Sarah Monette's Blog, page 6

UBC: Rule, You Belong to Me

You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"You Belong to Me": I-95 Indian River County FL 1990: The Florida State Highway Patrol was found not liable in Lorraine Dombroski Hendricks' murder, but the more I think about it, the more I think that judgment was itself part of the exact same failure that let her be killed: there was more than enough evidence that State Trooper Tim Harris was not fit to be out alone, much less in a position of authority--the problem was that the vast majority of the evidence was his behavior toward his estranged wife Sandy, and that evidence was consistently discounted because (1) it was considered Harris' personal life and not the business of his supervisors, and (2) his (male) supervisors preferred (again consistently) to believe Harris' version of the situation, which was that his wife was a cold-hearted bitch, rather than the truth, which was that she was terrified of her abusive unfaithful stalker of a husband. (Also (3) Sandy Harris had been conditioned to believe that the problem was her, even when it was manifestly him, and she had no confidence that her version would be believed, and that again is part of the same problem of not thinking that men need to be held accountable for their behavior toward women.) If Harris' supervisors had taken the situation seriously as what it was--mounting (and mountainous) evidence that Harris, sworn to uphold the law, believed with perfect sincerity that the law did not apply to him (it's the most ridiculously blatant double-standard I believe I've ever seen, or it would be ridiculous if the consequences hadn't become so dire)--or even if anyone, at any point, had looked at the way Tim Harris talked about women, treated women (including street harassment in front of other (male) law-enforcement officers), and behaved toward his wife, and simply said, Something here is not right, instead of letting it slide and letting it slide, Lorraine Hendricks would not have died in 1990. Because when you look at the pattern of evidence that Rule describes, the only surprise is that Harris' victim wasn't his wife. He used his authority as a Florida state trooper to find a proxy. I don't think--let me be clear--that anyone except Tim Harris is responsible for Lorraine Hendricks' death, because I am not prepared to accept excuses for him, but there is a certain amount of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? that, yeah, actually, I do think we need to be asking.
"Black Christmas": Seattle 1984: a lawyer and his family are murdered because a young man (who was judged legally sane, but I'm not convinced) fixated on Communists as the cause of all his problems and decided to start killing them, and because he read and confabulated an old story about the lawyer's father--and that story wasn't even what he thought it was. David Lewis Rice used a steam iron to bludgeon the lawyer, his wife, and their two little boys to death.
One Trick Pony": Yakima WA 1975: This is the obverse face of Why Buy the Cow?: Murder Is Cheaper than Divorce. Man murders his wife and fakes the scene to look like she was kicked by one of her horses; determined efforts on the part of the woman's sister finally get people looking at her skull who know a HAMMER when they see its shape in someone's skull.
"The Computer Error and the Killer": Burien WA 1974 (and several other dates and places): Here's another Kill Me Twice. Gary Addison Taylor should never have BEEN in Burien WA to abduct and kill Vonnie Stuth; he'd been judged psychotic--criminally insane and demonstrably a public danger--in Michigan in 1957. And then again in 1961. But our legal system has a really crappy memory, and in 1970 he was transferred to outpatient care (the director of the clinic said he believed Taylor "was no longer mentally ill and would be dangerous only if he failed to take his medication" (382)) and the blindingly inevitable happened. And at that point, as if this story weren't already beyond what a novelist could get away with, when he stopped showing up for his appointment in mid-1973, he wasn't reported as an escaped mental patient for three months and that report didn't get into the national law enforcement communication system, a mistake which wasn't discovered until more than a year later. And then, when Michigan authorities realized that mistake, their urgent bulletin which was supposed to be released on November 6, 1974 . . . wasn't. Gary Taylor's name wasn't actually entered into the national system until January 13, 1975. Vonnie Stuth vanished on November 27, 1974. King County law enforcement was forced to release Addison when they had him in custody on December 6, because they checked the system and his name came up clean. Which meant that more women in Texas would be raped and terrorized before Taylor was finally arrested in May 1975. He eventually confessed to four murders, including Vonnie Stuth, but investigators were pretty sure he wouldn't have told them about any murders they hadn't already connected him to. Which means the actual count of his victims is unknown.
"The Vanishing": Seattle WA 1979: this one's a mystery without a murder. Stacy Sparks disappeared without a trace in 1979. Friends, family, police searched and searched without success. She and her car were finally found by construction workers in 1981 where she had gone off the Lacey V. Murrow Bridge, one of many victims of the bridge's infamous "bulge." No one saw it happen and the accident left no evidence above the surface of the water.
"The Last Letter": Bellevue WA 1985: This case makes a horrible sort of ring composition with "You Belong to Me." Bill Brand, like Tim Harris, was a possessive stalker; Jackie Brand, like Sandy Harris, didn't recognize the difference between possessiveness and love until it was too late. In one way, Jackie was lucky; she never had to learn what Bill really thought of her.

Lorraine Hendricks' awful death, one part narcissistic sociopath, one part societal blindness, and one part malignant synchronicity, stirred into an cocktail of rape and ligature strangulation, just makes me heartsick.



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UBC: Rule, A Rage to Kill

A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Even if you don't want to read about this handful of sociopaths, go take a look at the Fremont Troll.


"A Bus to Nowhere": Seattle 1998: Silas Cool, who shot the driver of an articulated Seattle Metro bus just as it was starting over the Aurora Bridge (awesome and tangential sidebar: the Aurora Bridge may have my favorite public sculpture EVER: the Fremont Troll)
"The Killer Who Planted His Own Clues": Tumwater WA 1976: the murder of Sharon Mason by Charles "Buddy" Longnecker, who is the perfect stereotype of the sociopathic sexual predator.
"Born to Kill?": Seattle 1961, Walla Walla WA to McKees Rocks PA 1977: the dreadful career of Michael Andrew Olds, who shot Blossom Braham in a grocery story robbery in 1961 for no reason; convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, he was a model prisoner in the Washington State Penitentiary for thirteen years and was paroled in 1974. Sociopaths do very well in environments with external controls on their behavior. In 1977, he robbed his place of employment, murdered a taxi driver, kidnapped a series of elderly people, murdering one, as he veered on an erratic course across the US, and finally, having taken a seven year old boy hostage and missed shooting a police officer by a hair, was apprehended in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. This time, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
As Close As a Brother": Seattle 1969, Kent WA 1972: Bernie Pierce, kind and considerate and trustworthy . . . until he starts drinking. Murdered his girlfriend in 1969, raped and murdered a young woman he claimed to consider a sister in 1972.
"Profile of a Spree Killer": Miami FL, Coral Gables FL, Daytona Beach FL, Merritt Island FL, Tallahassee FL, Beaumont TX, Oklahoma City OK, Grand Junction CO, Las Vegas NV, Torrance CA, Gary IN, Victor NY, Colebrook NH 1984: the loathsome Christopher Wilder, who preyed on teenage girls by pretending to be a professional photographer--the list of his victims is probably a lot longer than just those raped and murdered during his last spree, but since he killed himself rather than letting police apprehend him, no one's ever going to know for sure. His seven million dollar estate was divided among the families of his victims. One of his probable victims, Colleen Orsborn, is the subject of Disappeared 4.9, "Spring Break Nightmare"; Wilder is also the subject of The FBI Files 2.1., "A Model Killer."
"The Lost Lady": Alderwood Manor WA 1979: the strange, strange case of Marcia Moore, heiress, psychic, astrologer, yoga teacher, ketamine "researcher." She disappeared in 1979; her remains were found in 1981 less than fifteen miles from her home. There wasn't enough left to determine how she died. Rule hints strongly that she was murdered by her fourth husband, although she clearly doesn't have enough evidence to present to a metaphorical grand jury. He certainly seems like a plausible suspect, but it also seems not improbable that Moore's long term ketamine habit finally caught up with her and she simply wandered out into the winter night and died of exposure.
"To an Athlete Dying Young": Olympic National Park 1979: Jane Constantino, in the wrong place at the cruelly wrong time, crossed paths with Dale Harrison on the day he was looking for a woman to murder.
"Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town": Des Moines WA 1974: the horrible truth that if someone is determined to kill his ex-wife (or her ex-husband or any combination of genders and relationships), he'll do it. This pseudonymous murderer, *Eric Shaw, is one of the most hateful people in this book, and that's saying something.
"That Was No Lady": Seattle 1976: file this under "that was another country and besides the wench is dead" for its clumsy treatment of transsexuality. The murderer in this case was a sociopath; that's why the victim ended up dead. Transsexuality or transvestitism (and whenever this story was actually written, Rule clearly didn't have a grip on the difference between a homosexual transvestite man and a male-to-female transsexual--her subject may not have had, either), that's not what was wrong, although it was very clearly what the murderer was hiding behind, just as other sociopaths hide behind other problems (Ted Bundy "confessing" the night before his execution that he was made into a serial killer by pornography and true crime magazines springs immediately to mind).
The Killer Who Talked Too Much": Seattle 1976: Another man raping and murdering a woman he claimed to consider a sister--and then raping and murdering another woman he barely knew, who happened to be his alibi for the first murder. He tripped himself up in talking to police by knowing about a split-leaf philodendron that his second victim hadn't been given until after the last time Jones claimed he was in her apartment.
I remind myself again that for every person like Longnecker or Olds or *Shaw, Jones or Wilder or Harrison, there are a dozen people like the police officers who caught them, people who can see outside themselves, whose empathy isn't broken off below the skin, who are as driven to protect as these men were driven to kill.



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UBC: Rule, A Rose for Her Grave

A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"A Rose for Her Grave": Beacon Rock OR 1981, Lake Sammamish WA 1991: the abominable career of Randy Roth, who murdered two of his four wives for their life insurance--and a third escaped him by the skin of her teeth
"Campbell's Revenge": Clearview WA 1974, 1982: the completely preventable murders of two women and a child by Charles Rodman Campbell. Campbell raped Renae Wicklund in 1974. She had the guts to testify against him. He was convicted in 1976 and sentenced to thirty years with a seven-and-a-half year minimum, plus fifteen years with a five-year minimum on a completely different conviction. (Why he was at large to rape Wicklund at all is not clear to me.) So it looked like Campbell should have been neutralized as a threat for somewhere between twelve and forty-five years (a range from 1988 to 2021). However. Those two sentences ran concurrently, not consecutively, and due to what looks like both corruption and gross mismanagement in the Monroe Reformatory, Campbell started getting furloughs in 1982. When he was put in a work-release program very shortly thereafter, nobody bothered to notify either Wicklund or her local law enforcement. Campbell promptly returned to Clearview and revenged himself on his victim: he raped and murdered her, murdered her daughter, and murdered a neighbor who happened to be visiting. I am so very ambivalent about the death penalty; mostly I think it's wrong, but every so often there's a case like this where I think it's right. Campbell was hanged in 1994.
"The Hit Person: Equal Opportunity Murder": Seattle WA 1980: this one is just so weird. The murder of Wanda Touchstone by Cynthia Marler, MOST LIKELY as the result of a conspiracy by Touchstone's estranged husband, his daughter, and his son-in-law; it was cheaper to murder her than to let her go through with the divorce. Marler did not testify against Touchstone, and in return he left her hanging out to dry.
"The Runaway": Nile Country Club WA 1974: Malevolent chance put 13-year-old Janna Hanson in the path of Ken Burke on a day when he couldn't keep his homicidal insanity under control. Her body wasn't found for eight months, during which time her family's concern was of course rebuffed by authorities telling them Janna had just run away.
"The Rehabilitation of a Monster": Salem OR 1961, 1975: two more completely preventable murders, from what we might call the Kill Me Twice (Shame On Me) Department. Richard Marquette murdered and literally butchered Joan Caudle in 1961. He spent 11 years being a model prisoner and was paroled in 1973. In 1974 he murdered and butchered a still unidentified woman (he didn't bother to find out her name before he killed her and, since searchers were unable to find her head, her remains couldn't be matched to any missing persons report--if anyone ever reported her missing at all); in 1975 he murdered and butchered Betty Wilson. This time, he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. He's 81 now and still in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
"Molly's Murder": Seattle 1986: Young woman raped and murdered by her upstairs neighbor . . . simply because he could. This case is also the subject of one segment of The New Detectives 5.4, "Natural Witness."
Dear men, If you ever wonder why women spend their lives being subliminally afraid, read this book.



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The Burgess Shale Revisited . . . in PLUSH

So in the comments to my review of Wonderful Life, an alert reader mentioned purchasing a plush Opabinia. I think I withstood temptation for about 18 hours before I just couldn't stand it any longer and had to Google "plush opabinia," whereupon I discovered that not only does such a thing exist, there's more than one. There's Opabinia in brown, blue and red, yellow and blue, yellow and orange, blue and purple, mottled green and blue . . . Anomalocaris also appears in plush, as do Hallucigenia and Wiwaxia and Perspicaris and Ottoia and Amwiskia and, I admit it, my absolute favorite, Sidneyia:

I love Sidneyia inexpectans with all my foolish weirdo heart. Can't even tell you why.

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher LyleMy ra...

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This book could have been so good. Lyle had all the pieces she needed: a fascinating story, comprehensive research into both the original crime and trial and into what had happened to the story in the intervening century., her own innate knowledge of the part of West Virginia where it happened. She's quite good as a historian/journalist, understands what her evidence does and does not prove; she even has an interesting theory about what "really" happened.

But she also has a fatal flaw. She didn't trust her material. "I am not the first to observe that fiction is, or can be, more real than truth. Thus I feel that the purposes of history, in this instance at least, are better served by a carefully documented account interspersed with invented scenes based on the best information I could find, than by an account so dry no one would have wanted to read it" (xv).

She could not be more wrong.

The parts of this book that are historiography are great, compelling and lively. The parts of this book that are fiction (and, credit where credit is due, she does delineate very clearly the bits that are made up) are terrible. They're not necessarily badly written, but they feel false because I was so aware, as a reader, that she was just making it up. She doesn't know how Zona Heaster Shue met her murderer. She doesn't know the story Mary Jane Robinson Heaster told about her daughter's ghost. And she doesn't know a goddamn thing about what was going on in Trout Shue's head.

Part of being a historian, it seems to me, is owning the parts of your story you will never find. She could have written a lovely chapter on the kinds of ghost stories that Mary Jane Heaster would have known as someone who grew up in the Appalachians (her endnotes indicate clearly that she did the necessary research into folklore and ballads)--and on that very interesting tidbit in the local paper, printed the same week as Zona's funeral, about a man in Australia who invented a ghost because he knew of no other way to convince people that the victim was in fact murdered. Instead, she makes up her own ghost story, with an endnote saying: "Mrs. Heaster must have told Preston something like this" (37). It's just wrong, and it's disappointing.



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Wacky hijinks ensue, wildlife edition

ROUND 1
1st BIPED1: What the fuck?
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is new toy!
1st BIPED: ... that's a mouse.
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA*: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is toy! See! [bats at mouse softly, no claws]
1st BIPED: Seriously?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is awesome toy!
MOUSE: [escapes]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: D'oh!
1st BIPED: Where the fuck did it go?
UNDERFOOT CAT: I will find!
1st BIPED: I wish you wouldn't.
2nd BIPED3: [emerging belatedly from the study] Mouse?
1st BIPED: [brightly] Adventures with nature!

INTERLUDE, in which there is much peering under furniture by UNDERFOOT CAT and both 1st & 2nd BIPEDS

ROUND 2
2nd BIPED: [from under the piano] JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
1st BIPED: [dryly] Did you find it?
2nd BIPED: It's on top of the radiator. I thought the cat was just on crack.
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy! I has finded you!
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
1st BIPED: [advances with makeshift mouse-capturing device] Cat, you are as much use as a trapdoor in a canoe.
UNDERFOOT CAT: [being dragged away] But! Is toy!
1st BIPED: [captures mouse]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Biped! No interfering!
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [advances to suitable mouse-release point and lifts makeshift lid of makeshift mouse-capturing device] Fuck, I don't have it.
2nd BIPED: [facepalm]

INTERLUDE, in which CATZILLA scoots anxiously through the living room & completely and utterly fails to notice the mouse

ROUND 3
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy is in radiator! Make it come out!
2nd BIPED: [attempting to pry mouse away from the radiator with a dowel] You're a strong little bastard, I'll give you that much.
MOUSE: [escapes]
2nd BIPED: FUCK.
1st BIPED: It's over here! Gimme the--
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Where is toy?
1st BIPED: HA! [captures mouse in makeshift mouse-capturing device]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: INTERFERENCE!
UNDERFOOT CAT: To-ooy! Where has you gone?
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [releases mouse at suitable mouse-release point]
2nd BIPED: This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning.
1st BIPED: At least you're not the mouse.

CODA
UNDERFOOT CAT: [peering under bookcase] Toy? Is you under here?
2nd BIPED: Really, cat?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, & MIRANDA: This is very embarrassing.
GHOST OF EMMA: Oh my god I can't even.
1st BIPED: I no longer wonder why he was found up a tree.
CATZILLA: ... Is something going on?


---
1Played by my lovely husband, mirrorthaw
2a.k.a. the Orange Creamsicle Dream Cat, the Elder Saucepan, and the First and Second Ninjas
3This would be me.

UBC: Gould, Wonderful Life

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I'm not saying anything startling or new when I say this book is awesome.

So, for one thing, it's a book about writing and about mythology, and how what we think we know limits what we see and therefore what stories we can tell, a problem which Gould addresses both in terms of paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale and in terms of Gould himself looking at the paleontologists looking at the Burgess Shale. So he talks about how Charles Doolittle Walcott got everything wrong (except for the names--surely some subconscious tingle was telling him these little animals were weirder than he thought they were) because he saw what he expected to see when he looked at them. And then Gould talks about himself looking at Drs. Whittington and Conway Morris and thinking he knew what he was looking at; surely when you have a conservative paleontologist ("conservative" in its proper dictionary meaning, not its political meaning) and his young, radical, fire-breathing graduate student, the two must butt heads.

But they don't.

Gould is perfectly transparent about the tangle he gets himself in because he lets his mythology do his thinking for him. So he's talking about how the stories we tell create mythology (like the myth of the discovery of the Burgess Shale, which in point of fact happened in an utterly undramatic field-science kind of way) and then how, in turn, that mythology once created limits the stories we can tell. The paleontologist and his graduate student collaborate with the other graduate student (who gets left out of the picture in the mythology precisely because he doesn't fit the false binary) to completely re-form our understanding of the evolution of multicellular life on Earth. The animals of the Burgess Shale are mostly not proto-crustaceans as Walcott labeled them. Some of them aren't arthropods at all.

This book is also awesome for two other reasons:

(1) Gould's enthusiasm (which I admit I found both endearing and infectious) for explaining the creatures of the Burgess Shale to his lay audience. And his passionate commitment to the notion of an intelligent lay audience that he can explain them to.

(2) the creatures themselves which are holy shit not even kidding the most unheimlich things I have ever seen, including tarantulas, which used to be my #1. (I like spiders, but there's something about tarantulas, the way they move, or the way they look like they ought to be inanimate but aren't . . .) I kept having to remind myself that Opabinia is (a) two inches long and (b) extinct, and even then it didn't really help with the way my spine kept trying to crawl up into my skull to hide.

But the animals of the Burgess Shale are weird and amazing and beautiful in their own way, and their principles of design are far more imaginative than anything I've ever read or seen in science fiction . . . except maybe "Or All the Seas with Oysters."

Maybe.



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UBC: Keppel & Birnes, The Riverman

The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer by Robert D. Keppel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book makes a fascinating counterpoint to Ann Rule's bookends, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story and Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer. It charts Keppel's path from the investigation of Ted Bundy's murders (which I've had to tag "the ted murders" instead of by geographical location as I usually do, since Bundy ranged from Washington State to Florida) to the investigation of the Green River murders . . . to the bizarre suggestion by Ted Bundy that he could be an invaluable resource in efforts to find the Green River Killer. And to the apprehension in 2003, more than ten years after Bundy failed in his efforts to beat the electric chair, of Gary Ridgway, and the ways in which Bundy's predictions do and don't match up with reality.

Keppel recognizes easily that Bundy is projecting himself onto the GRK, at the same time that he's driven mad with jealousy that somebody else is hunting on his territory. The simplest evidence of this is the way that Bundy keeps insisting that the GRK must be a Tacoma native, as Bundy was himself. Bundy keeps trying to swap himself in when he talks about the GRK (arguably, the only way that a person utterly lacking in empathy ever could proceed under those circumstances), and it's fascinating when he's right and equally fascinating when he's wrong, especially because the point on which Bundy was most consistently wrong was his assessment of the GRK's intelligence. Bundy was very smart (though never as smart as he thought he was) and he prided himself hubristically on his intelligence, so it's not surprising that he attributed the same intelligence to the GRK. But the interesting thing is that Ridgway isn't as smart as Bundy. In her book, Rule argues that the reason he went uncaught for so long was that he was such a loser, nobody could take him seriously as a serial killer. I wouldn't go quite that far (I think her own loathing of him may have colored her assessment, FOR WHICH I DO NOT BLAME HER), but I think Ridgway did survive uncaught as long as he did because he didn't have Bundy's prideful self-conception of himself as the most intelligent guy in the room. He was cunning, but he never tried to get "smart." And, horrible and counter-intuitive as it is to put it this way, he was a much more stable personality than Bundy. Bundy fell the fuck apart once he was on the run; his murders in Florida just became wilder and wilder and more unlike the careful, carefully thought out attacks he made on his victims in Washington State, and I think the very intelligence he prided himself on, that weird semi-accurate self-awareness that he shows in his interviews with Keppel--because he can never see himself entirely accurately, can never see the pits he's digging for himself to fall into --is part of what unbalanced him and made him need more and more and more, more murder and more violence and more of what he was able to recognize was depravity. (It's interesting that his last murder was a child, and his probable first murder--the one he refused almost hysterically to confess to--was also a child.) Whereas Ridgway, without that relentless over-clocking, was able to murder and walk away and murder again and eventually back off almost entirely. He never stopped killing between 1984 and 2001, but he slowed way, way down. If serial killers are addicted to murder, as Keppel and Bundy and Ridgway all suggest, in remarkably different phrasings, Ridgway was able to control his addiction; Bundy was not.

I've been struggling with how to describe this book in comparison with Rule. They're very different; one way to put it would be that Keppel writes like a cop and Rule doesn't, except that Rule was a cop, so however she writes is how a cop writes. A stereotyping way would be that Keppel writes like a man and Rule writes like a woman. Keppel tells Bundy, as part of the endless intricate pas de deux that the two of them dance, that he's not interested in the "why"--why Bundy was a serial killer--and while that's not actually true, since Keppel is intensely interested in why serial killers do what they do, the hunt, the kill, the afterparty--which, jeez, is a horrible metaphor, but both Bundy and Ridgway revisited their victims' corpses, partly for reasons of necrophilia (Ridgway admits to this without much apparent agonizing, but Bundy tied himself up in thirteen different kinds of hell-drenched knots over it: again, intelligence and self-awareness are not necessarily your friend if you're going to go in for this sort of thing) and partly for reasons of possession. They were both far more closely attuned to the places they left their victims' bodies than they were to their victims themselves. Which only makes sense; they only knew their victims for a matter of hours at the outside, but their relationships with those places stretched out over years. In 2003, Ridgway couldn't identify most of his victims from photographs, but he could lead detectives to exactly where he put them, and this despite the fact that the victims hadn't changed in the last 20 years and the land most certainly had. Keppel says that no one ever had any luck searching for Bundy's unfound victims, even when Bundy had described the location very precisely, and I wonder if it's because Bundy was lying, as he very well may have been, or if the land had changed in ways that the searchers couldn't adjust for but Bundy himself would have been able to. Moot point. Ridgway, with no investment in his own intelligence, took the plea bargain; Bundy, trying to prove he was the smartest man in the room, kept holding back the information until there was no leverage left in it.

Okay. Long tangent. What I was saying is, Keppel's interested in why, but he's interested in the why of serial killers as a class. He's not interested in Theodore Robert Bundy or Gary Leon Ridgway. And while he's outraged and grieved by the murders of these forty-eight plus young women, he doesn't have any interest in the sort of biographical detective work that Rule does. He's content with name, age, race, time and place last seen, when determinable, and the umbrella category of "working in prostitution." Other details are haphazard and mostly chosen because the irony makes them immediately memorable: Cheryl Wims, who was murdered on her 18th birthday; Cindy Smith, who'd moved back from California the day she disappeared in order to turn her life around; et cetera. And this is 100% okay because he's not writing the same kind of book Rule is. Rule's writing the story of the Green River murders, and that must include the stories of the victims. Keppel is writing about how he learned about catching serial killers through his work on the Ted murders and the Green River murders, and through his extraordinary interviews with Ted Bundy, as Bundy tried to teach him how to ask questions that would enable Bundy to answer him. (This is what The Silence of the Lambs looks like in real life. No Anthony Hopkins, no pretty FBI rookie. A middle-aged cop and Ted Bundy, whose manipulations were pathetic and terrifying at the same time and who wasn't, at the end, holding all four aces the way he thought he was. Hannibal Lecter is never pathetic, even in captivity, and there's part of me that says that makes him a horrifyingly irresponsible romanticization of men like Bundy and Ridgway.)

Very different perspective from Rule, but equally an excellent book.



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UBC: Rule, Green River, Running Red

Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is an excellent account of the Green River Killer's reign of terror, from the discovery of Wendy Lee Coffield's body in 1982 to his long, gruesome interviews with detectives as part of his plea bargain in 2003. Rule, as a famous true crime writer living in the south Seattle area, found herself a part of the story even as she was trying to prepare to write about it (to a lesser degree than happened with Ted Bundy, but I'm sure the coincidence was horrific for her), and I think part of what makes this book so engaging (if that's not an inappropriate term) is in fact Rule's own engagement with the story. Not just her empathy, but her deep personal knowledge of the geography that, as it would turn out, was so vital to Gary Ridgway himself. Her own fear informs the book (especially the literally fear-full moment when her daughter identified Ridgway as a man who frequently came to Rule's events); it's not as much a memoir as The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story, but it has some of that same feel.

Rule is also interested in the victims' sad, short stories (most of the girls Ridgway murdered were between 16 and 20) and clearly went to a lot of trouble to find their families and to listen to what they said. Her coverage is uneven, as it would have to be. You call tell that Opal Mills' brother, Tracy Winston's mother, Mary Bello's mother, and Mary Bridget Meehan's family gave extensive interivews, simply by the detail that Rule goes into; other victims are just names and the circumstances pieced together of their deaths. And then the ghastly afterlife of their corpses.

So if something possesses you to want to read about the Green River Killer, I do highly recommend this book.





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UBC: Levingston, Little Demon in the City of Light

Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is engaging, well-written, certainly entertaining as only belle epoque Paris can be. It features some of the same people as The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science, since one of the centerpieces of this story is a remarkable piece of forensic detective work. It never really answers its own questions, which bugged me a little--no discussion of modern understandings of what hypnotism can and can't do and how Gabrielle Bompard's story stacks up, and so no need to come down off the fence about whether she was as under Eyraud's thumb as she said she was or whether--as he maintained--she was the one controlling him.

Levingston occasionally has the lightning-bug problem--e.g., in describing what Emile Zola thought of women, he uses the word "distrustful" instead of the word he means (as is abundantly clear from context, even if I didn't know enough about Zola's misogyny to tell), which is "untrustworthy." But he uses primary sources--one of the French detectives kept a diary, which is worth its weight in gold--and he tells his story with flair.



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