Dead Men Walking: True Stories of the Most Evil Men and Women on Death Row (Hardcover)

by Christopher Berry-Dee (Author), Tony Brown (Author) "They say that the female is more deadly than the male and, to set a sado-homicidal benchmark for the degree of destruction that follows in..." (more)
Key Phrases: green mile, slave contract, Christopher Berry-Dee, Tony Brown, Death Row (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"'Their meetings with me were possibly the last contact with the real world after which they returned to death row, deep within the human warehouse which contains the most deadly men alive...' Christopher Berry-Dee"

Product Description

Twenty-five of the most horrific murder cases in American crime are brought together in this detailed and haunting compilation. Among the criminals covered are Bill Benefiel, the “Superglue Monster,” who brutally tortured his teenage victims to death; Kenneth Boyd, who killed his wife and her father while his three sons watched; and Veronica and Ivan Gonzalez, who systematically tortured their four-year-old niece over a period of six months before scalding her to death in a bathtub, making them the first married couple on death row. With in-depth accounts of each perpetrator and crime, Dead Men Walking offers a voice of reason in an exhausted debate between politicians, the public, and the press on the line between man and monster, and between justice and murder.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: John Blake (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184454592X
• ISBN-13: 978-1844545926
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,439,303 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I kept asking myself... why?, December 28, 2008

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Dead Men Walking: True Stories of the Most Evil Men and Women on Death Row by Christopher Berry-Dee and Tony Brown showed up as a new acquisition by our local library, and I put myself on the hold list for it. As I was reading it yesterday, about halfway through I started asking myself "why?" Not as in "why am I reading this?" (although one could probably make a case for that question also), but "why" as in "why did they write this?"

On the flyleaf, it's stated that this is an examination of the difference between "monster and man", as well as tracing "the often blurry line between justice and murder." If this book was focused on one or two cases, I might have felt like it met that criteria. If you dig deep enough into the life and background of a killer, you can often find the thread that led them to their eventual outcome. But in Dead Men Walking, you get a handful of pages on a number of different killers. In that amount of space, there's plenty of room to go into graphical detail about their crimes and brutality. And Berry-Dee and Brown get those details down quite well. But in many cases, the analysis and insight into the killer's motives tends to be glossed over, in my opinion. A few of the cases go deeper than the others, and in those there's more analysis as to what might have warped the killer along the way. But that felt like it was more the exception than the rule.

"Voyeur" is about the only way I can describe this work. People can be incredibly cruel and sick, doing things that a rational person can't even begin to imagine. To collect a number of stories like these in one place almost borders on being "adult pr0n" for crime. In terms of writing and research, the authors did their job well. But in terms of value and analysis, I still come back to the question of "why?".