Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell's Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first--and worst--mass murders in American history.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school--one of the most modern in the Midwest--Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.

Maniac is Harold Schechter's gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a "human time bomb" whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

Harold Schechter is an American true-crime writer who specializes in serial killers. Twice nominated for the Edgar Award, he is the author of the nonfiction books Fatal, Fiend, Bestial, Deviant, Deranged, Depraved, The Serial Killer Files, The Mad Sculptor, and Man-Eater; the Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestseller Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men; the Amazon Original Stories collection Bloodlands; and Ripped from the Headlines. Schechter received his PhD in American literature from the State University of New York in Buffalo. A professor emeritus at Queens College, he is married to the poet Kimiko Hahn. For more information, visit www.haroldschechter.com.