Butcher's Work: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness

Summary

A quartet of gripping historical true-crime narratives

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of US crime, a nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children, a Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country, and a decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.

While other infamous homicides from the same eras—the Lizzie Borden slayings, for example, or the “thrill killing” committed by Leopold and Loeb—have entered into our cultural mythology, these four equally sensational crimes have largely faded from public memory.

Butcher’s Work restores these once-notorious cases to vivid, dramatic life.