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Empty Promises and Other True Cases by Ann RuleMy rating:...

Empty Promises and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Empty Promises": Bellevue WA 1990: murder of Jami Hagel Sherer by her abusive stalker husband Steve
"Bitter Lake": murder of woman and her toddler son by her stalker ex-boyfriend
"Young Love": teenage boy threatens ex-girlfriend with bomb, but blows himself up
"Love and Insurance": gay man murdered by his roommate (lover? close friend?) for a $500,000 insurance policy
"The Gentler Sex": woman and her girlfriend murder her husband for the insurance money; another woman attempts to hire a hit man to murder her husband before he can divorce her (Murder Is Cheaper Than Divorce--she didn't care that he was divorcing her; she didn't want to have to divide her assets).
"The Conjugal Visit": the terrible history of Carl Cletus Bowles
"Killers on the Road": the equally terrible history of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine, who in 1967 murdered three people and nearly murdered a fourth--all complete strangers--simply because they could
"A Dangerous Mind": A man strangled his seven-year-old niece; investigators discovered a long history of his getting away with, or getting only very lightly punished for, sexually-motivated violence against children; his family (including the little girl's parents) continued to defend him. He committed suicide after his sentencing hearing.
"To Kill and Kill Again": Gary Gene Grant murdered two teenage girls and two six-year-old boys (the girls were separate crimes, the boys were together) for no motivation that even he could understand.
"The Stockholm Syndrome": Subject of a 1983 made-for-TV movie called The Awakening of Candra, Ann Rule's only novel, Possession, and (I think?) an episode of Forensic Files (I know I've seen the story re-enacted, so it was either Forensic Files or The New Detectives): Thomas Leslie Brown encountered a young couple fishing in the Oregon woods; having shot the young woman's husband and her dog, he spent three days dragging her through the mountains, raping her when he felt like it, and brainwashed her into believing that she had witnessed her husband's accidental death. It took her months to get reality sorted out again.



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UBC: Siegel, A Death in White Bear Lake

Death in White Bear Lake by Barry Siegel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Siegel is much more enamored than I am of the irony of the fact that in 1965, when three-year-old Dennis Jurgens died as the result of brutal and sustained abuse and the community failed to do a damn thing about it, White Bear Lake was named an "All-America City." Yes, yes, very ironic. But remarking on the irony would have been sufficient; the lengthy history of White Bear Lake and the chronicling of the campaign in the All-America City competition added unnecessary length to an already very long book. That part bored me.

The rest of the book was fascinating: the appalling train wreck of how Harold and Lois Jurgens were ever allowed to adopt a child in the first place, much less achieve their grand total of six (one died, the other five ran away); the way the system failed to protect children from Lois Jurgens over and over again; the revolution in the understanding of child abuse in the late 1960s; the cold case investigation (before "cold case" was a term in common usage) in 1986 that eventually led to Lois Jurgens' conviction on charges of third-degree murder (homicide committed in the course of a felony (aggravated assault in this case) but without the intent to kill; the jury was sure she was responsible for Dennis' death, but not sure beyond a reasonable doubt that she had intended to kill him). Siegel keeps control of his large cast of characters and his sprawling narrative; he's as nonjudgmental as he can be about bad decisions made by a large number of people while still pointing out that these were, hey, bad decisions.

Dennis Jurgens' death is kind of like Kitty Genovese in slow motion. Neighbors and family members knew that Lois was abusing him in all kinds of ways; they could provide eyewitness testimony to investigators both in 1965 and in 1986. But nobody thought it was their place to interfere. Everybody was waiting for somebody else to step up. And nobody did, either before or after he died--not until his birth mother discovered what had happened to him and started yelling.



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UBC: Fletcher, What Cops Know

What Cops Know by Connie Fletcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an oral history of cops--specifically Chicago cops. As with Fletcher's Every Contact Leaves a Trace, what makes this book fascinating is the voices of the cops she interviews, how they talk about what they've experienced.



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UBC: Fletcher, Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Connie Fletcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really liked this book, but I don't have much to say about it. It's an oral history of forensics, and I especially loved the feel it gives you for the voices of the people who do this work and the language they use (which varies widely, as one would expect) in talking about what they do.



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UBC: Rule, A Fever in the Heart

A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"A Fever in the Heart": Yakima WA 1975: the murder of Morris Blankenbaker & the highly ambiguous death of Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore
"The Highway Accident": Salem OR 1976: man tries to make his wife's death look like a car accident, not knowing the police have already found the murder scene
"Murder Without a Body": Rainier OR 1976: Vicki Brown's body was never found, but the cops found a sufficient corpus delicti to prosecute and convict her murderer.
"I'll Love You Forever": Auburn WA 1974: woman falls prey to sociopath; her daughters brought a successful civil suit against him before the cops could put together a criminal case--but after he managed to squander most of the wealthy victim's estate. He died in prison and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
"Black Leather": Roy WA 1979: a sadistic sexual psychopath's last victim manages to turn the tables on him
"Mirror Images": the horrific lives of Carl Harp (rapist and sniper) and James Ruzicka (rapist/murderer), who met in prison, became friends--insofar as either of them was capable of it--and shared a pseudonym, "Troy Asin." Harp died in prison (most likely suicide, but there's an outside chance he had help) and Ruzicka is serving consecutive life terms.

"A Fever in the Heart" demonstrates as clearly as any of her work the point where Rule and I don't mesh. She's interested in the people; I'm interested in the case. Mostly, this isn't a problem, but in this particular story she's so interested in the people--particularly Olive Blankenbaker, the victim's mother, who asked her to tell the story--that she does a lousy job of presenting the case. And the case is, in a horrible way, fascinating.

Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore was a phenomenal high school wrestling coach. Blankenbaker was one of his wrestlers, later a coach himself and Moore's friend. When Moore's first wife finally divorced him for being possessive, controlling, and manipulative, Blankenbaker let Moore stay with him and his wife for a few weeks "while he got back on his feet." Moore repaid him by seducing Blankenbaker's wife (pseudonymously called Jerrilee--and I'm going to call her that, even though I'm using everybody else's surname, because she shared surnames with both victims and it's too damn confusing, even though it's a patriarchal convention I loathe; just watch how rarely women get called by their unadorned surnames in anything you read). Jerrilee left Blankenbaker and married Moore, but less than a year later, she realized what a horrible mistake she'd made, divorced Moore, and went back to Blankenbaker. They were getting ready to be remarried when Blankenbaker was murdered. Moore was obsessed with Jerrilee and had told her he knew she'd come back to him if it weren't for Blankenbaker; she--and the cops--immediately suspected him, and even when his alibi held (he was in the hospital the night of Blankenbaker's murder), she and they were convinced he was behind it. He insisted he wasn't, insisted that he was trying to solve Blankenbaker's murder, that he was being stalked himself and was getting death threats. Jerrilee, the last time she was weak enough to speak to him, told him she didn't believe him, and he was trying to tell her he could prove it when she hung up on him. Moore could never grasp that she wasn't going to come back to him no matter what he did; he truly believed that Blankenbaker had been the obstacle in his path, not that he himself had driven her away.

Moore died less than a month after Blankenbaker of a gunshot wound that probably wouldn't have killed him if the .22 hadn't ricocheted off his rib and torn a hole straight across his body from left to right, through both lungs and the pericardium. (Low caliber bullets can do amazing things inside the human body.) The Yakima detectives working the case eventually dragged out the truth: Moore, who was like a god to his wrestlers, had gotten one of them to murder Blankenbaker and then, in pursuit of his delusion that he could "prove" his own innocence, browbeat that same wrestler into shooting him. Moore didn't intend that shot to be fatal, and one of the very important questions at trial was whether Angelo "Tuffy" Pleasant had also meant Moore to survive. Or not.

Angelo Pleasant (surely one of the most ironically misnamed people of all time) confessed to Yakima detectives on tape, then tried to recant his confession (throwing his younger brother and his best friend under the bus as the "real murderers"), but didn't have the intellectual stamina to maintain his new story under sharp and relentless cross-examination. It was hard to tell--and I think it was hard for Rule to tell--whether Pleasant was a conscienceless murderer or someone so malleable that Moore could verbally pin him to the mat and force him to do things he genuinely didn't want to do. Moore was a vile human being who hoist himself with his own petard.

Rule starts with Blankenbaker and her narrative meanders and loops and has to go spiraling off in all these different directions because Blankenbaker (to talk in terms of story-telling craft for a second) may be her hook, but he's not the throughline. In an awful, cruel, tragic way, Morris Blankenbaker is almost incidental to his own murder. Pleasant had nothing against him; he killed him because Moore wanted him dead. And Moore didn't care about Blankenbaker; he saw him only as the thing keeping Jerrilee away. And Jerrilee, in the worst tradition of courtly love, is also weirdly peripheral to the story; Pleasant barely even knew her and he said openly he didn't care about her one way or the other. She was Moore's idee fixe, the cruel beloved who appears in so much Renaissance lyric poetry, capriciously spurning the poet/knight until he proves his devotion. To give credit where it's due, Renaissance poets prove their worth by writing poetry, not by browbeating their former students into murder, but the cognitive schematic is the same. Feminist critics talk about the way the beloved in Renaissance lyric poetry is deprived of subjectivity, never allowed to be independent of the poet's desire for her, and that's exactly what Moore did to Jerrilee Blankenbaker. She had no subject position of her own in his conceptualization of her, no independent will that would keep her from returning to him if he just got rid of the other guy.

So most of the story is Moore and the steadily widening gap between Moore and reality, but Moore isn't the throughline either, because the investigation of his death made the investigation of Blankenbaker's death a whole new ballgame. But Pleasant, the murderer, isn't the throughline, because the motivation for Morris Blankenbaker's murder had nothing whatsoever to do with Angelo Pleasant himself.

You can see why Rule didn't think she knew how to tell this story, and I don't for a second pretend I would have done any better in her shoes.

But looking at what she did write, I think her throughline was staring her in the face in the person of Vern Henderson, a Yakima detective who was one of Moore's former students; was Blankenbaker's best friend; was--like Pleasant--an African-American man in a community that was 95% or more white; who found the shell casing at the scene of Blankenbaker's murder; shared investigative duties on the Blankenbaker/Moore case; and worked Angelo Pleasant into the right state of mind to confess. Henderson saw Jerrilee make the mistake of meeting with Moore after she'd returned to Blankenbaker, so although he wasn't close to Jerrilee (the poor woman exists in Rule's narrative almost exclusively in terms of her relationships with Blankenbaker and Moore), structurally he holds all the pieces of the story. If you follow Henderson, you get everything, and that isn't true of any of the other players. Also, if you follow Henderson, you stay focused on the case, but--because his life was so intertwined with Blankenbaker's, Moore's, and Pleasant's--you don't lose sight of the people. QED.



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UBC: Newton, Waste Land

Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate by Michael Newton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's all compiled from secondary sources; on the other, Newton collates his sources carefully, talks about discrepancies, and is clearly doing his own thinking, which I appreciate. He's an engaging writer, and he lays out the facts of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate's killing spree about as clearly as can be hoped for. I guess my problem is that I can't get a good read on how trustworthy he is--just because it's well-written doesn't mean it's a reliable source.

And the nature of the Starkweather/Fugate case foregrounds the question of reliability, with Starkweather's umpteen different confessions, all of them muddled, and Fugate's proclamations of terrorized innocence, so starkly at odds with basically EVERYTHING ELSE (including the self-contradictions in her testimony). Today she could probably make a case on Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm not even sure that that was what was going on. The fact that she and Starkweather dreamed up a clumsy "hostage" scenario before they even left the Fugate home tends to militate against the plausibility of any claim that Caril Ann Fugate, fourteen years old or not, knew exactly what she was doing. But, on the other hand . . .



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UBC: Olsen, Son

Son: A Psychopath and his Victims by Jack Olsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So far as anyone knows, Kevin Coe never escalated to murder, but Jack Olsen's narrative makes it clear it was only going to be a matter of time. Coe is currently incarcerated in a "Special Commitment Center"--a dreadfully Orwellian title for a facility that holds sexual predators; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's article about his attempt to sue the state of Washington makes it absolutely clear that he hasn't changed a particle since 1981 when he was first convicted; he's using the same arguments and the same language. That in itself suggests to me that he is where he belongs.

Son is an excellent book. Olsen has a sprawling story, a lot of people whose voices need to be heard, and some remarkable pieces of truth stranger than fiction, including Coe's mother in toto. Olsen doesn't rush, but there's no sense of wandering or rambling. He knows what story he's telling, and he balances it beautifully: Coe, his victims, his family and friends, the police, the city of Spokane (which is a character in this book in its own right). Olsen charts the damage done to Coe's victims but also to his friends, his girlfriend, his ex-wife; the book ends, in fact, with an oddly lovely and moving description of Jenifer Coe trying to put herself back together: "After twenty-eight months of self-imposed house arrest, she rode the bus downtown to look for work. She said she felt like Columbus sailing toward the edge of the earth" (570).



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UBC: Barthel, A Death in Canaan

A Death In Canaan by Joan Barthel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Unfortunately, this book just wasn't very good.

I've been trying to figure out why; it's not just that Barthel doesn't have any sense of how true crime works as a genre--she's not really writing true crime. The problem maybe is that she doesn't know what she's writing, so that what comes across is "This thing happened and I was there and me and my really important friends Did Something About It." It's not a memoir, because it's not about her, even though she keeps putting bits of her personal life in it for no clear reason. It's not really about Peter Reilly, who remains a cipher at the center of the book (and there are some questions about him that Barthel doesn't even seem aware she might want to try to answer); you might say it's about Barbara Gibbons, the murdered woman, but she is perforce an absence, only reconstructed from the people who knew her. And it can't be about the solving of Barbara Gibbons' murder, because that murder remains unsolved to this day.

It takes a writer who is not an artist but an obsessive and intensely self-aware artisan to write a book about an unsolved murder and make it work. Barthel complains about all the unknowns and ambiguities in the case, but she makes no effort (at least, no effort that she discusses) to find the answers. She comes across as a dilettante, a sightseer at someone else's tragedy. I have no idea if this is a fair assessment or not, which is what I mean by needing a self-aware artisan at the helm of a book like this. Barthel doesn't show any awareness of the self she's presenting through her narrative, and fortunately or unfortunately, the narrator in true crime--or, more generally, in nonfiction books about ambiguous or uncertain events (cf the book I just reviewed, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster)--is vitally important. The reader has to trust the author, not necessarily to know the truth, but to be able to distinguish between that they do know and they don't know, and part of that, if the narrator is also a character in the book's events, is self-awareness. Which Barthel just doesn't demonstrate.

There's also no throughline--as I said, she doesn't really seem to know what story she's telling or why she's telling it. The thing is hopelessly open-ended, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but Barthel neither has a story to put within that open-endedness, nor the skill needed to make the open-endedness her story.

At this remove, I have no idea why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer--except that Barthel's original article did uncover a really spectacular miscarriage of justice.



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UBC: Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



If this book doesn't cure you of wanting to climb Mt. Everest, nothing will.

I say that not only because the book is the story of the disaster that befell climbing parties on Everest in 1996, resulting in the deaths of three guides and two clients, but because Krakauer's vivid description of the experience of climbing Everest makes it clear that it is miserable, grueling, and agonizingly painful--and that's if nothing goes wrong.

Krakauer writes about the tragedy very movingly. His technique is nothing new--the bifurcation between past!Krakauer, who doesn't have any suspicions of what's coming, and present!Krakauer, who can see all the mistakes and warning signs and, like someone in a nightmare, wants nothing more than to be able to yell at past!Krakauer, pay attention HERE! But of course he can't. His foreshadowing--and maybe this is what makes it work--is not characterological. He talks about his friends Andy Harris and Doug Hansen without pointing toward their deaths. Although Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's characters bleed into the situation because they were the expedition leaders, the decision makers, but Krakauer makes it very clear that you can't point at any decision they made or action they took and say, this is why five people died. To a large degree, the only reason any of the disaster happened was that all of these people had made a common decision to climb Mt. Everest. People die doing that because it's an extremely dangerous thing to do.

This is not to say that Krakauer doesn't think mistakes were made. He does, and he says so. But he starts with himself. His own (self-perceived) culpability is maybe the center of the book, the whole thing an exercise in Krakauer trying to figure out why he made the decision he did, especially the decisions he believe led in part to Andy Harris' death.

The book is also a meditation on why people climb Mt. Everest, from the explorers to the people who feel they have to pit themselves against the mountain to the tourists. He's never entirely explicit about it, but there's a sub-theme of the danger involved in the obsession with, not climbing Mt. Everest, but "summitting" it. Reaching the summit. The guided expeditions led by Hall and Fischer (and a whole bunch of other people) had as their goal summitting Mt. Everest, getting as many people as were willing to pay their $65,000 to the summit as safely and easily as possible. (Hall's idol Sir Edmund Hillary was contemptuous of this practice, which crushed Hall, but didn't change his mind.) Summitting is a very different enterprise than climbing Mt. Everest--in fact, as Krakauer, an avid climber himself, notes with some dismay, there's very little climbing-qua-climbing involved. One of the things Krakauer thinks went wrong was the culture, the relationship of guides and clients as opposed to the relationship of climbing partners: "Andy and I were very similar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it's inconceivable to me that I would have neglected to recognize his plight. But on this expedition he had been cast in the role of invincible guide, there to look after me and the other clients; we had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment" (188). He acknowledges in other passages the reason for that "indoctrination," the fact that an expedition like that one cannot be a democracy, with clients arguing the guides' call, but in reading this book, I couldn't help feeling that both sides were correct: arguing on Mt. Everest is going to be pretty much synonymous with death, but there are so many things that can go wrong, so quickly, and so many of them have to do with oxygen starvation of the brain, that, yeah, Krakauer's right, the idea that guides are "invincible" is maybe just as deadly.

And Hall's boast that he could get anyone up Mt. Everest may have been, in the most Greek-tragedy-worthy style, the reason that he and Hansen were caught by the storm. Hansen had had to give up just short of the summit the year before, and Hall, having persuaded him to try again, was bound and determined that he would make it. Krakauer saw Hall talk Hansen out of turning back earlier in the day, and the last people to see Hall and Hansen alive saw Hall reaching the summit with Hansen's arm slung over his shoulder. Hall broke his own strict rules, and he and Hansen died for it.

This is a sad book and a horrifying book, a book that raises many more questions than it answers. In the end, Krakauer can't explain to his own satisfaction what happened. He can only leave this testament to the fact that it did.



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UBC: Rosenbaum, Travels with Dr. Death

Travels with Doctor Death by Ron Rosenbaum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I first encountered Ron Rosenbaum with his excellent book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which is a collection of investigative journalism essays about all the theories people have about what made Hitler into what he was (and in fact the last essay in this book bridges the two collections). This collection is not themed in the same way; it's just a bunch of essays Rosenbaum wrote in the '70s and '80s about a whole host of crazy things: JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, Watergate conspiracy theorists, the BATFUCK NUTS things the CIA was doing in the '80s, the cancer clinics of Tijuana, the phone phreaks, the extremely uncomfortable and awkward questions raised by nuclear deterrence theory, and some splendid true crime essays: the unsolved murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer (who was, among many other things, one of JFK's mistresses); a drug dealer's murder in Brooklyn; the very strange death of David Whiting; and the title essay, which is about Dr. James Grigson. Grigson was an expert witness Texas prosecutors called in basically on behalf of the death penalty. Grigson's schtick was pronouncing the defendant an incurable sociopath, guaranteed to kill again, based on nothing but the prosecutor's "hypothetical" reconstruction of the crime (in a Kafka-esque catch-22, the Supreme Court had judged it unconstitutional for Grigson to examine the defendant himself, because that violated the defendant's 5th Amendment rights). Grigson was a terror on cross-examination and he knew exactly how to get juries to believe him. A particularly perceptive defense attorney told Rosenbaum, "If you ask me, he's the sociopath [...] He's the one who, despite reprimands, goes around making pronouncements which have been condemned by his profession. He's the one who does it over and over again with no remorse [...] Just like a sociopath" (234). And Grigson tells Rosenbaum about the defendant he does get to examine, Gayland Bradford:

"And as I was leaving he pointed his finger at me and said, 'You're slick.'"

"You're slick?"

"Yeah, it was 'Hey, man, you're slick.' It's the sociopath's compliment. It's the recognition of the sociopath for somebody who appreciates what he really is."
(233)

Grigson doesn't quite say, "it's the recognition of the sociopath for another sociopath," but that isn't very far beneath the surface of his grammatically convoluted explanation.

(I notice that, while Rosenbaum doesn't mention all the testimony of future dangerousness listed by the site I found Gayland Bradford on (which, as it happens, is the Clark County Indiana prosecutor's website, which lists all the times the death penalty has been carried out since 1976 because, apparently, there haven't been enough of them), the Clark County website doesn't mention the testimony of Dr. Grigson. Further note, because irony is good for you, Bradford wasn't put to death until 2011--twenty-three years after he murdered Brian Williams, twenty-one years after he was sentenced to death, and seven years after Grigson died of lung cancer.)

It's probably hyperbole to say that Grigson was a sociopath--but is it more hyperbolic than Grigson's own on-the-spot "hypothetical" diagnoses of incurable sociopathy?

At this point, this collection is something of a historical artifact, but Rosenbaum is a smart, thoughtful, engaging writer, and beneath the dated topicality, what he's writing about is the weird, dark, twisted side of human nature, and that, my friends, is still extremely damn relevant.



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