Katherine Addison's Blog, page 12

Brooks, Too Pretty to Live (2016)

Too Pretty To Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee by Dennis Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an account, by the prosecutor, of the completely bonkers story of Jenelle Potter, who catfished her parents and her boyfriend into killing two people she had decided she hated. Brooks quotes extensively from her emails, both as herself and as Chris the CIA agent and as several other people, and the thing that's most unbelievable of all the unbelievable things is that anyone fell for it. Chris, an alleged CIA agent, has terrible grammar and spelling (exactly like Jenelle), is incredibly foul-mouthed, loves killing people (it's his job!), creates foul-mouthed trollish sockpuppets to go after people Jenelle doesn't like, and is focused solely on Jenelle and Jenelle's happiness and Jenelle's feud (which was almost 100% her own creation) with Billy Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth (and a third person who was lucky enough not to be there when Billy and Billie Jean were killed). Brooks delves deeper, picking apart the dysfunctional Potter family and finding the mother Barbara's paranoia and completely black-and-white view of the world and the father Buddy's self-aggrandizing lies (interestingly, he, too, claimed to work for the CIA), and the more Brooks shows, the clearer it becomes that Jenelle is the product of her parents' problems. Jenelle's dysfunctional, solipsistic worldview was largely created by her parents---but Jenelle herself retained agency and free will. She CHOSE to do the crazy things she did and bears her full share of the responsibility for what happened, especially considering that she used her parents' paranoia against them to get what she wanted, feeding them lies that they WANTED to believe. For all that she is intellectually disabled (and we never get a clear picture of just how much of a disability she has), Jenelle understands perfectly the first rule of conning people: show them what they want to see. And she seems to have had a very sophisticated understanding of what her parents wanted to see. "Chris" is utterly transparent (at least, if you're used to the idea of internet personas), a childish attempt at creating another identity, but the things he tells Barbara are carefully aimed and precisely calibrated to push her (and by extension Buddy) in the direction Jenelle wants. She knows how to push her parents' buttons and she does it like a pro.

Brooks is a competent writer and he explains things, like Jenelle's convoluted system of personas (e.g., the foul-mouthed hate-spewing dogpile sockpuppets are all created by her alter ego, Chris, because Jenelle herself would NEVER), extremely well. He also does a good job of presenting the real-world view of Jenelle (the people she was feuding with were mostly just baffled by and scared of her; none of them returned hate for hate---except in Jenelle's head, and by extension in her mother's and father's and boyfriend's). By quoting extensively from Jenelle/Chris's emails, and from Barbara's, he paints a vivid picture of how the murders came to happen.

There is a shadow center to this story, one Brooks can't reveal: the person who actually pulled the trigger. Jenelle's father Buddy did not use computers, so he left no (e)paper trail, and since he exercised his Miranda rights and refused to talk to the detectives who arrested him, and since he didn't testify at his own trial or at Jenelle and Barbara's, his voice is silent. We don't get a good sense of what the inside of his head looks like. We don't know how the gap from talk to action got bridged. It's entirely possible that Buddy couldn't explain it if he tried. Brooks also does a good job of showing Buddy's silence, of showing the fact that some answers are unfindable.



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Review: Cossins, The Baby Farmers (2013)

The Baby Farmers by Annie Cossins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating book about the Victorian practice of baby farming (where unmarried mothers paid people to "adopt" their babies, the babies then being left to die from a combination of starvation, neglect, and opium. Or strangulation, which was quicker. Baby farmers "adopted" multiple babies at a time, where the money they were making from these "adoptions" wasn't sufficient to support them, so they had to kill them to make way for the adoption of more babies.) John and Sarah Makin were baby farmers in Sydney, who through a long chain of remarkable circumstances, were tried and convicted of a murder that wasn't even proven to have been committed, since the prosecution proved neither the baby's identity nor that the baby's death was murder (Both judge and jury got very confused over the subject of the baby's identity; the idea that there were properly two entities, one being the child Horace Amber Murray and one being the body found and labeled Baby D, got so persistently elided together that the judge ended up stating as a given something that the jury was supposed to determine: whether or not Baby D was Horace Amber Murray.) Remarkably, the Makins' appeal failed. (The appellate judges also apparently failed to grasp the distinction between Horace Amber Murray and Baby D.) Both the original trial judge and the appellate judges were guilty of a miscarriage of justice, for however much it's clear that the Makins were responsible for the deaths of a minimum of 13 babies (that being the number of clandestine burials Constable James Joyce exhumed), it's not clear that those deaths were willful murder. Ironically, the state had a case of manslaughter against the Makins where the baby was identified and the cause of death (starvation) was known, but that case was not pursued because the Makins were (wrongly) convicted of murder first. John Makin was executed, and Sarah Makin served eighteen years in the hellish conditions of a late 19th century Australian prison.

Cossins tries a little too hard to be an engaging writer, but she does a good job with the legal issues in the Makins' trial, and she uses statistics on infant mortality and illegitimate children in the 1880s and 1890s (also some careful research on syphilis) to excellent effect.



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Review: Smith & Guillen, The Search for the Green River Killer (1991)

The Search for the Green River Killer by Carlton Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book about the Green River Killer is interesting precisely because it was written before Gary Ridgway was caught; Smith & Guillen don't have the benefit of hindsight in figuring out what's important and what isn't. There's no teleology available. This book gives an excellent sense of just how overwhelmed the Green River Task Force was: the dozens of victims, all of whom were living lives basically invisible to the authorities; all the other missing and/or murdered women in King County and environs; the hopeless task of narrowing down the suspect pool to a manageable size; the awful awful politics both within the police department and between the police department and the county government; the painful truth that they found Gary Ridgway in the 80s, they just didn't have enough evidence to arrest him.

Smith & Guillen tacked on an epilogue when Ridgway was convicted in 2003, in which they pose some excellent questions---questions that none of the other books I've read about the Green River Killer has asked (Rule cares about the victims enough, but is very much not a question-authority kind of author; Reichert is too busy polishing his ego; Prothero's book is really about Ridgway's plea deal)---questions like, how did this happen? Not the question of how Gary Ridgway came to be what he is, since that one there's no real answer to (nature? nurture? neither? both?), but the question of how he came to have such an abundance of prey. How could so many teenage girls fall through the cracks, that not only were they selling sex on the Sea-Tac Strip, but that nobody was even sure for a long time that they were MISSING. That part, Smith & Guillen point out, is not Gary Ridgway's fault. That part belongs to all the organizations and institutions and authorities that are supposed to protect children (and most of the Green River victims were still in their teens) and that, in these 48 cases and who knows how many more, failed.

This is not as compelling a book as Green River, Running Red, or as Defending Gary, but it is clearly written and non-partisan (Rule is always partisan, which I think is one of the reasons her books ARE compelling) and offers a reasonably objective view of the investigation.



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Review: Ellroy, My Dark Places (1996)

My Dark Places by James Ellroy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I don't actually like Ellroy, and I think this book shows me why. It is a memoir, both of Ellroy's childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and of his investigation into his mother's murder. Ellroy is very hard-boiled. He talks tough. It's hard to tell whether he himself is racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, or whether he's acutely self-aware and holding up a mirror to our society. I found My Dark Places less relentlessly noir than L.A. Confidential or the other Ellroy book I've read, the name of which I'm blanking on. My Dark Places acknowledges the existence of people who aren't just in it for what they can get out of it. It's also a procedural, deeply enmeshed in the procedure of searching for Jean Ellroy's murderer, the phone calls and interviews, the chasing down of one dud lead after another.

This is another book about cold cases (both Jean Ellroy's and others that Ellroy comes across as he investigates hers), another book with an inconclusive ending. Ellroy makes it a coherent narrative by playing his own psychodrama out as he learns more about his mother and has to face and accept his own wildly contradictory feelings about her. That story arc has pay-off, in that you feel that Ellroy has actually made progress in dealing with his own demons. (It may also be that we should be suspicious of this narrative tidiness, just as it may be that we should be suspicious of the narrative voice's aggressively transparent honesty.) The book is very fast paced and very readable, and I certainly prefer it to Ellroy's fiction.



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Review: Tillman, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (2016)

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City by Laura Tillman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent, sad, hopeful book about Brownsville, Texas, and a terrible murder that took place there in 2003. John Allen Rubio and his common-law wife Maria Angela Camacho murdered---decapitated---their three children, all under the age of 4. Rubio was sentenced to death. Tillman's inquiry is about the murder; about the history of the building it took place in; about the man who did it (and to a lesser extent about the woman---Rubio agreed to talk to Tillman and Camacho did not); in one amazing chapter about the death penalty; about the community and how they responded. Tillman writes beautifully and thoughtfully and empathetically about tragedy, and although she can't answer the question of why Rubio did it---a number of answers are put forward, including grinding poverty, schizophrenia, drugs, and/or demonic possession---she does record the community's ultimate, beautiful response: to make the land behind the building into the Tres Angeles Community Garden: 3 angels for Julissa, John Stephan, and Mary Jane.



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Review: Turrettini, The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer (2015)

The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer: Anders Behring Breivik and the Threat of Terror in Plain Sight by Unni Turrettini

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book is primarily about Anders Behring Breivik, but it's about him in comparison with Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski, and how between the three of them you have a kind of template of the lone wolf killer: intelligent, narcissistic, alienated, so fanatically devoted to his ideology that he believes he must kill for it. It is also a scathing denunciation of Norwegian society, in which, Turrettini says, no one is allowed to stand out or have different opinions and people sleepwalk through their lives.

I obviously can't speak to the state of Norwegian society, but I think Turrettini is trying to write two different books here, one about lone wolf killers and one about Norway, and the edges of the two don't quite mesh. The parts of the book that talk about Breivik and McVeigh and Kaczynski in comparison, I think are very good. That is, I buy her argument that there is such a thing as a lone wolf killer and that he is dangerous because he is (a) a fanatic who thinks that any number of innocent lives are necessary "collateral damage" for his cause and (b) invisible. He doesn't have a prior criminal history, or a history of mental illness, or a history of being anything worse or more alarming than an oddball, a weirdo who never fits in.

The parts of the book that are about what Breivik did, told in clear, straightforward prose, are also very good. Where things start to come a little unglued is where she starts talking about WHY Breivik did what he did. Because she has two quite different arguments. One is that ANY ideology would have served as Breivik's rationale for a violent outburst that had more to do with his psychology than any of his buzzwords; the other is that Breivik was right to be angry and that what drove him to the massacre of 77 people was the failure of Norwegian society to provide him with an outlet for his unpopular political views. Given that those views amount to white supremacist hate speech, I find it really hard to be sympathetic to Breivik here, and it makes me uneasy about Turrettini herself and whether she's using her argument about Breivik as a kind of stalking horse. Although I think the term "multiculturalism" must be used differently in Europe (or, at least, she doesn't seem to be using it quite in the way that is familiar to me), she seems to me to be saying that multiculturalism is the wrong response to Muslim immigrants because it lets them walk all over the law-abiding citizens of their new country and that that's one reason why Norway's combination of socialism, democracy, and monarchy is a horribly failed, frankly dystopian enterprise. At the same time she denounces Breivik she almost seems at certain points to agree with him, and she doesn't make the distinction clear, so I don't know if the Islamophobic argument about multiculturalism is HIS argument, which she is explicating for her readers, or if it's HER argument as well.

She does at least vehemently reject his claims to be a martyr (going on a hunger strike because the prison won't give you the computer game you want?), and I felt on firmer ground with her argument that the Norwegian courts, in their anxiety to preserve Breivik's rights, forgot about the rights of the victims.

So this was certainly a thought-provoking book, but I'm not sure it was always for the right reasons.



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Guinn, The Last Gunfight (2011)

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral--And How It Changed The American West by Jeff Guinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Jeff Guinn has a system for writing books. He goes and talks to people, witnesses and relatives if he can get them. He interviews people who have written books on the subject and other researchers. And then he synthesizes it all into beautifully readable text. I don't know if this is the BEST book on Wyatt Earp and Tombstone and the Gunfight (somewhere near) the O.K. Corral that I have read (that honor may belong to Paula Mitchell Marks' To Die in the West), but it is a very balanced, very readable, very historically conscientious account of what happened to the best of anybody's ability to tell. Guinn also does a great job of explaining the AFTERMATH of the gunfight, the inquest, and the hearing, and how it came about that the Earps (Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan) and Doc Holliday WEREN'T prosecuted for murder. And his last chapter is a thoughtful exploration of how the event---a shoot-out in a vacant lot where both sides were wrong and both sides lied about it afterwards---turned into the epitome of Good defeating Evil as it plays out in the "Wild West" of our collective (white) American imagination. Excellent book.



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Review: Orlean, The Library Book (2018)

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library suffered a catastrophic fire ... on the same day as Chernobyl. The first thing Susan Orlean is doing in this book is telling the story of that fire, the terrible scope of the disaster, the heroic efforts made to save the books (including freezing those with water damage and finding remarkable ways to get the water out of them again), the equally heroic efforts made to save the building from being torn down, and the torturous path of the investigation into the cause of the fire. Along the way, she also recounts the history of the Los Angeles Public Library and of Central Library itself and provides a series of meditations/interviews with Central Library employees on what a library is and what it does and how what it does is changing as new technology comes along.

For my day job, I work as the administrative assistant for a small public library, so a lot of what Orlean was talking about, in terms of the idea of the library, was familiar to me. My library is doing (on a very small scale) the same things that Central Library is doing, and I found the comparison fascinating. Also, I think Orlean is spot-on in her ideas about what a library IS and what it DOES, that it isn't just a repository of books, but an information hub, a place where literally everyone is welcome (and how many of those are there?), and a place where people, from babies to senior citizens, can come (or be brought, in the case of babies) and find help or education or entertainment or simply a safe space to be in for a while.

I also appreciated her investigation into the investigation of the fire, and the fact that she dug hard enough to find out that there have been dramatic changes in arson investigation since 1986, and that she therefore reevaluated the investigation, coming to the conclusion, instead of that it must be arson, that there's no way to tell how the fire started, but odds are it was accidental and did not involve human agency.

(I caught her in one incidental factual error. The silent-film actress Olive Thomas did not "overdose" on her husband's syphilis medication: she accidentally drank a topical preparation of mercury bichloride, which killed her slowly and horribly. It is pedantic and nitpicky of me to point this out, but I accept those as flaws in my character.)

Overall, this is an excellent, thoughtful, and extremely interesting book about books and libraries. It is elegantly written, and Orlean's own love of libraries comes shining through.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Busqued, Magnetized (2020)

Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer by Carlos Busqued

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a condensation of hours upon hours of interviews Busqued did with Ricardo Melogno, who murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires in 1982. Much of it is Melogno's autobiography; he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in a dissociative state, almost entirely divorced from reality, and it was in this dissociative state that he murdered the taxi drivers, so that when Busqued asks him to describe the murders, he can't. And he has absolutely no idea why he did it. From where he is at the time of the interviews, he can only partially recall his life before he was incarcerated. His incarceration was first in a mental hospital, where he was cavalierly and excessively---massively excessively---drugged, and between that and the need for self-preservation, Melogno's dissociative state seems to have ended. He became present in his own (horrible) life, and it's hard to say how much continuity there is between Melogno before and Melogno after; without any sense of his motivation, it's also hard to say whether he would commit murder again. I would guess that Melogno himself doesn't know.

Busqued also uses newspaper clippings, extracts from Melogno's official record, interviews with the man who arrested Melogno and with a psychiatrist who treated him for 7 years and who rejects all the varied and contradictory diagnoses he's been given, to offer the most rounded picture he can. I was not transfixed by this book, but it kept me interested and engaged and engendered a certain amount of empathy for its subject, who did four horrible things, but who has been treated horribly for 34 years in the Argentine prison system, and now, having served his sentence, is not being released because he's been legally defined as "dangerous"---which, on the one hand, he might well be, but, on the other, is manifestly unjust. The book raises ethical questions about the treatment of monsters. Melogno unquestionably WAS a monster, murdering four men for absolutely no reason that anyone, including Melogno himself, can find. Is he a monster now? If he is or if he isn't, should that make a difference in how he's treated? What is our ethical obligation to those like Melogno?



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Review: Gray, Centennial Campaign (1976)

Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876 by John Stephens Gray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is the result of exhaustive research in primary sources about the campaign in which George Armstrong Custer and all his men lost their lives. As with his other book, CUSTER'S LAST CAMPAIGN, Gray has devoted himself to accurate time-and-motion studies to figure out who was where when, for both the US Army and the Native Americans they were trying to fight. One of the things Gray reveals this way is that, during a four month campaign, the Army encountered Indians on only four days. And, he does not add although he could, three of those days were disasters for the Army.

I suspect this is the sort of book that is only interesting if you are already interested in Custer or the Battle of the Little Big Horn or white Americans' shameful treatment of Indians in (though not exclusive to) the 1870s. It is a very thorough book, cross-referencing official Army reports and diaries and newspaper articles and Indian accounts. He does some very careful and extensive math to figure out how many people there actually were on each side of the Little Big Horn fight and it's hard to argue with his conclusion that there's no mystery about why the Native Americans won. Custer and his men were just horribly outnumbered.



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