"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.

Harold recently wrote an article for HuffPost on famous literature inspired by true-life crimes.

"Schechter (American literature, City University New York) shares another rigorously researched true crime story in the latest in his series that delves into American serial killers (e.g., Fatal; Fiend; Bestial; et al.).

“To become a true tabloid sensation,” Mr. Schechter writes, “a murder has to offer more than morbid titillation. It needs a pair of outsized characters — diabolical villain and defenseless, preferably female, victim — a dramatic story line, and the kind of lurid goings-on that speak to the secret dreams and dangerous desires of the public.”

"Examining the life and surroundings of Irwin, who perpetrated a triple homicide on Easter Sunday 1937, veteran true-crime writer Schechter (American Literature and Culture/Queens Coll.; Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of, 2012) also offers tales of other grisly murders, particularly the two murders that took place over an 18-month period in exclusive Manhattan’s Beekman Place. They are connected only by geography and the fact that the tabloids embellished the stories with any salacious material they could dig up or create.

"In large part because it sold newspapers, exceptionally lurid reporting of murders often “shook the nation,” especially in post-Depression America. The tabloids sold well if they got the scoop, and if they invented much of it, few cared.