Sarah Monette's Blog, page 3

UBC: Rule, Too Late To Say Goodbye

Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm drawn to true crime in part because I love puzzles and mysteries--which means I'm especially drawn to cold cases. So the part of this book that dealt with the investigation and re-investigation of Dorothy Carlisle "Dolly" Hearn's death in 1990 was fascinating. The murder of Jennifer Barber Corbin in 2004 was just sad, as the murder of a woman trying to get out of a pitcher-plant marriage is always sad, every goddamn time it happens.

What's worst about both Dolly and Jenn's murders (aside from the simple destruction of good people) is that their murderer, Barton Corbin, is about as empty a shell of a human being as is possible to imagine. There's nothing there. Other obsessive stalker-murderers that Rule has written about--Thomas Capano in And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer or Brad Cunningham in Dead By Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?--are monsters, but they're also men with, well, rich inner lives (in Cunningham's case, his inner life and delusions of grandeur were far richer than his outer life). Corbin is just nothing. He became a dentist to make money off his patients. His brothers and his friends--it becomes clear--know him only in the most superficial, stereotypical, guy-on-guy way, where you drink beer and watch sports together and are therefore friends. He spent and over-spent on status symbols. He cheated on his wife (and, of course, as this kind of guy always does, went ballistic at the thought that she might be interested in a man that wasn't him). He was so verbally abusive to his elder son that the child, at the age of six, would beg his mother not to make him go anywhere with his father, and after Jenn's murder, the two little boys never asked for their daddy--which is just as well because he certainly never made the least attempt to see them. The only things that seem to inhabit Barton Corbin are rage and greed. He's one of T.S. Eliot's hollow men and it is simply vile that he murdered two women for simple dog-in-the-manger jealousy. He couldn't stand the fact that they might have lives--that they might even go on living--after they left him. And if he hadn't murdered Jenn, he would almost certainly have gotten away with murdering Dolly.

Corbin most recently lost an appeal in 2014.



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UBC: Rule, Dead by Sunset

Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brad Cunningham is like a villain in a melodrama. You can absolutely imagine him twirling his mustache and cackling as he made his wives and ex-wives miserable. He was married five times, missed successfully killing his first wife by a matter of inches and pure blind luck; married his second wife solely to help him gain custody of his children (and when that failed, divorced her basically on the spot); abandoned his third wife when she was six months pregnant, after having persuaded her to quit her job and move with him into a more expensive condo--he in fact abandoned her in the middle of the move; beat his fourth wife to death so he wouldn't have to share custody of their three sons; milked his fifth wife for everything she was worth; and persuaded the woman he wanted for wife #6 (who obstinately refused to marry him, and more power to her) to become a topless dancer to support him. And he cheated on all of them, while accusing them of cheating on him. Not to mention the emotional abuse, the stalking, the gaslighting . . .

This book became mesmerizing. I kept turning pages just to see what horrible thing Cunningham would do next. And the end of the book, the civil trial for wrongful death followed by prosecution for first-degree murder, was as deeply satisfying a vindication as I've ever seen.

Except for the part where Cheryl Keeton is still dead, and the people Cunningham hurt: his wives, his children, his kith and kin, everyone who loved Cheryl . . . are never not going to have a torn place in their souls where Cheryl was ripped away.

Rule does an excellent job with her complicated story and cast of thousands. She's so good at explaining legal complexities that I almost don't notice how good she is at it. And I admire the way she practices compassion even as she digs for the truth.

---
Cunningham lost an appeal in 2004, and I found the court's decision well worth reading.



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UBC: Sachs, Corpse

Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death--An Exploration of the Haunting Science of Forensic Ecology by Jessica Snyder Sachs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very good book about the emergence of botany, entomology, and other unexpected sciences into the world of forensics.

It would have benefited from a better copy-editor, to catch typos like "wholistic" and a number of others that made the book look just slightly less than professional. Especially, someone should have caught the error Sachs makes in assuming corpus delicti means the body of the victim, when it means no such thing (as Ann Rule is frequently at pains to point out in her books). The corpus delicti is the proof that a crime has occurred. The body of the victim is a particularly COGENT corpus delicti, but it is far from the only way to prove that homicide has taken place.

Aside from that background static of typos and misused words and errors that someone should have caught, this is a good, readable book. Sachs has a remarkable flair for describing flies and maggots in a way that's vivid without being revolting, and she conveys the enthusiasm these scientists have for their (sometimes grotesque) jobs even to a layperson who wants to stay as far away from flies, in all stages of their life-cycle, as possible. And the forensic work itself is fascinating.

(This book also gets a check in the box marked Places I Did Not Expect To See My Hometown Mentioned. One of Bill Bass' students, Arpad Vass, took his forensic work to ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), where my dad was a chemist until he retired and where I worked two summers as a secretary.)



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UBC: Rule, Lying in Wait

Lying in Wait and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



"The Baby Seller": Athens AL 1980: the abominable Jackie Sue Schut, child abuser, child pornographer, kidnapper, murderer: she murdered a young mother in Alabama, stole her newborn, then abandoned the child in a deserted field when she discovered his club foot. (He was rescued by a chance passing motorist.) She most likely abducted another young mother and her newborn, only to panic and send the child back via taxi when she (allegedly accidentally) murdered the mother. It seems only too likely those were not her only two victims.

"Secrets of the Amorous Pizza Man": Whidbey Island WA 2012: meteorologist (of the straight-up scientific kind, not the TV weather report kind) meets a man in Antarctica, falls in love, marries him, and is murdered by him in Washington State after six years of marriage when she becomes inconvenient to him. So far as anyone knows, she had no idea he didn't love her as much as she loved him.

"A Road Trip to Murder": Everett WA 2011: white supremacist ex-con and his white supremacist ex-con girlfriend murder his father, the stepmother he had never met before, and two perfect strangers, in an effort to get to Sacramento and "kill more Jews."

"Murderous Epitaph for the Beautiful Runaway": Seattle WA 1977: young woman runs away from wealthy home in Maryland, ends up being raped & murdered in a seedy Seattle hotel.

"Tracks of a Serial Rapist": reprint of Part II of "The Most Frightening Crime of All" from Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases with the pseudonyms taken out and real names put in.

"'Take a Lifer Home to Dinner . . . with Murder for Dessert!'": Tacoma WA 1972: another surreal dispatch from the early seventies; convict takes advantage of half-baked quasi-furlough program (for which he wasn't even eligible), runs, and kills a pawn-shop owner.

This collection contains no case called "Lying in Wait."



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UBC: Rule, Bitter Harvest

Bitter Harvest by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



True crime writers seem to be afflicted by what I am dubbing the Groucho Marx Fallacy, from Groucho's famous line, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." True crime TV shows do this all the time, and I've seen it in more than one true crime book, the assumption that anyone with an interest in true crime must be ... a criminal! So I'm reading Rule describing Debora Green's interest in true crime as if it must correlate with what she did in 1995, as if she could only have been reading those books to pick up tips for how to commit murder and not get caught, and thinking, Well, I have all of your books, lady, so what does that make both of us?

And while I'm criticizing, the habit of Rule's that I am finding annoys me most is the way that she judges women, both victims and perpetrators, based on (a) their weight, (b) their housekeeping, and (c) their "attractiveness," meaning both whether their physical features are attractive and whether or not they wear make-up or get their nails done or wear "flattering" clothes. I understand perfectly where Rule's coming from, and I'm sure she got this habit as a stringer for true crime magazines, where she had to write under the pseudonym Andy Stack, because her editors told her their readers wouldn't read stories written by women. But for a woman whose moral purpose is to educate women against sexual predators of both the domestic and stranger-on-stranger kind, it's either hypocritical or a sign of some badly under-examined assumptions, because this is the Male Gaze in all its patriarchal bullshit glory. Again, telling me that Debora Green, in the '90s, wore jeans and t-shirts most of the time, as if that makes her a bad person, does not actually make me believe she's a bad person, especially since jeans and t-shirts constitute 94% of my own wardrobe.

With all of that said, this is an excellent book. It's counter to Rule's usual pattern, in that the perpetrator here of hideous and cruel domestic violence is a woman, and while she and her husband had a horribly dysfunctional marriage, she was the emotionally abusive one. I know at least one reviewer felt Rule was too sympathetic to Mike Farrar, but while she clearly empathizes with him and works to present him in the best possible light, she doesn't hide the character traits that must have made him a sometimes aggravating spouse. He was (presumably also is) a control freak and consumed by his job, and for all that he complained about Debora Green's housekeeping, I don't notice any evidence that he himself made any effort to clean the house or--since for a man routinely working twelve-hour days, that's not feasible--hiring a housekeeper, which the Green-Farrar household could most certainly have afforded. So, yeah, the domestic dysfunction wasn't all her. And, yes, he did have an affair in 1995 (which Rule does not condone, either). But the part where Green decided to poison him with ricin . . . no, I'm sorry. No matter how aggravating your spouse is, castor beans are not the answer. Especially when he has already asked you for a divorce, which you have refused to grant him, partly on the grounds that you will lose your position and lifestyle as a cardiologist's wife, but mostly on the grounds that you are a narcissist and see him as your possession.

And then there's what she did in October of 1995, which is entirely on her.

Green burned down their house, deliberately trapping their three children and two dogs inside. The youngest child and the Labrador succumbed to carbon monoxide without ever waking up. The oldest child used the house intercom to ask his mother what to do. She told him to stay put until firefighters rescued him; he obeyed her and died. The middle child escaped over the roof of the garage. When she was afraid to jump down, her mother promised to catch her and then didn't. It was pure chance that the little girl wasn't hurt. The greyhound's body was found by firefighters searching the wreckage of the house.

Police first suspected Green because, like many people with personality disorders, she couldn't figure out how to fake grief. But it was the arson investigation that convicted her. I first learned about this case from an episode of Forensic Files, because the arson investigators not only found accelerant and not only traced the path of the accelerant through the house, demonstrating that the children were not merely collateral damage but in fact the targets of the fire, they found that the accelerant trail ended at Green's bedroom door and furthermore disproved her story that she woke up and opened the door to find the house on fire, because the door was open when the fire started, and Green's hair was singed. Like many first-time arsonists, she wasn't prepared for how fast her accelerant ignited.

Bitter Harvest is a thorough examination of what Green did and why, both in the ricin poisoning of her husband and the arson-murder of her children, and how law enforcement figured it out.



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UBC: Rule, Don't Look Behind You

Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



"North to Alaska": Puyallup WA 1978: The long-unsolved missing persons case of Joe Tarricone is solved when his bones are discovered buried in the backyard of a condemned house. A lengthy investigation eventually convicts his girlfriend Renee Curtiss and her adopted brother Nick Notaro (and their deceased mother) of murdering Tarricone, dismembering him and burying him.

"Too Late for the Fair": Des Moines WA 1962: Rule is a clear, descriptive writer, but she isn't usually atmospheric. This case is the exception. She describes the atmosphere of Bob Hansen's house vividly. (This case also made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because Hansen also makes a cameo appearance in Green River, Running Red, as the "lonely farmer" who abducted a call girl and kept her imprisoned for three days in his barn. He wasn't the serial killer, but this story acts like a kind of hypertext link, expanding the background of that incident in a way that completely changes the reader's interpretation of it. Hansen wasn't, as the FBI profilers more or less dismissed him as, an eccentric but ultimately harmless man. He was an abusive father, an abusive husband, and a murderer who was much much better at disposing of his victims than Gary Ridgway. Joann Hansen is still missing.)

"The Case of the Deadly Giant": Echo Lake WA 1971: Paul Vinetti savagely murdered a woman because, he said, she made fun of him.

"The Most Frightening Crime of All": Edmonds WA 1976 and Seattle WA 1980: two serial rapists (all the names have been changed). Rule's purpose is to educate women in how to keep themselves safe(r). Not blame-the-victim thinking, just strategies to reduce risk. This sort of didacticism I do not mind.

There is no case in this collection called "Don't Look Behind You."



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Catzilla Explains It All, Night-time Edition

Underfoot Cat and I have conversations in the early morning. Catzilla and I have conversations at night, which generally go something like this:

ME: [reading in bed]
CATZILLA: [materializing out of freaking nowhere] Kitty is adorable.
ME: AUGH! Hi.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is walking on my book.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is walking on my hair.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is standing in my light.
CATZILLA. Kitty is adorable.
ME: Oh god, no. Not the tail-across-the face trick.
CATZILLA: Kitty. Is. Adorable.
ME: [through Catzilla's magnificent plumy tail, draped elegantly across my face] Mmmmhnmph.
CATZILLA: Admit it. Kitty is adorable.
ME: Yes, okay, okay! I give! Kitty is adorable!
CATZILLA: Le chat, c'est moi.
ME: [pets Catzilla]

UBC: Olsen, Abandoned Prayers

Abandoned Prayers by Gregg Olsen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(N.b., I made a new edition for this book in Goodreads because (1) the edition I have is a hardcover, but the subtitle on the dust jacket is "The Shocking True Story of Obsession, Murder and 'Little Boy Blue,'" not "The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession and Amish Secrets," and (2) careful inspection of the book itself reveals no subtitle on title page or copyright page, which says to me that the bibliographic entry shouldn't list a subtitle at all. The cover of my edition is the same as that of the paperback edition with the "Obsession, Murder, and 'Little Boy Blue'" subtitle.)

Short, flippant summary: Even the Amish aren't immune from sociopaths.

It is, however, unfair to imply that Eli Stutzman's Amish upbringing had anything to do with his career as a murderer, starting with his pregnant wife (in a staged barn fire, which incidentally also netted Stutzman a free new barn), then a roommate, then most likely two men involved in drug deals with him, and finally his nine-year-old son, whose body he abandoned in a ditch near Chester, Kansas, on Christmas Eve in 1985. It was never proved that Stutzman murdered the boy, mostly because the forensic pathologists who examined the body couldn't determine cause of death. Olsen thinks the boy may still have been alive, although unconscious, when his father dumped him. It was brutally cold that Christmas, and Danny Stutzman was wearing nothing more than a cheap pair of footie pajamas from K-mart. He would have frozen to death before his body even had time to become hypothermic.

Stutzman was a pathological liar and sociopathic (forgetting to fake grief when you tell people that your son died in a terrible traffic accident in Salt Lake City is a pretty clear diagnostic marker). He lied his way out of trouble again and again, and when his lies got too tangled, or the trouble got too big for them to contain, he ran. And if people were inconvenient enough to him, he murdered them.

Stutzman was gay, and for 1990, Olsen does a good job of examining his choices without judging (although some of the cops who interrogated Stutzman would so be up on charges for the things they said to him); he makes it clear that it wasn't Stutzman's sexual orientation that made him a murderer, a drug dealer, a liar, or an abusive father. Olsen is actually able to tell more of the story than the police were able to find, because the men Stutzman had relationships with, one of whom had a letter that a good prosecutor could have turned into proof of premeditation in Danny Stutzman's death, didn't talk to the police. It was the mid-80s; they were afraid of the cops and afraid to come out.

This is the competently written result of a lot of research and legwork and interviewing people who don't want to talk about their secrets, both in the gay community and in the Amish community. One of the things I like about it is the way that Olsen's own anger bleeds through; although he keeps himself out of the narrative, he is transparently infuriated by the way Stutzman treated his son, the pattern of abuse and neglect that culminated in Danny Stutzman's death. Objectivity is important, but so is basic human empathy--empathy that Stutzman himself lacked.

Eli Stutzman was paroled in 2005, having served 15 years of a 40 year sentence for the murder of Glen Pritchett. He committed suicide in 2007.



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UBC: Rule, Mortal Danger

Mortal Danger and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"Mortal Danger": Gold Beach OR 1999, Gig Harbor WA, 2007. Every Woman's Nightmare, twice. John Branden, aka John Williams, beat, raped, and very nearly murdered his long-time girlfriend when she had the temerity to try to end their relationship. He eluded police and vanished. Under a new name (one of many), he charmed a divorced lady in Gig Harbor into a common law marriage, then became increasingly controlling, abusive, and paranoid, until in 2007, when she found out something about that previous relationship, he shot her, shot his "best friend," who was trying to mediate between them, then shot himself. The friend survived, blinded. Branden/Williams and his girlfriend (I just can't use the word "partner" in this context) died.

"Written in Blood": Graham WA 2007: Kill Me Twice: The vicious, pointless murder of Brian and Bev Mauck by Daniel Tavares, a man who'd served 16 years in Massachusetts for murdering his mother with a carving knife; the judge at his bail hearing for two attacks on prison guards believed his attorney that Tavares was rehabilitated and not a flight risk. He kept two appointments with his parole officer, then skipped out, traveling across the country to marry a woman he met online. Not very long thereafter he murdered his neighbors Brian and Bev Mauck for reasons that remain unclear, beyond Tavares' father's assessment that Daniel Tavares was pure evil. Google tells me that he was arraigned in 2015 for another murder, one that Rule actually talks about in "Written in Blood."

"If I Can't Have You ...": Sea-Tac Airport 1976: Every Woman's Nightmare: Amelia Jager fled from her abusive, controlling husband in Switzerland back to her family in Seattle. He followed her (despite Swiss authorities having assured her he would not be grated a visa). As they were at the airport trying to get him on a plane back to Switzerland, he pulled a knife from where he'd secreted it in his bag, fatally stabbed Amelia and seriously injured her sister, who tried to stop him. The jury at his trial did not buy his insanity defense.

"Thirty Years Later": Seattle WA 1978: Clarence Williams abducted and murdered Laura Bayliss (aka Julie Costello), the night-shift clerk in a 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill, and was convicted because he was caught on the security cameras. He insisted it was a case of mistaken identity. In 2007, still serving his sentence for Laura Bayliss' murder, Williams was convicted of the 1978 rape and murder of 15-year-old Sara Beth Lundquist based on DNA evidence from samples that detectives at the time had had the wits to take and preserve. Williams entered an Alford plea, refusing to admit guilt just as he had done in the Bayliss case. He was sentenced to an additional 30 years in prison.

*"Not Safe at Home": Marysville WA 1978: 56-year-old Traia Carr was raped and murdered by a 17-year-old neighbor who--as it turned out--was a ticking time bomb of sociopathy and sexual sadism. No one had any reason to suspect he was dangerous before Carr's death. He was tried as an adult on charges of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree theft, and riding in a motor vehicle without the owner's permission (Snohomish County threw the book at him to be sure that something would stick). He was found guilty on all five counts.

(In a creepy coincidence that Rule swears she didn't plan, Sara Beth Lundquist and Traia Carr were murdered the same July 4th weekend of 1978.)



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UBC: Lourie, Hunting the Devil

Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History by Richard Lourie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this book in conjunction with Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer, and the parallax view was fascinating.

Lourie is a little too "human interest" for my taste: he's actually much more interested in the biography of the man who organized and led the search for Chikatilo than he is either in Chikatilo or his crimes. Now, I agree with him, Issa Magamedovich Kostoev, the head of Russia's Department of Crimes of Special Importance, is a much more interesting person than Chikatilo, and Lourie could actually have done more than he did with the parallels between the two men. Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (who was executed the year after both this book and Comrade Chikatilo were published) was ethnic Ukrainian and, being born in 1936, lived through the years when Ukraine was being kicked around Europe like an old soccer ball. His mother told him stories of his older brother Stepan, killed and eaten by starving Ukrainians before Chikatilo was born. (The problem with this story is that, although Chikatilo's sister also remembers their mother's vivid recounting of Stepan's death, no one else remembers it happening, and there are no records of a Stepan Romanovich Chikatilo, eaten by cannibals or otherwise.) Chikatilo wanted to go to law school, but his father committed the terrible crime of surviving being a POW in WWII, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him a traitor. So Chikatilo became a teacher and then a supply clerk, married, had two children, and in 1978 started raping, killing, and mutilating girls, boys, and young women.

Issa Magamedovich Kostoev is ethnic Ingush, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him and his entire nation traitors. He lived through two "resettlements" (in which three of his siblings died), and clawed his way up, by virtue of being smart and aggressive, to the point that he could in fact go to law school; he also had the sense, unlike Chikatilo, not to try for Moscow, knowing it was pointless. (Kostoev's dream was actually to become a test pilot, but he got thrown out of the stiff competition for admission for brawling.) Kostoev became a master interrogator, solved a number of difficult cases (including indicting basically the entire legal and judicial structure of Rostov-on-Don for corruption), and became head of the Department of Crimes of Special Importance. And got handed the dreadful clusterfuck that was the investigation of the serial killer working in Rostov-on-Don.

Putting Kostoev and Chikatilo side by side makes mincemeat of most of Chikatilo's attempts at self-exculpation. Chikatilo had an awful childhood? So did Kostoev. Chikatilo was denied his heart's desire? So was Kostoev. It's that old unanswerable question of why some people are able to choose not to do evil. And in some cases, like Kostoev, become illuminated inside with the desire to do good.

Like I said, Lourie could have done more with that.

He does do a good job of following Kostoev's Herculean achievement in actually catching Chikatilo, and in putting both Chikatilo's career as a murderer and Kostoev's career as an investigator in context with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition from Stalinist corruption, paranoia, and mindless bureaucracy to glasnost--which if not a miracle panacea at least brought a new set of problems to the table. His version of the inside of Chikatilo's head is based on imagery and metaphor, but is in its own way effective. I have no idea if his version of Kostoev is an accurate portrait of the real human being, but he does make him a splendid protagonist.



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