Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who,...

A detailed historical account of the serial killer calls on never before examined primary documents to reveal how he managed to take advantage of the crowds drawn by the 1893 World's Fair to create his own castle of horrors. Herman W. Mudgett, better known by his alias, H.H. Holmes, is considered America's first-- and most notorious-- serial killer. During the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, the basement of his house in Englewood, Illinois contained...

How did two teenagers brutally murder an innocent child ... and why? And how did their brilliant lawyer save them from the death penalty in 1920s Chicago? Written by a prolific master of narrative nonfiction, this is a compulsively readable true-crime story based on an event dubbed the "crime of the century." In 1924, eighteen-year-old college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb made a decision: they would commit the perfect crime by kidnapping...

"As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers"...

A tale of murder, sorcery, and criminal justice in turn-of-the-century Chicago, the true story of a mysterious Bohemian fortune teller named Herman Billik, charged in 1907 with murdering a half-dozen people by slowly poisoning them with arsenic.

A grand object lesson -- The variable feminine mechanism -- One-gun duel -- Hang me? That's a joke -- No sweetheart in the world is worth killing -- The kind of gal who never could be true -- A modern Salome -- Her mind works vagrantly -- Jail school -- The love-foiled girl -- It's terrible, but it's better -- What fooled everybody -- A modest little housewife -- Anne, you have killed me -- Beautiful? But not dumb! -- The tides of hell -- Hatproof,...

In 1924, University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were young, rich, and looking for a thrill. The crime that came next--the brutal, cold-blood murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks--would come to captivate the country and unfold into what many dubbed the crime of the century. As the decades passed, the mythology surrounding the unlikely killers continued to capture the interest of new generations, spawning numerous books, fictionalizations,...