Katherine Addison's Blog, page 32

UBC: Breo & Martin, The Crime of the Century

The Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murders That Shocked a Nation by Dennis L. Breo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has one major flaw, and I'm going to talk about it right up front. It is co-written by a journalist and the lead prosecutor at Richard Speck's trial. The prosecutor is obviously a main character in the book, and they talk about him always in the third person and in a weirdly adulatory way, e.g.: "Although many casual observers found Martin to be cool and remote, he was underneath a very caring, emotional, warm man" (379). It's jarring and uncomfortable, and it makes me cringe. The book also exhibits a rather simplistic pro-cop, anti-media stance, and as I said in my review of The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition, you knew it was a snake. Richard Speck was a sociopath. Don't be surprised when he behaves like one.

(I admit this is hard to do. Sexually sadistic sociopaths like Brady and Speck by their nature are abhorrent to non-sociopaths, and part of us is always going to be surprised and shocked by their crimes. We use emotionally charged words like "vile" and "horrific" and "evil" and all those things are accurate in our moral system, and I don't want for a moment to imply that that judgment is wrong. But I think it's also important to remember, although not to condone, that to sociopaths our moral system is meaningless. There is nothing inside them that tells them not to do evil. So seriously. It's a snake. Don't be surprised when it bites you.)

Aside from that, this is an excellent book, a blow by blow account of the incredibly complicated process of prosecuting Richard Speck. I learned a great deal about how lawyers approach criminal trials, the octopus-like contingency planning that has to act as flying buttresses to every move they make in court. (That metaphor got away from me a little bit. Sorry.) Breo and Martin do an excellent job of contextualizing what Speck did on July 14 with the rest of what was going on in America in 1966 (race riots and the Vietnam War and Charles Whitman) and also paint a vivid picture of Chicago itself. Not surprisingly for a man with Martin's particular talents, the narrative is well-organized and coherent--or as coherent as a narrative of an inherently chaotic enterprise (remember the octopus) can be.

Not being a sociopath, I do consider Richard Speck vile. He contributed nothing to the world except the rape-murder of eight young women in one night. And he couldn't even do that competently, because he forgot about the ninth woman and left her alive to testify against him. This book balances the horror of his crime against the genuinely heroic efforts of the police and Cook County prosecutors and the Public Defender's office to catch Speck, keep him safe from vigilante justice, respect all of his civil rights, give him a fair trial (oh the desperate, agonizing scrupulousness as the prosecutors try to block every possible grounds for an appeal), and prevent him from ever harming anyone else. Even though he escaped the death penalty (because the system, grinding slow, couldn't get him executed before the Supreme Court decision in 1971), he died of a heart attack in 1991 before a parole board got stupid enough to let him out. It's not, as Martin said after Speck's conviction, a victory that gives us any cause to rejoice or celebrate, but the officers of the law and the court did their duty, and Speck was not left free to continue raping and murdering the innocent. Justice is cold comfort.




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UBC: Frank, The Boston Strangler

The Boston Strangler by Gerold Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The last sentence of this book is a lie:

But no matter what direction is taken by the law and those who act in its behalf--determined to protect the rights of society, yet equally determined to protect the rights of the individual--the story of the Boston Stranglings has ended.

Even when he wrote it in 1966, Frank must have known it was a lie. There were too many loose ends, too many contradictions. It wasn't until 2013 that forensic evidence was able to conclusively prove Albert DeSalvo killed any of the thirteen women whose murders he confessed to. Fifty years, and the "story of the Boston Stranglings" arguably still isn't over.

The essential problem with Albert DeSalvo and what I'm going to call the Single Strangler Theory is that the 13 murders are all over the map. Young women, old women, one African-American woman. One woman brutally stabbed. One woman beaten to death. The victimology doesn't match, the M.O. doesn't match. It actually makes more sense, logically, to say that there were several people (some of them must have been men, because of seminal fluid left at the crime scenes, but not all of them), all imitating the signature of the first killer. Except then you have to explain away DeSalvo's knowledge of details only the killer could know for all thirteen murders.

Frank doesn't help. He reports everything, but he doesn't provide any kind of critical rubric. He obviously believes that DeSalvo was the Single Strangler, hence that last lying sentence, but he doesn't ever come out and provide a theory or an explanation--which also means that it's impossible to tell where his reporting may or may not be biased by his own beliefs.

And it's a pity, because there is a Single Strangler Theory that you can use to make at least some sense of Albert DeSalvo, and it's right there in the data Frank dumps on the reader. DeSalvo as a criminal was all over the map. He was grotesquely oversexed to the point of satyriasis. (He blamed his wife (while passive-aggressively insisting he didn't blame her) for withholding sex, which (obviously!) caused him to go out and strangle old ladies.). But his rap sheet, leaving the murders aside entirely, included child molestation, breaking and entering, petty theft, scams (he was known as the Measuring Man because he'd use a line about a modeling career to get Boston and Cambridge-area coeds to let him "take measurements"), rape. He didn't have an M.O. And not unlike Gary Ridgway, who killed white women, black women, and Native American women indiscriminately because his only criterion was that the woman would get in the car with him, DeSalvo murdered completely at random. His only criterion was that the woman was home alone, and she let him in.

DeSalvo doesn't fit the FBI's profile of a serial killer. You can't go down the line of boxes and tick them off. He was an utterly disorganized killer, who eluded capture for two years because (1) pure dumb luck and (2) he was known to the police as a chronic offender, but not the kind of cruel, violent person they thought they were looking for. So, no, his crimes don't make sense in the way that other serial killers' do, where you can see a pattern, a tiny psychodrama the killer acts out every time. But their very lack of sense makes sense in the context of DeSalvo's life and verified criminal career. And I think it's important to be open to the possibility that the FBI's profile might not fit all serial killers. (In kind of the same way that Aristotle's theory of tragedy really only fits Oedipus Rex.) Yes, psychopaths share certain traits, and yes, many serial killers are psychopaths. But then look at Gary Ridgway and the way that two psychopathic serial killers, both of whom, by their nature, had to assume that all serial killers were like them, were completely wrong about him.

This is a pretty good book, if you allow for the fact that it was written in 1966 and is very much a child of its times: the casual misogyny that makes it perfectly okay to refer to two professional journalists in their their thirties as "the girls"; the equally casual, stunningly bigoted homophobia that assumes all "sexual deviates" (gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, pedophiles, etc.) are equally capable of all sex-related crimes. Frank is a good writer; his prose is engaging and clear. But that blatant lie right at the end makes me unwilling to trust him to be telling the truth--even though I think Albert DeSalvo really might be the Boston Strangler.





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UBC: Brady, The Gates of Janus

The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition by Ian Brady

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm giving this book five stars as a primary source. Because whatever you think about Brady and Brady's motives in writing the book, and how much of what he says is lies, Brady is giving the reader a Boschian picture of the inside of a serial killer's head. He tells you openly that serial killers lie. He talks about why they lie, and so when you catch Brady lying, you know what's going on.

It's a strange experience, full of cognitive dissonance. Brady is clearly very intelligent (clearly, like several of the other serial killers he discusses, just not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is), very rational. He's an excellent writer. He lays out the information he has about his subjects crisply, concisely, and with an eye for tiny but vital details.

And he's a psychopath.

(He differentiates clearly between psychopaths and psychotics and then tells you that he was diagnosed psychotic. But he's given you the information you need to see, while he may have what he calls secondary affective symptoms of psychosis, he's a psychopath.)

If this were not a primary source, I would give it three or four stars, because Brady spends way too much time discoursing on his theory of "moral relativism," a truckload of Nietzschean bullshit that follows naturally from the inherent built-in belief of the psychopath that whatever he wants to do is right. (Brady can recognize, and even cogently analyze, the fallacy in others, but he can't see it in himself.) It's both infuriating and boring--and intensely valuable if you genuinely want to understand how psychopaths think. The contempt for everyone around him (especially police and prison officials), the contempt for his audience that oozes out of everything he says (it clearly never occurs to him that the person reading this book might actually be as intelligent and "self-aware" as he is--"self-aware" is in quotes because Brady's self-awareness is a remarkably close mirror of the "self-awareness" of his fellow psychopaths, Eric Harris and Ted Bundy), the absolute certainty that he shouldn't have to obey the laws, which he bolsters with a great deal of nonsense about the corruption of society--not that his critique is wrong, power does corrupt and the people who gain power are very likely to be just as psychopathic as Brady and his criminal brethren (*cough*topical relevance*cough*), but he takes from that it's therefore morally better to be a criminal, which is what he means by "moral relativism." This is a psychopath who has had a lot of time to think about his belief system, to elaborate and defend it, and I'm sure that what he wanted most from writing this book was a captive audience for his Hitlerian rant. Boring and infuriating, but at the same time you can see the way that his thinking always makes that same twist back into the center of the maze rather than finding its way out. Extremely intelligent, perfectly rational (he's a psychopath, not a psychotic), and absolutely condemned, like the Minotaur, to live in the labyrinth he's built for himself.

(I find it hilarious that in his afterword to the second edition, Colin Wilson is shocked to discover that he's been corresponding for ten years with a psychopath: "I knew that Brady was a sex killer, and that his chosen victims were children. What I failed to grasp is that this involved an incredibly high degree of self-centeredness" (316). Colin Wilson's pontificating (particularly about serial killers as "dominant males") annoys me profoundly, so I admit to a certain degree of schadenfreude in watching him falling face-first into the trap that he himself built. What Wilson describes of his correspondence with Brady reminds me very strongly of Ted Bundy's correspondence with Ann Rule. Brady and Bundy maintain the same supercilious patronizing attitude until something trips one of their triggers, and then they go off in prima donna hissy fits. Intelligent psychopaths conforming to the pattern that's worn into their mental circuits. You knew it was a snake, Mr. Wilson. Why are you surprised that it bit you?)

Brady discusses Henry Lee Lucas (with utter contempt for both Lucas, whom he considers a miserable excuse for a serial killer and for all the law enforcement officers who bought the line of goods Lucas was selling); John Wayne Gacy; Graham Young; Dean Corll; Peter Sutcliffe; Richard Ramirez; the Cleveland Torso Murderer (whom Brady knows as "the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," which is a much better name); Ted Bundy; the Green River Killer; Carl Panzram; and Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. He is an excellent analyst, as long as you remember to compensate for the psychopathic lens, and as I said above, an excellent writer, and most of those chapters are well worth reading on their own merits. (Brady admires Panzram too much, and that chapter is mostly adulation.) As Robert Keppel learned with Ted Bundy (see The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer), you have to watch for where Brady, in talking about other serial killers, is actually talking about himself. Both Bundy and Brady are trying to explain how hard it is for serial killers to talk about their crimes, both because of shame (Guilt? No. Shame? Yes.) and because of what Brady calls the hidden agenda, the true reason for the murders, the den at the center of the labyrinth where the Minotaur lives. Brady says that serial killers will do anything to protect this last hidden mystery, and you have to remember that he always includes himself in that.

I find it really interesting that both Brady and Bundy seemed unable to conceptualize of a serial killer like Gary Ridgway. Brady argues for two killers using the Green River site, but he's arguing from his recognition of the killings as a psychopath's crimes, and he, like Bundy, can't not put himself in that equation. He can't imagine a psychopath as stunningly banal as Gary Ridgway, someone who was perfectly happy being mediocre in every way except this one thing. It's another place where the value of this book as a primary source shines through.

In his afterword, which I recommend skipping entirely, Peter Sotos makes much of his loathing for Brady, citing specifically Brady's refusal to reveal the location of Keith Bennett's body. Leaving aside the fact that Brady may genuinely be unable to find the grave, this is something that he shares with Bundy and Ridgway, the idea that the body, hidden, is the significator of that hidden mystery at the center of the serial killer's dark and fundamentally empty life, that thing that he will die rather than articulate. No connection to the victim as a living human being (Rule comments on that as a commonality between Bundy and Ridgway, that they both attached far more strongly to inanimate objects than to people), but the corpse and the corpse's hiding place are awash in meaning and power. It's not necessarily cruelty that keeps Brady silent (although cruelty is certainly, to him, a beneficial side effect); it's that last shred of the mystery, that last thing that he knows and no one else in the world does.



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UBC: Springer, Body Hunter

Body Hunter by Patricia Springer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In fairness to Patricia Springer, she has a very difficult task in this book. Any book about a serial killer has to find a way to organize what is inherently a very complicated story, especially if, as in this case, the killer crosses jurisdictional lines.

Between 1984 and 1986, Faryion Wardrip murdered five women, Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs, Debra Taylor, Ellen Blau, and Tina Kimbrew. After Kimbrew's murder he turned himself in--but did not confess to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, Taylor, and Blau. He was sentenced to 35 years, of which he served 11 before being released on parole. He got a job, remarried, was extremely active in his church. And two years later, cold case investigators looking at the Sims and Gibbs murders were able to get DNA, first to link the two crimes, and then to prove that Wardrip was the killer. He was arrested for the murder of Terry Sims in 1999. He confessed to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, and Blau--and then to the murder of Debra Tayor, for which no one had even considered him a suspect. He pled guilty at his trial and was sentenced to death in 1999, a sentence which still has not been carried out because the case is bouncing around the courts like a pinball. (Wikipedia says: "In 2008, a federal magistrate recommended that the death penalty be overturned because Wardrip received ineffective defense in his trial. On June 14, 2011, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that ordered the State of Texas to either give Wardrip a new sentencing trial, or agree to giving him a life sentence. The case will be sent back to the U.S. District Court for reconsideration.)

Faryion Wardrip is a person who raises a lot of questions about serial killers, and the course of the investigations of his murders raise a lot of questions about law enforcement and our legal system. Barry Macha, who relentlessly prosecuted Wardrip, also relentlessly prosecuted Danny Laughlin, who was innocent. Law enforcement officers in Wichita Falls ignored information they received, including information from officers in other jurisdictions, because it didn't fit their theory. Ken Taylor was hounded by Fort Worth police--and his life was torn apart--because they locked onto the idea that the husband is the most likely suspect. But then in 1999 everything turns around, and you get excellent detective work and interdepartmental cooperation . . . and at Wardrip's trial, while Macha and his team are performing brilliantly, the public defender falls apart, and you're left with more questions about whether Wardrip really got an adequate defense. So there are a myriad of really interesting questions that can be explored through the lens of Faryion Wardrip's case.

Unfortunately, Springer doesn't explore any of them.

She shows that what Ann Rule makes look easy is actually extremely difficult. She's a clumsy writer, exhibiting many problems that anyone who's taught beginning fiction writers (or ever looked at the Turkey City Lexicon) will recognize immediately. As an example, the first paragraph of Chapter 16:

"John, this is Judy Floyd with Gene Screen. I was able to collect a saliva sample from the cup you sent me. I'll be able to make a comparison," the DNA expert told Little, indicating there had been enough of the salivary excretion to perform the test.
(161)

And seriously, that's one example. Her descriptions of the murders are blackly, unintentionally comic, and she explains DNA at least three times, each time badly. She seems to suggest that Wardrip has Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, but she never either (a) makes it clear that she understands the difference between that and OCD or (b) indicates that Wardrip has been formally diagnosed. She has my hobby horse bad habit of writing from the victim's point of view and because she does that, it's impossible to tell, when she's writing from Wardrip's point of view, whether she's making it up or whether it's actually based on her interviews with him. She gives extraneous information that I can't tell what I'm supposed to do with. Her research is sloppy and inadequate (she says in one place that Wardrip is his parents' oldest son, but in another that his younger brother Bryce was afraid of Faryion and "their older brother" Roy (emphasis added). She talks about a learning disability, but it's not clear whether that's something Wardrip told her that she's repeating or something that she actually got independent confirmation of. When there are discrepancies (e.g., between Wardrip's version of his childhood and his brother Bryce's version), she doesn't seem to have made any effort to figure out which story is more accurate, nor does she indicate which story she thinks readers ought to believe. Should we disbelieve Wardrip on principle because we have ample evidence that he is a pathological liar? Or should we understand that his lying was in part caused by his parents' failure to get him help for his intense depression as a child and teenager? Bryce is certainly not an unbiased witness, so when he says that nothing Faryion says about his childhood is true, should we believe that?

If any serial killer's career is an Inferno, then the reader is Dante, and the true-crime writer has to act as Virgil, providing guidance and a clear path through the horrors. Springer fails to give either.



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UBC: Jones, Women Who Kill

Women Who Kill by Ann Jones

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Cullen, Columbine

Columbine by Dave Cullen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book about a horrible subject.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Berry-Dee, Talking with Serial Killers

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

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



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UBC: Nash, Among the Missing

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Graysmith, Zodiac Unmasked

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


See also Zodiac.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Graysmith, Zodiac

Zodiac by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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

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

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

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

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

Starr was everywhere I looked.



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