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

began displaying the symptomatic behavior of budding serial killers: juvenile sadism and precocious pyromania. On one occasion, he “drowned a dog in the family well.” On another, he “stabbed a swine.” He also tried to burn down his master’s house, “but the fire was discovered in time and the dwelling was saved.” For each of these acts, young Green was horsewhipped to within an inch of his life.
    His already vicious behavior took its inevitable turn toward the homicidal when, in a fit of vengeful fury, he attempted to murder his master. The latter, we are told, “had a workshop, the door of which opened outward. Against this, the young desperado laid a heavy stick of timber on the inside, and on the top a broad axe, in the hopes that when his master opened the door, they would fall upon and destroy him.” As a backup, Green also “prepared the barn door in the same fashion, poising a pitchfork on the top, with the points downward.”
    By good luck, Green’s intended victim escaped both of these booby traps alive, if not entirely unscathed. “The fall of the timber bruised his shoulder,” Faxon informs us, “and at the barn the pitchfork wounded his foot.” Neither injury proved sufficiently disabling to prevent Green’s master from administering a savage flogging to his young would-be murderer.
    H AVING NARROWLY AVOIDED death at the hands of his incorrigible apprentice, Green’s master lost no time in ridding himself of the boy, who returned to the home of his now aged parents. Before long, Green fell in with a local crook who became his mentor in vice, “showing him how to break open shops and window shutters.” The older man “also gave him counterfeit money to pass, promising him half the profits.” Thewily Green proved an apt pupil, quickly disposing of forty-seven counterfeit dollars and—with the aid of a fellow delinquent named Ash—burglarizing a neighborhood shop of “merchandise to the value of an hundred dollars.”
    From the scant historical record, it’s difficult to determine exactly how old Green was at this time. Evidence suggests, however, that—though already embarked on a career as a professional thief—he was still a preadolescent.
    Along with their new criminal pursuits, Green and his accomplice, Ash, found plenty of time to perpetrate various acts of juvenile mayhem. On one occasion, while attempting to steal a rowboat, they were set upon by the owner, who “succeeded in laying his hands upon Ash.” Snatching up a large rock, Green struck the boat’s owner on the head, then broke his arm with the stone “as he lay on the ground.”
    Some months afterward, when winter had set in, the two young reprobates came upon a group of children sledding down a hill “with great velocity” and threw a piece of timber under its runners, causing it to crash. “One boy had his arm and another his thigh broken,” reports Faxon. When the children’s schoolmaster, “a large man,” learned of the deed, he tracked down the perpetrators and “beat them severely.” In retaliation, Green and Ash armed themselves with clubs and waylaid the teacher as he made his way home one evening. After “felling him to the earth,” they “bound him, beat him, stripped him naked, and tore his clothes to pieces before his face. It was a very cold night but, notwithstanding, they left him thus with his hands tied behind his back.” Ash—described by Faxon as even more vicious than Green—wanted to slice off the man’s nose but, in a rare moment of compunction, “Green would not consent.”
    H AVING ROUSED the fury of the law with their savage attack on the schoolmaster, the two hooligans fled town and took to the road. With their pockets full of “bad money,” they caroused through the New England countryside, bankrolling their debaucheries with the counterfeit bills, supplemented with the proceeds from countless burglaries and armed robberies. When Green wasn’t cheating at cards,