An ordinary evening. The quiet, shy girl. The contents of the dustbin. The fading light. The careful search. A glove. The reassembled skull. The simplAn ordinary evening. The quiet, shy girl. The contents of the dustbin. The fading light. The careful search. A glove. The reassembled skull. The simple question. The ghosts of a thousand childhoods. The uneasy clock. This ruined place. The heart-shaped blade. The missing left ring finger. Ordinary domestic troubles. The final six months. The love and hate still here in my heart. The last straw. The first straw. The wrong time to ask. An arm was visible. We thought. We didn’t think. No one liked him. He was well-liked. So close to home, so far from help. Hurry back, dear! I will, I will. Don’t worry.
This gently gripping book (once I started I had to finish it in a day) takes five completely obscure British murders from the 1968 to 1973 period and peels back the layers. Most of this is a careful orchestration of investigations of facts along with the lives of the murderers and the victims but occasionally the sorrow of these crimes inspires the author’s eloquence :
Murder delivers silence. When one human life has been taken by another, that heavy, noisy silence which endures is usually a silence of despair. Mourners long for it to be broken by some explanation, some small consolation, some blanket with which to swaddle their grief. But very occasionally, a different silence follows a murder. It is the silence of indifference…the silence of a victim for whom no one weeps. Perhaps the only person who ever mourned Nora was the man who killed her.
For true crime readers this is definitely recommended....more
This one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with tThis one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with this dense thickety intertwining of murder, memoir, industrial history and her incessant Theory of Lead And Arsenic Poisoning, which is, that it infects the brains of certain men and helps to turn them into serial killers, and since the North West of the USA was awash with the stuff in the 60s to 80s, this accounts for the extraordinary number of serial killers operating in that part of the world, in that time.. And for all I know that might be true but the Big Theory was hammered so much it was a case of enough with the lead poisoning, alright, I believe you, stop….
Other factors were in play, of course. The liberalisation of ordinary social behaviour gave these horrible men a limitless supply of victims – hitch-hikers, sex workers, free spirited young people out past their bedtimes.
And the lack of the Big Three innovations in detection which have shut down contemporary would-be serial killers : CCTV, mobile phones and their attendant cell towers (ever vigilant, ever smiling) and of course DNA DNA DNA.
You don’t have to write true crime books in a plain no-frills just-the-facts style – others that don’t include As If by Blake Morrison, Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, Going Postal by Mark Ames and the amazing Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burns. I see most of the reviews of Murderland love it, so you may too, but I didn’t.
Three stars for the obvious enormous work that went into this big book....more
COMPARTMENTALIZATION : the act of separating something into parts and not allowing those parts to mix together
We do it all the time. It allows us to hCOMPARTMENTALIZATION : the act of separating something into parts and not allowing those parts to mix together
We do it all the time. It allows us to have some control, and stop our lives descending into chaos. And it seems the human mind – some of them anyhow – can take this to a very extreme degree.
THREE EXAMPLES OF EXTREME COMPARTMENTALIZATION
ONE : RUDOLF HESS
After participating in the slaughter of hundreds of prisoners during his working day in Auschwitz, he would return home in the evening to his sweet family (one wife, five children, various dogs) and slip right in to his normal German family life, in his house and garden right there next to the camp itself. And it was no problem at all. And this happened day in day out from 1940 to 1943. You can see this dramatized very compellingly in the film The Zone of Interest (2023).
TWO : DOMINIQUE PELICOT
You remember that this guy drugged his wife and filmed at least 50 different men raping her many times between 2011 and 2020 when he was found out and arrested. The morning after the horrible crime he would, I assume, just be his usual self. They had been married for over 35 years. Pass me another croissant, dear. That kind of thing.
THREE : TED BUNDY
On 14 July 1974 he abducted a woman in broad daylight from a park at Lake Sammamish in Washington state, and murdered her, then tried to abduct a second woman (she wouldn’t get into his car), then successfully abducted a third woman and murdered her, also in broad daylight, and then, in the early evening, he took his girlfriend Liz and her daughter out for hamburgers and ice cream. Liz never noticed anything was amiss. He was his usual charming self.
Oh, one more thing. This Liz was his long time girlfriend but when he moved to Utah he got himself another girlfriend and she really liked him at first but then when he started drinking too much she ditched him. Did he attack her in a homicidal rage? Not at all. He didn’t stalk her, he accepted her decision. Later when she found out who he really was she said their relationship had been quite normal.
What can you say about the human mind?
A QUESTION OF BALANCE
Writing about Bundy requires great balance. The horror of his actions is too many times eclipsed by his barefaced arrogance, roguish cheek, smarminess and resourcefulness, to the extent that writers can topple over into a fascination with almost an undercurrent of admiration. How could he live this life? The young Republican go-getter with a bright future! He worked at a suicide helpline! He was talking female students out of self harm on one evening and murdering them on the next….. And how did he spirit these women away like that, and never leave any clues behind? And the extraordinary drama of the incidents ! How could he escape not once but twice from prison? And then acting as his own defence attorney. And then the judge, right after handing Bundy his death sentence, says
Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner. I don’t have any animosity to you. I want you to know that.
I think Kevin Sullivan gets it right in this short, succinct account. BUT he does himself absolutely no favours to begin with, however. In the introduction he tells how he met with Detective Jerry Thompson who investigated the Utah murders. And Jerry brought the bag.
”What bag?” I asked. “The bag Bundy carried… I have it with me now in my truck!”…. “You’ve got Ted Bundy’s bag!” I said, my voice rising with excitement. “Yes, I’m holding it right now.”
Later, Kevin’s friend fishes the stuff out of the bag.
First, the woolen ski mask, and then a red-handled ice pick. Next, he retrieved a flashlight, then, a long piece of clothesline rope…
Etc etc. Kevin even gets to keep one of the plastic trash bags in the bag. We can only guess what Ted would have used them for.
And whilst I’m being a little critical, Kevin sometimes coughs up some truly orotund sentences :
Like all the women before her, Laura Aime would soon be immortalised in that heartbreaking litany of those who succumbed to the deviant desires of the serial killer known as Theodore Robert Bundy.
Fortunately there’s not too much of that kind of thing here…
There are quite a few books on Bundy and the ones I’ve seen always scramble up the chronology for effect and make it confusing. This short book doesn’t do that.
A FINAL QUOTE
Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body.
What's one less person on the face of the Earth, anyways?...more
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this…
In 1959 Question : IS THERE SUCH A THING AS FATE?
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this…
In 1959 two guys doing short stretches in Lansing (aka Kansas State Penitentiary) are sharing a cell and like all cons they talk about their lives and maybe cook up a plan or two for some future malfeasance. This one guy, Floyd, is telling Dick, the cellmate, about maybe the best job he ever had, which was working on a big old wheat farm in Kansas for a real rich farmer. He particularly remembers this farmer because he was such a kindly employer. Farm was way out in the middle of nowhere. Oh says Dick, rich? Oh yeah, maybe every week they did ten thousand dollars of business. Hey, says Dick, did you happen to see a safe in that farm house ever? Well, says Floyd, I kind of sort of remember there was something. All right, says Dick, I will rob this farmer, and I will shoot all the witnesses. Well, in jail, everybody brags on the great deeds they will do, what else is there to yap about. Floyd discounted this big talk.
In fact there was no safe at all, there was no cash kept in the farmhouse. Floyd got that part wrong, what a shame. So when Dick and his good friend Perry crept into the said farmhouse a few months later, all they found was thirty bucks. But they’d already agreed there would be no witnesses left, whatever happened, so they shot all four members of the Clutter family that night and left. And they were careful and there were no clues.
Imagine Floyd’s surprise when a couple of days later, him being still in the jail, he hears on the radio about this terrible crime. He about jumped out of his skin. Dick and his pal actually did it! At this point he realised that aside from the criminals he was the only person in the world who knew who’d done it. What to do? As every con knows, snitches get stiches. But on the other hand, there was a thousand dollar reward for information. Hmmm.
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WAITING IMPATIENTLY FOR THE HANGMAN
Truman Capote did more than interview the two killers once they were caught. He visited them dozens of times, spent many hours with them, particularly liked Perry Smith, sent them the maximum allowed letters and gifts of books and candy. The book was finished by 1963 – all except for the last chapter, when the death penalty would be finally applied.
He could not finish his book until he had an ending, but neither could he put it aside and go on with something else. …His frustration was made worse by his knowledge that, lying in front of him, missing only thirty or forty pages, was the best-seller that would alter his life irrevocably, that would make him rich… the success of In Cold Blood was as predictable as the future movements of the planets.
Imagine the bizarre mixture of hopeful anticipation and agonised disappointment as Perry and Hickock went through appeal after appeal, their damned busy lawyers petitioned for a new trial – this nearly gave TC a heart attack – he liked these miserable malformed murderers but why didn’t they just go ahead and hang them so he could get his book done and become rich and famous as was his destiny? Why are they torturing me like this with their endless appeals and delays? I’m only human!
A MASTERPIECE
This is a great but strange book, a non fiction novel, I can see where that odd phrase came from, it veers between reportage and entirely novelistic recreations of some scenes with dialogue and characters and all, in this way it’s the exact literary version of the “re-enactments” they do on some true crime shows – I hate those, but in Truman’s hands it never comes across as tacky.
Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighting the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out.
So good is TC in this book that it becomes a real shame that this book made him and destroyed him at the same time. He spent the next 20 years dithering, writing bits and pieces, but there was never another novel or much of anything after this one. Then he died.
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IN COLDER BLOOD
Three movies :
In Cold Blood (1966) – the film of the book, really excellent
Capote (2005) Infamous (2006)
Both these biopics concentrate on TC’s weird relationship with Perry Smith, both are worth it
And Gerald Clarke’s biography of TC is really excellent....more
On 13 November 2015 Islamic State terrorists attacked Paris in three groups -
1) Stade de France, the national football stadium. This attack went wrongOn 13 November 2015 Islamic State terrorists attacked Paris in three groups -
1) Stade de France, the national football stadium. This attack went wrong, so to speak - the three suicide bombers got there too late to get into the stadium, anyway they didn’t have tickets so they were refused entrance. Suicide bombers need tickets to get in, just like anybody else. So bizarrely they blew themselves up outside, killing one other person. I nearly wrote only one other person.
2) Three other attackers fired on customers outside and inside various cafes and restaurants. One attacker went to a final restaurant and blew himself up. 39 dead, 40 seriously injured.
3) The Bataclan theatre massacre – the other attackers went into a rock concert and killed 90 people with hundreds of others injured. Two blew themselves up, the other was shot by police.
Total body count – 130 dead, 350 plus injured. Immediate result : bloody chaos.
A good two weeks later we found another one of the terrorists’ legs.
The cops arrested a group of 14 aiders and abettors, the actual perpetrators being dead. Of these four were the main organisers and the others were bit part players. This trial lasted from 8 September 2021 to 29 June 2022. Emmanuel Carrere reported on this trial every day. He was there day in and day out.
The trial was massive, elaborate, ponderous, operatic, French – meaning not anything like a British or American trial in many ways. For one thing, it began with 5 weeks of testimony from The Plaintiffs, that is, the victims of the attacks and their families. Emmanuel sums up this first part :
Too much suffering, too much horror. It’s very unfair to the witnesses who were slotted in towards the end or testify late in the afternoon when attention is waning … To describe what was no doubt an equal amount of suffering, some found the right words and moved their listeners, others reeled off cliches and bored them
This whole thing of there being plaintiffs in a terrorist trial is strange to me. In the UK the state takes over the entire proceeding, and the victims and their eventual compensation is dealt with elsewhere.
NOT WHAT I WAS EXPECTING
In 2000 the author wrote a fantastic true crime book called The Adversary. So I knew he could spellbind me with a complex narrative. But this book did not do the same. Eventually, even though EC is a fine writer, a keen, wry and humane sensibility and a crafter of arresting sentences, the vastness of this trial overwhelmed this book. Or to put it another way, I thought I was going to get the story of the attacks and the story of the trial and the story of the perpetrators and I didn’t quite get any of that. I got the mordant dour grim and despairing semi-diary of a guy sitting in a courtroom and hanging with the other reporters and some lawyers for a year.
So you won’t get a clear idea of the attacks themselves or the police response at the Bataclan or the hunt for the gang; even when the sentencing arrives it’s almost presented offscreen.
THE BIG WHY
Moreover, I was wanting a dive into the jihadi mind. Here’s how he describes this homicidal gang :
The defendants come across as good kids who’re somewhat lost, moderately religious…big smokers of weed…who go in and out of prison to a steady beat of petty offences
So how did these stoners get galvanized into committing horror? How did they get “radicalised”, to use the tiresome word? Well, who knows. We don’t get to find out. They just did. And what was their rationalisation, if that’s not a ridiculous term? We get very little about that. But there’s this :
I heard him say “There, that’s for our brothers in Syria, if you don’t like it talk to your President Hollande.”
And one of them said in court :
I can understand that people feel sorry for those killed and hurt in the attacks, but…when you’re being killed in Syria, it’s normal to come and kill in France
It seems all jihadi attacks are based on this straightforward Biblical idea
Deuteronomy 19 : 19-21
Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you. And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you. And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
So when a missile shot by a Western country hits a target in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, and kills the intended targets, but also kills a few dozen unintended human beings, the phrase that is used is “collateral damage”. No strikes can possibly be as surgical as the public would like them to be. And this is by no means uniquely modern, it's not like suddenly the Western governments have become morally unmoored, it happened in all wars and on all sides. But now we are investigating why some guys would want to murder people at a rock concert in Paris or as they were sipping lattes in a café. These guys would say well, it’s simple, this is your turn for some collateral damage.
Emmanuel Carrere comments :
We hold a trial of historic proportions, shoot films, write books like this one. But 131 Syrians or Iraqis killed by American bombs (or by Bashar or Putin for that matter)? Nobody cares, it’s a Reuters dispatch, and that’s that.
RESPONSIBILITY
Are we responsible for the actions of the government we voted for? And are we responsible for what our friends or partners or children are cooking up on the internet?
WWJD
Matthew 5 38-39
Jesus said .Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
I know, pretty difficult to take that seriously. Resist not evil ? Ridiculous. We have to resist evil, surely. Must be a mistranslation....more
1965 to 1975 were wild times in the USA and elsewhere*. The hippies, the yippies, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the assassina1965 to 1975 were wild times in the USA and elsewhere*. The hippies, the yippies, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the assassinations, blah blah, you know it all. This particular story of the Zebra murders is strangely not so famous. It’s very easy to see why : it’s a horrible tale about racists.
The location was San Francisco. The time span : October 1973 to May 1974. The number of victims : 15 dead, eight more who survived.
All the victims were white. All the perpetrators were black. This wasn’t coincidental. I had thought that that was why these crimes were called Zebra murders but that would have been gross. No, it was because the Z channel on police radios was cleared for use only by the cops working on this case. Z is always for zebra, you know.
This is a story of American terrorism, not serial murder. Beginning in October 1973 the homicide cops in SF were confronted with a seemingly unstoppable series of random shootings. It was a worst nightmare situation. Usually with murders the cops have something to go on – witnesses, evidence, motive that can be deduced, money, drugs, sex, connections between the corpse and the killer that spin a thread the cops can follow. But in these cases, one after another after another, there was nothing. All the witnesses, when there were any, said the same thing – a guy walked up the street, pulled out a gun, shot this poor person twice, three times, then walked away. Description? Kind of tall, nondescript clothes. A black man. And it didn’t take the cops long to connect the shootings, they were all done with the same gun. And the cops also noticed the thing about the victims – young, old, men, women, quite random, except they were all white. The bodies kept falling : five in December, five in one single evening in January. The story is told by Earl Saunders, the black homicide cop who worked the case from the very beginning. After the five in one evening, he said
“It felt like the gates of hell had opened up and something evil swarmed out. It was a feeling that grabbed your stomach and wouldn’t let go. Because as bad as that night was, what made it worse was we didn’t have a clue when it would end.”
Earl and his black partner shook down all their informants in the black community and got stony silence. Usually they could pick up a whisper here, a word there, not this time. That made them think – it’s not ordinary criminals doing this. Who then?
Eight months and they had nothing, not a single clue.
Eventually the case was cracked when the cops finally released some police sketches of suspects (they were reluctant to do this for some complicated reasons). And plus, the city put up a $30,000 reward. One of the group recognised himself and thought he could convince the cops he hadn’t killed anyone but he’d been along on the ride for a lot of the time, so he could turn state’s witness and get the thirty grand. And that’s what happened.
So who were the killers and why did they do it? If they weren’t called the Zebra murders they would have been called the Black Self-Help Moving and Storage murders, because the five guys who had been doing all the shooting met when they worked for this small company. It specialised in employing black guys recently released from prison, and it was associated with the Nation of Islam. The book states many times that the Nation of Islam that existed in the early 70s was a totally different organisation to that which exists today. It then goes on to show that the teachings of Elijah Muhammed, especially one inflammatory passage about killing white devils, was taken literally by these guys. Earl says :
From what I could see, the one thing that seemed to guide every other possible motive, whether it was to start up a race war or just avenge what they saw as injustice, was rage. A crazy, insane rage over what they thought whites had done to blacks. Once you got to that realisation, if you were black, you had to pause. Because the truth was there wasn’t a black I knew who didn’t feel at least an inkling of the same thing.
Earl later became the first black police chief of San Francisco.
Although this is a fascinating and horrifying crime story, I nearly had to rate the book only 3 stars because it tries to tell two stories at the same time, the main one being, of course, the story of the murders and the investigation, and the other one the struggle of Earl Saunders and the very few other black police officers in San Francisco against the awful racism of the San Francisco Police Department. It’s a very worthy subject, surely, but, no offence intended, it gives the first half of the book a draggy stop-start effect. You want to get on with the what-happened-next of true crime and you are continually being informed about the lawsuit black officers were bringing against the SFPD and how the white officers tried to sideline the black minority, etc. But I can see that from Earl’s perspective the two are intertwined.
Final note : the 4th victim, who survived two point-blank bullets in the chest on 13 December 1973, was a guy called Art Agnos. 15 years later he became Mayor of San Francisco.
FURTHER READING (all these stories are connected and these are all wonderful books)
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
Malcolm X : A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff
And i need to to read
The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad by Claude Andrew Clegg III
*
*Of course, in the future they will say those 2020s sure were wild times....more
I was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book isI was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book is about the homicide department of the Baltimore police in the 1980s, so what that means is almost all the detectives are white and almost all of the criminals and victims are Black. And the white detectives all look similar, with great heavy moustaches and unchanging mournful expressions. They never smile, they never look surprised. What was it in the 80s with moustaches? And there’s no action – the cops get to the murder scene after the crime has happened, so they stand and stare and write stuff down. And of course the victim is not moving much either. There are no car chases, there are no shootouts. (Okay, one brief shootout.) Practically the only action most of these detectives engage in is getting in and out of cars.
Then there’s the concept of the “red ball”, the cops’ name for a murder that “matters”. That concept will be very offensive to some modern readers. Most of the murders in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade. Those that weren’t, those where the victim is a child, or a city official, say, are the red balls, the “real” murders. This was the way of thinking. A dead 22 year old Black guy in an alley with no witnesses was not a red ball.
And also there’s a long discussion of a police shooting in this book and how attitudes were very slow to change. Were? Still are.
If it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident was not an intentional murder. It was a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman used his weapon…if that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from the scene because he had no faith in his department to protect him….
Probably not how someone writing about police shootings today would phrase it.
SOME HISTORY
This whole thing has a history; it began as a series of articles by David Simon who was “embedded” as they say with Baltimore homicide for about a year. Then that became a book which is still one of my all time favourite true crime books, it’s brilliant (but very long).
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Then the book became the basis for the tv show Homicide : Life on the Street which ran from 1993 to 1999
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which dramatized most of the stuff in the book and then added lots more fictional cases. It was a real masterpiece of tv drama with a fantastic cast (Melissa Leo! Andre Braugher! Yaphet Kotto! Richard Belzer!) . After that came the famous The Wire (2002-2008) which was a kinda-sorta spinoff from Homicide and at that point many people became fans.
So now, 32 years after the original book, we get the graphic novel version. But that’s a misnomer as the original book wasn’t a novel. This is a graphic nonfiction book. I thought it was a great addition to this particular universe.
Maybe Homicide: the Theme Park will be next....more
This excellent book asks the question ”did the building of the American interstate highway system inadvertently create the perfect conditions for a whThis excellent book asks the question ”did the building of the American interstate highway system inadvertently create the perfect conditions for a whole bunch of disgusting serial killers?” and the answer is yes, of course it did. All those victims dumped at the side of the I-5 ! So this book is where true crime meets urban geography.
The magnificent highway system is a tremendous feat of engineering, but its blank sameness and its anonymous encounters provide the necessary backdrop to hundreds of murders. Commonest victims : no prizes for guessing, hitchhikers and truck stop sex workers. Because of all the murdering done in the 70s and 80s nobody would think of hitching now. Sex working at truck stops has not died out, however, according to the author. Quite the reverse.
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(note – first it was the hitcher who was the killer but that quickly flipped round)
Ginger Strand (great name) kicks off with the well-known Charles Starkweather in 1958 who drove around with his 14 year old girlfriend shooting people.
Reporter : Do you regret throwing your life away? Charlie : I throwed away nothin’ cause I didn’t have nothin’.
Ginger is not one of these deskbound academics. She attends trials and like any true crime fan she wants to see the precise locations of the murders:
Charles gave such a complete account of their flight that when I visited Lincoln I was able to follow the pair’s exact route.
But it doesn’t always work out like that. When later Ginger drives to Atlanta to see the locations of the famous 1981 child murders there’s only disappointment :
The Hollywood Shopping Plaza, where Clifford Jones was found in a dumpster: razed. Hollywood Courts, where Terry Pue lived : a pile of cement chunks. Hillcrest Apartments where Latonya Wilson lived and died : boarded up and abandoned. Thomasville Heights, home to at least three of the victims: scheduled for demolition
But she finds the home of Wayne Williams still intact and well-maintained, and includes her own photo of it on p122.
There’s a chapter on Edmund Kemper III, who is now pretty famous from Mindhunter. I only mention this because Ed provides us with an example of psychiatry at its finest:
Two days later, with Aiko Koo’s head in his trunk, he drove to Fresno for a psychiatric examination. Based on the interview, the psychiatrists determined that Kemper was no longer a threat to society and that his juvenile murder record should be sealed.
Moving on to Bundy, Ginger takes the time to skewer some fake news:
Bundy fascination spawned a number of false myths about serial killers: that they are predominantly white, middleclass men who prey on beautiful young coeds; that they are intelligent, even brilliant, capable of eluding and tricking the police…[these myths] serve to make serial killers more likeable
And here ’s my favourite paragraph, where Ginger simply can’t hold back her feelings about the interstate highway system anymore:
A number of things had become apparent about the interstate highway program. It had mowed down mountains, plowed through communities, and divided up farms with little regard for the opinions of affected citizens. It had cost at least three times what it was expected to cost. It had accelerated white flight from cities, contributed to urban blight, and abetted the spread of environmentally destructive, aesthetically awful suburbia. It had spawned a monotonous national landscape of homogeneous franchise businesses, ticky-tacky homes, eyesore shopping malls and hideous commercial strips.
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Ginger is bang-on also about the curious pickiness of the American press and public about serial killers. They are fascinated by some (Dahmer, Bundy, you know them all) and they ignore a whole string whose awful murders were just as bad – who has heard of William Bonin, Patrick Kearney and Randy Kraft? Ginger thinks that they were ignored because they were dull : “Like the highways themselves, they were bland, unappealing and lacking in taste”.
The best chapter in this jargon-free, compelling, eccentric and borderline-essential book is the one most based on Ginger’s own research – called "Drive By Truckers", it’s all about long distance truckers murdering truckstop hookers – a very ghastly subject which may be why hardly anyone has written about it.
The US national average for all homicides in 2009 : 5 per 100,000. The homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000
**
I could go on extracting grisly little-known facts from this book but this review is long enough. For true crime fans this is totally recommended....more
After the crimes themselves, the most sickening aspect of the story of a lot of serial killers is the teasing dance of the seven veils that then unfolAfter the crimes themselves, the most sickening aspect of the story of a lot of serial killers is the teasing dance of the seven veils that then unfolds as the cops try to get a full confession. The killer finds that the cops themselves become a second type of victim presented for his sadistic pleasure. He dangles tiny scraps of information in front of their eager faces, maybe he snatches them away at the last moment, maybe he throws them a couple of victims they didn’t know about, maybe a dump site. There they sit, the cops, and they know he’s got them squirming. They have to be so kind to him and offer him exciting enticements – writing material, a radio, they’ll fly his brother up to see him, that kind of thing. Oh how they want him to confess believably (not like that old embarrassing fraud Henry Lee Lucas). Oh how he sees them hanging on his every word.
This book is an exercise in frustration. After a terrific page-turning first third, the account of Israel Keyes’ last crime and how he was caught, and how the cops began to realise the vast extent of the case, the rest of the book is all about Keyes telling them he wants to confess and then not confessing and then committing suicide whilst on suicide watch.
Before his very timely end he was coming into focus as an extremely chilling character, planning his crimes like a supersmart villain from a cheesy thriller, with gun stashes in various states, murder kits, police scanners, and his studies of FBI methods. And living almost entirely off the grid : the cops find
no property records. No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. He had left nearly no digital footprint, no paper trail – and this was a guy with an unusual name.
His background was extraordinary – his parents were “cult tourists” (his description) – they moved their family of ten children from one loony Christian cult to another, from state to state. They didn’t believe in modern medicine or science. Mostly lived in tents. I would have liked more on these strange people but like the rest of the book I was frustrated. As was the author, I think. She just couldn’t find out anything more.
***
Additional note which has nothing to do with this book : true crime fans should not miss the recent series textmewhenyougethome - it's brilliantly made, it's a must watch. ...more
This painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetiThis painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetime of anguished reflection. The results are disheartening. The preface by Professor Andrew Solomon says:
The ultimate message of this book is terrifying : you may not know your own children, and, worse yet, your children may be unknowable.
Or as a three minute song from the 1960s put it :
Nobody knows what’s going on in my mind but me.
LIKEABLE YOUNG MAN FROM A GOOD HOME
When you find out about Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, you can see there were enormous red flags all over, he was practically announcing I will be the Next One. Dylan Klebold was the opposite. He was the sweet loveable gentle teenage giant (6 foot 4) who only in his 16th year started doing a few sketchy things – the big one was breaking into a parked van and stealing some electronic equipment, with his dodgy friend Eric. Dylan didn’t do drugs but he was a secret drinker. But then he shaped up and got his applications in order when the time came to apply for university, and he was accepted. He wasn’t a weirdo loner, he wasn’t a bully. She says :
He wasn’t the pinwheel-eyed portrait of evil we know from the cartoons. …(he was) an easygoing, shy, likeable young man who came from a “good home”…he was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who always made us proud.
The story his mother tells is a horror story : her journey from denial and disbelief to ghastly realisation of the facts. On the dreadful day she thought at first he had been a bystander, then she realised he was some kind of perpetrator, but she told herself he couldn’t have actually shot anybody, then she found out he had, then she told herself he was on drugs, but he wasn’t, then she told herself he had been hypnotised in some way by that monster Eric Harris, and perhaps dragged into it at the last minute, and that was the belief she clung to until six months after the massacre the cops released the evidence they had collected and she was able to see the Basement Tapes for the first time, which you can believe she watched through her fingers, in total dismay. These were videos that Dylan and Eric made in the months before the shooting, and it was clear from them that the massacre had been carefully planned for eight months before the event. And it was also clear that the event that happened was a watered-down version of the event that was supposed to happen, which was the destruction of the whole school by means of propane bombs they put in the school cafeteria that morning. The idea was that they would sit outside and shoot the survivors of the explosions and fire as they ran outside. But the bombs failed to detonate so they changed their plan and went inside.
What was on the tapes was the sheer hatred Eric and Dylan had for the school and their lives in general. For Sue Klebold this was a revelation. Where did this hatred come from? Kids can easily have fantasies about burning their school down, hahaha, but to actually plan such a thing, go to the trouble of assembling the equipment bit by bit and then do it is a whole other thing. For Sue Klebold’s especial misery, on these tapes the two 17 year olds viciously mock what their parents will say after the massacre :
Dylan: If only we could have reached them sooner, or found this tape.
Eric : If only we would have searched their room. If only we would have asked the right questions.
Dylan: They gave me my fucking life. It’s up to me what I do with it
Eric: My parents are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn’t have any remorse, but I do. This is going to tear them apart. They will never forget it. [He then addresses his parents directly, if briefly] There is nothing you guys could have done to prevent any of this. There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and Vodka [Klebold’s nickname]. Our actions are a two man war against everyone else
HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?
This sums up the general reaction to Columbine, and this book is the explanation.
I would never have told you that I had access to Dylan’s every thought and feeling, but I would have said, with confidence, that I knew exactly what he was capable of. And I would have been wrong… I had raised a murderer without knowing it a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. … I had been a “I want o meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of parent. What good had it done?
OKAY THEN, WHY DID THEY DO IT?
The explanation Sue finally comes up with sounds inadequate – it amounts to the toxic nasty culture of bullying and belittling that goes on in every school and has had countless movies and tv shows made about it. And the reader is inclined to feel this explanation is inadequate. I did. But then I thought – yes, in the same way that many people think that the idea that Oswald was the sole shooter of JFK is inadequate; hence the conspiracy theories. So maybe Sue Klebold is right. The other part of the explanation she has is that Eric was a psychopath who wanted to kill people and his suicide was a byproduct of that whereas Dylan was a depressive who wanted to commit suicide and killing other people was the byproduct of his suicide. It sounds a little neat to me. But really, who can explain these things? At one point Sue asks of her own son “Was he evil?” and says well, no, I don’t think so. She spends pages talking about mental illness, then says even if he was diagnosable that’s no excuse. She spins in these nets of words like we all do.
Everyone knows that true crime is my Achilles’ heel. I’ve said many times that these careful accounts of human misery are just too sleazy and voyeuris Everyone knows that true crime is my Achilles’ heel. I’ve said many times that these careful accounts of human misery are just too sleazy and voyeuristic and I quit. But just like that Godfather meme, I thought I was out and they pullllled me back in.
My excuse here is that I never read an account of a killer nurse before and I wondered how they get away with it. Turns out, with considerable ease. They can go on for years if they choose victims that are likely to die anyway. The tale told expertly by this book is quite shocking. The perp doesn’t shock us so very much, human revoltingness being a well-known component of our lives. But the hospitals involved did shock me. Their drug accounting was almost non-existent. This guy Cullen was using more of one particular dangerous drug in a week than all other night staff on the ICU ordered in six months – did anyone spot this? Nope. Finally when suspicions began to gather did the hospital call the cops? Nope. They sat on the whole case very nervously making “internal enquiries” whilst the lunatic nurse continued to work there. When pressure of evidence forced them to call the cops did they explain that there was a computer system where you could see exactly what a particular nurse did to a particular patient? Nope. The hospital’s whole attitude was we want this to go away, we are going to squash this if at all possible.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE THING
99% of killer nurses are women and they do it for two reasons. One is simply mercy killing. The other used to go under the flamboyant name Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. This is where you cause the patient to have a medical crisis and then you rescue the patient from certain death, thus becoming a hero. (Or they die anyway but you still heroically tried to save them.) This Cullen guy (he admitted around 40 murders, cops think it might have been more like 400 over 16 years) was different.
Here’s the strange theory this book mentions (almost in passing). Cullen was a life-long depressive who had attempted suicide many times. So, his murders were a way of killing himself successfully by proxy. Hmmm…. Sounds wacky to me. But otherwise the explanation for this guy’s dedicated 16-year long career of dealing out death randomly is blowing in the wind.
I’m hoping American hospitals have tightened up their drug dispensing procedures since 2003. ...more
You gotta read it. It’s a true crime classic! Total page-turner!
SECOND, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEYTWO REVIEWS
FIRST : FOR PEOPLE THINKING OF READING THIS
You gotta read it. It’s a true crime classic! Total page-turner!
SECOND, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY WON’T READ THIS BUT ARE WONDERING WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
The first thing is, true crime books almost never get translated into English, possibly because the English speaking world is arrogant and parochial, and possibly because it is so cram full of revolting crimes that it doesn’t need any more accounts of revolting crimes, thank you very much. So since this is a French book that was immediately translated in 2000 and then republished 17 years later, you got to figure this is quite something.
Second thing is this concerns a familicide which is as the name suggests where a guy slaughters his family. In this case it was his mother, father, wife and two children. There have been quite a number of such cases before, such as that of Ronald Gene Simmons who in 1987 murdered all 14 of his large family (including four grandchildren). That was in Arkansas. Compared to that guy, and trying not to be too crass, but five victims doesn’t sound like it warrants two books, three movies and a couple of tv episodes, which this Jean-Claude Romand case has inspired. So what’s the story here?
This Jean-Claude Romand was just an ordinary medical school student up until the point where he didn’t take his second year exams, he just stayed in bed. And lied to his parents. That was the beginning.
In year two and three he carried on being a student even though he wasn’t one. He attended classes, used the university library…had the same textbooks and photocopied lectures as the other students…he spent as much time and energy pretending to become a doctor as he would have to become one in reality.
(Numerous judges have said similar things to prisoners in the dock before passing sentence.)
He came back home pretending to have graduated. The family lived in France but only a couple of miles from Geneva, and he then set up the next big phase in this world of lies by pretending to get a job at the HQ of the World Health Organisation in Geneva. Over the years this job became a real globe-trotting bigwig-meeting hifalutin affair but nobody ever called him at his non-existent office, for 18 years. Not his parents, not his wife. He set up an answering service and they had to call that.
He lived a nice life for 18 years. You’re going to ask well, if he didn’t have a job at all, where did the money come from. And this was the magical part of the story. By innuendo and suggestion, he spun around himself the aura of a man who has some great contacts in a very top Swiss bank – like a top WHO research consultant might - & so if you’re looking for some safe investments that’ll get you a much better return than anything mere citizens could find (how does 18% sound?) he was the guy. So his wife, his wife’s parents, his own parents and his own best friend all regularly supplied him with large amounts of francs to “invest”, and all without any bank statements or interest agreements involved. They just handed over wads of dough to their fine upstanding friendly neighbourhood man of the world.
So you can see how this thing panned out. The thin ice he was standing on came to the point where it was about to melt, so he decided to murder his family before his life of shame was exposed. For some men, fortunately a very small number, it’s better that their family all die before they find out their son/husband/father was a heartless fraud.
When everyone was dead he made a very half-hearted attempt at suicide. The firemen rescued him out of the burning house and after a couple of years they had a big trial and put him inside for life. By that time he had found religion and was a born again Christian, and everyone was so happy for him, his troubles were over and he had finally found peace in the bosom of Jesus.
I’m glad to say that our author Emmanuel Carrere doesn’t buy that sickly bullshit.
Jean-Claude Romand is still alive in his French jail. His wife and little children and his parents are still dead....more
I keep thinking that you can draw a line from Sylvia Plath to Andrea Dworkin to Valerie Solanas to Aileen Wuornos.
Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise wI keep thinking that you can draw a line from Sylvia Plath to Andrea Dworkin to Valerie Solanas to Aileen Wuornos.
Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
- Sylvia Plath
We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent -- see, he's jealous, he cares -- a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure.
- Andrea Dworkin
They put one man on the moon. Why not all of them?
- Valerie Solanas
Sure, I killed these seven guys, but they deserved it…when I think about what I’ve done sometimes I get upset. I killed so many guys, like I feel guilty, you know? And at other times I’m happy, I feel good. Like a hero. Cause I’ve done some good. I’m a killer of rapists.
- Aileen Wuornos
FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER? YES
For sure there have been dozens of women in past centuries who have killed impressive numbers of human beings. To name but two :
Nannie Doss – poisoned four husbands, two children, her sister, her mother, two grandsons, and a mother-in-law in the 40s and 50s – so Nannie was what they call a Black Widow.
Jane Toppan - 12 confirmed, 31 confessed, more than 100 suspected – she was a nurse who poisoned patients, friends, acquaintances in the 1890s – so Jane was what they call an Angel of Death.
There are big obvious differences between this poisoning thing and what male serial killers do. When we say Aileen Wuornos is the first female serial killer we mean she didn’t use poison, she did not know her victims, she used a gun and she shot them full of holes, one at a time. (Since Aileen very few have followed in her footsteps, which for Valerie Solanas and any who believe in female equality might be a matter of regret.)
THOSE WHOM THE GODS WISH TO DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE MAD
Given that two of 1991’s blockbuster hit movies were The Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, as soon as the detectives in Florida figured out that one person had killed these seven guys and that person was a female, they knew that Hollywood would be on the phone the instant she was caught, and that’s what happened, as we know.
This caused a whole vale of tears for the detectives involved.
ONLY IN AMERICA
When the case had hit the press and Aileen was becoming famous, up popped a lady named Mrs Arlene Pralle, “a twinkly-eyed forty-four-year old born-again Christian". She wrote a letter : “You’re going to think I’m crazy but Jesus told me to write to you”. No, Aileen didn’t think she was crazy at all. They became instantly ascloseasthis and within weeks Arlene (44) had legally adopted Aileen (34) and was now her Mom.
A CROWD OF SOUR TEETH
At various times our author Michael Reynolds lapses into tough-guy detective thrillerese:
Her lips curled up to show a crowd of sour teeth.
Trailer parks crawling with oily-backed palmetto bugs the size of mice and old geezers running out their string on union pensions
There was nothing but fire. Fires burning way down inside and getting bigger. He needed to get up, was up. On his knees. Then up on his feet. But no. He couldn’t. He was choking. His throat was full.
A howling catastrophe of alcohol, drugs, fire, and craziness was coming down before this Wednesday night was over.
Dramatic stuff! And I love the way he introduces his characters:
A solid light heavyweight with a bulldog jaw somewhat softened by a set of aviator-style glasses
She was a roly-poly redhead with a burgundy Suzuki motorbike and no restraints
Detective Jimmy Pinner, a tall rail-thin country fellow with sad eyes
Mrs Vera Ivkolivich, a thin birdlike Yugoslavian with large liquid eyes
Judge Uriel “Bunky” Blount, a rotund, well-respected jurist with lavish jug ears, bloodhound jowls, and a florid rope of flesh bulging over his blue knit collar, topped by a rigorously maintained flattop
DATES
Aileen born in 1954 to a 15 year old mother and a father who later turned out to be a violent paedophile who died in prison in 1969 as a result of suicide or at the hands of fellow inmates, no one cared either way.
1955 – Aileen given up by her mother & raised by grandparents
1968 – aged 14 Aileen gets pregnant. Baby given up for adoption.
1969-1989 Trouble every day. Aileen is a full time grifter, part time highway hooker, busted numerous times for assault, destruction of property, nothing too major, until the two and a half stretch for armed robbery.
1989-90 The seven murders
1991 Arrested. Media circus.
1992 Guilty verdicts, death sentence
Documentary : Aileen Wuornos : The Selling of a Serial Killer
1992-2002 On death row
2002 Executed at age 46
2003 movie Monster. Charlize Theron gets an Oscar for playing Aileen Documentary Aileen : Life and Death of a Serial Killer (winner of the Amnesty International Award)
2021 Movie Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman – a prequel to Monster
Everything in the world is ours – the homes, the cars, the credit cards. People only think these things are theirs.
- Susan Atkins
*
This is a very fasciEverything in the world is ours – the homes, the cars, the credit cards. People only think these things are theirs.
- Susan Atkins
*
This is a very fascinating but often dubious 1980 book about five of the six main Manson women. The concept here is that these women challenge the lazy idea that women are innately less violent than men. And it’s true, whenever women are involved with murder, the public (me included) want to believe that it was the man who made them do it. Women’s dark side has been denied, airbrushed out. Take the examples of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers, and Fred and Rose West, killers of at least 12 women, and Paul Barnardo and Karla Homolka, also serial killers. When they are arrested the defence is always that the woman was acting under orders, they were terrified of their partner, they were a horrified onlooker only, and so on. And let it be said, that may well be true.
Quite rightly the author mentions the female participants in such violent political gangs as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Baader-Meinhoff group. Clara Livsey says that women should not be denied their capacity to be detestable murderers. But she didn’t start off with this idea. “How difficult it was for me to accept that these women committed murder of their own free will” she says. Her ideas coalesced as she went along and eventually the book explains that in her view the Manson women were not in any sense victims, they chose to do these things. These things being the murder of eight people including one unborn child over two days in August 1969, plus another two less famous murders during that summer.
PALPABLE CONTEMPT
Dr Livsey interviewed Manson and most of these women for this book. And after a lot of talk and thought and research, it is quite clear she has nothing but contempt for these people. You don’t often find such harsh sentiments expressed by the academic author of a psychological investigation. Here she is describing the main message the women were promoting during her interviews, the cause that they claimed all their actions were in support of :
Their alleged concern for the environment, their tired verbosity on behalf of pure air and clean water never materialized into any constructive action; it was empty…
They were takers with an infantile sense of omnipotence and the belief that it was their right to avail themselves of anything they wished to have, a kind of magic thinking appropriate in the very young child…
Their empty language, their banal “truths” masquerading as wisdom, their ignorance wrapped up in their meaningless philosophizing…
Here’s a summary of the main characters in this gruesome drama.
SUSAN ATKINS
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She was convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California. She was later also found guilty of the murder of Gary Hinman in July 1969.
Consistently denied parole and died of cancer in prison 24 September 2009 aged 61
By the way she wrote a book
[image]
LYNETTE FROMME
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not charged in relation to the Tate-La Bianca murders. On 5 September 1975 she tried to assassinate Gerald Ford
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I must say that I enjoyed Dr Livsey’s book greatly but she does have – inevitably – the psychiatrist’s tendency to fall into what is to me dreadful psychobabble. Here she is on Lynette Fromme’s famous failure:
Her attempt to assassinate President Ford symbolically represents her wish to do away with the “bad” and powerful father who she felt rendered her powerless, while keeping alive the illusion of the “good” father, Manson, who eventually, in her fantasies, will be powerful again and put her back in the position of child-queen that she had as a child.
Of course Dr Livsey does not think that is psychobabble! She thinks that is some solid analysis. You may too!
Lynette was sentenced to life 19 November 1975; released August 2009, aged 61 Still alive, aged 72.
By the way she wrote a book
[image]
SANDRA GOOD
[image]
Not charged in relation to the murders, but found guilty in March 1976 for “conspiracy to send threatening letters through the mail". Got a 15 year sentence; paroled in December 1985 aged 41 Still alive, aged 77.
PATRICIA KRENWINKEL
[image]
She was convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California
Consistently denied parole, still in prison aged 73
LESLIE VAN HOUTEN
[image]
convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California. That was declared a mistrial and she was re-tried TWICE. It’s a complicated story. Eventually she got life.
Consistently denied parole, still in prison aged 72
AND FINALLY
I was looking through some files the other week and found a letter from many years ago written (typed) to me by my old friend Nick Barks, who died four years ago. He included a long account of this book, which is what inspired me to get it and (finally) read it. Thanks Nick. I am so very sorry you aren’t around to see this review....more
**spoiler alert** This book presents eleven case histories* of psychologically disturbed violent offenders. Of course these are not real cases, becaus**spoiler alert** This book presents eleven case histories* of psychologically disturbed violent offenders. Of course these are not real cases, because there is such a thing as patient confidentiality. So what are they?
Drawing from many encounters and case studies over the years we have created composites; the eleven mosaic portraits presented here are clinically and psychologically accurate but won’t be found on Google.
For instance, we have the case of “Gabriel”. He is an immigrant from Eritrea who randomly stabbed a passer-by on a street. So “Gabriel” is a composite or mosaic drawn from different real offenders. We understand, then, that all of these details are true, such as his sad back story, but not all true about one particular individual. And the name must be true of one of them too, as Dr Adshead goes on about the significance of Gabriel’s name (“A name with meaning”).
But what about the very first of these composites, Tony the gay serial killer? There have been three such cases in the last 20 years in the UK, so if this chapter is really talking about a gay serial killer, it must be one of those guys. Or am I missing something? If I thought too much about this composite mosaic business, I got confused. So I tried to ignore that.
HARDCORE COMPASSION
The inmates in secure psychiatric hospitals have access to services the general public are denied, which means that the perpetrators of violence get therapy and their surviving victims don’t. Dr Adshead is aware of this, and thinks it very wrong, of course. But it is her job to treat these offenders. Back to Tony. According to this chapter he had strangled three men to death.
“Tony, I think you’re brave enough to look at something really difficult”…”I’m not brave”. I looked into his eyes. “You don’t think so? Well, I experience you as brave. It takes courage to think about past violence… you’ve shown real courage.”
And later
I gazed at him, this man who so wanted to talk and who felt things so deeply. I thought about how removed he was from the image I’d once had of the ruthless and unfeeling serial killer.
It’s possible that victim’s families will feel more than a little distressed should they happen to read this section. In another chapter she is dealing with Marcus who murdered his ex-girlfriend because she told him she was going to start dating other men.
I used the remainder of our session to explain our team’s set-up to Marcus. The goal was to work together to treat him for depression, aiming to reduce his suicide risk and get him back to prison
And later, also about Marcus
We had given him a chance to resolve his inner conflict by caring for him, allowing him to talk about his needs and his anger towards people who had failed him early in his life
This compassion for the perpetrators is probably entirely and absolutely correct but it really challenges the reader. You are perpetually thinking that there were never any teams of carers for the victims’ families.
SOME THINGS THAT GRATED
Dr A doesn’t indulge in too much therapy-speak (thank you for that Dr A!) but she is inclined to throw out general statements such as
In a psychiatric sense faiths are not delusions because they are based on reason and an awareness of doubt, as well as being culturally coherent, whereas delusions are rigid and culturally alien.
(“based on reason”?)
And she seems to approve of such borderline-useless statements as
Today’s statistics indicate that seven out of ten people in the UK are likely to experience PTSD in their lives
And
Intriguing research by American colleagues finds a correlation, particularly among men, between shame and higher rates of violence in times of increased social instability and wealth inequality.
(Oh you don’t say so? I wonder which times of relative social stability and wealth equality these researchers were using to make their comparisons.)
And also she has an off-putting tendency towards self-praise :
I was able to keep a neutral expression while still communicating interest and warmth with my body language, eye contact and careful listening and questions
NEVERTHELESS
Given all the above caveats and dubieties, there is no doubt these eleven “composite mosaic” account make compelling reading, even when, as happens, you are left with gaping questions that Dr A simply never addresses (why would a woman try to commit suicide by fire multiple times - why not try an overdose or another method?). Making an argument for the humanity of violent offenders is, I guess, a laudable enterprise. If you are thinking that while I was turning the pages I was feeling really very queasy the whole time you are quite right.
*THE ELEVEN CASE HISTORIES
Tony – murdered three men – wait, he thinks it might have been four Gabriel – random street assault with knife Kezia – murdered her care worker Marcus – murdered his ex-girlfriend Charlotte – part of a teenage group which killed a homeless man Zahra – attempted suicide multiple times by setting fire to her rooms Ian – sexually abused his two sons Lydia – female stalker Sharon – Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy Sam – murdered his father David – a GP with a nasty secret...more
Tony Parker turned the interview into an art form by finding extraordinary ordinary people and letting them talk. He edits out his questions. You neveTony Parker turned the interview into an art form by finding extraordinary ordinary people and letting them talk. He edits out his questions. You never heard people like these speak in their own voice at length before. Always they get filtered through the educated minds of the novelists or documentary makers, and they’re given to us in 15 second soundbites. Here they talk for ten pages at a time. Ordinary extraordinary lives.
This book is about twelve murderers, none of them in any way famous. I see there were hardly any manhunts involved, after their horrible act they either wandered around in a daze or gave themselves up. This was a reread. This time I made notes on all twelve but I’m only including five for this review. Three of the others were child killers and I don’t think you’d want to read those details.
NOTES ON FIVE OF THE TWELVE
DANNY
Aged 21 when interviewed. He had already spent 7 years in prison. He was 14, drunk, and went to see his grandfather. His parents wouldn’t give him any more pocket money. There was a big row when the old man also refused any money and he stabbed his grandfather in the neck with a pair of scissors that happened to be on the table between them.
I liked him, he was a nice man. What happened was mostly an accident.
EDGAR
aged 78. The story this guy tells is the fishiest in the book. He thinks the murder was actually a terrible accident. If so, police and judge and jury perpetrated a dreadful injustice. He wasn’t getting along with his wife. They went for a drive in his work van. It had a sliding door. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. He drove up a steep country road. At the side of the road was a deep ravine. The door flew open and the wife shot out and died. He said he didn’t push her. The more he describes his life since being released on license the more he sounds like a violent man. He says “there were one or two little scrapes or bits of bother”.
CAROL
aged 41. Ten years in prison so far.
No more men for me, I’ve had enough of men.
Adopted as a baby, then the adoptive mother died and the father remarried. She hated the new wife and the feeling was mutual. She was a wild child, always truanting and finally sent to live in a children’s home. Had sex first at age 11. Had a baby at 17, gave her up. Drifted from man to man, not quite a prostitute. But she ended up on a boat having been picked up by a drunk Dutch sailor. There was an argument. He went off to his cabin and fell asleep. She found a knife and stabbed him six times.
I don’t even know who he was.
Thinking about her lifestyle at the time she said
I suppose I could easily have ended up being the one who was killed.
That is so true.
ANDY
aged 45.
I was first put in an institution when I was 11. That’s 15 years I’ve had in the outside world, and 20 inside.
My father carried a knife, my brothers carried knives, everyone. You wore a shirt and trousers and shoes and a knife.
He was walking the streets late one night and a guy walked past him and muttered something Andy took to be a proposition.
I pulled out my knife and I turned around and I stabbed him…I was trying to hurt him, give him something to remember me by…I don’t know how many times I stabbed him but it was quite a few.
In prison some guys will become religious and some will become addicts if they weren’t before and some guys will get educated for the first time.
I studied English literature, psychology and sociology and maths. I read E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Jung, people like that. I’d stay up all night reading.
BETSY
aged 60. Longest serving female life prisoner up to that point (1990). She spent 30 years inside.
Tony Parker makes a rare personal comment :
Talking to her was as difficult as trying to interview a fully turned on bathtap.
She got TB as a child and was in sanatoriums for years She met a woman named Janet there who was 6 years older than her and fell in love. Janet loved her too but she was married.
I should describe what we had as a close lesbian relationship but without sex.
When they were both released from the sanatorium Janet moved in with Betsy’s family and everything was nice until Janet decide to visit her husband. Betsy got frantically jealous, stormed over to her house and after a big row stabbed her once with a knife she’d brought along for that purpose.
After that her TB returned, so that at her trial she was brought in on a stretcher. She was found guilty and given the death sentence (which was abolished in the early 60s). This was later commuted to life due to her poor health. I thought that was strange – they give her a death sentence but because it looks like she’s going to die anyway they think it's not appropriate. Ridiculous. Anyway, Betsy did nothing but what they call “hard time” for the next 30 years, she couldn’t stop rowing with people and threatening to kill them.
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This is a classic true crime book, highly recommended....more
This plainly written heartfelt true crime book focuses on the four victims, which is refreshing, of course, and very laudable, yes, but uncomfortably This plainly written heartfelt true crime book focuses on the four victims, which is refreshing, of course, and very laudable, yes, but uncomfortably serves to remind us nasty readers that we’re much more interested in the criminal who commits the vile acts than the poor ordinary blighters that stumbled into his grisly purview. We probably really shouldn't be, but we are.
There were four distinctive murders of men, all of them dismembered post-mortem, drained of blood, bagged, double-bagged and dumped in rural trash bins. The cracking of the case had to wait some years for forensic science to develop a much better technique for lifting prints off the bags. Or to be more accurate, it had to wait for one of the cops working these cases to stumble over the information that a much better technique for lifting prints off plastic bags had been available for some years already.
Yes, this book exposes the often chaotic nature of policing in the USA. There was no national fingerprint database, for instance. So investigators had to laboriously send their prints, when they finally got them, to ALL FIFTY state crime laboratories, and wait for the results. Can you imagine!
Plus, the initial fingerprinting of individuals left quite a lot to be desired: “The patrolman or the sheriff often didn’t have the expertise and didn’t know how to take fingerprints” says Maine’s crime lab guy.
All too frequently, there was too much ink on the pad, and the print would be smeared, or there wasn’t enough ink, so the print lacked the necessary detail. As a consequence, many of the hundreds of thousands of ten-prints scanned …were functionally useless
Insert facepalm emoji here.
So anyway finally they find the murderer and there’s this casually dropped in on page 200 :
The investigators didn’t talk about it at the time, but they all believed he had killed dozens of men. In fact, they assumed he killed people whenever he went on vacation.
Well, the murderer is currently languishing in New Jersey State Pen, aged 70. The victims, however many there really were, are still dead.
This was a very solid account of a complicated case. Nothing spectacular, but a fine example of uncovering case that should not have been forgotten....more