"I bite."
--Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer and cannibal, to his prison guard
"I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them."
--David Berkowitz, a.k.a. "Son of Sam"
These are just two of the 1,000 bizarre, twisted, and peculiar statements muttered by history's most memorable outlaws, gangsters, despots and other evil-doers in the new book "Criminal Quotes" (Visible Ink Press, $12.95), edited by Andrew Chesler and H. Amanda Robb.
"Our book is intended as dark humor -- a laugh at the chilling, revealing, and simply peculiar things that criminals say," says the husband and wife team who combed through hundreds of pages from books and newspapers searching for the most diabolical, egomaniacal, bizarre and sometimes grisly things outlaws have had to say throughout the Ages.
From Nero, the fifth emperor of Rome, to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, every person quoted in Criminal Quotes has been indicted as a criminal by a judicial body or by history.
Readers will discover such quotes as:
"And you can go to hell, hell, hell."
--William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid,"
responding to the judge who sentenced him to hang until "...you
are dead, dead, dead."
"Miss, I have a bomb in my suitcase and I want you to sit beside me."
--Dan B. Cooper, skyjacker, to a stewardess on a 1971
flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington.
"You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy."
--Joseph Valachi, a henchman in the Genovese crime family,
on the murder of John Joseph Saupp, a fellow prison inmate who
Valachi mistakenly thought was going to kill him.
"I never heard of Richard Morton...Oh, that Richard
Morton!...Yes, I was married to him."
--Nannie Doss, Oklahoma woman who murdered eleven people,
including four of her five husbands.
"Why, that's better than sex!"
--Bonnie Brown Heady, alcoholic ex-wife of a bank robber,
on her new boyfriend's plan to kidnap the son of one of the richest
men in Kansas City, MO.
"'Jaws' is the warmest, tenderest, lovingest movie of the year.
I give it four coconuts."
--Idi Amin, 1970s Ugandan general/dictator, on the movie "Jaws"
"Ten days from now."
--Tillie Klimek, Chicago woman who poisoned her five
husbands in order to collect their life insurance policies, upon
being asked by a stranger when her husband had died. Klimek was
buying a dress to wear to his funeral
Quotes are arranged under such topics as advice, persuasion, winning, pick-up lines, rationalization, remorse, and more. The master index provides brief biographies of each criminal mentioned in the book.