On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield. Three months later Garfield died, the second U.S. president to be assassinated. The assassin himself, a forty-year old megalomaniac, con artist, and stalker who had begged for months for a White House job, lived for another year. After a circus-like trial in which he wildly castigated his attorneys and gave bizarre, impromptu speeches, a jury found him guilty in January of 1882. Later that year, he was executed publicly in Washington D.C.

Born in 1841, beaten regularly by his father and often told he wanted too much in life, Guiteau had a difficult childhood. Inheriting the large sum of $1,000 in 1859, the eighteen year old tried education, but he flunked out of the University of Michigan. He squandered his inheritance with the Oneida Community, a utopian religious commune notorious for its open sexual views, and then was driven out from...