FIVE BEST Killer Stories Sensational murder trials are at their most transfixing in these works. BY HAROLD SCHECHTER Saturday, November 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. 1. "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen (Knopf, 1998). On the night of April 9, 1836, a young prostitute named Helen Jewett was hacked to death in an upscale Manhattan brothel. Within hours, a suspect was arrested for the crime: a dry-goods clerk named Richard Robinson, scion of an old-line Connecticut family and one of Jewett's regulars. In Patricia Cline Cohen's impeccably researched and elegantly written "The Murder of Helen Jewett," we see how the case, with its titillating mix of sex, scandal and savagery, became a media sensation--the O.J. Simpson affair of the 19th century. Thousands of New Yorkers--their prurience piqued by lurid accounts in the "penny papers" (the progenitors of today's tabloid press)-- descended on City Hall for Robinson's dramatic five-day trial. Despite overwhelming circumstantial evidence against him, he was acquitted after less than 10 minutes of jury deliberation. 2. "Dead Certainties" by Simon Schama (Knopf, 1991). Simon Schama's provocative investigation of the 1849 murder of Dr. George Parkman by Harvard chemistry professor John Webster constitutes only half of "Dead Certainties." (The other half concerns the heroic battlefield death of British Gen. James Wolfe in 1759, the subject of Benjamin West's famous painting.) But it stands as a singularly absorbing account of the case, one of the most famous in the annals of American jurisprudence. Parkman showed up at Webster's lab to collect on a long-overdue $400 loan and was never seen again, though various dismembered body parts were later discovered on the premises. Webster's ensuing trial--which led to his conviction and hanging--riveted the country and was a legal milestone, owing partly to its pioneering reliance on forensic evidence: It was the first murder trial in which dental identification played a key role. 3. "The Minister and the Choir Singer" by William M. Kunstler (William Morrow, 1964). Before he became the sort of radical provocateur who helped turn the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven into a courtroom circus, lawyer William Kunstler produced "The Minister and the Choir Singer," a compelling chronicle of one of the most carnivalesque murder cases in American history. On Sept. 16, 1922, the Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall and his mistress, choir member Eleanor Mills, were found shot to death in a New Jersey apple orchard, their corpses strewn with Eleanor's torrid love letters. After a considerable delay, the reverend's eminently respectable wife, Frances, and her two highly eccentric brothers were indicted for double murder. With public excitement stoked to a frenzy by the tabloids, the trial became one of the most riotous media events of the Roaring Twenties, complete with outdoor refreshment stands, celebrity commentators and the dramatic appearance of a dying witness dubbed "The Pig Woman," who delivered her testimony from a hospital bed wheeled into the courtroom. In the end, the defendants were acquitted, and the crime remains officially unsolved. Kunstler's presentation of the facts is first-rate, though his speculative solution is more ingenious than convincing. 4. "Compulsion" by Meyer Levin (Simon & Schuster, 1956). In May 1924, self-professed Nietzschean supermen Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the pampered sons of two prominent Chicago families, set out to prove their intellectual superiority by committing the "perfect crime." They abducted and killed Loeb's 14-year-old cousin, then stuffed his nude body into a drainpipe. Despite the supposed brilliance of their plan, they were arrested less than two weeks later. The highlight of their prosecution--which had been immediately (and rather prematurely) trumpeted as "The Trial of the Century"--was the summation by their lawyer, the formidable Clarence Darrow, who delivered an eloquent 12-hour attack on the death penalty. His clients were convicted but spared execution. In "Compulsion," Meyer Levin's 1956 best-selling account of the case, the author thinly disguised the story for legal reasons, producing what many critics consider the prototypical "nonfiction novel"--a genre that Truman Capote would take credit for inventing a decade later. 5. "Kidnap" by George Waller (Dial, 1961). For Depression-era Americans, no crime in living memory was as heinous as the abduction of the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh. As George Waller recounts in the solid, straightforward and eminently readable "Kidnap," from the instant the baby was snatched out of his cradle on the night of March 1, 1932, the case became a national obsession ("the biggest story since the Resurrection," H.L. Mencken called it). When, two months later, the infant's decomposed remains were found in the woods a few miles from the Lindbergh family's New Jersey home, the whole country went into mourning. Another two years passed before a suspect was charged, a German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. His trial, conducted amid tumultuous media coverage, ended with his conviction. He went to the electric chair protesting his innocence, and crime buffs have argued over the question of his guilt ever since. Mr. Schechter is author of "The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century" (Ballantine).