Serial Killers

The Minds, Methods and Mayhem of History’s Most Notorious Murderers

Richard Estep

Visible Ink Press 2021

Pb, 400pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781578597079

Serial killing is a popular subject for those indulging in criminous extremism, reading about the horrors of HH Holmes and his “murder castle”, the transatlantic monsters John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader, and Britain’s Dennis Nilsen and John Christie. Denver paramedic Richard Estep has now further enriched the literature.

The book deals with a population of mainly US and UK serial killers, largely based on published sources, in print or on the Internet. The problem is that it is not factually reliable. Those Edinburgh fiends, Burke and Hare, are wrongly described as resurrection men, whereas in reality they stuck to murder and never robbed any graves. Ludicrously, their surgeon associate is given the ill-deserved accolade of “Sir Robert Knox”! In a similar vein, the Jack the Ripper chapter names one of the suspects as Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria (he died in 1861) instead of his grandson Prince Albert Victor, thought by some deluded Ripperologists to have been the murderer. JG Haigh never lived at 79 Gloucester Road, he just rented some basement rooms as a workshop, used to digest the bodies of some of his victims in large barrels of acid. Hopefully, the many transatlantic cases are better researched in this book from a US publisher.

The selection of serial killers appears to have been performed more or less at random; a perfectly good London murderer like Patrick Mackay is unaccountably left out, and the non-existent “Sawney Bean” tribe of Scottish cannibals included. The book is not annotated but has a brief list of sources at the end. The illustrations are numerous but often of a low quality and of dubious relevance to the matters discussed. This is the kind of book that nasty teenagers would like, but it has little to offer to the serious student of criminology. Jan Bondeson

★★