Dave Bagby

Elliott Leyton

On November 2001, the body of a young doctor named Andrew Bagby was discovered in Keystone State Park outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania, by a homeless man searching dumpsters for aluminum cans. The alleged murderer was his ex-girlfriend Shirley Turner---also a doctor. For parents Dave and Kate, the pain was unbearable. Little did they know, however, that the worst was far from over. Shirley Turner---knowing charges would be laid against her---fled to her family home in Newfoundland. While fending off extradition efforts by U.S. law enforcement, she discovered she was pregnant with Andrew's son, Zachary. The Bagbys---hoping to gain custody of Zachary, frustrated beyond endurance as the legal process dragged on interminably, and unable to make any headway with Canadian social services---moved from their home in California and settled in Newfoundland. In august 2003, Shirley Turner murdered thirteen-month-old Zachary and then herself. Dance with the Devil is an angry, raw, and brutally honest memoir of murder and loss. It is an eye-popping and frankly terrifying indictment of the Canadian judicial and social welfare system that failed the Bagbys in nearly every way.

A Memoir of Murder and Loss

Dance with the Devil

In this new edition of his landmark 1986 study, pioneering anthropologist Elliott Leyton examines the psyche and motivations of his six original multiple-murderer subjects and now takes stock of how far we've come since then in our understanding of why people commit gruesome assaults on innocent strangers. This case-study approach—based on years of immersion in the killers' diaries, confessions, psychiatric interviews, statements to the press, videotapes, and photographs— led the way in defining serial and mass murders not as the acts of alien creatures with deranged minds but rather as personalized protests by alienated men against the society that they believe has excluded them. Leyton also provides an analysis of the Washington, D.C. sniper case. While uncovering the central themes of modern culture that motivated their deeds, Leyton provides vivid and chilling portraits of Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, Albert DeSalvo, and David Berkowitz, serial murderers whose prolonged killing campaigns provided them revenge against the world and celebrity careers; and other mass murderers whose brief but horrific murder sprees constituted their own enigmatic suicide notes. The author shows that the motives of multiple murderers are not simply sexual or psychotic; but rise from the very core of American mass culture.

The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer

Hunting Humans

Children Who Kill Their Families

Sole Survivor

In this classic study, Elliott Leyton challenges the conventional idea of serial murderers as deranged madmen. He explores the twisted – but comprehensible – motives of a half-dozen notorious killers: Edmund Emil Kemper, Theodore Robert Bundy, Albert DeSalvo (“The Boston Strangler”), David Richard Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), Mark James Robert Essex, and Charles Starkweather. In the process of describing their crimes Leyton exposes the cold rationality that underlies their apparent pointlessness. The result is startling: a revelatory text on a deeply troubling topic.

The Rise Of The Modern Multiple Murderer

Kinship and Class in an Irish Village

The One Blood

The horror of certain crimes is so resonant that it shocks all who hear of them to the very core. Such crimes are revealed within these pages....In this powerful book, noted anthropologist Elliott Leyton explores what it is that drives children to become killers, what turns innocence into deadly evil. The crimes he examines are especially disturbing, as they are perpetrated by children on their own families.Amongst the studies are the horrific case of Jeremy Bamber, who executed his parents, his sister and her twin sons; Steven Benson, the heir to a tobacco fortune who left two bombs in his family's van and Marlene Olive who forced her compliant lover to brutally kill her adoptive parents.Read Sole Survivor and find out how the troubles that lie beneath the façade of middle-class life can cause such disturbing events to occur.

Sole Survivor - Children Who Murder Their Families

This title was first published in 2000: Few areas of criminal activity have sustained such widely held attention as serial murder. This volume charts the complete progress of academic work in this field, detailing the development from the early domination of psychiatric enquiries to the later proliferation of criminal justice studies into the darkest of human behaviours.

Elliott Leyton

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