Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Read Online Free

favorite volumes:
The Career and Death of the Mad Thief and Murderer, Samuel Green
. The case, dating from 1822, was one that Laszlo often cited to the parents of his “students,” for the infamous Green had been, in Kreizler’s words, “a product of the whip”—beaten throughout his childhood—and at the time of his capture had openly acknowledged that his crimes against society were a form of revenge. My own attraction to the book was prompted by its frontispiece, which depicted “The Madman Green’s End” on a Boston gallows. I always enjoyed Green’s crazed stare in the picture.…
    Carr, exercising the prerogative of a novelist, invents the name of Moore’s “favorite volume”; no book with that title is known to exist. Its subject, however, is no fiction. Indeed, Samuel Green, though long forgotten, was one of the most infamous American criminals of his time. His appalling career confirms the belief that today’s forensic psychiatrists share with Carr’s fictitious “alienist”: that, almost without exception, psychopathic killers are subjected to extreme and unrelenting cruelty as children.
    I N HIS OWN time, when New England was still permeated by the grim spirit of Puritanism, Green’s lawless behavior was set down to “innate depravity.” Despite the best efforts of his “poor, honest parents” to “give him some education,” Green—born in Stafford County, New Hampshire, in 1797—was trouble from the start. “From his earliest childhood,” writes one nineteenth-century chronicler, “mischief was his whole study.”
    It is clear from this account, however, that, in seeking to curb the boy’s unruly conduct, Green’s parents, along with other adult caretakers in his life, took the old adage “Spare the rod and spoil the child” to extremes. He was whipped for playing hooky and whipped for misbehaving at school. Apprenticed at eight years old to a blacksmith, he committed a petty theft, “for which he received a sound flagellation.”
    He was later sent back to school, “but usually played the truant and was as constantly whipped.” On one occasion, he skipped school and went to the general store, where he shoplifted a mouth harp. “Returning home, his master whipped him for running away, and on the morrow discovered the theft; for which he whipped the boy again and sent him to restore his booty, with a promise that unless he returned in due time, he should be flogged once more. Green again transgressed, and his master kept his word.” The boy escaped “back home to his parents, who made him taste of the rod afresh and sent him back to his master, who applied the whip to his back once more.”
    Nowadays, we have come to understand that brutalizing a child is a surefire way to turn him or her into a sociopath. If a person is hideously maltreated from the earliest years, it is almost guaranteed that he or she will grow up with a malignant view of existence. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based not on love and respect but on power and domination. Having been tortured by his primary caretakers, he will, in later life, seek to inflict torture on others,partly as a way of taking revenge—of making other people suffer the way he has suffered—and partly because he has been so psychologically warped by his experiences that he can feel pleasure only by inflicting pain.
    Some inkling of this truth appears to have entered the minds of Green’s contemporaries. “Perhaps, had mild measures been taken,” writes James Faxon, his first biographer, “reform might have been the result; but the scourge confirmed him in obstinacy and awakened a spirit of revenge in his bosom.” Even Faxon, however, concludes that the real problem was not the draconian discipline to which the boy was subjected but his own inborn character, his “stubborn and ugly disposition.”
    Unsurprisingly, after years of relentless punishment and humiliation, young Green