Not Just the Facts

"Often, the stories from the 18th and 19th centuries are the most gripping, because we are unlikely to have encountered them before. Two early chapters describe separate murders in 1781 and 1782, wherein a farmer and a shopkeeper took up the ax and murdered their families, one because God told him to, the other because of business reversals. Mark Twain explains that the many shootings in America's Wild West came about because 'a person is not respected until he has "killed his man."' An anonymous piece called 'Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend,' tells of a lad in South Boston who in the 1870s tortured and killed younger children, and at age 14 was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, and he died in prison 60 years later."

Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post reviews the Library of America's True Crime: An American Anthology.