Katherine Addison's Blog, page 33

UBC: Henderson, Blood Justice

Blood Justice: The True Story of Multiple Murder and a Family's Revenge by Tom Henderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Interestingly, although my copy has the same (lousy) cover, the subtitle is THE TRUE STORY OF MULTIPLE MURDER AND TWO DEVASTATED FAMILIES, which is just as bad and inaccurate as the listed subtitle: on the one hand, there's no "revenge" involved: Jeffrey Wayne Gorton was caught and prosecuted legally, not extralegally, and the families of the victims, while involved, were not spearheading anything; on the other hand, it's not TWO devastated families, it's THREE, and I'm not sure who they're leaving out, given that the photographs on the cover are two photographs of Gorton and one of (I think) Margarette Eby--given the crappy interior photographs of the murdered women, it's difficult to be sure, but I'm pretty confident those eyebrows are Eby's. So where's Nancy Ludwig? And is it her family we're discounting as devastated? Eby's family? Or Gorton's family? Because it's hard to imagine anyone MORE devastated than Gorton's wife (who knew he had a fetish for women's underwear, but had no idea it went any further) and two children. And while I'm nitpicking, that silhouette at the top, with the dilapidated house and the tree? What the hell is that supposed to be? Nancy Ludwig was murdered in the Detroit Airport Hilton. Margarette Eby was murdered in her home, the Gatehouse of Applewood, the Mott estate in Flint, MI. (The virtual tour of Applewood, btw, does not mention the grisly history attached to the Gatehouse.) Nothing less like that shack can be imagined. And Jeff Gorton grew up in a middle-class household and himself maintained a middle-class household. No creepy isolated shacks, thank you.

[Here endeth the digression.]

In some ways this is a pretty good book, and in other ways it's not so great. Henderson isn't a bad writer, and he has by god done his homework. He talked to everybody he could (the two people who refused to be interviewed are (1) Gorton and (2) the bureaucrat in Romulus who forced eleven of seventeen command officers in the Romulus Police Department into early retirement two weeks after Gorton's sentencing); he dug into the inter- and intradepartmental politics that bedeviled the Flint police, the Romulus police, and the Michigan State Police, and he did a good job of presenting both sides, particularly in the ridiculous, petty war between the MSP and the Genesee County Prosecutor's office. He even talked to the public defender who made the world's worst botch of Gorton's defense in his trial for Nancy Ludwig's murder (when the prosecutor calls the defense lawyer at home and tells him to get his head out of his ass, you know you are looking at a very special version of bad) and got his version of what went wrong. Henderson's at his best when he's discussing the lawyers and the judge and what happened in the courtroom, and I'm actually giving him that fourth star for that part of the book (i.e., the end), because otherwise this was a three-star book.

Henderson's worst problem is that he doesn't trust his material and therefore tries to jazz it up with flashbacks and flashforwards and intercutting different timelines, whereas I have come to the conclusion that with true crime, you are best served by telling the story in the simplest way possible. If you need fancy rhetorical tricks, you will know. And this story, which is so complicated--Jeff Gorton's criminal history in Florida, the Eby murder and its investigation, the Ludwig murder and its investigation, the cold case squad that decided to take a second look ten years later, and then the forensic investigation that was able, because of the leaps and bounds by which DNA analysis had progressed in those ten years, to link the two murders by the DNA of the murderer's semen, then identified a partial print left in blood in Margarette Eby's bathroom as belonging to Jeffrey Wayne Gorton. And then the story of how they actually caught Gorton. This whole tangled history doesn't need to be made more complicated with narratological flim-flam. It needs to be presented in a way that is as easy to follow as possible, and Henderson irritated me mightily by failing to understand that.

Everyone involved seemed confident that Gorton had murdered more than twice--and I would tend to agree. The escalation from knocking women down and stealing their underwear in Florida to rape, torture, near decapitation, and necrophilia in Michigan is so dramatic that it seems like Margarette Eby can't have been his first homicide victim. But if any progress has been made on linking Gorton to unsolved cases in Florida, Michigan, or anywhere else, nobody's talking about it.



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UBC: Grann, The Lost City of Z

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is amazing. Grann is a superb writer, and his subject--the explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett and the archaeology of the Amazon (two subjects, but so inextricably intertwined that there is no sense of bifurcation between Fawcett's biography and the history of archaeology in the Amazon)--is the kind of thing that you couldn't make up if you tried. The epigraph from Italo Calvino is spot on, because the book, for all that it is nonfiction, in some ways reads like Calvino or Miéville or even Kafka: the quest for an ancient city in the depths of the Amazon, a city that shimmers and vanishes like a mirage every time you get close to it, a city that is as much allegory as reality (a city that, it turns out, was exactly where Fawcett was trying to find it, but because of his Victorian ideas about what he was looking for, he was never going to be able to see it), and a quest that has taken the lives of (Grann estimates) at least 100 people.

This is also a book about obsession: Fawcett's obsession, Grann's obsession, the obsessions of the people, both living and dead, whom he encounters as he tries to trace Fawcett's trajectory through the world. In that way it reminds me a little of Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster: Fawcett's obsession killed him and his 22-year-old son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell just as surely as the obsession with Everest killed Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and the others lost on the mountain. And this, like Into Thin Air, is very much about the descent of the journalist reporting on the obsession into the belly of the obsession itself.



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UBC: Barer, Murder in the Family

Murder In The Family by Burl Barer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe this case has been an episode both of Forensic Files and The New Detectives, which only makes sense given that it's a landmark case in the use of forensic evidence like hairs and fibers in convicting a murderer.

Also, the vileness of this particular murderer is exemplified by the fact that one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him was pubic hairs he left on his eight-year-old victim with pubic lice egg cases attached.

Really, that's Kirby Anthoney in a nutshell. He raped and murdered his aunt, raped and murdered his eight-year-old cousin and murdered his three-year-old cousin, very likely masturbating over her corpse. Then he cleaned up in their bathroom (leaving another pubic hair with pubic lice egg cases in a washcloth in the sink), stole his uncle's expensive camera and rolled coins from his aunt's waitressing tips and amscrayed. This is after being convicted back in Idaho of robbing an old lady in a wheelchair, including macing her unnecessarily, and raping and beating an eleven year old so severely that she was left blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and unable to remember anything about the attack. (After which he fled to Alaska before he could be arrested; his mother neglected to mention this to her brother.) He also murdered a transvestite Native Alaskan, for reasons that may or may not have been sexual, and the Anchorage police believed he was also the murderer of a Native Alaskan girl. And he beat, stalked, and terrified at least three girlfriends, including one who testified for the prosecution for the trial.

Barer writes a compelling story. The legal wrangles at Anthoney's trial get a little tangled occasionally, but that's forgivable. And I like Barer for at least trying to talk about what creates people like Kirby Anthoney, whether we call them mass murderers, serial killers, sociopaths, psychopaths, people with antisocial personality disorder, or whatever the DSM has decided is in this year (yes, I know these aren't all synonyms; that's part of my point). Abusive childhoods don't help, but he points out that many psychopaths come from stable, loving homes and psychopaths' siblings, whether they share in a nurturing environment or an abusive one, do not also become psychopaths. "Violence in the media" or "video games" or "Dungeons & Dragons" or whatever your hobby horse is, isn't an explanation or even a theory. It's a cop-out, because it doesn't explain why some people can create and maintain a moral/ethical center despite these factors, while others can't or don't. And that's the question that I think matters most, even though I don't have an answer for it.



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UBC: Rule, In the Still of the Night

In the Still of the Night: The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for the Truth by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This case. This bizarre, baffling, infuriating case.

Ronda Reynolds was shot sometime in the early morning hours of December 16, 1998. Somebody made a very clumsy effort to make it look like suicide. And the first police officers on the scene--let's be brutally honest--fucked up. They moved the gun. They let the victim's three teenage stepsons leave the house without being questioned. They decided that the victim's soon-to-be-ex-husband's story (a story which makes NO SENSE) was true, and that Ronda had committed suicide. Because they decided that (when the rule of thumb in death investigations is, prove it's NOT homicide, THEN consider suicide), they didn't follow basic procedures to secure evidence (and much of the evidence they did collect would be "lost"). The history of this case thereafter, from 1998 until Rule's book was published in 2010, is at least 75% the history of Lewis County law enforcement trying to make their fuck-up go away. They drove one of their best homicide detectives to resign because, in refusing to let go of the case, he made them look bad. So they punished him instead of punishing the detectives who fucked up.

Or, y'know, choosing a less dysfunctional alternative than punishment.

By and large, Rule is pro-cop. She makes no bones about it. She was a cop herself, she made an effort as a reporter to maintain good relationships with the cops she wrote about, she admired--and I, too, admire--the homicide detectives who work cases like bulldogs. I don't think I can really imagine how hard it must have been for her to write this book, in which officers she knew and liked come across as men who are corrupt, who don't care, who are vastly more invested in their egos than they are in the truth. That's a harsh judgment, and it's my judgment, based on the evidence Rule presents. I don't think Ronda Reynolds' death was an insoluble homicide when it was committed; I think it may very well be insoluble now, unless somebody talks. And it seems less and less likely--with the complete lack of interest demonstrated over and over again by Lewis County law enforcement--that anybody ever will.

The trial in this book is not actually a murder trial. It's a judicial review of the (criminally incompetent) Lewis County coroner and his handling of Ronda Reynolds' death. The triumph of this book is the jury deciding that (a) the coroner mishandled the case dreadfully and (b) that the manner of Ronda Reynolds' death was homicide. Ronda's mother's website Justice for Ronda has not been updated since 2010, and the only evidence of activity on the case is Ron Reynolds (the soon-to-be-ex-husband who told such a flimsy and ridiculous story) and his son suing Lewis County for violation of their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Note that the coroner who convened this inquest in 2011 was not the coroner who made such a botch of the case originally. Also note that: "The jury unanimously ruled that Ronda Reynolds’ manner of death was homicide and identified Ron Reynolds and his son Jonathan Reynolds as responsible for her death. After the inquest, McLeod issued arrest warrants for Reynolds and his son. The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office declined to press charges."

I'm gonna be honest: I did not enjoy this book. I hate reading about botched investigations and I hate even more reading about the kind of stonewalling that Lewis County law enforcement has continued and continued to practice, defeating efforts to find the truth simply by inertia. Even when individuals, like Coroner McLeod, try to rectify the glaring failure, they are met again with "declined to press charges." (I know that there can be very good reasons for a county prosecutor or district attorney to decline to press charges, and in this case I imagine that it was actually that they didn't think they could win the case rather than any lack of desire to see justice done, but it's just so fucking emblematic of the whole damn thing.) It makes me angry, and because there's no constructive outlet for my anger--there's nothing I can do--it makes me frustrated ("seething" is probably the correct word), and that leads to a kind of unpleasant reading experience. But that's not a judgment of the quality of the book, just of the nature of its subject.



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UBC: Rule, Too Late To Say Goodbye

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

Corbin most recently lost an appeal in 2014.



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UBC: Rule, Dead by Sunset

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Sachs, Corpse

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Rule, Lying in Wait

Lying in Wait and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Rule, Bitter Harvest

Bitter Harvest by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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UBC: Rule, Don't Look Behind You

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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

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

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

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

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



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