![]() These abuses left their toll on Kallinger in the form of severe mental illness. ![]() Abandoned as a child by his birth mother and adopted by unfeeling parents who resented him, Kallinger experienced his childhood as a rotary of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Culled from years of interviews and research with Kallinger himself, Schreiber paints a horrifying picture of a lifetime of abuse after abuse. How Schreiber does this is by chronicling not just Kallinger’s crimes, but his entire life, beginning from the point of his birth and tracing exactly how events in his childhood lead to Kallinger’s deranged mental state and the horrific crimes he committed later in life. Flora Rheta Schreiber has achieved the nigh insurmountable task of portraying this man – someone who most people would see the death penalty as too good for – as someone deserving of our sympathy and pity. Torturing animals to death, abusing children, enlisting his twelve-year-old son as an accomplice for a series of brazen home invasions and sexual assaults, and murdering both children (his own and others) and women are just some of the crimes among the litany of abuses Kallinger committed. ![]() It would be easy to depict Joseph Kallinger as a monster. ![]() ![]() What makes The Shoemaker, a “true crime” book about a series of murders in Pittsburgh, so disturbing is not that it details genital mutilation, child murder, and rape, but that you may find yourself sympathizing with the man behind those crimes. ![]()
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