Maniac

The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer

By: Harold Schechter

Narrated by: Braden Wright

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first - and worst - mass murders in American history.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school - one of the most modern in the Midwest - Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.

Maniac is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

©2021 Harold Schechter. (P)2021 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

American LARGEST school attack

Gripping story of America's first & LARGEST attack of a school killing scores od students and staff a century ago, followed by a chapter of its footnotes in history and media vs later attacks through to Sandy Hook.

A name veiled in shame; Remember the victims

I don't know how I missed this bit of history. The Bath School Disaster involved a clearly disturbed man with a history of violence, who killed his neighbor's dog and who had grievances against the government and taxes. His revenge against his town and his scorched-earth tactics chilled me. Like other mass murders, his name should remain veiled in shame even as we remember the victims and move to prevent it from happening again. To that end, the book does an excellent job. It makes no apologies for the monstrous deed but paints a picture of the suffering and events leading to it.

A Holistic View of the Bath School Disaster

This book takes readers on a journey through not only Andrew Kehoe’s life and his actions and their effect upon the Bath community, but also delves into the context of the times and how this act of violence was the precursor to today’s mass killings.

Too much filler

Too much extraneous stuff about events unrelated to the actual topic. The book could have been reduced at least 25 percent. The writing style otherwise is bare bones, it reads like a police blotter blurb for the newspaper.

Local history comes to life.

As a resident of Michigan, I had only a vague knowledge of this event. The book covered every detail of this event to a satisfying conclusion.