Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer

Mysterious Radio: Paranormal, UFO and Lore Interviews

My special guest tonight is true crime author and researcher Harold Schechter who's here to discuss his new book about the first mass killing of it's kind in the United States. Get his book Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer on Amazon.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.

Maniac is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

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