Exhaustively researched and told in an unflinching narrative, Harold Schechter’s Maniac tells the story of “the Bath School Disaster and the birth of the modern mass killer” bringing a crime from almost 100 years ago into sharp modern-day detail.
Beginning with the history of the township of Bath, a small town not far from Lansing, Michigan, Schechter builds the story piece by piece while the reader knows all along they are headed toward tragedy. We are introduced to Andrew Kehoe as a complete person, not a two-dimensional villain. He was educated, respected, and served his community as school board treasurer. He was even asked to complete a term as town clerk when the person in that position unexpectedly passed away, such was his attention to detail.
Schechter also shows the reader the slow unraveling of Kehoe as he begins to take slights (both real and imagined) more and more personally. His disapproval of a newly proposed school tax (a property tax used to fund public schools which is extremely common throughout the U.S. today) was only the beginning as he began to find objection to many decisions made by town leaders. This all leads up to the morning of Wednesday, May 18, 1927, when Kehoe detonated explosives numerous times.
Rather than simply telling the story of what happened in Bath, Schechter looks much more deeply into the situation, what similarities we would see in our world today (tabloid stories, “murderabilia” collectors, and people from nearby towns coming just to look at the devastation) as well as what was going on in the world in May of 1927 that may have had a large effect on the news coverage the Bath disaster did (and did not) receive.
Schechter also looks closely at modern-day school shootings and what these events do and do not have in common with this almost century old precedent. Additionally, he examines some of the crimes referred to as “the crime of the century” in pop culture, and how these crimes “measure up” to Kehoe’s disastrous work in Bath.
Far from focusing exclusively on the crime itself and the sadist who committed it, Schechter also brings the reader heart-warming stories of heroes and survivors in a beautiful and honourable way. Without realising it, tears were rolling down my face as I finished reading the final sentence.
Maniac is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first—and worst—mass murders in American history.
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.
