I picked up a couple of books to add to my collection of Serial Killer books.
By Reason Of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story, by Mark Bourrie (Dundurn 1997). In the summer of 1993, people in Ontario were shocked by one of the most bizarre murders in the province’s history. A patient at the Brockville psychiatric hospital was brutally killed in a forest grove on the grounds of the institution. One of the killers, a nearly blind psychiatric patient, walked into a nearby police station and turned himself in. The other murderer lay near the body in a sleeping bag, drugged into unconsciousness. Police found that the myopic suspect is one of the Canada’s most dangerous killers, David Michael Krueger. His accomplice was Bruce Hamill, a murderer who had been freed after years of treatment at Penatanguishene’s Oak Ridge Institution for the criminally insane. Brockville hospital authorities had let Hamill escort Krueger on his first day pass in thirty-five years. How could this killing have happened? The bizarre story of Krueger’s life unfolds in this tightly-written book. It explores how Krueger allowed his strange fantasies to run his own life and how he was able to dupe psychiatrists, lawyers, and fellow inmates of the country’s toughest institution into doing his bidding.
David Michael Krueger is the current name of Peter Woodcock, a Canadian serial killer. His penchant for sexually murdering children got him into the institution in the first place. He died March 5, 2010.
The other book is Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden (Nation Books, 2010). Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. Last year 1,607 people were killed: a number that is on pace to increase in 2009. In Murder City, Charles Bowden, one of the few journalists who has spent extended periods of time in Juárez, has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants: a raped beauty queen, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his life, with a broader meditation on the town’s descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juárez’s culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread North. Heartbreaking, disturbing, and unforgettable, Murder City establishes Bowden as one of our leading writers working at the height of his powers.
The Ciudad Juarez Rebels (Sergio Armendáriz Diaz, Juan Contreras Jurado, Carlos Barriento Vidales, Gerardo Fernández Molina and Romel Omar Ceniceros Garcia) were a gang of serial killers who were active between 1995 and 1996 in Ciudad Juárez. They were all convicted of 8 murders of women, but were suspected of up to 16.