Showing results by author "Brian Lee Tucker"

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.

>"A bullet to the front of the head demonstrates good marksmanship. A bullet to the back of the head demonstrates good judgment." So quotes John Wesley Hardin, one of the infamous killers of the old west. But, like modern day killer Henry Lee Lucas, was he more of a bragger than a killer? Or was he more of a serial killer than a gun slinger? Was it the loss of his only love, Jane Bowen that drove him over the edge? Or was he just born to be a killer? Find out.

In True Criminal Minds: Interviews with Real Life Serial Killers: Volume II, author Brian Lee Tucker once again strips away all of the glitz and glamour so often associated with the romanticizing and glamorizing of modern day so called "true stories", featuring charming, suave serial killers that women just can't seem to stay away from.

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.

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 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.

The city streets are a carnival, they are burlesque. The city moves like an insect. It scurries. Neon beats against the window like a probe, even in the day. And somewhere, buried deep within this crazy world, are two killers who call this place home. One of them, a man whose birth given name was Kenneth Bianchi but whom his friends know as Ken, waits in the shadows sipping beer and smoking a cigarette and watching the show with delightful glee.

Brother Blood lives in a place where shadows come out after the sun goes down, and they don't come out to play. There are old folks in his building that draw social security checks that eat dog food and winos mark their territory like dogs, pissing in the stairwells. A scream from that building is routinely dismissed as anxiety. And a majority of the folks that lived there were white. As Brother Blood sat at his window looking down on the streets below, he couldn't help but wonder, is there any justice?

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. 

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.

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.

Ottis Toole, born at the bottom of the gene pool, retarded and illiterate, had been out of control since early childhood. A severely drug-dependent individual as well as an arsonist, murderer, rapist, and cannibal, he was unsafe under any conditions outside of a secure prison, and perhaps unsafe there. To him, life itself was so unmeaning, and the distinction between living and dead people so blurred, that killing another human being was no more than swatting an annoying fly.

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.

To characterize Aileen Wuornos' start in life as a poor beginning is truly an understatement. It was an awful beginning from the time she was born on February 29, 1956, as Aileen Carol Pittman. One of the few good things in her young life, ironically, was that her biological father, Leo Dale Pittman, never got to know her. Pittman was a psychopathic child molester who hanged himself in prison in 1969.

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.

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.

It was once stated that "if the devil were a man, it would have been Ottis Toole." Raised by a mother who was a religious fanatic, Toole admitted to committing his first murder at age 14. After being picked up by a traveling salesman who forced him to have sex, Toole ran the man down with his own car. As a boy, Toole was classified as retarded, and he soon dropped out of school and turned to a life of petty crime.

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.

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.