ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF MODERN MURDER, 1962-1982

 Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, BCA 1984.

This is the sequel to the masterly Encyclopaedia of Murder, first published in 1961, which covered the history of the world’s most terrible crime up to that year.

The succeeding years have seen a sudden increase in motiveless violence and a new nonchalance towards murder; in both Britain and America the murder rate has trebled since 1960, and there have been more murders in the last two decades than in the previous fifty years.

The Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder comprises an extensive catalogue of the murderers, victims and group-killing organizations, and of the world’s most remarkable cases from 1960 to 1982.

Psychopath, terrorist, poisoner, mass killer – all come under the microscope. From the sexual murderers of the early 1960s – the Moors Murderers and the London based ‘Jack the Stripper’- to the Charles Manson gang and Ted Bundy, who murdered some fifty women on his trips round America, the most extraordinary and baffling cases are retold and analysed with commendable dispassion.

Although California appears to lead the world in gruesome murders – a fruit farmer there thought it cheaper to murder his workers rather than pay them, and twenty-five corpses were found on his farm – Poland was the home of the ‘Red Spider’ who raped and killed twenty girls on trains, Holland the home of Hans van Zon who murdered a series of men and women for the most trivial of reasons.

The range and extent of the murders selected by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman may seem never-ending, but from the great mass of evidence they have gathered the authors believe that some conclusions may be drawn as to the mind of the murderer, and these are enumerated by Colin Wilson in his introductory essay on the psychology of modern murder.

 Both the book and the dust jacket are in very good condition.