Sarah Monette's Blog, page 2

UBC: Jones, Women Who Kill

Women Who Kill by Ann Jones

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I. The American legal system: grotesque and ludicrous double standard between white men and everybody else, with modifiers for class, race, gender, and whether or not you have connections (see Borden, comma, Lizzie). This is especially clear in (although by no means unique to) the definition of "self-defense," which assumes two able-bodied men of roughly the same size. Not a woman and a man who may be a foot or more taller than she is and outweigh her by a hundred pounds.

II. Most women who kill are women in long-term abusive relationships with men who will not let them leave, women who have called the police, who have gotten restraining orders, who have done what they're "supposed" to do. (And if battered women have another option, any other option, the evidence shows they will take it rather than resort to homicide.) These are women whose boyfriends or husbands have threatened to kill them and in some cases have actually tried it, above and beyond the usual repertoire of battering and intimidation. Sometimes the police are still on the scene, having allegedly resolved the situation, when the man attacks again and the woman shoots. The especially horrifying part is the extremely clear evidence that if these women do not kill, they will be killed. As Jones says more than once, the question isn't, why don't the women leave? The question is, why won't the men let them go?

III. Otherwise, most women who kill, kill for the same reasons that men of their class, race, and age-group kill. They're desperate, frustrated, angry . . . and they happen to have a loaded gun in their hands at the wrong time.

IV. But then there's the case of Velma Barfield, who died by lethal injection for poisoning a number of people, including her mother. And here's where the problems start.

Problem A, since I seem to be writing this review in outline form, is the death penalty. The death penalty is totally problematic and I don't have a good answer, because the actual answer is drastic and draconian reform of our entire legal system on every level. You can't reform the death penalty if you don't deal with prison overcrowding. You can't deal with prison overcrowding if you don't address the problems of sentencing that sends all those prisoners to already overcrowded prisons. And you can't address the problems of sentencing if you don't want to tear apart the process that decides which people get tried for which crimes and why some people tried for the same crimes get radically different outcomes, which means questions about arrests, questions about public defenders, questions about prosecutors who are more concerned about their win-loss record than upholding the law . . . I think the adversarial model on which our legal system is built is incredibly, ludicrously, tragically wrong. As an example, the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold refused to be interviewed, on the absolutely correct advice of their attorneys that they would make themselves liable to prosecution. That's wrong--and I'm not talking about the Harrises and the Klebolds. In any situation where a crime has occurred, the first obligation of the legal system should be to find out the truth. And when the legal system itself is preventing that from happening--and Columbine is not the only case where that happens--then the legal system desperately needs reform. In the same way, and while I'm standing on this soap box, defense attorneys are absolutely obligated to do the best they can for their clients, but when did we get that twisted around to mean that it's okay (as in, not illegal and/or grounds for disbarment) for a defense attorney to work to get an acquittal for a client he knows is guilty? Because they do it all the time. And we all know it.

"Win-loss" is a very different cognitive structure than "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and until we change that--which I don't see happening any time soon--legal or penal reform is going to be partial and only semi-successful at best. Probably not even that much.

And that's leaving aside the poison of privilege and the things people (mostly white, mostly men, but not exclusively) will do to keep the privilege they have, instead of understanding that it's poison. Privilege also works on a win-loss model, on the idea that if someone else wins privilege, you automatically lose yours. So you can't get anywhere until you can shift that paradigm to one of abundance, to the idea that there's enough to go around.

Problem B, in the meantime, is, as Jones very rightly says, the standards. Do we judge women by the same standards as men? How do we figure out what "the same standard" means when it's obvious (see above re: self-defense) that the identical standard is grossly unfair? (In the same way, do we--should we--judge people, men or women, living in extreme poverty, by the same standards we judge men or women living in the rarefied heights of Manhattan penthouses?) What is fair and what isn't?

I agree with Jones that women are often judged more harshly than men, partly because of the public perception that they are routinely judged less harshly, and thus in individual cases judges and juries feel they have to be harsh in order to correct the perceived (i.e., imaginary) imbalance, and partly because there are extenuating factors that you can't see if you look at a woman as if she were a man. Why, yes, it is reasonable and justifiable force for a 5'2" woman to use a gun against a 6'1" man who has beaten her up routinely for months or years, who has stalked her and harassed her and threatened her, even if it wouldn't be reasonable and justified for another 6'1" man who wasn't trapped in an abusive relationship to do the same thing. We have overwhelming evidence (Jones lists cases, and I don't even know how many more cases than that there must be) that if she doesn't use the gun, he will kill her, either intentionally or simply because he kicks her in the wrong place or punches her one too many times.

But Velma Barfield. Velma Barfield grew up in abject poverty. She was sexually abused by her father. She ended up addicted to pain-killers after a hysterectomy and was hospitalized several times for depression and drug overdoses. And she murdered her mother, her boyfriend, and two elderly people who had the misfortune to be married to people Barfield was hired to take care of. (She may also have murdered her second husband, although she denied it.) When there was a discernible motive for her murders, it was financial fraud--to cover up her habit of forging checks for drug money. One of her murders had no motive that even Barfield could find. In prison she detoxed from her addictions, became a born-again Christian, and was apparently in every way an admirable and valuable human being. So where do you draw the line between extenuating factors and personal responsibility? She murdered to fund her drug habit, but her drug habit could, by North Carolina law, be an extenuating circumstance to mitigate capital punishment. Barfield off drugs, and in the structured environment of a prison, was clearly not the same as the person who poisoned her mother with arsenic, but does that mean she should be exculpated of the murders she committed? The then-governor of North Carolina, James B. Hunt, Jr., chose not to commute her sentence for largely political reasons--although the families of two of her victims urged against commutation, so it wasn't just that he was running against Jesse Helms for the Senate. Should she have been put to death? If the death penalty is simply wrong, then obviously she shouldn't have been. That's easy. But if there are cases where the death penalty is justified, I'm not sure Barfield is a case where it wasn't. Okay, wow, syntactic scramble. What I mean is, Barfield murdered four (or five) people in cold blood--by arsenic, which is a terrible way to die--in order to hide another crime (forging checks) which was committed in order to fund her drug habit. (And, of course, in one case she seems to have committed murder for no reason at all.) If we admit the hypothesis that the death penalty can be a justifiable sentence, how can we commute Velma Barfield's sentence of death?

***
V. Obviously, this book made me think. In our current national zombie apocalypse, it is more than ever valuable and important reading, because what it's talking about more than anything else is the way in which patriarchy will defend itself, in which the men in power will continue to wiggle out of having to admit that all citizens are equal under the law and all have equal right to protection against (specifically) assault, whether the person doing the assaulting is a person in a domestic relationship with the victim or not. This is an excellent overview of the (appalling and infuriating) history of women in the American legal system and a sharp reminder that women (and other people who aren't white men) cannot trust blindly that the system will be fair to them. The system isn't necessarily set up to be fair to anyone who isn't a white man, and it is full of loopholes (i.e., "personal discretion") that allow its fairness to be adjusted to suit the views of police officer, prosecutor, judge . . .

Jones writes clearly, incisively, and with devastatingly sharp analysis. I didn't agree with her on all points (which isn't a criticism, just a fact), but I was fascinated throughout. And even though the book was originally written in 1980, it is (sadly) not an iota less relevant today.



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UBC: Cullen, Columbine

Columbine by Dave Cullen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book about a horrible subject.

Cullen provides a panoramic view of the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. He talks about the students, the teachers, the parents, the media, the investigators, the clusterfuck of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office's official response(s), which included outright lying and destructive of evidence, and of course the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Cullen is careful, dispassionate, working hard to present all sides of an event that was like a devastating cyclone that spawned cyclones of its own, whirling off on new paths of catastrophe. Cullen follows them all as far as he can, tracking the lives devastated and destroyed (and in some cases rebuilt) in the wake of the catastrophe.

Cullen, like Ron Rosenbaum and David Grann, shows me what journalism ought to be and what it so often isn't. One of the things I like about him is that although he is careful and dispassionate, you can nevertheless feel him there, a human being struggling with the unfolding tragedy. I like him for being absolutely willing to dissect the media's errors (which were many), while at the same time being unstinting in his praise of journalists who did their jobs right. I like him for his efforts to understand the gunmen (who left a wealth of writing and video about what they were planning to do and why), and I like him because he lets his loathing of Eric Harris show through.

Harris was a psychopath (in the psychiatric sense), the same kind of person as Ted Bundy or Gary Ridgway; he just blew his wad (and, yes, I am using that phrasing deliberately) early in an attempted Armageddon, rather than spacing it out victim by victim. (And if Harris' actual plan had worked, there wouldn't have been anything left of Columbine High School but smoking rubble and piles of corpses. Mercifully, he wasn't as smart as he thought he was and his propane tank bombs failed.) Harris hated everybody, considered himself inherently superior to everyone on the planet, and thought--as psychopaths think--that he was entirely justified in killing as many people as he possibly could. Harris was nothing but smugness, hatred, and lies.

Klebold was different. Where Harris needed to be stopped, Klebold needed to be helped. He was struggling with crushing depression, had been struggling with it for years, and one of the many tragedies of Columbine is that nobody recognized it. (And because one of the symptoms of Klebold's depression was a yawning lack of self-esteem, he was never going to be able to ask for help, because he was never going to be able to imagine that it was possible, or that he deserved it if it was.) His parents loved him, but they clearly didn't know that he was suffering from anything more than teen-angst bullshit (to quote Heathers). And even though he was in counseling (as part of a program for teenage felons), his counselors . . . didn't see it, didn't look for it, I don't know. Cullen uses Klebold's journal to show how the impulse toward self-destruction (which he never acted on) turned outward, and the way that Harris took the lead, the way that Klebold was just grateful to have someone to follow.

Both boys prided themselves on their self-awareness. The awful thing is that both of them were wrong. Harris' self-awareness was delusions of grandeur. Klebold's self-awareness was self-hatred.

Cullen also does an excellent job of deconstructing the myths of Columbine, tracking down their origins and differentiating them scrupulously from the truth. There was a Trench Coat Mafia (which itself is a quote from Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic, which Cullen does not note), but Klebold and Harris weren't really part of it. They didn't get their guns at home. (They bought them at a gun show.) They weren't Goths. They weren't loners or outcasts. They weren't gay. They weren't bullied. (They were more likely to be doing the bullying, as it turns out.) They weren't targeting jocks or blacks or Christians. They had no reason for what they did, and what the myths of Columbine have in common is their desire to give Klebold and Harris a reason. Even a bad reason. Because we are story-telling animals and pattern-seekers, and we need there to be a reason. But there wasn't one, except that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was in such a nihilistic state of despair that a massacre sounded like a good idea.

It's hard to wrap your head around the massacre at Columbine, but Cullen does an outstanding job of making it possible.



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UBC: Berry-Dee, Talking with Serial Killers

Talking with Serial Killers: The Most Evil People in the World Tell Their Own Stories by Christopher Berry-Dee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is a lot of hat and not very much cattle. It profiles and interviews Harvey Louis Carignan, Arthur John Shawcross, John Martin Scripps, Michael Bruce Ross, Ronald Joseph "Butch" DeFeo, Jr., Aileen Carol Wuornos, Kenneth Allen McDuff, Douglas Daniel Clark and Carol Mary Bundy (who declined to be interviewed), and Henry Lee Lucas. (I note that somebody changed the subtitle between the time the book was in galleys and the time it was printed: the cover says "the most evil people in the world," while the title page says, "the most evil men in the world." Which, yes, hello, you did interview Aileen Wuornos.) Berry-Dee seems more interested in congratulating himself on his own prowess as an interviewer (interviewing people who wouldn't talk to anyone else, getting his subjects to talk about things they wouldn't talk about with anyone else) than in the people he interviewed. (I think it's probably unintentionally telling that the photograph of Michael Ross is actually a photograph of Christopher Berry-Dee shaking hands with Michael Ross; Ross is essentially invisible behind the bars of his cell.) In some cases there's barely any interview at all. The section on Kenneth McDuff, while it indulges in an indefensible description of lethal injection from the injectee's point of view (e.g., "McDuff felt pressure in his chest" (257)), dismisses the interview with very little more than "McDuff whinged on for an hour about the injustices committed by the judicial and prison system" (260). Granted that McDuff is maybe the number-one contender for Most Repellent in this particular rogues' gallery, that's still a poor excuse for an "interview." And Berry-Dee is not as good as he thinks he is at laying out the (admittedly very complicated) careers of these serial killers in a clear narrative.

If this book has a valuable point, it's the shrieking need for prison reform in America. Several of these killers murdered, were arrested, convicted, sentenced, imprisoned, were paroled for reasons ranging from over-crowding to bribery, and went right back to murder. (McDuff was given three death sentences in 1968, had the sentence commuted to life in 1982 (? Berry-Dee has it as 1992, but that can't be right), and was paroled in 1986. It's believed he started killing again three days later.) Capital punishment may or may not be the answer, but letting this kind of killer out to continue murdering is most definitely NOT.



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UBC: Nash, Among the Missing

Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present by Jay Robert Nash

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For what it is and when it was written, this is a pretty good book.

It is not (what I realized belatedly I had been hoping for) a history of missing persons investigations. It's a series of anecdotes about people who go missing, whether it's for hours or years, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, whether they turn up alive or dead or not at all. The book shows its age in its cheerful disregard for source citation, and it is distinctly a book for dilettantes, not written for people like me who want to delve deeply into every subject they read about.

But for all that, it's a fascinating book. Some of the cases in here I'd read about, like Charley Ross, (Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom) Brooke Hart (Swift Justice: Murder & Vengeance In A California Town), and Bobby Franks, although I would not have described that as primarily a missing persons case (For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago). (Oddly, I had just come to the section on Percy Harrison Fawcett when I found The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, which I paused this book to devour.) Some of them I knew about (Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, the Mary Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle, Ambrose Bierce). Some of them I'd never heard of, like the terrifying case of Dorothy Forstein, who was attacked and brutally beaten in her own home by an assailant who was never identified. Five years later, she disappeared, again from her own home. The case has never been solved. Or the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold--again, never solved. Or the awful, baffling disappearance of Orion Williamson (the only case in the entire book which Nash insists he has verified), who disappeared in full view of his wife and neighbors while walking across a field in Selma, Alabama, in 1854. Nash also talks about fraudulent kidnappings and faked deaths, people who go missing for all kinds of reasons, or no reason at all.

Mostly, it's a book that pointed me toward cases I want to learn more about.

Including one that itself seems almost to have disappeared. In the back of Among the Missing, Nash has a chronology of "the most distinctive and notorious disappearances" from 1800 to 1977. Under 1972, he lists: "Nineteen-year-old Robin Lee Reade, of Lake Forest, Illinois, disappears on March 27 while on a trip to California and Hawaii. Her parents hire two detectives, who turn up nothing. The Reades then employ mystic Peter Hurkos, who takes them on a tour of Oklahoma, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Honolulu. Though Hurkos points out several buildings to the Reades, stating that their daughter is buried somewhere inside, nothing is uncovered. Chicago private detective Anthony J. Pellicano, who specializes in missing persons cases, is employed by the Reades in March 1977. Within one month, he finds Robin Reade's grave on the side of a mountain outside Honolulu" (411). And there's a picture beside the entry, captioned "Private investigator Anthony J. Pellicano, who specializes in missing-persons cases, explains how he solved the Robin Reade case in 1972." (Of course, by Nash's own narrative, he didn't solve the case in 1972. He solved it in 1977.) If you Google for Robin Lee Reade, you find less than what Nash provides. On the other hand, if you Google for Anthony J. Pellicano, you discover that he went on to have an interesting but not entirely legal--or in fact legal at all-- career as a private investigator with a much more lucrative specialty. Which makes me wonder, how did he find Robin Lee Reade's grave in less than a month, five years after she disappeared? Nash has that infuriating photo of Pellicano explaining, but he doesn't say what the explanation was. Which is sort of emblematic of why this book frustrates me.



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UBC: Graysmith, Zodiac Unmasked

Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


See also Zodiac.

This book shares with Zodiac the inherently confusing, nebulous, ambiguous nature of its material, but it also has some problems of its own. The worst of which is repetition. Graysmith not only repeats information covered in Zodiac (which I totally admit he couldn't avoid), but he repeats information within Zodiac Unmasked. There was a symposium on Zodiac in 1993, and Graysmith not only gives large chunks of that verbatim, but he repeats the quotes, again verbatim, at other points in the text, without even flagging that that's what he's doing. It's annoying and unnecessary, and somewhere along the line a good editor should have dealt with it. Zodiac Unmasked is about twice the length of Zodiac, and it doesn't need to be.

The experience of reading these books, particularly Zodiac Unmasked feels like a matter of form mirroring content: endlessly going over the same ground, looking for things missed or new interpretations or can we get DNA evidence off these thirty-year-old envelopes? Hunting down witnesses who weren't properly interviewed in the 60s, arguing about whether a particular murder or a particular letter was or was not the actual Zodiac's work. (Graysmith loses points with me because he changes his mind about the authenticity of one of the letters and doesn't bother to SAY SO. And it's important because it's the 1978 letter, which he uses as part of his argument for Starr/Allen being the Zodiac--until suddenly, when the DNA doesn't match, he's like, Oh that letter. The fake.

(He also, incidentally, does a lousy job of the transition from calling the prime suspect Robert Hall Starr to using his real name, Arthur Leigh Allen.)

The matter of that 1978 letter, the one that is sometimes real and sometimes fake depending on whether it suits Graysmith's argument or not, is representative of what happens to evidence in the Zodiac case. Nobody can agree about any of it. And what's really frustrating--and this is not a frustration with Graysmith, this is a frustration that he does really an excellent job of exposing--is the degree to which the fact that this case is unresolvable is due to bad police work at the beginning. Not the part where they didn't have DNA analysis to help. The part where police didn't follow up with witnesses, didn't come back to see if they could identify the Zodiac from a photo line-up (and 20, 30 years later, when other detectives did track them down, they were remarkably consistent in identifying Arthur Leigh Allen, which would have been super helpful back in 1968), where the first guy to interview Arthur Leigh Allen decided, snap judgment, on the spot, that Allen wasn't the killer and therefore wrote the interview up in 100 words or less and never bothered to mention what sent him to interview Allen in the first place. And police departments and sheriff's departments not cooperating with each other, not sharing vital information, the Department of Justice stepping on everybody's toes, evidence getting destroyed, getting lost, getting "lost."

I think it's very likely that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac killer. (If he wasn't, my god, that poor man spent the last twenty years of his life being harassed and stalked by professional and amateur detectives alike. If he was Zodiac, of course, that's not even close to as bad as he deserves.) I have no idea how many of the letters attributed to him he actually wrote (and it puzzles me that in Zodiac, Graysmith presents a complicated but entirely plausible method by which Zodiac could have disguised his handwriting and stymied every forensic document examiner ever born, and then in Zodiac Unmasked, that method just disappears and Graysmith talks about comparing suspect's handwriting to Zodiac's as if he'd never explained why that was pointless). I don't know how many of the possible Zodiac murders he committed. Graysmith got me so confused with the various detectives arguing for and against various murders (all of a sudden we're doubting Faraday and Jensen were killed by Zodiac? what? where did that come from?) that I'm not even sure what's reasonable and what's just tin-hat conspiracy theory bullshit.

And it bothers me that Arthur Leigh Allen is convicted--in both Graysmith's books--based on circumstantial evidence and the fact that everyone who talked to him, both detectives and journalists, were subliminally terrified of him. They "just knew" that he was Zodiac, and that's not actually evidence. Now, the circumstantial evidence--which includes things like pipe bombs found in his basement--is pretty damning, and I don't in fact believe that an innocent* man was hounded to his grave. But it worries me that that could be what happened.

---
*"Innocent" being a relative term. Arthur Leigh Allen was a convicted child molester, and there were a lot of crimes they could have charged him for based on the 1991 search of his house (being a felon in possession of a firearm, for starters), even if none of them was what they were after.



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UBC: Graysmith, Zodiac

Zodiac by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


See also Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed.

There are two main problems with both Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked. One of those problems they have in common: the nature of their material. The Zodiac case is a mess. No one agrees on when the murders started, on how many there were, on when they ended, on how many of which letters are from the real Zodiac, or on who Zodiac was. There are several different jurisdictions involved, and one of the really striking differences between the Zodiac murders and the Green River murders is the way that King County set up a task force, whereas the Zodiac murders were like a tug-o-war, with different departments actively refusing to pool information because nobody wanted some other department to get the credit for solving "their" case. Graysmith, as a journalist who could talk to all the investigators, ended up with more information than any of the detectives, and while that's good journalism on his part, it is criminally bad law enforcement on the part of every police and sheriff's department involved.

So the Zodiac case is inherently incredibly confusing. Graysmith does not help matters by the way he tells the story, bouncing back and forth along the timeline in a completely unnecessary attempt to heighten narrative tension. I just ended up confused. Given this problem--and the fact that as a prose stylist, I would describe Graysmith as "dogged"--Zodiac is a pretty good book. He has compiled a remarkable amount of information and he makes a good case for his pseudonymous Robert Hall Starr as the killer. And he does a good job of showing the conflict between San Francisco PD, Vallejo PD, Vallejo County Sheriff's Department, Riverside PD, Santa Rosa PD, Napa County Sheriff's Department, and the California Department of Justice without taking sides or judging. He lets the obvious errors and bad decisions speak for themselves.

And the final image of the book is chilling--both as an image of the Zodiac killer and as a startlingly accurate, startlingly self-aware metaphor for Graysmith's obsession:

Across the blindingly bright illuminated showroom, Starr was reflected in the brass compass, duplicated in the shiny varnished sides of the Chris Craft, reflected in the deep and highly polished floor, mirrored in the brass work around him, and copied in a hundred polished shaft bearings. He was reproduced full length in the floor to ceiling show window.

Starr was everywhere I looked.



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UBC: Henderson, Blood Justice

Blood Justice: The True Story of Multiple Murder and a Family's Revenge by Tom Henderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Interestingly, although my copy has the same (lousy) cover, the subtitle is THE TRUE STORY OF MULTIPLE MURDER AND TWO DEVASTATED FAMILIES, which is just as bad and inaccurate as the listed subtitle: on the one hand, there's no "revenge" involved: Jeffrey Wayne Gorton was caught and prosecuted legally, not extralegally, and the families of the victims, while involved, were not spearheading anything; on the other hand, it's not TWO devastated families, it's THREE, and I'm not sure who they're leaving out, given that the photographs on the cover are two photographs of Gorton and one of (I think) Margarette Eby--given the crappy interior photographs of the murdered women, it's difficult to be sure, but I'm pretty confident those eyebrows are Eby's. So where's Nancy Ludwig? And is it her family we're discounting as devastated? Eby's family? Or Gorton's family? Because it's hard to imagine anyone MORE devastated than Gorton's wife (who knew he had a fetish for women's underwear, but had no idea it went any further) and two children. And while I'm nitpicking, that silhouette at the top, with the dilapidated house and the tree? What the hell is that supposed to be? Nancy Ludwig was murdered in the Detroit Airport Hilton. Margarette Eby was murdered in her home, the Gatehouse of Applewood, the Mott estate in Flint, MI. (The virtual tour of Applewood, btw, does not mention the grisly history attached to the Gatehouse.) Nothing less like that shack can be imagined. And Jeff Gorton grew up in a middle-class household and himself maintained a middle-class household. No creepy isolated shacks, thank you.

[Here endeth the digression.]

In some ways this is a pretty good book, and in other ways it's not so great. Henderson isn't a bad writer, and he has by god done his homework. He talked to everybody he could (the two people who refused to be interviewed are (1) Gorton and (2) the bureaucrat in Romulus who forced eleven of seventeen command officers in the Romulus Police Department into early retirement two weeks after Gorton's sentencing); he dug into the inter- and intradepartmental politics that bedeviled the Flint police, the Romulus police, and the Michigan State Police, and he did a good job of presenting both sides, particularly in the ridiculous, petty war between the MSP and the Genesee County Prosecutor's office. He even talked to the public defender who made the world's worst botch of Gorton's defense in his trial for Nancy Ludwig's murder (when the prosecutor calls the defense lawyer at home and tells him to get his head out of his ass, you know you are looking at a very special version of bad) and got his version of what went wrong. Henderson's at his best when he's discussing the lawyers and the judge and what happened in the courtroom, and I'm actually giving him that fourth star for that part of the book (i.e., the end), because otherwise this was a three-star book.

Henderson's worst problem is that he doesn't trust his material and therefore tries to jazz it up with flashbacks and flashforwards and intercutting different timelines, whereas I have come to the conclusion that with true crime, you are best served by telling the story in the simplest way possible. If you need fancy rhetorical tricks, you will know. And this story, which is so complicated--Jeff Gorton's criminal history in Florida, the Eby murder and its investigation, the Ludwig murder and its investigation, the cold case squad that decided to take a second look ten years later, and then the forensic investigation that was able, because of the leaps and bounds by which DNA analysis had progressed in those ten years, to link the two murders by the DNA of the murderer's semen, then identified a partial print left in blood in Margarette Eby's bathroom as belonging to Jeffrey Wayne Gorton. And then the story of how they actually caught Gorton. This whole tangled history doesn't need to be made more complicated with narratological flim-flam. It needs to be presented in a way that is as easy to follow as possible, and Henderson irritated me mightily by failing to understand that.

Everyone involved seemed confident that Gorton had murdered more than twice--and I would tend to agree. The escalation from knocking women down and stealing their underwear in Florida to rape, torture, near decapitation, and necrophilia in Michigan is so dramatic that it seems like Margarette Eby can't have been his first homicide victim. But if any progress has been made on linking Gorton to unsolved cases in Florida, Michigan, or anywhere else, nobody's talking about it.



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UBC: Grann, The Lost City of Z

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is amazing. Grann is a superb writer, and his subject--the explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett and the archaeology of the Amazon (two subjects, but so inextricably intertwined that there is no sense of bifurcation between Fawcett's biography and the history of archaeology in the Amazon)--is the kind of thing that you couldn't make up if you tried. The epigraph from Italo Calvino is spot on, because the book, for all that it is nonfiction, in some ways reads like Calvino or Miéville or even Kafka: the quest for an ancient city in the depths of the Amazon, a city that shimmers and vanishes like a mirage every time you get close to it, a city that is as much allegory as reality (a city that, it turns out, was exactly where Fawcett was trying to find it, but because of his Victorian ideas about what he was looking for, he was never going to be able to see it), and a quest that has taken the lives of (Grann estimates) at least 100 people.

This is also a book about obsession: Fawcett's obsession, Grann's obsession, the obsessions of the people, both living and dead, whom he encounters as he tries to trace Fawcett's trajectory through the world. In that way it reminds me a little of Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster: Fawcett's obsession killed him and his 22-year-old son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell just as surely as the obsession with Everest killed Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and the others lost on the mountain. And this, like Into Thin Air, is very much about the descent of the journalist reporting on the obsession into the belly of the obsession itself.



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UBC: Barer, Murder in the Family

Murder In The Family by Burl Barer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe this case has been an episode both of Forensic Files and The New Detectives, which only makes sense given that it's a landmark case in the use of forensic evidence like hairs and fibers in convicting a murderer.

Also, the vileness of this particular murderer is exemplified by the fact that one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him was pubic hairs he left on his eight-year-old victim with pubic lice egg cases attached.

Really, that's Kirby Anthoney in a nutshell. He raped and murdered his aunt, raped and murdered his eight-year-old cousin and murdered his three-year-old cousin, very likely masturbating over her corpse. Then he cleaned up in their bathroom (leaving another pubic hair with pubic lice egg cases in a washcloth in the sink), stole his uncle's expensive camera and rolled coins from his aunt's waitressing tips and amscrayed. This is after being convicted back in Idaho of robbing an old lady in a wheelchair, including macing her unnecessarily, and raping and beating an eleven year old so severely that she was left blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and unable to remember anything about the attack. (After which he fled to Alaska before he could be arrested; his mother neglected to mention this to her brother.) He also murdered a transvestite Native Alaskan, for reasons that may or may not have been sexual, and the Anchorage police believed he was also the murderer of a Native Alaskan girl. And he beat, stalked, and terrified at least three girlfriends, including one who testified for the prosecution for the trial.

Barer writes a compelling story. The legal wrangles at Anthoney's trial get a little tangled occasionally, but that's forgivable. And I like Barer for at least trying to talk about what creates people like Kirby Anthoney, whether we call them mass murderers, serial killers, sociopaths, psychopaths, people with antisocial personality disorder, or whatever the DSM has decided is in this year (yes, I know these aren't all synonyms; that's part of my point). Abusive childhoods don't help, but he points out that many psychopaths come from stable, loving homes and psychopaths' siblings, whether they share in a nurturing environment or an abusive one, do not also become psychopaths. "Violence in the media" or "video games" or "Dungeons & Dragons" or whatever your hobby horse is, isn't an explanation or even a theory. It's a cop-out, because it doesn't explain why some people can create and maintain a moral/ethical center despite these factors, while others can't or don't. And that's the question that I think matters most, even though I don't have an answer for it.



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UBC: Rule, In the Still of the Night

In the Still of the Night: The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for the Truth by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This case. This bizarre, baffling, infuriating case.

Ronda Reynolds was shot sometime in the early morning hours of December 16, 1998. Somebody made a very clumsy effort to make it look like suicide. And the first police officers on the scene--let's be brutally honest--fucked up. They moved the gun. They let the victim's three teenage stepsons leave the house without being questioned. They decided that the victim's soon-to-be-ex-husband's story (a story which makes NO SENSE) was true, and that Ronda had committed suicide. Because they decided that (when the rule of thumb in death investigations is, prove it's NOT homicide, THEN consider suicide), they didn't follow basic procedures to secure evidence (and much of the evidence they did collect would be "lost"). The history of this case thereafter, from 1998 until Rule's book was published in 2010, is at least 75% the history of Lewis County law enforcement trying to make their fuck-up go away. They drove one of their best homicide detectives to resign because, in refusing to let go of the case, he made them look bad. So they punished him instead of punishing the detectives who fucked up.

Or, y'know, choosing a less dysfunctional alternative than punishment.

By and large, Rule is pro-cop. She makes no bones about it. She was a cop herself, she made an effort as a reporter to maintain good relationships with the cops she wrote about, she admired--and I, too, admire--the homicide detectives who work cases like bulldogs. I don't think I can really imagine how hard it must have been for her to write this book, in which officers she knew and liked come across as men who are corrupt, who don't care, who are vastly more invested in their egos than they are in the truth. That's a harsh judgment, and it's my judgment, based on the evidence Rule presents. I don't think Ronda Reynolds' death was an insoluble homicide when it was committed; I think it may very well be insoluble now, unless somebody talks. And it seems less and less likely--with the complete lack of interest demonstrated over and over again by Lewis County law enforcement--that anybody ever will.

The trial in this book is not actually a murder trial. It's a judicial review of the (criminally incompetent) Lewis County coroner and his handling of Ronda Reynolds' death. The triumph of this book is the jury deciding that (a) the coroner mishandled the case dreadfully and (b) that the manner of Ronda Reynolds' death was homicide. Ronda's mother's website Justice for Ronda has not been updated since 2010, and the only evidence of activity on the case is Ron Reynolds (the soon-to-be-ex-husband who told such a flimsy and ridiculous story) and his son suing Lewis County for violation of their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Note that the coroner who convened this inquest in 2011 was not the coroner who made such a botch of the case originally. Also note that: "The jury unanimously ruled that Ronda Reynolds’ manner of death was homicide and identified Ron Reynolds and his son Jonathan Reynolds as responsible for her death. After the inquest, McLeod issued arrest warrants for Reynolds and his son. The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office declined to press charges."

I'm gonna be honest: I did not enjoy this book. I hate reading about botched investigations and I hate even more reading about the kind of stonewalling that Lewis County law enforcement has continued and continued to practice, defeating efforts to find the truth simply by inertia. Even when individuals, like Coroner McLeod, try to rectify the glaring failure, they are met again with "declined to press charges." (I know that there can be very good reasons for a county prosecutor or district attorney to decline to press charges, and in this case I imagine that it was actually that they didn't think they could win the case rather than any lack of desire to see justice done, but it's just so fucking emblematic of the whole damn thing.) It makes me angry, and because there's no constructive outlet for my anger--there's nothing I can do--it makes me frustrated ("seething" is probably the correct word), and that leads to a kind of unpleasant reading experience. But that's not a judgment of the quality of the book, just of the nature of its subject.



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