Sarah Monette's Blog

PSA

My blog is now Technical Difficulties.

UBC: Roughead, Glengarry's Way

Glengarry's Way, and Other Studies by William Roughead

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am extremely fond of William Roughead, and my rating of this book--fair warning--reflects that. This is a collection of ten essays on Scottish crime and Scottish trials, courts, lawyers, and judges, focusing mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. None of them are crimes or trials you will ever have heard of, unless you are a devotee of Sir Walter Scott, and I read purely for the pleasure of Roughead's voice and personality--and incidentally a great deal of information about Edinburgh and the history of the Scottish legal system, neither of which I know anything about.

If you like this sort of thing, as Abraham Lincoln said, this is the sort of thing you'll like.



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UBC: Jesse, Murder & its motives

Murder & its motives by F. Tennyson Jesse

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is extremely dated, with its talk of "moral imbeciles" and its somewhat naive belief that the motives for murder can be neatly separated in 6 categories (gain, revenge, elimination, jealousy, lust for killing, and conviction--she does admit there can be overlap). Jesse is a clear precursor of modern profilers, attempting to figure out what kind of person commits murder and what motivates them, even if her attempts seem clumsy now. And she provides excellent true crime writing. She writes clear and vivid narratives of the crimes of her subjects: William Palmer; Constance Kent; a dreadful pair of siblings, Aime and Aimee de Querangal; Mary Eleanor Pearcy; Thomas Neill Cream; and Felice Orsini, who tried and failed to assassinate Napoleon III. She conveys the horror of murder better than most of the true crime writers I've read, particularly in the chapter on Mrs. Pearcy.



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UBC: Lefebure, Murder on the Home Front

Murder on the Home Front: A True Story of Morgues, Murderers, and Mysteries During the London Blitz by Molly Lefebure

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Molly Lefebure was a remarkable woman. I just wish she'd let it show.

I'm giving Murder on the Home Front four stars for its value as a primary source about living in London during World War II. Lefebure captures vividly what it felt like to go through the Blitz, and about the sheer hell of carrying on with daily life in a city that was being destroyed around your ears. She's an excellent, engaging writer with occasional startlingly poetic turns of phrase.

But her persona. Oh dear god I wanted to drown her in a bucket. She is chipper and cozy, and she presents herself as a person with barely two thoughts to scrape together in her head, which a glance at her biography shows is manifestly untrue. And while she's being chipper and cozy in the foreground, her job, as secretary to Keith Simpson, would be fascinating if she'd let us see it.

She is not a true crime writer. She doesn't have the knack (and there is definitely a knack to it), and her focus is always just slightly off-center--or, conversely, my focus is slightly off-center. Despite the fabulous opening line: The murdered baby had been found in a small suitcase.: this is much more about living in London during World War II and happening to have an unusual job, replete with "characters" to provide anecdotes, than it is about, say, the practice of forensic pathology between 1941 and 1946. It is very decidedly a memoir.

So, fascinating book, just not quite in the way I wanted it to be.



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UBC: Badal, In the Wake of the Butcher

In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders by James Jessen Badal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[There is apparently a revised and updated edition of this book, which I will be keeping an eye out for.]

This was a much better book than Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer. Badal is a good writer, he's done extensive primary research, and he's not trying to argue an indefensible thesis. He lays the baffling story of the Cleveland Torso Murders (as baffling in their way as The Thames Torso Murders) out clearly and with careful attention both to maintaining narrative and to exploring the sheer weirdness both of the murders and of the (exonerated) suspects.

Ironically, because Badal has a better command of his material, he does a better job of smoothing out the homophobia and racism that Nickel's more awkward book left on display. (The classism is still there. There's nothing you can do about the classism in this story.) And Badal's hero in this book is very clearly Peter Merylo, the Cleveland detective who became obsessed with the Butcher, but who was never able to catch him (and not coincidentally, whose daughter gave Badal open access to the previously untapped wealth of primary material of her father's papers). So Badal is pro-Cleveland police (as opposed to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office, which behaved disgracefully and which Badal ignores as much as possible). Badal does not talk about racism. And it's telling that his only apparent interest in questions of sexual identity and homophobia is to defend Edward Andrassy from the widespread accusations of being homosexual--instead of taking the stance I would have preferred to see, of pointing out that there's nothing wrong with non-heterosexual preferences, and what does it say about the detectives, the press, and the researchers that they treat it as "deviancy"?

And, to finish out my round of caveats, Badal is very distinctly an apologist for Eliot Ness, always looking for the best interpretation of his actions. He says about the disastrous mistake of the shantytown raid in August 1938:

Whether his actions in the final weeks of August were the knee jerk responses of a man desperately in need of results or the appropriate, well-planned measures of an accomplished professional seems to be a matter of personal interpretation, not to say prejudice. In either case, there remains something both wonderfully heroic and perhaps sadly anachronistic in the image of the onetime G-man standing resolutely in Kingsbury Run, ax handle in hand, overseeing his men on their methodical march of destruction through the shantytown.
(150)

. . . "wonderfully heroic"? In what alternate universe is there anything even remotely heroic about this ill-thought-out piece of security theater? In his desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something (even though in cold reality there was nothing he or anyone else could do), Ness chose this midnight raid, persecuting the destitute, homeless, and innocent men living in Kingsbury Run. That's not heroic. And it is totally Eliot Ness' just desserts that it backfired spectacularly, creating a PR debacle that his career never recovered from.

So Badal has his biases. As social history of Cleveland during the Kingsbury Run murders, this is not great. But as true crime, in terms of talking about the murders and the investigation--these poor detectives who have no conceptual framework for the Butcher and only the most primitive forensic science to help them, doing the best they can with the methodology they have--it is very good. He is very careful in talking about the victims, only two or maybe three of whom were ever identified, out of twelve or possibly thirteen--and that's the conservative estimate--not just lumping them together as unidentified transients, but remembering that each of them was a human being. And I feel like I came away from this book with a stronger sense of both the murders and the men who investigated them.

So, flawed but well worth reading.



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UBC: Wambaugh, Fire Lover

Fire Lover: A True Story by Joseph Wambaugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlike most post-WWII American true crime writers, Joseph Wambaugh has a prose style. It's a breeze, Chandleresque, tough-guy style: he uses slang, obscenities, metaphors for crying out loud. As an example, here's a paragraph about Ted Bundy:

All death-penalty lawyers remembered the time when America's most notorious violent serial offender, Ted Bundy, had wanted to do some life-and-death trading. After he'd had such a great time representing himself at his trial, giving interviews and fielding marriage proposals, it all had stopped. When he was just days away from his appointment with the Florida electric chair, he offered to locate his victims' bodies if the governor of Florida would commute his death sentence to life without parole. But the authorities told him, in effect, Too late, Ted. You got a date with Ol' Sparky, and Satan is waiting for his number-one draft pick.
(259-60)

So Wambaugh is an unfailingly entertaining writer, and he does a good job of conveying the black humor of law enforcement (not surprisingly, since he was a detective sergeant for the LAPD). He's maybe the only writer I've encountered who can show that humor well enough for a reader to share it. (Rule tries, occasionally, but it always falls flat and awkward.) And he's very good at tracking what he calls the balkanization of American law enforcement--the way that neighboring jurisdictions see themselves as being in competition rather than cooperation and sneer at each other like rival high schools. And he's absolutely willing to wade in and call people out on their mistakes and bad judgment. His heroes in this book are two firefighter/arson investigators: Marvin Casey, who had this serial arson case solved in 1987, four years and scores, if not hundreds, of fires before John Orr was finally arrested in 1991, but couldn't get anyone to listen to him because he was accusing an arson investigator (and because the fingerprint examiner made an indefensible blunder), and Steve Patterson who insisted in the face of cynical, condescending derision from cops that a cold case victim deserved to have them expend their precious time trying to solve her murder.

I appreciate Wambaugh's humor and his chutzpah. But everything has the defects of its virtues, and Wambaugh can get grating. I found this particularly true during the lengthy coverage of Orr's lengthy trials (more than 200 pages, so basically half the book) as Wambaugh caromed from patronizing the jury(/ies) to making catty comments about the prosecutors to taking potshots at the defense lawyers (and always just a little contemptuous of John Orr--and on that I'm in agreement with him). He is capable of respect for his subjects, but he doles it out sparingly: the fingerprint expert who cowboys up and admits his egregious mistake under oath in open court, and the people who testified in the penalty phase of John Orr's trial for murder about the loss of their loved ones in the Ole's Home Center fire in 1984 (that's the fire I've tagged this book with, because it is--astonishingly--the only time John Orr's fires actually succeeded in killing anyone).

John Orr is considered one of the worst--if not the worst (the other contender being Thomas Sweatt)--serial arsonists of the twentieth century. One of the ATF agents who investigated him thinks that Orr set more than 2,000 fires between 1984 and 1991. Orr used his training in arson investigation to commit arson, and he used his credentials as a deeply respected arson investigator to cover for his crimes. John Orr, first on the scene? Well, that's just how dedicated he is to his job. His novel/memoir, Points of Origin (Orr claims it's fact-based fiction; prosecutors claim it's a very thinly veiled record of his crimes) and his attempts to publish it make it clear just how willing Orr was to trade on his arson to get what he wanted. I'm with Joseph Wambaugh; this man deserves nothing but contempt. The more you point to his dedication as an arson investigator and the number of cases his solved and the number of investigators he trained, the worse his crimes look. As usual I'm conflicted about the death penalty, but I'm certainly glad that Orr got life without parole. He is not a person who either deserves or can be trusted with freedom.



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UBC: Breo & Martin, The Crime of the Century

The Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murders That Shocked a Nation by Dennis L. Breo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has one major flaw, and I'm going to talk about it right up front. It is co-written by a journalist and the lead prosecutor at Richard Speck's trial. The prosecutor is obviously a main character in the book, and they talk about him always in the third person and in a weirdly adulatory way, e.g.: "Although many casual observers found Martin to be cool and remote, he was underneath a very caring, emotional, warm man" (379). It's jarring and uncomfortable, and it makes me cringe. The book also exhibits a rather simplistic pro-cop, anti-media stance, and as I said in my review of The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition, you knew it was a snake. Richard Speck was a sociopath. Don't be surprised when he behaves like one.

(I admit this is hard to do. Sexually sadistic sociopaths like Brady and Speck by their nature are abhorrent to non-sociopaths, and part of us is always going to be surprised and shocked by their crimes. We use emotionally charged words like "vile" and "horrific" and "evil" and all those things are accurate in our moral system, and I don't want for a moment to imply that that judgment is wrong. But I think it's also important to remember, although not to condone, that to sociopaths our moral system is meaningless. There is nothing inside them that tells them not to do evil. So seriously. It's a snake. Don't be surprised when it bites you.)

Aside from that, this is an excellent book, a blow by blow account of the incredibly complicated process of prosecuting Richard Speck. I learned a great deal about how lawyers approach criminal trials, the octopus-like contingency planning that has to act as flying buttresses to every move they make in court. (That metaphor got away from me a little bit. Sorry.) Breo and Martin do an excellent job of contextualizing what Speck did on July 14 with the rest of what was going on in America in 1966 (race riots and the Vietnam War and Charles Whitman) and also paint a vivid picture of Chicago itself. Not surprisingly for a man with Martin's particular talents, the narrative is well-organized and coherent--or as coherent as a narrative of an inherently chaotic enterprise (remember the octopus) can be.

Not being a sociopath, I do consider Richard Speck vile. He contributed nothing to the world except the rape-murder of eight young women in one night. And he couldn't even do that competently, because he forgot about the ninth woman and left her alive to testify against him. This book balances the horror of his crime against the genuinely heroic efforts of the police and Cook County prosecutors and the Public Defender's office to catch Speck, keep him safe from vigilante justice, respect all of his civil rights, give him a fair trial (oh the desperate, agonizing scrupulousness as the prosecutors try to block every possible grounds for an appeal), and prevent him from ever harming anyone else. Even though he escaped the death penalty (because the system, grinding slow, couldn't get him executed before the Supreme Court decision in 1971), he died of a heart attack in 1991 before a parole board got stupid enough to let him out. It's not, as Martin said after Speck's conviction, a victory that gives us any cause to rejoice or celebrate, but the officers of the law and the court did their duty, and Speck was not left free to continue raping and murdering the innocent. Justice is cold comfort.




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UBC: Frank, The Boston Strangler

The Boston Strangler by Gerold Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The last sentence of this book is a lie:

But no matter what direction is taken by the law and those who act in its behalf--determined to protect the rights of society, yet equally determined to protect the rights of the individual--the story of the Boston Stranglings has ended.

Even when he wrote it in 1966, Frank must have known it was a lie. There were too many loose ends, too many contradictions. It wasn't until 2013 that forensic evidence was able to conclusively prove Albert DeSalvo killed any of the thirteen women whose murders he confessed to. Fifty years, and the "story of the Boston Stranglings" arguably still isn't over.

The essential problem with Albert DeSalvo and what I'm going to call the Single Strangler Theory is that the 13 murders are all over the map. Young women, old women, one African-American woman. One woman brutally stabbed. One woman beaten to death. The victimology doesn't match, the M.O. doesn't match. It actually makes more sense, logically, to say that there were several people (some of them must have been men, because of seminal fluid left at the crime scenes, but not all of them), all imitating the signature of the first killer. Except then you have to explain away DeSalvo's knowledge of details only the killer could know for all thirteen murders.

Frank doesn't help. He reports everything, but he doesn't provide any kind of critical rubric. He obviously believes that DeSalvo was the Single Strangler, hence that last lying sentence, but he doesn't ever come out and provide a theory or an explanation--which also means that it's impossible to tell where his reporting may or may not be biased by his own beliefs.

And it's a pity, because there is a Single Strangler Theory that you can use to make at least some sense of Albert DeSalvo, and it's right there in the data Frank dumps on the reader. DeSalvo as a criminal was all over the map. He was grotesquely oversexed to the point of satyriasis. (He blamed his wife (while passive-aggressively insisting he didn't blame her) for withholding sex, which (obviously!) caused him to go out and strangle old ladies.). But his rap sheet, leaving the murders aside entirely, included child molestation, breaking and entering, petty theft, scams (he was known as the Measuring Man because he'd use a line about a modeling career to get Boston and Cambridge-area coeds to let him "take measurements"), rape. He didn't have an M.O. And not unlike Gary Ridgway, who killed white women, black women, and Native American women indiscriminately because his only criterion was that the woman would get in the car with him, DeSalvo murdered completely at random. His only criterion was that the woman was home alone, and she let him in.

DeSalvo doesn't fit the FBI's profile of a serial killer. You can't go down the line of boxes and tick them off. He was an utterly disorganized killer, who eluded capture for two years because (1) pure dumb luck and (2) he was known to the police as a chronic offender, but not the kind of cruel, violent person they thought they were looking for. So, no, his crimes don't make sense in the way that other serial killers' do, where you can see a pattern, a tiny psychodrama the killer acts out every time. But their very lack of sense makes sense in the context of DeSalvo's life and verified criminal career. And I think it's important to be open to the possibility that the FBI's profile might not fit all serial killers. (In kind of the same way that Aristotle's theory of tragedy really only fits Oedipus Rex.) Yes, psychopaths share certain traits, and yes, many serial killers are psychopaths. But then look at Gary Ridgway and the way that two psychopathic serial killers, both of whom, by their nature, had to assume that all serial killers were like them, were completely wrong about him.

This is a pretty good book, if you allow for the fact that it was written in 1966 and is very much a child of its times: the casual misogyny that makes it perfectly okay to refer to two professional journalists in their their thirties as "the girls"; the equally casual, stunningly bigoted homophobia that assumes all "sexual deviates" (gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, pedophiles, etc.) are equally capable of all sex-related crimes. Frank is a good writer; his prose is engaging and clear. But that blatant lie right at the end makes me unwilling to trust him to be telling the truth--even though I think Albert DeSalvo really might be the Boston Strangler.





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UBC: Brady, The Gates of Janus

The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition by Ian Brady

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm giving this book five stars as a primary source. Because whatever you think about Brady and Brady's motives in writing the book, and how much of what he says is lies, Brady is giving the reader a Boschian picture of the inside of a serial killer's head. He tells you openly that serial killers lie. He talks about why they lie, and so when you catch Brady lying, you know what's going on.

It's a strange experience, full of cognitive dissonance. Brady is clearly very intelligent (clearly, like several of the other serial killers he discusses, just not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is), very rational. He's an excellent writer. He lays out the information he has about his subjects crisply, concisely, and with an eye for tiny but vital details.

And he's a psychopath.

(He differentiates clearly between psychopaths and psychotics and then tells you that he was diagnosed psychotic. But he's given you the information you need to see, while he may have what he calls secondary affective symptoms of psychosis, he's a psychopath.)

If this were not a primary source, I would give it three or four stars, because Brady spends way too much time discoursing on his theory of "moral relativism," a truckload of Nietzschean bullshit that follows naturally from the inherent built-in belief of the psychopath that whatever he wants to do is right. (Brady can recognize, and even cogently analyze, the fallacy in others, but he can't see it in himself.) It's both infuriating and boring--and intensely valuable if you genuinely want to understand how psychopaths think. The contempt for everyone around him (especially police and prison officials), the contempt for his audience that oozes out of everything he says (it clearly never occurs to him that the person reading this book might actually be as intelligent and "self-aware" as he is--"self-aware" is in quotes because Brady's self-awareness is a remarkably close mirror of the "self-awareness" of his fellow psychopaths, Eric Harris and Ted Bundy), the absolute certainty that he shouldn't have to obey the laws, which he bolsters with a great deal of nonsense about the corruption of society--not that his critique is wrong, power does corrupt and the people who gain power are very likely to be just as psychopathic as Brady and his criminal brethren (*cough*topical relevance*cough*), but he takes from that it's therefore morally better to be a criminal, which is what he means by "moral relativism." This is a psychopath who has had a lot of time to think about his belief system, to elaborate and defend it, and I'm sure that what he wanted most from writing this book was a captive audience for his Hitlerian rant. Boring and infuriating, but at the same time you can see the way that his thinking always makes that same twist back into the center of the maze rather than finding its way out. Extremely intelligent, perfectly rational (he's a psychopath, not a psychotic), and absolutely condemned, like the Minotaur, to live in the labyrinth he's built for himself.

(I find it hilarious that in his afterword to the second edition, Colin Wilson is shocked to discover that he's been corresponding for ten years with a psychopath: "I knew that Brady was a sex killer, and that his chosen victims were children. What I failed to grasp is that this involved an incredibly high degree of self-centeredness" (316). Colin Wilson's pontificating (particularly about serial killers as "dominant males") annoys me profoundly, so I admit to a certain degree of schadenfreude in watching him falling face-first into the trap that he himself built. What Wilson describes of his correspondence with Brady reminds me very strongly of Ted Bundy's correspondence with Ann Rule. Brady and Bundy maintain the same supercilious patronizing attitude until something trips one of their triggers, and then they go off in prima donna hissy fits. Intelligent psychopaths conforming to the pattern that's worn into their mental circuits. You knew it was a snake, Mr. Wilson. Why are you surprised that it bit you?)

Brady discusses Henry Lee Lucas (with utter contempt for both Lucas, whom he considers a miserable excuse for a serial killer and for all the law enforcement officers who bought the line of goods Lucas was selling); John Wayne Gacy; Graham Young; Dean Corll; Peter Sutcliffe; Richard Ramirez; the Cleveland Torso Murderer (whom Brady knows as "the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," which is a much better name); Ted Bundy; the Green River Killer; Carl Panzram; and Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. He is an excellent analyst, as long as you remember to compensate for the psychopathic lens, and as I said above, an excellent writer, and most of those chapters are well worth reading on their own merits. (Brady admires Panzram too much, and that chapter is mostly adulation.) As Robert Keppel learned with Ted Bundy (see The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer), you have to watch for where Brady, in talking about other serial killers, is actually talking about himself. Both Bundy and Brady are trying to explain how hard it is for serial killers to talk about their crimes, both because of shame (Guilt? No. Shame? Yes.) and because of what Brady calls the hidden agenda, the true reason for the murders, the den at the center of the labyrinth where the Minotaur lives. Brady says that serial killers will do anything to protect this last hidden mystery, and you have to remember that he always includes himself in that.

I find it really interesting that both Brady and Bundy seemed unable to conceptualize of a serial killer like Gary Ridgway. Brady argues for two killers using the Green River site, but he's arguing from his recognition of the killings as a psychopath's crimes, and he, like Bundy, can't not put himself in that equation. He can't imagine a psychopath as stunningly banal as Gary Ridgway, someone who was perfectly happy being mediocre in every way except this one thing. It's another place where the value of this book as a primary source shines through.

In his afterword, which I recommend skipping entirely, Peter Sotos makes much of his loathing for Brady, citing specifically Brady's refusal to reveal the location of Keith Bennett's body. Leaving aside the fact that Brady may genuinely be unable to find the grave, this is something that he shares with Bundy and Ridgway, the idea that the body, hidden, is the significator of that hidden mystery at the center of the serial killer's dark and fundamentally empty life, that thing that he will die rather than articulate. No connection to the victim as a living human being (Rule comments on that as a commonality between Bundy and Ridgway, that they both attached far more strongly to inanimate objects than to people), but the corpse and the corpse's hiding place are awash in meaning and power. It's not necessarily cruelty that keeps Brady silent (although cruelty is certainly, to him, a beneficial side effect); it's that last shred of the mystery, that last thing that he knows and no one else in the world does.



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UBC: Springer, Body Hunter

Body Hunter by Patricia Springer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In fairness to Patricia Springer, she has a very difficult task in this book. Any book about a serial killer has to find a way to organize what is inherently a very complicated story, especially if, as in this case, the killer crosses jurisdictional lines.

Between 1984 and 1986, Faryion Wardrip murdered five women, Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs, Debra Taylor, Ellen Blau, and Tina Kimbrew. After Kimbrew's murder he turned himself in--but did not confess to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, Taylor, and Blau. He was sentenced to 35 years, of which he served 11 before being released on parole. He got a job, remarried, was extremely active in his church. And two years later, cold case investigators looking at the Sims and Gibbs murders were able to get DNA, first to link the two crimes, and then to prove that Wardrip was the killer. He was arrested for the murder of Terry Sims in 1999. He confessed to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, and Blau--and then to the murder of Debra Tayor, for which no one had even considered him a suspect. He pled guilty at his trial and was sentenced to death in 1999, a sentence which still has not been carried out because the case is bouncing around the courts like a pinball. (Wikipedia says: "In 2008, a federal magistrate recommended that the death penalty be overturned because Wardrip received ineffective defense in his trial. On June 14, 2011, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that ordered the State of Texas to either give Wardrip a new sentencing trial, or agree to giving him a life sentence. The case will be sent back to the U.S. District Court for reconsideration.)

Faryion Wardrip is a person who raises a lot of questions about serial killers, and the course of the investigations of his murders raise a lot of questions about law enforcement and our legal system. Barry Macha, who relentlessly prosecuted Wardrip, also relentlessly prosecuted Danny Laughlin, who was innocent. Law enforcement officers in Wichita Falls ignored information they received, including information from officers in other jurisdictions, because it didn't fit their theory. Ken Taylor was hounded by Fort Worth police--and his life was torn apart--because they locked onto the idea that the husband is the most likely suspect. But then in 1999 everything turns around, and you get excellent detective work and interdepartmental cooperation . . . and at Wardrip's trial, while Macha and his team are performing brilliantly, the public defender falls apart, and you're left with more questions about whether Wardrip really got an adequate defense. So there are a myriad of really interesting questions that can be explored through the lens of Faryion Wardrip's case.

Unfortunately, Springer doesn't explore any of them.

She shows that what Ann Rule makes look easy is actually extremely difficult. She's a clumsy writer, exhibiting many problems that anyone who's taught beginning fiction writers (or ever looked at the Turkey City Lexicon) will recognize immediately. As an example, the first paragraph of Chapter 16:

"John, this is Judy Floyd with Gene Screen. I was able to collect a saliva sample from the cup you sent me. I'll be able to make a comparison," the DNA expert told Little, indicating there had been enough of the salivary excretion to perform the test.
(161)

And seriously, that's one example. Her descriptions of the murders are blackly, unintentionally comic, and she explains DNA at least three times, each time badly. She seems to suggest that Wardrip has Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, but she never either (a) makes it clear that she understands the difference between that and OCD or (b) indicates that Wardrip has been formally diagnosed. She has my hobby horse bad habit of writing from the victim's point of view and because she does that, it's impossible to tell, when she's writing from Wardrip's point of view, whether she's making it up or whether it's actually based on her interviews with him. She gives extraneous information that I can't tell what I'm supposed to do with. Her research is sloppy and inadequate (she says in one place that Wardrip is his parents' oldest son, but in another that his younger brother Bryce was afraid of Faryion and "their older brother" Roy (emphasis added). She talks about a learning disability, but it's not clear whether that's something Wardrip told her that she's repeating or something that she actually got independent confirmation of. When there are discrepancies (e.g., between Wardrip's version of his childhood and his brother Bryce's version), she doesn't seem to have made any effort to figure out which story is more accurate, nor does she indicate which story she thinks readers ought to believe. Should we disbelieve Wardrip on principle because we have ample evidence that he is a pathological liar? Or should we understand that his lying was in part caused by his parents' failure to get him help for his intense depression as a child and teenager? Bryce is certainly not an unbiased witness, so when he says that nothing Faryion says about his childhood is true, should we believe that?

If any serial killer's career is an Inferno, then the reader is Dante, and the true-crime writer has to act as Virgil, providing guidance and a clear path through the horrors. Springer fails to give either.



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