Americas First Serial Killer

This book is for listeners of true crime podcasts and audiences of both fiction and true-crime nonfiction. It's the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, and wrote her out of the will.

What turns a bedwetting twelve-year-old girl with bruises she does not talk about into the woman the cameras would, two decades later, call America's first female serial killer? The answer is not the one the headlines gave you. Aileen Wuornos killed seven men along the Florida highways in twelve months. She confessed to all of them, took the stand against her own lawyers, and screamed at the jury that she hoped their wives and daughters would suffer the same fate she claimed had been done to her. The state of Florida killed her by lethal injection in October 2002.

🕯 He couldn’t stop history’s first serial killer… but he might finally save himself. 🕯 On the brink of relapse, a broken man wanders into a decaying amusement park exhibit on Chicago’s lakefront. Moments after taking a long-feared hit of heroin, he finds himself not dead — but transported to the glittering horror of the 1893 World’s Fair. There, amid marvels of invention and carnival excess, he meets a charming doctor named H.H. Holmes. What begins as a surreal hallucination turns into a waking nightmare as the man realizes he’s inside the past… and inside the orbit of...

We tend to think of serial killers as a modern phenomenon. They are not. The first known serial killers in the United States were the Harpe brothers. Active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Harpe brothers spread a path of terror across more than half a dozen American states. Along their way, they murdered between 39 and 50 men, women, and children. Their crimes, which often included grotesque mutilations, were so vicious that they made other murderers cringe with disgust. This is a true story, and it is as gruesome as any horror tale ever told. This fully documented story ...

Fans of Mindhunter and true crime podcasts will devour these chilling stories of serial killers from the American "Golden Age" (1950-2000). With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of...

Two hundred bodies. A gas chamber in the basement. Acid vats. A torture maze built to catch tourists at the 1893 World's Fair. You have read the stories. You have watched the documentaries. You have heard the body count climb on every new podcast. Almost none of it is true. The real Herman Webster Mudgett, the New Hampshire farm boy who took the name H. H. Holmes, killed perhaps nine people. The Murder Castle on Sixty Third Street was a swindler's headquarters with an oversized furnace, not a Bluebeard's slaughterhouse. The famous Hearst confession was paid fiction, written in a ...

A sweeping narrative history of a terrifying serial killer--America's first--who stalked Austin, Texas in 1885 In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin...

Between 1871 and 1873, travellers vanished along a lonely Kansas trail. The Bloody Benders is the true story of America's first known serial killer family. Reconstructed from historical records, newspaper archives, and modern criminological analysis. This is not folklore, this is history.

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in 1861 in a small New Hampshire hill town, and he was dead before he turned 35. In the years between, operating under a name he had constructed to replace his own, he built a hotel in Chicago designed to kill its guests, committed a number of murders whose exact count remains in dispute, and earned the distinction of being among the first Americans to whom the word “serial killer”—a term that did not yet exist in his lifetime—could reasonably be applied.

On September 6, 1949, 28-year-old Howard Barton Unruh shot 13 people, in less than 12 minutes, on his block in East Camden, New Jersey. The shocking, true story of the first recorded mass-shooting in America has never been told, until now. Through the eyes of the young boy who visited Howard regularly to listen to his war stories, and the mother trying to piece together the disturbing inner-workings of her son’s mind, Ellen Green uncovers the chilling true story of Howard Unruh - the quiet oddball who meticulously plotted his revenge on the neighbors who shunned him.

The year is 1893, and the vibrant city of Chicago is a buzz of streetcars, horse carriages, magicians, dancers, and excited visitors from all over the world. The Columbian Exposition, or World's Fair, is in town and marking the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the United States of America. While fair-goers are enjoying the sights, sounds, and aromas of the many markets, halls, and walkways in the scenic Jackson Park, a sinister young man is planning his next murder only three miles away.

Behind the doors of a respectable brick house at 37 Prospect Street, elderly men and women believed they were buying safety. For a thousand dollars, the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids promised “lifetime care” in a Christian household: clean rooms, hot meals, and a Bible‑carrying widow at the head of the table. Families in small‑town Windsor, Connecticut, trusted Amy Archer‑Gilligan with their parents, their savings, and their peace of mind. Then the undertaker’s wagon started coming at night. Between 1907 and 1916, more than sixty residents of the Archer ...

John Stone was a prolific American serial killer who was found dead from a shotgun wound in Houston Texas in early 2021. In the typewriter next to his corpse, the police found this confession. Stone committed some of the most horrific and disgusting crimes in US history during his 40-year reign of terror.

With a history marred by wild speculation, media sensationalism, and mysteries that have puzzled historians and true-crime fans for generations, the legendary con artist and killer H. H. Holmes has a strange and sinister story to tell. From tales of a gruesome “Murder Castle”, where he would trap his victims to the string of confessions that only served to muddy the waters, Holmes’ life seems to leave us with more questions than answers. Now, this gripping true-crime novel cuts through the hype and speculation, transporting listeners back in time.

Have you watched horror stories with serial killers? There are different techniques that are used by serial killers in carrying out their evil plots on their targets. There are many documented serial killers in the United States, but some of them have indeed left everyone in much fear and terror with their horrifying way of killing their victims. In this audiobook, let's take a closer look at 14 of the most notorious serial killers in the United States.

This audiobook contains biographies on America's most notorious serial killers: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy (Killer Clown).

Learn about the most atrocious crimes known to man, committed by the most dangerous serial killers. This is the true story of America's 13 worst serial killers and how they turned the lives of many innocent victims upside down while causing chaos and creating surprise and utter shock in the minds of the American public at large.

A fascinating look into the mind of one of America's first serial killers! Who was H. H. Holmes, the killer made famous in the Devil in the White City? Did he build a 'Murder Castle' to lure victims into secret rooms, vaults, and gas chambers and to prey on Chicago's World's Fair travelers? In Holmes' Own, you will discover: HH Holmes 1895 memoir written by Holmes while he awaited trial Moyamensing Prison diary Confession of twenty-seven murders of men, women, and children (1896) Judgement day with Holmes' death by hanging at Moyamensing Prison Unusual concrete burial at historic Holy ...