Jim Goad

On the morning of June 20, 2001, mother-of-five Andrea Yates of Houston, TX, drowned all of her children one by one in her bathtub.

How does a seemingly 100% normal man wind up with the bodies of 29 murdered young men under his house?

To hear Jeffrey Dahmer speak is to hear a polite, intelligent, well-mannered blond man with a wholesome-sounding Midwestern accent. But beneath this flat and harmless-seeming demeanor lurked one of the grisliest monsters in world history.

Over the course of four hours one night in July 1966, pockmarked drifter Richard Speck—high on heroin, armed with a knife, and dressed all in black—tied up and murdered eight Chicago nursing students one by one in their South Side townhouse.

By his own admission, Carl Panzram killed over 20 people and sodomized at least 1,000 males. He never apologized said he would kill more if he had the chance. Was he born a monster, or did his environment play a role in what he became?

The day he entered San Quentin for murdering his wife and son, Scott Peterson received three dozen phone calls from female admirers and a marriage proposal from an 18-year-old girl. The question is—WHY?

In deepest, darkest Los Angeles smack-dab in the middle of the Reagan Era, residents were terrified to sleep lest they become the next victim of a serial killer the press were calling “The Night Stalker.”

Gary Leon Ridgway, AKA “The Green River Killer,” has been convicted of 49 murders, making him the most prolific confirmed serial killer in American History. After killing his victims, Gary Ridgway also had sex with them.

My blood is spraying everywhere…and I’m still high on acid.

I was a biology-class frog, my brain severed from my spinal column, pinned down in a steel tray, unable to move or feel.

These new mental powers could make Wilvert Teeter rich and famous, but he didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted to know for sure what other people were thinking about him.

Whenever they write history books, it’s a miraculous coincidence that the bad guys always wind up losing. And what’s ironic is that by definition, those who win wars are not those with the best morals or the loftiest ideology, but those who are the better killers.