Killer Colt: Murder, Disgrace, and the Making of an American Legend

An in-the-room account of John Colt’s scandalous nineteenth-century murder trial from “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (Boston Review).

In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John’s rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt’s rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary revolver. With a killing that made headlines...