This book was about the most twisted true crime book I have read in a long time!

I didn't realize there were so many psychos back in the 19th century, but after reading this book, there were more than I ever expected to be living in those days. The author, Harold Schechter, delved long and deep into the past to find these crazy murderers!

All these murderers were people I have never heard of before and it didn't matter if it was a man or a woman as both were the most cold hearted individuals to walk this earth. In my opinion, the men in this book that committed the crimes back in the 1800's were worse than the famous killers that we know of today. We thought that Bundy, Dahmer, and Gacy were twisted, but after reading this book, there were worse killers than them back in the "old days".

The women were just as bad and it seems that the women loved to use arsenic and any kind of poison they could get their hands on to commit their crimes. The men loved to use axes and hatchets to "chop" up their victims.

This book is not for the faint of heart as the author goes into descriptive detail about the murders and it was one of the most detailed versions of murders that I have read in a very long time.

I found myself through some of the stories getting queasy as the information of the murders were so detailed that I could imagine the pain and agony of the victims. That is saying a lot for me as I consider myself a hardened horror fan and normally I don't get queasy reading about twisted psychos! But with this book it was a different. This is no "walk in the park" book. It is a "ride into hell". Four stars for this one. ( )

Highly recommend, excellent narrator. ( )

Harold Schechter is one of my favorite true crime authors. I have several of his books covering the crimes of Ed Gein, H.H. Holmes, Jesse Pomeroy and others and one day hope to find myself with time to read some of his fiction. He writes in a manner that is both intelligent and accessible and manages to speak about the unspeakable without the bombast and disgust that I am sure would mar my writing were I ever to try to write about killers.

So given his skills, I should not have been so smug as to think this book had little to teach me. I’ve stated on this site before that up until 2000 or so, I knew about almost all serial killers, and I did know quite a bit. But I certainly knew far less than I thought I did because in this book of more obscure American killers, some of whom are serial killers or mass murderers, I only knew of three killers out of the thirty-one presented. Among poisoners, sex killers, lonely hearts murderers and family annihilators, I knew of the Smutty Nose Killer, an angry seaman who killed a house full of women for money; Carlyle Harris, a despicable seducer and poisoner; and William Edward Hickman, a kidnapper and mutilator. I had sort of heard of Andrew Kehoe, having come across his name in reference to school mass murderers, but had never read about him in any depth.

Since I am attempting to write quickly for Halloween, I’m going to write about the two murders I know best, and hope I can give justice to this compendium as I do it. A lot of the true crime encyclopedias out there are tiresome cash grabs, covering the same ground over and over and discussing intricate and fascinating murders in so little detail that the reader finds herself longing for text at least as comprehensive as Wikipedia. Not so with Schechter, and even if my discussion doesn’t resonate, you should look into him if his name is new to you. If it doesn’t resonate, it’s probably my fault.

Smutty Nose

I hate to call any of these murders my “favorite” but I find the Smutty Nose murders absolutely fascinating. This may be the murders most casual true crime readers know the best because it was written about in a fiction novel by Anita Shreve (called The Weight of Water) and the book was adapted into a film of the same name that featured Sarah Polley, Sean Penn and the amazing British actress, Katrin Cartlidge, who died too young from peritonitis.

The Smutty Nose murders get their name from the location of the killing – off the coast of New Hampshire there is a series of small islands that are pretty much the last place anyone would want to live but in 1873 some hearty folk decided to live on these islands and a Norwegian family lived on one of the islands called Smutty Nose. Quoting Anita Shreve, Schechter tells us the island got its name from “a clump of seaweed on the nose of a rock extending into the ocean.” On this island lived Maren Hontvet, a 26 year old woman; her husband John; Maren’s older sister Karen; Maren and Karen’s brother Ivan; Ivan’s wife Anethe; and John’s brother Matthew. The three men were commercial fishermen and occasionally worked with other fishermen in the area. They lived in a relatively small house, yet they took in boarders periodically, notably Louis Wagner, the 28 year old Prussian immigrant who would eventually slay everyone he found in the house on Smutty Island.

Louis Wagner was angry because he did not earn enough money and decided to rob the Hontvets.

Wagner was intimately familiar with the Hontvets, their financial circumstances, and the layout of their little home, having boarded with them for several months. By his own later admission, they had always treated him “like a brother.” During one of his recurrent bouts of illness, he had been nursed back to health by the women, who, in his words, “were most kind to him.” He would repay that kindness with the sort of atrocious cruelty that defies easy psychological explanation and tempts even rationalists to speak of pure evil.

Schechter isn’t being hyperbolic – what Wagner did to those women was appalling. Striking on March 3, 1873, Wagner knew the men of the house would be out. He had met them in Portsmouth and they told him they were delayed and would not go back to the small island until the morning. Wagner seized his chance. He stole a boat and rowed his way to the island. It was after ten pm when he reached the house, and all the women had gone to bed. Karen was sleeping on a cot in the warm kitchen, while Maren and Anethe slept in a bed in a nearby room. Around midnight Wagner burst into the house and launched an attack so quickly and without warning that Maren had no idea what was happening. She died believing that her brother-in-law John had snapped and was bludgeoning her – Wagner used a kitchen chair to beat her.

Maren heard her sister screaming and could not get the latch on the door to work and was unable to get to her sister to help her. Karen ran to the door and hitting the door she dislodged the latch and Maren was able to let her wounded sister inside, but Wagner made it inside the room too and began to beat the two women with a long piece of wood from the chair he broke over Karen. Somehow Maren got her sister inside and shut and locked the door with Wagner outside. Anethe ran for the window to escape and Maren told her to scream in the hopes people on nearby islands might hear her and send help. But Anethe was scared to the point that she couldn’t utter a sound. Wagner found her outside the house and Anethe finally was able to say something. Recognizing her killer, she said, “Louis! Louis!” letting Maren know who was waging this attack. Maren had made it to the window just in time to see Wagner pick up an axe leaning on the side of the house and strike her with it.

Maren had a dire choice to make – stay and try to defend herself and her mortally wounded sister, because Karen was too injured to flee, or run away on her own and leave her sister to die. As she heard Wagner reenter the house, Maren had to act quickly.

Now it was either flee or die for Maren. Grabbing the nearest garment, a skirt, she threw it over her shoulders, climbed out the window, hurried past the slaughtered corpse of Anethe and – with the little dog, Ringe, following close on her heels – searched desperately for a hiding place.

As she ran, she was able to hear Wagner killing Karen. She made her way to the far end of the island, she wedged herself between two rocks and she and the little dog huddled together for warmth. She could barely breathe as she heard Wagner searching for her.

It was a situation so nightmarish that it has become a staple of horror movies: an implacable monster hunting for a young woman who huddles nearby in absolute terror, barely daring to breathe for fear her hiding place would be discovered.

Ending here to avoid "spoilers and because this is yet another of my entirely too long looks at a book. You can read the rest of this and my other Halloween 2017 entries over on Odd Things Considered. ( )

I like my true crime to have more to it than this. As a collection of people it would be interesting to learn more about, this book is fine, but it isn't interesting of itself. ( )

"In this book, Schechter has compiled short but gruesome accounts of several of the most shocking murderers in United States history. These men and women were, in their respective times, considered to be the perpetrators of Crimes of the Century - the most vile and atrocious fiends this country had ever seen. But they have since faded into obscurity.

Now, however, Schechter has brought them back...

...Psycho USA is a great read for anyone who is interested in things that are morbidly fascinating. It took me longer than I expected to get through it, but only because school + two jobs leaves me precious little time for leisure reading most of the time. People with less time-consuming schedules could probably get through it in a night or two...

...Another thing I had a tendency to do whilst reading Psycho USA (and another reason this took so much longer than expected to finish) was I'd open up the internet and end up doing searches for the people mentioned in this book, especially the ones brought up in passing but who did not have a chapter dedicated to them...

...There were some technical aspects about the format of the book that I didn't care for, like the way the photo captions were in the same font size as the main text, which was a little confusing until I realized I was looking at a caption, and not misplaced text. That is my only real complaint, though...It was a very interesting read - I'm a fan of any book that prompts further research on my part, so Schechter wins points for that...

...Overall, I rather enjoyed this book, and I'd recommend it. However, and this is probably obvious because of the subject matter, but a lot of the descriptions in this book are pretty detailed, especially those that are in the killers' own words, so if that sort of thing tends to bother you...this might not be the book for you."

For full review, please visit me at Here Be Bookwyrms on Blogger:

http://herebebookwyrms.blogspot.com/2013/10/pyscho-usa-famous-american-killers-y... ( )