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

Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hells Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the firstand worstmass murders in American history. In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary schoolone of the most modern in the MidwestAndrew 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 Schechters 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.