Only the sex-and-drug-fueled, drop-out culture of hippie-era southern California, with its occult dabblings and nothing-is-forbidden philosophy, could have produced the Manson murders. The barren landscape of Nebraska was not just the historical setting for the 1950s killing spree of the young outlaw-lovers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but the outward projection of their harsh, empty lives. America’s dean of true crime Harold Schecter has penned a definitive study of crime that reflects the typical (or stereotypical) traits associated with the state where it took place. Rather than rehash the details of such overly familiar horrors, in 50 STATES OF MURDER: An Atlas of American Crime (September 16, 2025; $19.99 paperback) Schecter reveals lesser known, darkly fascinating cases that, taken together, form a unique criminal history of the United States.Filled with hundreds of darkly fascinating tales of murderous mayhem, 50 STATES OF MURDER is a chilling work of storytelling and an authoritative survey of the United States’ homicidal history. Schechter explores each state’s most grizzly, gruesome, and notorious murders that have passed into regional lore, including:The 1840 murder of New Jersey banker Abraham Suydam that inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s horror classic “The Tell-Tale Heart.”The 1912 “Villisca Axe Murders” that claimed the lives of eight victims, including all six members of a single family, in a small town in Iowa. The “Inwood Park Horror” of 1937, when the mutilated corpse of a twenty-eight-year-old woman was found in a Cincinnati dance hall.Robert Hansen’s ten-year reign of terror in Alaska from 1973-1983, where he hunted and slayed at least seventeen women, ranging in age from sixteen to forty-one.The brutal 1953 abduction-murder of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease Jr., son of a multimillionaire car dealer, in Kansas City, Missouri.Andrew Cunanan’s 1997 killing, not of Gianni Versace in Miami, but of two intimate friends in Minnesota three months before his assassination of the fashion icon.Presented in a photo-filled, atlas-like format, 50 STATES OF MURDER is a bloodcurdling journey into the dark heart of American murder that will please any true crime obsessive.

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