"This history revives a tabloid sensation of 1937, when a mother and daughter were found strangled in their Manhattan apartment. The fact that the daughter was a twenty-year-old nude model who left behind a "seemingly endless stream of boyfriends" made the case, as Schechter writes, a "perfect storm of prurience." The killer turned out to be sculptor, taxidermist, and failed seminarian who had spent his adult life in and out of mental institutions. The book delves deeply into his biography–calling special attention to his odd ideas about visualization and time travel–but is most engaging when it stick to the particualrs, prurient or otherwise, of the crime and its investigations."