. You know, you have these psychopathic sex murderers who were driven to perform these horrendous mutilation rapes on young women. And again you know, you know, associated necessarily with nineteenth century New Hampshire. But you know that's part of the point of my book is that these crimes have taken

place at all times and in all places. And let me just say that it's not, of course, you know, limited to America. You know, I I tend to limit my books to American killers. But it's an international phenomenon.

of the men. You know. The main message of something like Little Red Riding Hood, you know is after your young girl and you venture out into the forest in medieval Germany, you know you're likely to get raped and dismembered, you know, and that is converted into this dreamlike tale of a little girl and a wolf, you know, but it represents a historical and a social social reality of the time.

That crime went unsolved for a very long time, and it turned out to have been perpetrated by this guy named Franklin Evans, who was arrested years later again for committing a crime similar to the kind of atrocity that Lapage perpetrated on Josie Langmaide, except in this case it was his own niece that he lured into a forest and again raped, mutilated, cut out her sexual organs, supposedly because you know, he wanted to do some anatomical study on them. You know, it's a case that was provoked,

you know, this incredible nationwide outrage. At the time that it was discovered, Evans was considered to be again one of the most monstrous criminals in the annals of American crime. And yet you know, nobody's ever heard of him. And again, you know, the crime itself, I would argue, for example, is much more horrific than something like the Leopold had Low murder. And yet no one's heard of Evans anymore so until you till now.

had worked as a messenger in a bank. This is nineteen twenty seven, and abducted the daughter of one of the executives in the bank and held her for ransom, and the father agreed to pay the ransom, and Hickman arranged to rendezvous with him. He was going to turn over this little girl. He had the little girl captive for a few days and treated her very nicely, took her to movies and bought her ice cream, and kept her entertained and kept assuring her that she would be

returned safely to the father. You know. The father agreed to pay the ransom. And they arranged for a rendezvous spot, and the father arrived there with this bag full of money. Hickman pulled up in a car. The father said, you know, I want to make sure my daughter's okay before I pay you. So Hickman showing a flashlight on the passenger seat, and there was the little girl who was sitting there, wrapped up in a blanket, with her eyes wide open

and apparently smiling. So the father passed them money to Hickman through the window. Hickman drove off little ways, opened the passenger door, tossed the little girl out, and drove off. The father ran up to retrieve his daughter, and what he discovered was that Hickman had killed her, disemboweled her, cut off her arms and legs so in her eye lids open to make it look as if her eyes were open, put rouge on her cheeks, and lipstick on her mouth to make it look as if those she

were healthy and smiling. You know, it's it's a crime that it's so unimaginably horrible. And when Hickman was you know, and when Hickman was arrested, he himself expected that he would become his infamous Leopold and Lope. And yet again, you know, it's completely stated from public memory.

You know, but I think to again enter into the cultural folklore, you know, there has to be something about them. You know, it's like any other story. It's like any movie or any play or whatever. There has to be something of the story. There has to be something of the characters. It can't just be the the awfulness of the crime.

made their living well as fisher people. You know, the husband, the men were fishermen, and you know, the wives kept the house and they Louis Wagner was this German emigre who occasionally helped out with a fishing enterprise and uh and sometimes boarded with him. You know, he was a friend of the family really and uh in on the on the on the night of this horrible crime that he committed, because the men of the family, I guess there were three men. There were three women and three men.

The men went off on their fishing boat and ended up having to spend the night on on the mainland, and they ran into Lewis Wagner uh And Wagner realized that the women were going to be all by themselves on this remote island, and he believed that there was a cache of money somewhere in the house. So he stole a row boat and rowed to this little island and ended up ended up butchering two of the women

with an axe. One of the women managed to crawl through a window with her little dog and run down to the to the shoreline and huddle in under a rock all night while Wagner, you know, I think I write in the book a sort of a classic scene out of you know, like a Hollywood you know, a

movie with Jamie Lee Curtison or something. You know. You know, she was like huddling under this rock, trying to keep her dog quiet, you know, while this homicidal madman was scouring the island for her with his axe, you know, just walking very very close to where she was. But

in the end he couldn't find her. So he went back to the cottage where the corpses of these two other young women he had just butchered leg you know, and made himself a meal and then hopped in the rowboat and you know, and made off, and you know,

he was eventually caught and executed. One of the very interesting things about it was that inhabiting the next island over was a family that ran a little hotel which was frequented actually by you know, some very very famous people during the summer, people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry

David Farreaux had visited there. And the daughter of the family was this woman named Celia Thaxter, who was a very very well known poet at the time, and she was one of the first on the seat on the murder scene the next day, and she ended up writing a long, long article about the smutty Nose horror. That is a very very very pioneering piece of American true crime writing. It really, in many ways, I would argue, is the first modern piece of American true crime writing.

It predates in Cold Blood, you know, by almost one hundred years, but it does something of what in Cold Blood does, you know, which is bring a literary kind of sensibility and literary style and literary language, you know, to the telling of this horrible, horrible murder. So it's quite an interesting case. The author Anita Shreeve wrote a book called The Weight of Water, which was made into a not very good movie with Sean Penn, I believe based on the case.

we're going to these little separate, one room schoolhouses. And the town built this big, consolidated school which was the pride of the community, this big modern school which educated the children from kindergarten up through high school. And to support, of course, you know, all the citizens of the town were taxed. And Keiho developed this obsession about being taxed.

He and his wife didn't have any children, you know, and he thought that this was you know, incredibly unfair, and so on and so forth, and and anyway he had been he was he had some engineering background and was very very very skillful in mechanics, and you know, had some electrical knowledge. So he was kind of hired

to do some upkeep on the building. And over the course of many, many months, he was given a key to the to the schoolhouse, and unbeknownst to anybody else in the community, he was smuggling in explosives into the building at night and rigging up this huge time bomb in the basement which was triggered to go off of some homemade detonating device he made out of alarm clocks.

Got he got some surplus World War One explosives which were very widely available at that time to farmers who used them to get rid of stumps on their property and so on. And he had managed to accumulate a huge man of this stuff, and he just brought you know, I can't even remember how much, but you know, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of this he loaded into the

basement of this school. And then on the last day of the school year, when he knew that there would be many, many, many students attending class to take their finals, he set this timer to go off and blew this school up. Fortunately for some reason, not all the explosives detonated, but it did destroy a huge portion of the school and killed I can't remember, about forty children and teachers. At the same time. While the school was going up, he loaded up his Ford pickup with all this shrapnel

and dynamite. He murdered his wife. Again typical of mass murderers who basically are going to like end their whole lives and destroy their whole worlds. Killed his wife up this forward pick up with shrapped alt explosives, drove it down to the schoolhouse where all these survived, all these men and community members are frantically trying to save kids

and dig the survivors out of the rubble. And drove this car bomb down to the down to the schoolhouse and called over some men he had this grudge against, and then detonated this car bomb, killing himself and these other men. So he you know, this was the greatest act. This was the most heinous act of domestic terrorism up

until the time of Timothy McVeigh. And it was a kind of combination of both you know, the you know, the Oklahoma City bombing, and you know, what you now think of is like a contemporary car bombing, so it was a suicide bombing, domestic terrorism, just this horrendous, horrendous act, and yet after making the front pages of the newspapers for a few days, it completely disappeared. And again nobody's

ever heard of it. And here's a guy who blew up a schoolhouse, killing forty children in you know, the Midwest in nineteen twenty seven. And if you you know, say you know, mentioned the Bath School disaster and it was such a horrendous crime for the time that people were suggesting that the name Keiho was going to enter into the language as a slang term for a domestic terrorist. And yet far from that happening, you know, he became,

you know, completely obscure. So, I mean, I think part of the I think there are several reasons for that. One is, the Bath School disaster occurred literally just days before Charles Lindberg made his transatlantic crossing, and that was such a huge epical event that completely overshadow the disaster. But the other factor is, you know, I think that again, there are certain kinds of crimes that become called obsessions.

For example, back in the late nineteenth century, poisoners Americans obsessed about poisoners in the way Americans did about serial killers. In like the nineteen seventies and eighties. There was something about something about the crime of poisoning that played on very very widespread fears at the time, which I think had to do with the fact that, you know, there was no regulation of food and drugs and so on and so forth, so people were just always afraid that whatever

they ingested was going to kill them. And somehow the poisoner came to incarnate, you know, that particular kind of cultural anxiety, you know, just as a serial murderer came to incarnate certain kinds of anxieties having to do with sexual danger and the spread of aids and so on and so forth. In the eighties and so on, and now, you know, the fear of the serial killer, I think was we're not quite as obsessed with serial killers as

we were twenty years ago. Now we're much more focused on mass murderers again, like you know the Columbine or this, you know, the guy in Denver recently, and I think that's because you know, the fear of serial murder has been replaced by you know, this terror of the mass murder. You know, because of terrorism. So yeah, yeah, that key how is that? I mean, Key Hoo's crime was always like, you know, in that sense, it was ahead of its time.

You know, it wasn't quite the kind of crime. As horrendous as it was, it didn't strike that sort of communal cord of anxiety, you know that something like that would nowadays.

of a you know, a vast conspiracy. Then there was just this one loose Cannon, you know, who randomly killed this president and you know, changed all of history.

of a routine. But the Probe's case is one that you know, I found when I really really allowed myself, you know, to think about it, getting quite upset over it. You know. Probes, again, was this German immigrant fought in the Civil War. He'd been taken in by this family called the Deerings, this farmer and his wife and young children, and you know, who'd just been treated really really well

and you know, almost like a family member himself. And then he decided that again a little bit like it was a little analogous to this smutty nos case, you know, because just as Lewis Wagner had been taken into this family and then decided he was going to kill them all, or the women, just so he could rob the money. You know, Probes decided, you know, that Deering had a bunch of money in his house which he didn't uh

and he was going to get it. And the only way he could figure out somehow to achieve this goal was to slaughter the entire family. So excuse me. One day, he basically lured each of the members of the family in succession, you know, the mother, you know, then one child, the next child. He lued each one into the barn under some pretext, you know, and as soon as he got them in the barn, he would butcher them with

an axe. And then he ended up killing the father, and he ended up killing you know, one other young man who worked on the farm who was very very friendly with He ended up butchering like eight people all together. When I was writing about it, you know, it struck me again as an atrocity that was on the level

of the Manson murders, you know, the Sharon Tate killings. Sure, And you know, I in proped was a rather dull witted fellow who didn't actually bother after he committed this massacre, to put much distance between himself and the crime scene. And so he was promptly, promptly captured. And that crime, you know, very justifiably generated such incredible communal outrage and indignation.

You know, the Probes was just really seen as one of the most hideous murderers of that era, which you know, in fact he was so again it's not you wouldn't call him a serial murder. His you know, he's unlike Bundy or Gay si Er, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer. You know, these are people whose crimes are sexually motivated. That wasn't the case with Probes. He was just this, you know. At the same time, he was obviously you know, psychopathic

in the sense that he was without any conscience. He basically contrived and carried out this massacre, you know, on people he knew and who had befriended him, you know, for no other reason that you know, they were basically in his way, because he wanted to get a little money so he can go to the local brothel.

and so on and so forth. And Irwin and his brothers, they were very neglect at as children because well, the father ran off with some other woman, leaving the mother to raise the kids by ourselves. And the mother was very very fanatically religious, I mean, all her time was spent involved with her religion and all that. There were three sons who were allowed to run wild, and Erwin's two brothers, you know, very promptly ended up in reformed

schools and they really became career criminals. Erwin himself displayed a very very early talent for art, and particularly for sculpture, and as he grew older, he decided to devote his life to his art, and he became quite quite an accomplished sculpture sculpt her who made his way first when he was around in his teens, he ran away from home, made his way to Hollywood and found work in the studio of a guy named Carlo Romanelli, who did a

lot of set design at that time for early silent movies. Romanelli, for example, did the statuary for the first silent version of Ben her and Erwin worked with him for a while, and then he made his way to Chicago and became a protege of the man who at that time was America's most famous sculptor guy named Laredo Taft who had done a lot of work for the eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair and did a lot of public statuary around Chicago. Very very well known, and Irwin was a

favorite student of his. But Irwin was a very very stable character. He really was a kind of jackal hide personality. He can be extremely likable, extremely ingratiating. He was very very bright. He was basically self taught but very well read.

But at the same time, he really had this kind of homicidal temper which could be provoked for very very little reason, and again and again and again he would end up being fired from his jobs or as or kicked out of his place of work, you know, because some coworker would somehow insult him in some small way, and he would just go crazy and administer this horrendous, horrendous beating on this person, you know, and end up

being fired. Anyway, Irwin made his way to New York City, and at that time he also had this weird crackpot theory he developed called visualization, in which he believed that he could somehow acquire the power to create art strictly through mental you know, through his imagination. You know that if he trained himself enough, if he could visualize a piece of art in his mind, he would somehow be

able just to transform it into some material form. And he became convinced that what was preventing him from doing that was his his sexual impulses. You know, he believed that he was being too distracted by his sex drive and he wanted to channel that energy into his visualization. So sometime in nineteen thirty four, he attempted to slice off his own penis. Was living in New York at the time, and he you know, you know, he tried

to do it. I mean, he inflicted this very very very severe incision on his penis, but he couldn't quite manage to bring himself to cut loll off. It was

too painful. So he went to Bellevue Hospital and tried to persuade the doctors there to finish castraining him, and instead, of course, they stuck him in the psych award and he spent the next three or four years in an out of mental institutions, and when he got out, he became obsessed with He was boarding at the home of a family called the Geddeons, and the family consisted of a mother, a father who subsequently moved out of the house, a daughter named Ethel who was an editor for a

valley fair magazine, and a beautiful younger what her named Veronica Ronnie Gideon, who was an artist's model, and and and Erwin became actually Erin became very obsessed with Ethel, the older sister, you know. And and at this point, you know, he was really in a way becoming more and more demented. He also had syphilis, which might have been a contributing factor to his growing instability. And anyway, he decided he was going to he decided that again in his own mad way, you know, to to achieve

this apotheosis. He was after who was going to sacrifice Ethel? Who was going to kill Ethel? And he went to the house. Ethel was not there. She had actually moved out of the house and gotten married. And Erwin ended up strangling the mother, strangling Veronica, the beautiful artist model, and they and killing a border who was just living there and was just you know, Irwin decided he had

a dispose of him as a potential witness. He stabbed him eleven times, and they had with an ice pick that he happened to have with him, and it became this huge, huge tabloid sensation. I mean, it was one of the biggest tabloid sensations in the nineteen thirties. Irwin

was called the mad Sculptor. I mean, it became a huge tabloid sensation for a whole variety of reasons, one of which was that there were all these naked photographs of Ronnie Gideon floating around, which the tabloids immediately started splashing over their front pages. You know, they retouched them a little with air brushed on, you know, some you know, some discrete coverings, but you know, they were running dozens

and dozens and dozens of pictures of Ronnie Gideon. She had also posed for some true detective magazines at the time, so that was another, you know, very very sensational, lurid element of the case because she had posed for pictures in these true detective magazines being attacked and strangled, and

here she showed up getting getting killed. So anyway, you know, the thing that was one thing very fascinating to me about the case is that Irwin's psychiatrist at Bellevue, when he tried cutting off his penis was this famous New York psychiatrist named Frederick Weretham. Wortham had been Albert Fish's psychiatrist, and then were them in the nineteen fifties became very, very notorious himself for leading a crusade against comic books that almost put the comic American com book industry out

of business. He wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, which was a big best seller, which argued that the main cause of juve no delinquency was comic books. Yeah, and so I've always been interested in more of them, and was his psychiatrist where them got to know him very well. It was, it was, it was a huge case.

The other element, you know, that added by the way to its sensational character was that Irwin, who himself was something of a religious fanatic, killed this family on Easter Sunday in nineteen thirty seven.

was like the perfect tabloid storm. You know. So it was like a huge, huge case.

the Illustrated Police News when Jack the Ripper was around. Again, nothing new, I mean, you know that tabloid sensibility, you know that so many people point to somehow you know, it's a sign that we're living in particularly like debased you know, particularly debased culture. You know, that's that's completely ridiculous. I mean, you know, the tabloids going back to the Victorian era, where every bit as lurid and prurient, as they are now wiistic, you know.

events that would in many cases overshadow. I just interviewed somebody, Steve Miller, about his book about the Cleveland serial killer, and I wondered why it wasn't, you know, these facts weren't ringing so easy for me, Like I hadn't really known about this crime so much, And of course it was overshadowed by Casey Anthony. So you know, even even a case like that can be overshadowed by a case that has the optics or something that the media can

that does grab onto and that's that story dominates. And you've seen in American media both three or four stories seen the dominate in the last couple of years.

enough of them. I think there are complex, you know, there are very very complex psychological and social reasons for that. You know, think if there are aspects to those cases that speak to very very dark, unacknowledged and forbidden feelings that lots and lots of people have. And you know, I mean, just to to state what I regard is the obvious, you know, something like suit You know, you get these matricidal cases like Susan Smith or Casey Anthony.

You know, and then you have this huge audience and a great you know, a large part of it is made up of women, you know, who just can't get enough of this, you know, and you can't help to get the feeling that you know, these kinds of cases allow people to think thoughts that they that are going on in the deepest recesses of their mind, you know, if they wouldn't allow themselves other ways of thinking about, like, oh, what would it be like to get rid of my child?

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you know, whatever, what you've.

different about the killers today? Do you see any new Not that we're looking for anything like this, but do you see any difference in any trend, any disturbing sort of difference in killers over the last three hundred years?

definitely were. It's just that they couldn't quite wreak as much you know, carnage as they can do. So you know, I can't you know, I don't actually see a huge amount of difference, and certainly in terms of the kinds of killers that I write about, which again are these

you know, psychopathic basically psychopathic sex killers. To the most part, you know, that seems to me just to be as I said, you know, a part of human nature that has always unfortunately existed, and that seems to be rooted, you know, something very very archaic in our in our nature.

of murder. Obviously sex and murder intertwined fantasies, but then you get there are fair amount of necrophiliacs out of this deal as well. And again those we can see why I think why some of those crimes don't Certainly they resonate, they send fear throughout the throughout the community.

But at the same time, there are things that we really don't want to dwell on, those those horrific tag teams where they're torturers and keep these sellers, and so I think maybe that's why some of that is that there's certainly you don't want to make a movie about anything like that.

knowledge of these crimes is much more widespread. But you know, if you look at craft Ebbing Psychopathia Sexualis, you know, which was published in the late nineteenth century, and you know, parts of it originally were written in Latin, you know, so that presumably only like professional medical people could understand what was going on, you know, the case histories that he relates there, I mean, you know again, or you know,

every bit is is horrendous and awful. Or Wilhelm Steckel, who is a you know, who is a colleague of Sigmund Freud's, has a famous book on sadism and masochism, you know, and he has case histories of killers you know, who are at least as you know, horrendous and monstrouses John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, you know, or Jeffrey Dahmert.

Really you know, you see there again that there've always been very fortunately, you know, a small you know, but fraction of you know, any given population where you have these people who indulge in these kinds who are driven to indulge in these kinds of things. And I think

it's probably always been that way, you know. Again, one difference is that nowadays, you know, the books about it, and certainly on the internet, the information about that kind of thing is just so much more readily available, but the crimes themselves have always existed and probably always existed in the same proportion to the population at large.

I think it is really good for true crime authors because a lot of these books, and part of what this program is too is telling people about some of the the best and greatest true crime authors who have covered some of the most incredible cases and written some of the best books. So I can get your back, I want to talk about some of the cases, so it would be great. Well, thank you very much, Harold. You have a good evening, and thank you very much.