Twentieth-Century Murder [Hardcover]

"Twentieth Century Murder" is formatted to look like a scrap-book of newspaper clippings that date from 1900 through 1994, complete with grainy photographs and drawings. 'Breezy' might seem like an odd descriptor for a book about murder, but that's the tone this author achieves, while whole families are battered to death with a sash weight, actresses are pushed out of portholes at sea, and a woman is shampooed to death by her boyfriend.

Both the notorious and the obscure make their appearance in a particular year, and sometimes more than one year. In retrospect, it's amazing how many murderers were set free to kill again.

The author has a soft spot in his heart for some of his murderers, including the poisoner, Dr. Crippen. The good doctor's wife is described as a second-rate soprano. She is "a vulgar, domineering, promiscuous woman." On the other hand, her killer a is 'meek and mild-mannered' man who "has won the affection and, to some extent, admiration of his jailers."

Although occasional misogynist rants darken the overall cheerful tone of the articles, this author really comes into his own when writing about oddball sexual scandals. He gives us headlines like "Gay slave boy batters top people's S-M gal pal," "Miss Whiplash Found, Bound and Drowned in Bath," and "Jet Set Rent Boy was Rough Trade Killer." One of his favorite scandals was eventually made into a movie called "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" starring the inimitable Joan Collins. Even if you don't read the whole book, be sure to turn to 1906 and check out "Society Sex Scandals behind New York Killing." It features beautiful chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit (the girl on the red velvet swing) and dog-whip-wielding millionaire Harry K. Thaw, as well as free-living architect, Stanford White. This particular love triangle had legs. Not only was it turned into a 1955 movie and several books, it eventually ended up as a morality tale in the February 1999 'Smithsonian' Magazine.

Henry K. Thaw was too bad to be confined to one year. His rich mother kept bailing him out of jail, and probably helped him to escape from the Matteawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, so he also appears in 1907, 1908, 1913, 1914, and 1916 where he rates the headline: "Thaw Again! Now he Ravishes a Boy."

The one-or-two-pages-per-year format of this book does not lend itself to the completion of all the cases presented, so I had to keep popping onto the Internet to see how some of them ended. The website crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/ is a great place to supplement the articles in this book.

So what happened to Henry K. Thaw? He continued to wield his whip during his trademark fits of rage, until he died in 1947 at the ripe old age of seventy-six.