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A fascinating tale of seduction, murder, fraud, coercion—and the trial of the “Minneapolis Monster”

On a winter night in 1894, a young woman’s body was found in the middle of a road near Lake Calhoun on the outskirts of Minneapolis. She had been shot through the head. The murder of Kittie Ging, a twenty-nine-year-old dressmaker, was the final act in a melodrama of seduction and betrayal, petty crimes and monstrous deeds that would obsess reporters and their readers across the nation when the man who likely arranged her killing came to trial the following spring. Shawn Francis Peters unravels that sordid, spellbinding story in his account of the trial of Harry Hayward, a serial seducer and schemer whom some deemed a “Svengali,” others a “Machiavelli,” and others a “lunatic” and “man without a soul.”

Dubbed “one of the greatest criminals the world has ever seen” by the famed detective William Pinkerton, Harry Hayward was an inveterate and cunning plotter of crimes large and small, dabbling in arson, insurance fraud, counterfeiting, and illegal gambling. His life story, told in full for the first time here, takes us into shadowy corners of the nineteenth century, including mesmerism, psychopathy, spiritualism, yellow journalism, and capital punishment. From the horrible fate of an independent young businesswoman who challenged Victorian mores to the shocking confession of Hayward on the eve of his execution (which, if true, would have made him a serial killer), The Infamous Harry Hayward unfolds a transfixing tale of one of the most notorious criminals in America during the Gilded Age.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright, Epigraph
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. p. vii
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  1. Minneapolis, circa 1895
  2. p. viii
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  1. Introduction: “Under a Cloud of Moral Darkness”
  2. pp. ix-xii
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  1. 1. “This Woman Was Murdered”
  2. pp. 1-16
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  1. 2. “Who Killed Kittie Ging?”
  2. pp. 17-35
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  1. 3. “A Saturnalia of Crime”
  2. pp. 36-43
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  1. 4. “Money Was My God!”
  2. pp. 44-63
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  1. 5. “Go Out and Kill Somebody”
  2. pp. 64-76
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  1. 6. “She Made No Sound, and Was Dead”
  2. pp. 77-83
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  1. 7. “The Plot of a Fiend”
  2. pp. 84-101
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  1. 8. “A Cursed Ghoulish Monster”
  2. pp. 102-115
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  1. 9. “Don’t Under Any Circumstances Squeal on Me”
  2. pp. 116-132
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  1. 10. “The Boldest Thing I Ever Heard of in My Life”
  2. pp. 133-146
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  1. 11. “We Shall Be Able to Prove Everything”
  2. pp. 147-161
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  1. 12. “You’ll Be Wearing Stripes within a Year”
  2. pp. 162-173
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  1. 13. “Evidence! Oh, What a Sham!”
  2. pp. 174-181
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  1. 14. “Take Him to the Gallows!”
  2. pp. 182-194
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  1. 15. “The Greatest Villain of the Nineteenth Century”
  2. pp. 195-210
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  1. 16. “Stained with Blood”
  2. pp. 211-221
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  1. 17. “A Kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Existence”
  2. pp. 222-245
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  1. 18. “The Awful Finale”
  2. pp. 246-258
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  1. Epilogue: “I Had a Scheme”
  2. pp. 259-266
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. 267-268
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  1. Sources and Further Reading
  2. pp. 269-276
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 277-282
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  1. Illustration Credits
  2. pp. 283-284
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 285-291
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