S6: Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer

My special guest tonight is actual crime author and researcher Harold Schechter, who's here to discuss his new book about the first mass killing of its kind in the United States. Get his book Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer on Amazon.

 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 most 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.

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