Harold Schechter is a great voice in modern true crime narratives. Professor Emeritus of literature and pop culture at Queens College, New York, he has spent over forty years writing crime stories. I actually read his first Edgar Allan Poe mystery, Nevermore, when I was a senior in high school and loved it (recommending it twenty-some-odd years ago to anyone who would listen). This new Bloodlands collection takes his narrative and true crime skills to another level, focusing on six high-profile crimes forgotten to history, but which changed crime in America forever in larger historical ways—bloody, violent turning points from which we have never quite cleaned our hands.
One of the coolest parts of these books was the way Amazon presented them. If you read them in the Kindle app, they are accompanied by illustrations, photos, and a really neat layout. They begin with colorful animations that accompany each story in a really engaging way that I haven’t seen in other Kindle books, and I would love to figure out how to include something like it in a future publication. It’s really cool stuff that I would love to see more of, adding a little technological flair to keep an audience engaged.
The Pirate
When a small, unmanned sloop covered in blood drifted into New York Harbor in 1860, the media immediately went into a frenzy trying to figure out what had happened in international waters. Albert Hicks, a criminal well known to the ins and outs of the waterfront’s operations, had joined a crew to transport money at sea. Only a little way into the journey, Hicks killed the entire crew, threw them overboard, and made off with the stolen money. The newspapers immediately sensationalized the story, creating America’s first media murder spectacle and first celebrity killer. Of course, after spending some of the stolen loot, he was caught and hanged. Many attended his hanging, including the great P. T. Barnum. Ever since, the media’s sensationalism with bloody murder hasn’t let up.
Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie
In Kansas, the Bloody Bender family ran a tiny inn and grocery on the frontier. When travelers stopped for supplies, food, or lodging, they would sit in a small chair. A canvas partition would be quietly moved aside, and the traveler was knocked over the head with a hammer and buried in the orchard. This happened over and over again. As the town grew and neighbors moved in, people became suspicious as they noticed travelers disappearing. The family, sensing that something was wrong, vanished forever, leaving the town to dig up body after body from the orchard. The lack of any evidence of where the family escaped, along with the beauty and supposed extrasensory powers of Kate Bender, solidified the family and their actions in both American history and folklore legend.
The Brick Slayer
Robert Nixon was a Black teenager accused of—and later confessing to, albeit under highly suspicious circumstances and extrajudicial processes—brutal murders in Los Angeles and Chicago. He would force entry into a woman’s home when she was alone and beat her to death with an ordinary brick found near the scene. The truly interesting aspect of this story isn’t just the brutal crimes, but the way his Blackness was hypersensationalized by the police, the media, and the justice system. Schechter analyzes the extreme injustices of his public humiliation in the court of public opinion, the grotesquely racist language news outlets and police used to classify the case, and the speedy trial that led to an all-white jury’s unanimous conviction. What I found most interesting, and something I didn’t know, was that this case was a major inspiration for portions of Richard Wright’s Native Son—a book I am now inspired to reread after a couple of decades.
Panic
This one is singular in the collection as a portrait of nationwide panic during the Great Depression. Much like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, there was a similar moral panic in the 1930s spawned by a small handful of nationwide child murders. A whisper network of panic swept the nation, and people began to believe that there was a spate of sadistic child killers everywhere. Fear spiraled out of control, parents became terrified and formed community posses, and mass hysteria led to very real, tragic consequences—including a man who was so convinced predators were after his three daughters that he preemptively killed them to keep them safe. It is not a big stretch of the imagination to see how often this pattern has repeated itself since.
Rampage
Rampage is the next in the chronology of American crime, this one focusing on the 1949 mass shooting—one of the very first in the nation—by Howard Unruh in New Jersey. In twelve minutes, he walked around his neighborhood with a Luger pistol and killed twelve of his neighbors. He returned home, organized his various papers and affairs outlining a long list of grievances, and waited for the police. He was arrested without incident, essentially becoming the blueprint for the modern mass shooter motivated by resentment, isolation, perceived humiliation, and indiscriminate rage—not against one person, but against modern society as a whole. It is the tragic touchstone that led to the hundreds that have occurred since.
The Pied Piper
Finally, Charles Schmid’s murders in Tucson in the early 1960s focus on one of the first cult-like, charismatic men who used their magnetic personalities (similar to, but predating, the Manson murders) to lure vulnerable young women to their deaths. He was a very strange man who stuffed his shoes to look taller, wore stage pancake makeup, drew a fake beauty mark on his face, and even impersonated Elvis. While he only killed three young girls, his narcissism, charisma, and heartless manipulation of his victims was the first of its kind in a style of serial murder that has since become relatively common. Another aspect of this story that I didn’t know (similar to the Wright connection to Robert Nixon) is that this case influenced one of my favorite short stories of all time: Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
All of these stories were a blast to read. In each of these books, Schechter tells an incredible story while mapping out the broader cultural turning points that these events inspired over and over again. These are very American, home-grown institutions of violence—a part of our culture that is no less gruesome for how common it has become.
Garrett Zecker 