Maniac – 3.5 stars
Decades before the modern school shooter burst onto the national stage, a man in Bath, Michigan blew up his local elementary school because he resented that his taxes had been increased to help build and maintain it.
This is such a strange and shocking crime that it’s hard to understand why it’s also rather little known, but Schechter makes a compelling case for why it has mostly faded into the shadowy corners of history. He does a good job of recreating the experience of daily life in Bath Township, and how abruptly and violently Kehoe’s incomprehensible actions disrupt it.
There is however a tendancy to go off on digressions about other crimes or trains of thoughts, which can be a bit frustrating in an already short book. And about two-thirds through we spend some time with of all people Charles Lindburgh. Sure, his pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic would wipe the Bath School disaster off the front page, but I just wanted to get back to the story.
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Murderabilia – 4.25 stars
Though the term was coined fairly recently, people have always been interested in ‘murderabilia’ as long as they have been interested in true crime.
Whenever I read about people deriding the popularity of true crime as a genre nowadays as some symptom of societal dysfunction, I always want to tell them about how in centuries past, people used to visit the sites of horrible murders as though they were tourist destinations and abscond with evidence as souvenirs. I guess now I could also direct them to this book.
Schechter uses a wide variety of objects linked to infamous crimes, from murder weapons to pieces of evidence to art and music inspired by the crime, to tell the story of one hundred cases and how the public engaged with them. Despite the number of stories covered, each is covered in concise detail. The cases are mostly from the last few centuries, predominantly taking place in the United States and Great Britain, though cases from other countries do still feature.
