Showing results by author "Brian Lee Tucker"

I am constantly amazed – and somewhat bewildered – by the amount of Hollywood and indie produced films that seem to glorify and sensationalize serial killers. And even placing a romantic spin on low life dirt-bags like Ted Bundy is almost too much to bear. The man almost radiated evil like a supernova. What is even more strange is, while filmmakers continue to spew out films starring handsome, normal looking men {Ted Bundy was one of the only men to fit into this category} they seem to totally ignore some of the most prolific and vicious serial killers in history. Now don't get me wrong; I am not saying that I believe that any serial killer should be made famous for their crimes, gain celebrity status. But is has always left me totally confused as to why so many unheard of killers haven't shown up in popular media. Hell, some of these guys even have web sites dedicated to them, as well as a lot of loyal fans and followers of their crimes. Some of them even have 'groupies' who follow their favorite killer's every move, news articles, etc., in order to keep up with them. Some of these groupies have even married their favorite serial killer. Love is truly blind, I guess. After listening to this audiobook, maybe more people will not only have a more clear view into the mind of a serial killer, but may also be as mystified as I am as to why serial killers seem to be so prevalent in popular media.

In They Don't Always Open Their Eyes, author Brian Lee Tucker takes a horrifying look into the mind of Richard Trenton Chase, the so-called “Vampire of Sacramento”, an American serial killer who killed six people in the span of a month in California, and into his delusional beliefs that eventually led to his capture and imprisonment. 

Are serial killers born or raised? The argument of “nature vs nurture” always has been and is still being researched to this day. The idea is simple enough: if you have had a happy childhood - but killer genes - you may go on to live a normal, happy life. If you have the wrong genetics and a bad childhood, you are a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off at any time.

If Pat Garrett didn't kill Billy the Kid on that night long ago in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, then obviously the Kid lived on to be someone else, no doubt under another alias. Indeed, it would have been extremely likely that he would have adopted another name to live his new life under, since he had shown such a propensity for adopting aliases for most of his life. In June of 1949, enter William Henry "Brushy Bill' Roberts - who claimed to be Billy the kid. Probate investigator William V. Morrison agreed to interview Brushy Bill.

There's arguably no one man who's been more inadvertently influential to the horror genre than Mr. Edward Gein. Because of him, authors and screenwriters were inspired to create the following characters: Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. But let's not give Gein too much credit here. After all, he was a murderer who also dug corpses out of graveyards.

Charles Manson was known as prophet, a singer, a messiah - and then a mass murderer. But what the public didn't know was that behind the façade he so cleverly conveyed to his followers - and victims - was a little boy in a man's body, one who had never known a loving touch or a sincere hug or a tender kiss. Abused as a child, Charlie was passed around by his mother's boyfriends, who performed licentious acts upon him to further his education in the cold, cruel ways of the world that awaited him in manhood.

The nightmare that 12-year-old Shanda Sharer had to endure was beyond horrifying. Kidnapped and beaten, stabbed, tortured, and then burned alive by her assailants, one can only imagine the horror she suffered in the last moments of her life. Green Eyed Monster provides a terrifying glimpse into the minds of her killers, young girls who had led such horrible home lives and eventually descended into a life of sexual promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, self-harm, and physical violence.

In shows like Criminal Minds and in the portrayal of the fictitious character Hannibal Lecter, we are confronted with the idea of the genius serial killer. He makes the perfect villain for our heroes to battle against in a plot that rises, falls, and then reaches a maddening peak. Does the genius serial killer really exist? Yes. Out of thousands of serial killers, people who have committed three or more murders, there are the only a small handful of actual killer geniuses - and even those individuals aren't genius enough to elude capture indefinitely.  

Richard Kuklinski would kill more than 125 people - some just for fun. Some would call Richard Kuklinksi a “hit man", while others would refer to him as one of the prolific serial murderers of our time. Or was he both? Did he suffer from antisocial and paranoid personality disorder, or was he, as some experts say, just born to kill? Born with an “evil gene” in his blood?

The typical serial rapist leads a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde life, undetected by neighbors, co-workers, even family. He may work his way through dozens or even hundreds of victims before he's caught - assuming he ever is. Who are these men and what makes them tick? A small band of criminologists and psychologists make it their life's work to find out, devising elaborate psychological profiles of specific rapists.

In the book, Growing Up Jeffrey: The True Story of Jeffrey Dahmer, author Brian Lee Tucker examines Dahmer's life from the other side of the coin, from his early childhood to his teenage years to his first murder - seen through the eyes of a young man who, feeling as though he had never been a part of anything normal and loving, kept his inner demons bottled up inside until he couldn't fight the urges he'd kept at bay too long, and exploded in a frenzy of sexual violence, murder, and unadulterated evil, his deviant sexual appetites finally satisfied - until he became lonely again.

Dean Corll was an electrician for Houston Power and Light, but most of Henley's friends knew him as the Candy Man, so named because he had labored for years in the candy manufacturing plant that he and his mother had once owned. Corll was famous for giving away candy to the kids. Little did they know that "the Candy Man of Houston" was in fact a sadistic, cruel, remorseless rapist and murderer. Between September 25, 1970 and August 3, 1973, Corll killed at least 28 young men and boys, and the actual number of victims may have been more than 30.

Within a maze of true crime books that tend to provide only minor portions of the whole story, Serial Killers 101 provides a much more detailed and comprehensive insight into the world of some of the most infamous serial killers in American history.

Some time after his second meeting with the therapist, Marty Smartt was overheard telling someone he was afraid if he didn't get help soon he was going to go back to Keddie and “kill somebody, and didn't really give a shit who it was.” Within a short period of time following his last session, he returned to Keddie, California with a "friend" he'd met at the hospital, Severin Bob “Bo” Boubede.  Author Brian Lee Tucker examines the weeks leading up to the murders, and the aftermath, with two suspects who were never charged, and the detectives who bungled the case.

Based on excerpts from his own true confessions, Costume Party delves into the mind of one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, deep into the psychosis that was John Wayne Gacy's mind, a dark, terrifying place where most of society has never ventured - or would ever want to.

Alex Baker had never known what real pain and heartache was until now. The feelings he’d had to endure since his fiancée's brutal murder made him feel powerless over his own destiny. And crimes like these - unexpected, violent, and forever - are hard enough to bear without the fact that the victim’s killer has yet to be brought to justice. He’d always been taught that everything happened for a purpose - and at times even a higher purpose - but at that point in time, that was hard for him to swallow. And lately, his thoughts had been leaning more toward revenge.

Rape, sodomy, strangulation, stabbing, murder, and dismemberment. So were some of Joel David Rifkin's favorite "hobbies" that he inflicted on mostly drug addicted or alcoholic prostitutes from 1988 to 1993. Police finally caught up to Rifkin on June 28, 1993, when state troopers spotted him driving his pickup truck without license plates on the Southern State Parkway. A high-speed chase ended in Mineola, New York, when he crashed into a utility pole directly in front of the courthouse where he eventually stood trial.

An in-depth look into the mind of Henry Lee Lucas, as he sits on death row, just weeks before his death, reflecting back on his life and the reasons for his crimes. Henry is, indeed, almost an anomaly in a genre full of faceless, cardboard killers. Henry is no Jason, Michael, or Freddy. He's real. That's the most frightening aspect of the film; Henry could be the guy next door, at times wearing an almost pleasant, trusting expression.

Ted Bundy was the man who defined the term "serial killer". Until his murderous rampage that spanned almost decades, law enforcement had never encountered such an elusive killer. Having experienced his first kill at age 14, he would go on to murder at least 36 young women, his last victim a 12-year-old grade school girl named Kimberly Leach - the crime for which he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.

As cozy as their house had seemed, there was a cold secret beneath the house. At the bottom of the basement stairs and beyond a small pond-like sized puddle was where evil lived. It was the only part of the house that was always cold and damp no matter the time of day or time of year. Structurally speaking, it was part of the house but there were two, perhaps three steps that separated home from hell.