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Cold-Blooded

The Saga of Charles Schmid, the Notorious “Pied Piper of Tucson”

By John Gilmore

8.5 x 11 in, 117 Pages, ISBN 0-922915-31-8, $12.95

Price: $12.95

“Gilmore got in good with many of the key players, and lets them speak at length about their world: It’s a strikingly amoral and enticing place. … aficionados of juvenile delinquency will certainly want to seek this out.”
— Scram

This new edition of The Tucson Murders is a fascinating study of a 60s suburban nightmare. ‘Smitty’ was a charismatic kid perpetually surrounded with adoring underlings. They didn’t seem to mind his peculiar appearance (heavy Man-Tan makeup, a ghoulishly enlarged beauty mark, lace-backed boots stuffed with trash so he’d look taller) or his often-confessed propensity for murder. These kids spent their time hanging out, racing cars, listening to rock and roll, and swinging. Probably they all would have grown up to become our parents had not Schmid felt compelled to pull a Leopold and Loeb on a neighborhood girl. Later he repeated the trick on a persistent ex and her baby sister. His best buddy finked to the cops, and this so-called ‘pied piper’ got shipped off to the big house, where he was himself soon murdered.

Author John Gilmore’s hard-edged noir style reportage leaves little to the reader’s imagination, from Schmid’s grisly murders to the hard-boiled courtroom gymnastics in the Arizona courts. The author of Severed, about the Black Dahlia murder, and The Garbage People, on Manson and the “Family,” Gilmore’s Cold-Blooded lays bare a hefty slice of the human condition that is revealing, shocking, and most disturbing.

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