Katherine Addison's Blog, page 34

Catzilla Explains It All, Night-time Edition

Underfoot Cat and I have conversations in the early morning. Catzilla and I have conversations at night, which generally go something like this:

ME: [reading in bed]
CATZILLA: [materializing out of freaking nowhere] Kitty is adorable.
ME: AUGH! Hi.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is walking on my book.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is walking on my hair.
CATZILLA: Kitty is adorable.
ME: Kitty is standing in my light.
CATZILLA. Kitty is adorable.
ME: Oh god, no. Not the tail-across-the face trick.
CATZILLA: Kitty. Is. Adorable.
ME: [through Catzilla's magnificent plumy tail, draped elegantly across my face] Mmmmhnmph.
CATZILLA: Admit it. Kitty is adorable.
ME: Yes, okay, okay! I give! Kitty is adorable!
CATZILLA: Le chat, c'est moi.
ME: [pets Catzilla]

UBC: Olsen, Abandoned Prayers

Abandoned Prayers by Gregg Olsen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(N.b., I made a new edition for this book in Goodreads because (1) the edition I have is a hardcover, but the subtitle on the dust jacket is "The Shocking True Story of Obsession, Murder and 'Little Boy Blue,'" not "The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession and Amish Secrets," and (2) careful inspection of the book itself reveals no subtitle on title page or copyright page, which says to me that the bibliographic entry shouldn't list a subtitle at all. The cover of my edition is the same as that of the paperback edition with the "Obsession, Murder, and 'Little Boy Blue'" subtitle.)

Short, flippant summary: Even the Amish aren't immune from sociopaths.

It is, however, unfair to imply that Eli Stutzman's Amish upbringing had anything to do with his career as a murderer, starting with his pregnant wife (in a staged barn fire, which incidentally also netted Stutzman a free new barn), then a roommate, then most likely two men involved in drug deals with him, and finally his nine-year-old son, whose body he abandoned in a ditch near Chester, Kansas, on Christmas Eve in 1985. It was never proved that Stutzman murdered the boy, mostly because the forensic pathologists who examined the body couldn't determine cause of death. Olsen thinks the boy may still have been alive, although unconscious, when his father dumped him. It was brutally cold that Christmas, and Danny Stutzman was wearing nothing more than a cheap pair of footie pajamas from K-mart. He would have frozen to death before his body even had time to become hypothermic.

Stutzman was a pathological liar and sociopathic (forgetting to fake grief when you tell people that your son died in a terrible traffic accident in Salt Lake City is a pretty clear diagnostic marker). He lied his way out of trouble again and again, and when his lies got too tangled, or the trouble got too big for them to contain, he ran. And if people were inconvenient enough to him, he murdered them.

Stutzman was gay, and for 1990, Olsen does a good job of examining his choices without judging (although some of the cops who interrogated Stutzman would so be up on charges for the things they said to him); he makes it clear that it wasn't Stutzman's sexual orientation that made him a murderer, a drug dealer, a liar, or an abusive father. Olsen is actually able to tell more of the story than the police were able to find, because the men Stutzman had relationships with, one of whom had a letter that a good prosecutor could have turned into proof of premeditation in Danny Stutzman's death, didn't talk to the police. It was the mid-80s; they were afraid of the cops and afraid to come out.

This is the competently written result of a lot of research and legwork and interviewing people who don't want to talk about their secrets, both in the gay community and in the Amish community. One of the things I like about it is the way that Olsen's own anger bleeds through; although he keeps himself out of the narrative, he is transparently infuriated by the way Stutzman treated his son, the pattern of abuse and neglect that culminated in Danny Stutzman's death. Objectivity is important, but so is basic human empathy--empathy that Stutzman himself lacked.

Eli Stutzman was paroled in 2005, having served 15 years of a 40 year sentence for the murder of Glen Pritchett. He committed suicide in 2007.



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UBC: Rule, Mortal Danger

Mortal Danger and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"Mortal Danger": Gold Beach OR 1999, Gig Harbor WA, 2007. Every Woman's Nightmare, twice. John Branden, aka John Williams, beat, raped, and very nearly murdered his long-time girlfriend when she had the temerity to try to end their relationship. He eluded police and vanished. Under a new name (one of many), he charmed a divorced lady in Gig Harbor into a common law marriage, then became increasingly controlling, abusive, and paranoid, until in 2007, when she found out something about that previous relationship, he shot her, shot his "best friend," who was trying to mediate between them, then shot himself. The friend survived, blinded. Branden/Williams and his girlfriend (I just can't use the word "partner" in this context) died.

"Written in Blood": Graham WA 2007: Kill Me Twice: The vicious, pointless murder of Brian and Bev Mauck by Daniel Tavares, a man who'd served 16 years in Massachusetts for murdering his mother with a carving knife; the judge at his bail hearing for two attacks on prison guards believed his attorney that Tavares was rehabilitated and not a flight risk. He kept two appointments with his parole officer, then skipped out, traveling across the country to marry a woman he met online. Not very long thereafter he murdered his neighbors Brian and Bev Mauck for reasons that remain unclear, beyond Tavares' father's assessment that Daniel Tavares was pure evil. Google tells me that he was arraigned in 2015 for another murder, one that Rule actually talks about in "Written in Blood."

"If I Can't Have You ...": Sea-Tac Airport 1976: Every Woman's Nightmare: Amelia Jager fled from her abusive, controlling husband in Switzerland back to her family in Seattle. He followed her (despite Swiss authorities having assured her he would not be grated a visa). As they were at the airport trying to get him on a plane back to Switzerland, he pulled a knife from where he'd secreted it in his bag, fatally stabbed Amelia and seriously injured her sister, who tried to stop him. The jury at his trial did not buy his insanity defense.

"Thirty Years Later": Seattle WA 1978: Clarence Williams abducted and murdered Laura Bayliss (aka Julie Costello), the night-shift clerk in a 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill, and was convicted because he was caught on the security cameras. He insisted it was a case of mistaken identity. In 2007, still serving his sentence for Laura Bayliss' murder, Williams was convicted of the 1978 rape and murder of 15-year-old Sara Beth Lundquist based on DNA evidence from samples that detectives at the time had had the wits to take and preserve. Williams entered an Alford plea, refusing to admit guilt just as he had done in the Bayliss case. He was sentenced to an additional 30 years in prison.

*"Not Safe at Home": Marysville WA 1978: 56-year-old Traia Carr was raped and murdered by a 17-year-old neighbor who--as it turned out--was a ticking time bomb of sociopathy and sexual sadism. No one had any reason to suspect he was dangerous before Carr's death. He was tried as an adult on charges of first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree theft, and riding in a motor vehicle without the owner's permission (Snohomish County threw the book at him to be sure that something would stick). He was found guilty on all five counts.

(In a creepy coincidence that Rule swears she didn't plan, Sara Beth Lundquist and Traia Carr were murdered the same July 4th weekend of 1978.)



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UBC: Lourie, Hunting the Devil

Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History by Richard Lourie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this book in conjunction with Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer, and the parallax view was fascinating.

Lourie is a little too "human interest" for my taste: he's actually much more interested in the biography of the man who organized and led the search for Chikatilo than he is either in Chikatilo or his crimes. Now, I agree with him, Issa Magamedovich Kostoev, the head of Russia's Department of Crimes of Special Importance, is a much more interesting person than Chikatilo, and Lourie could actually have done more than he did with the parallels between the two men. Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (who was executed the year after both this book and Comrade Chikatilo were published) was ethnic Ukrainian and, being born in 1936, lived through the years when Ukraine was being kicked around Europe like an old soccer ball. His mother told him stories of his older brother Stepan, killed and eaten by starving Ukrainians before Chikatilo was born. (The problem with this story is that, although Chikatilo's sister also remembers their mother's vivid recounting of Stepan's death, no one else remembers it happening, and there are no records of a Stepan Romanovich Chikatilo, eaten by cannibals or otherwise.) Chikatilo wanted to go to law school, but his father committed the terrible crime of surviving being a POW in WWII, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him a traitor. So Chikatilo became a teacher and then a supply clerk, married, had two children, and in 1978 started raping, killing, and mutilating girls, boys, and young women.

Issa Magamedovich Kostoev is ethnic Ingush, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him and his entire nation traitors. He lived through two "resettlements" (in which three of his siblings died), and clawed his way up, by virtue of being smart and aggressive, to the point that he could in fact go to law school; he also had the sense, unlike Chikatilo, not to try for Moscow, knowing it was pointless. (Kostoev's dream was actually to become a test pilot, but he got thrown out of the stiff competition for admission for brawling.) Kostoev became a master interrogator, solved a number of difficult cases (including indicting basically the entire legal and judicial structure of Rostov-on-Don for corruption), and became head of the Department of Crimes of Special Importance. And got handed the dreadful clusterfuck that was the investigation of the serial killer working in Rostov-on-Don.

Putting Kostoev and Chikatilo side by side makes mincemeat of most of Chikatilo's attempts at self-exculpation. Chikatilo had an awful childhood? So did Kostoev. Chikatilo was denied his heart's desire? So was Kostoev. It's that old unanswerable question of why some people are able to choose not to do evil. And in some cases, like Kostoev, become illuminated inside with the desire to do good.

Like I said, Lourie could have done more with that.

He does do a good job of following Kostoev's Herculean achievement in actually catching Chikatilo, and in putting both Chikatilo's career as a murderer and Kostoev's career as an investigator in context with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition from Stalinist corruption, paranoia, and mindless bureaucracy to glasnost--which if not a miracle panacea at least brought a new set of problems to the table. His version of the inside of Chikatilo's head is based on imagery and metaphor, but is in its own way effective. I have no idea if his version of Kostoev is an accurate portrait of the real human being, but he does make him a splendid protagonist.



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UBC: Krivich & Ol'gin, Comrade Chikatilo

Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer by Mikhail Krivich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this book in conjunction with Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History, and the parallax view was fascinating.

Krivich and Ol'gin (which is how his name is transliterated for the copyright page) are Russian journalists who covered Chikatilo's trial. Where Lourie in Hunting the Devil was mostly interested in Kostoev (transliterated Kostoyev in Comrade Chikatilo), the investigator from Russia's Department of Crimes of Special Importance, who organized the search for Rostov-on-Don's serial killer into something effective, so was looking at the thing from top down, Krivich and Ol'gin are interested in the case, and thus are looking at it from the bottom up. They're interested in the victims, in the policemen who actually arrested Chikatilo in 1984 but couldn't prove he was the killer, in the dreadful red herrings of Aleksandr Kravchenko, who was executed for Chikatilo's first murder (although Lourie does a better job of exploring why Kravchenko was too tempting a target to be resisted) and the "fools," the mentally handicapped young men who confessed to the murders (and when the murders kept happening after the young men were in jail, the police just went out and found another of their friends and got another confession). They follow Chikatilo's trial (as Lourie does not, because Kostoev wasn't there) in its descent into gruesome farce.

They acknowledge that they wrote the book very quickly (Chikatilo was convicted in 1992; this book, like Hunting the Devil, came out in 1993; Chikatilo was executed in 1994), and it is certainly riddled with errors in dates and names that another, slower pass through the manuscript would have caught. The translator, Todd P. Bludeau, did an excellent job. The book is readable and clear, but I never lost sight of the fact that it was a translation (which I think is actually a feature rather than a bug--although I'm sure other people disagree with me--because you can't translate seamlessly from one language to another; if it reads like it was written in English, you've sacrificed accuracy in translation to make it that way). And while Lourie does an excellent job as an outsider with extensive knowledge of and experience with Russian culture, Krivich and Ol'gin are insiders. For me as an American reader this book had that weird almost sfnal feel of reporting from a worldview that is in some crucial ways is not like mine. (I don't know if Krivich and Ol'gin were writing from the beginning with an American audience in mind, but they are very good at telling details, things that demonstrate their worldview to an outsider audience.)

The book is sloppy and superficial in places, and it isn't as coherent a narrative as Hunting the Devil, but the view it provides of Chikatilo and of Russia is invaluable.



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UBC: Rosenman, Forgery, Perjury, and an Enormous Fortune

Forgery, perjury, and an enormous fortune: 2303 claimants to the Ella Wendel estate by Mervin Rosenman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is an odd little book about an inheritance case straight out of Dickens. Ella Wendel died in 1931, leaving an estate worth $36,000,000--and that's the value in 1931, not adjusted for inflation to 1984, or to 2017. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator can't handle $36 million, but it tells me $36 in 1931 has the same buying power as $571.63 today. So the Wendel estate was worth something over $500 million. Since the Wendel holdings were mostly real estate in Manhattan, the New York Times estimates the estate would be valued today at over $1 billion.

Compounding the inherent problem of fuck that's a lot of money, Ella Wendel, her brother, and five of her six sisters all died without marrying. The sixth sister, Rebecca, did marry, but had no children. Ella's brother, John Gottleib, was a miser beyond even the dreams of Scrooge, and he ruled his sisters with an iron fist. Ella, who seems to have been only dubiously mentally competent, believed she was ruinously poor, and her lawyer--about whom the kindest thing one can say is that his ethics were remarkable for their elasticity in the face of fuck that's a lot of money--did nothing to convince her otherwise. In fact, he prevented her from spending money when she wanted to and refused to allow her to leave her property to the people she wanted to have it. "Her" will, aside from leaving a great deal of money to charities when everyone who knew her testified that she scorned charities utterly, left a great deal of property to her lawyer's daughter, as well as appointing her executrix, which meant another several hundred thousand dollars worth of income. And the will left nothing for the care of the only creature in the world she loved, her dog Tobey. (She had a succession of Tobeys, each pampered and cossetted and buried when the time came with elaborate care. Rosenman describes Tobey as a "Maltese poodle," a breed which, of course, does not exist. From the photograph in the book, Tobey was probable a Maltese, but he might, of course, have been a miniature Poodle.)

Ella's lawyer, Charles Koss, made the egregious and inexcusable blunder of telling reporters that Ella had no next-of-kin. The world promptly erupted with 2,303 claimants, each trying to prove that Koss was wrong. (He was wrong. Ella had no immediate family surviving her, but she did have provable next of kin, a first cousin once removed (or kin in the fifth degree) named Rosa Dew Stansbury. There were other fifth-degree relatives, but no one closer.) There were a lot of forgeries, most of them transparently inept, and wildly unsubstantiated claims. One man went to prison. In the end, the lawyers for the charities and the lawyers for the fifth-degree claimants negotiated a settlement--in which the charities got most of the estate. And Ella's lawyer's daughter was a very rich woman.

Rosenman's interest in is the lawyers, including hagiographic little biographies and quotes from reminiscences, and in the research they did into each claim. There was a forensic document examiner, Elbridge W. Stein, who did brilliant work in a couple of the cases where the claimants had faked signatures or entire documents. And because no Wendel ever threw anything away, teams of young lawyers did soul-destroying work correlating letters and check stubs and invoices and diaries proving that John Gottleib couldn't have been in Scotland fathering a son because he never left New York long enough to get there, or that Ella's sister Georgiana couldn't have been having a child out of wedlock because she was in a mental institution. I very much enjoy this kind of puzzle-solving narrative, so I found the book very enjoyable, despite Roseman's sycophantic attitude towards certain of his subjects.

Deeply bizarre case--more so than any novelist would dare to try to offer readers--and a very odd little book. I'm glad I found it.



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UBC: Rule, Smoke, Mirrors and Murder

Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If this collection doesn't cure you of that abhorrent coinage The [Male Noun]'s [Female Noun], nothing will.

"The Deputy's Wife": Seattle WA 2001: Just when I think the bar can't get any lower . . . Bill Jensen, a former King County Deputy, conspired while in prison awaiting trial on charges of felony domestic abuse to have his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two children murdered either so that he could (a) inherit a fortune he believed his wife and his sister had inherited (even though he had squandered most of his wife's share already) or (b) so that he wouldn't have to go through divorce proceedings and admit to his wife how much money he'd lost gambling. (Murder is cheaper than divorce.) Jensen was bullying, spiteful, vindictive, selfish, poisonously egotistical, abusive, and finally just irredeemably cruel. Fortunately, the man he approached about the hit on his family decided he didn't actually want to be a murderer for hire, and when Jensen made the final arrangements, he made them to an undercover cop wearing a wire. Poetic justice is sometimes deeply satisfying.

"The Antiques Dealer's Wife": Seattle WA 1960: Raoul Guy Rockwell was something else. He murdered his wife Manzanita and his 18-year-old stepdaughter Dolores, dismembered them in his attic and disposed of the bodies so that only parts of them were ever found (fragments of Dolores were discovered in the septic tank of their home; Manzanita's legs were fished, one at a time, out of the Columbia River). Six months later, before anyone knew what had happened to Manzanita and Dolores, he divorced the woman he'd murdered, claiming she'd left him and taken thousands of dollars with her (thousands of dollars which, arguably, the Rockwells , and within four days had married another woman, Evelyn Emerson. He conned Evelyn's mother out of $10,000 to buy First Nations artifacts from Canada (itself a venture that was semi-legal at best), then convinced a third woman (who didn't know he was married to Evelyn) to abandon her husband and go with him to Portugal. He abandoned that woman in San Francisco and vanished. He was eventually found, but he was never tried for Manzanita & Dolores' murders.

"The Truck Driver's Wife": Seattle WA 1976: This may or may not be a case of spontaneous human combustion. If it isn't, it is truly difficult to come up with an explanation of Dorothy Jones' death.

"The Convict's Wife": Salem OR 1971: Every time I try to summarize this case, it comes out sounding like a John Steinbeck novel. So, career criminal George Light takes his wife Doris Mae and his five small children from Illinois to Salem (Oregon) where they squat in an abandoned farmhouse. George's brother Larry gets out of Joliet and follows them to Oregon. Larry has a long-held grudge against George for sending him up the river, and he doesn't like the way George treats Doris Mae. Within a few months, the inevitable happens: Larry kills George and buries him in a shed behind the house. Doris Mae was an accessory, in that she held the door for Larry to drag George out. Larry then gets arrested for brawling, and Doris Mae gets evicted because the house is unsafe. (Nobody realized until much later that she had no actual right to be there.) Larry gets out of jail; he and Doris Mae and the children disappear. Three years later, Larry--in prison in Illinois again--gets an attack of conscience and confesses, directing police to the location of the body, which they would never otherwise have found.

"The Chemist's Wife": Seattle WA 1975: Every Woman's Nightmare: This man abused, stalked, and terrified his teenage, common-law wife. When he realized that she really meant to leave him, he kidnapped her and drove her from Texas to Seattle, just in time for Christmas with her grandparents. When he started to abuse her again, her grandfather tried to stop him. The abusive stalker nutjob murdered her grandfather, nearly murdered her grandmother, and fled, taking his wife with him again. Mercifully, he was apprehended before he could hurt anyone else. He was convicted of second-degree murder.

The only time I've ever seen Rule commit the Blame the Victim fallacy is in her introduction to this case: "In the end, this [domestic abuse] seems to be an insoluble problem, one that might be avoided only if women could see beyond the romantic facade of a suitor who promises her the world while he is steadily separating her from her family and her friends" (284). The victim isn't the one responsible here (and the victim isn't always a woman, either--Rule says in her introduction to the last case that she had a guy call her on that (although that case is actually the same old familiar pattern of male abuser/female victim up until the woman picks up a shotgun)--nor is the relationship always heterosexual). It's not her job to avoid being abused. It's his job to not abuse her. I'm all in favor of cooperation here: self-reliance and accepting responsibility for oneself. But don't put the blame for the situation on the victim's failure to avoid it. Put the blame where it belongs, on the person (male or female) committing abuse.

"The Painter's Wife": Pasco WA 1978: Michael Anderson escaped from prison and hid in the basement of a middle-class family's home. When he was discovered, two days later (!), he tied up the woman's two teenage sons (and a friend), beat her mostly unconscious, and kidnapped her. He threatened to, but did not actually, rape her. He imprisoned her in her own trunk. Then he decided to rob a big box store, and did so, taking the store manager hostage as well. The store manager, Doug Parry, was a former EMT who'd changed careers because he was tired of getting into high-risk situations. (Irony punches you in the face. Roll D20 for damage.) Parry kept his head and talked Anderson into getting a motel room instead of killing them. He then managed to alert the desk clerk without tipping off Anderson, which meant that Anderson was apprehended and neither hostage was killed. Anderson was given multiple life sentences, to run consecutively, meaning that he might actually spend, or have spent, the rest of his life in jail.

"The Minister's Wife": Selmer TN 2006: Mary Winkler killed her husband Matthew, a minister in the Church of Christ. She shot him in the back with his own shotgun, most likely while he was sleeping. The big unanswerable question is why. There's certainly evidence that Matthew was domineering and abusive, emotionally if not physically. Mary Winkler had gotten herself involved in an email scam; their bank account was overdrawn by $5,000 they did not have and (although I do not understand the ins and outs of it, she herself had done something illegal). Mary claimed that she'd only been acting on Matthew's instructions, and that she killed him (a) because she couldn't stand his abuse and his sexual kinks any longer (Matthew liked anal sex; Mary did not. Matthew liked pornography; Mary did not.), (b) because she couldn't stand his way of shutting up a crying baby any longer (she claimed he pinched their infant daughters' noses shut and suffocated them into silence, which, if true, means that Matthew Winkler probably very narrowly avoided committing infanticide at least once), and (c) in a fugue state, without fully understanding what she was doing. It's really hard to see how she could have gotten the shotgun down from a high closet shelf without fully intending to commit homicide with it. Her defense largely hinged on learned helplessness: she claimed she didn't understand the check kiting scheme--it was all Matthew's fault; she claimed she didn't know how the shotgun worked and was shocked when it went off in her hands.

The other way to look at it is: Matthew was domineering, all paterfamilias Father Knows Best asshole and into kinks Mary did not share. She was up to her eyeballs in a bank fraud, and the day she murdered Matthew was the day they were both supposed to show up at the bank to discuss the matter. The Church of Christ does not sanction divorce, and as a minister, Matthew would certainly never have agreed to it. She wanted him gone and she made it happen.

It's like one of those optical illusions. Is it a vase or two profiles? To what degree was Mary genuinely not responsible for the disaster she made of her life and to what degree was she a cold-blooded murderer?
There is no case in this collection called "Smoke, Mirrors and Murder."



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UBC: Rule, No Regrets

No Regrets and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"The Sea Captain": Lopez Island WA 1980: murder of an 80 year old Puget Sound pilot by his wife of 20 years because he discovered that she'd been moving all of his pension and other income out of their joint checking account into one solely in her name--and because she didn't want to share any of his money with his two sons by a different woman.
"It (Ain't) Hard Out There for the Pimps": Seattle WA: the brutal rape and near-fatal beating of an 18 year old woman (who may have been working informally as a prostitute, but it doesn't seem like her rapist even bothered to pretend he was going to pay her for sex) by a man who worked as a bouncer for a place called the Exotica Studio, which seems to have been somewhere between a peep show and a brothel; Rule's point--evinced by her title--is that it's not hard for the pimps. It's hard for the women who are trapped working for them.
"The Runaway and the Soldier": Bellevue WA: 15 year old runaway Teresa Sterling murdered and raped (yes, in that order) by her 18 year old boyfriend, who abandoned her body in the woods. I felt like Rule left out a piece of this one; she says that Teresa hit a psychotic trigger with some particularly mean teasing, but she doesn't really explain what that trigger was or where it came from. "Old rages," she says, but that doesn't clarify much.
"The Tragic Ending of a Bank Robber's Fantasy": Seattle WA: Sam Jesse thought he'd planned the perfect bank robbery, but apparently he'd never heard that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. He'd also apparently never heard that you should never point a gun at someone unless you're prepared to shoot them. In carrying out his "perfect" robbery, he first didn't notice the dye-pack in one of the stacks of bills the teller gave him (which was going to put a nasty spoke in his wheel anyway) and second accidentally shot the relief bank manager, who was 77. Sam was arrested before he even got out of the airport in Honolulu; extradited back to Washington, he committed suicide in his cell before he even went to trial.
"A Very Bad Christmas": Portland OR: this pretty much takes the cake for Murder is Cheaper than Divorce. Richard Hamilton was married with two small children. He decided he was tired of being a married man, but he didn't want to have to pay child support. So he murdered his wife, his two year old son, and their seven year old daughter, and threw the bodies in the Columbia River; in the hopes of preventing identification, he decapitated his wife's body. He got away with his crime for approximately two days.
"To Save Their Souls": Pasco WA: A young , devout Mormon mother, deserted by her husband and caught in the horrible Catch-22 where her job didn't pay enough that she could afford daycare for her two little boys while she worked--never mind paying enough for rent and groceries--went absolutely insane. She became convinced that she was evil and that the only way to be sure that her children would enter the Celestial Kingdom was for her to kill them. She dropped them off the Pasco-Kennewick Bridge into the Columbia River. Under M'Naughton--because she did know right from wrong at the time she murdered her children--her jury had no choice but to find her sane and therefore guilty. She was remanded to a mental hospital for more tests after her trial, and Rule was unable to find what happened to her after that.
". . . Or We'll Kill You": Fairfield CA: crisis-intervention counselor kidnapped, raped, and terrorized for nearly twelve hours by a pair of unbalanced sociopaths. She escaped them and survived because she kept her head and, ironically, used her training.
There is no case in this collection titled "No Regrets."



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UBC: Larson, The Assassin's Accomplice

The Assassin's Accomplice by Kate Clifford Larson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


There are many phrases I can think of to describe John Wilkes Booth's plot against President Lincoln, but "madcap scheme" (118) is not one of them.

Short version: I recommend American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies instead.

Slightly longer version: Despite its claims to the contrary, this book has no new evidence or insights to offer, unless by "insight," you mean unsupported speculation about what various people must have been feeling during interrogations or while giving testimony. Larson's writing ranges from pedestrian to awful. She makes only clumsy and superficial gestures in the direction of social and gender history. She gets basic things wrong, like claiming that "a crazed John Wilkes Booth burst into [the President's] private box" (89) to assassinate Lincoln (Booth proceeded calmly, stealthily, and with obvious premeditation until after he shot Lincoln, at which point he became very stagey and theatrical . . . but still not crazed) or failing for some unfathomable reason to note that Sic semper tyrannis is the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia and not only the slogan of John Wilkes Booth. She can't decide what her own position is, whether she admires Surratt and deplores her death as a travesty of justice, or believes that she was a contemptible traitor who was justly executed, or any of the many possible judgments in-between. Nor can she decide what she thinks about Louis Weichmann or about the military tribunal who sentenced Surratt to death. This indecision incidentally makes it impossible for her to articulate or support a thesis.

Bah.





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UBC: Kauffman, American Brutus

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is an excellent and thought-provoking book, not a biography of John Wilkes Booth so much as it is a dissection of Lincoln's assassination: everything that can be reconstructed about the events that led up to it and the events that followed. Kauffman works intensively with primary sources, collating and correlating affidavits and testimony and letters and diaries and memoirs, talking carefully about discrepancies and contradictions, talking about the primary sources that did exist but are now lost, talking about why people said the things they did.

I learned a great deal about John Wilkes Booth, the most important thing being that Booth was a liar. Nothing he said and nothing he wrote is remotely trustworthy. He lied to everyone around him and I'm pretty sure he spent most of his life lying to himself. Kauffman is particularly interested in the way that Booth implicated innocent people in his plotting. For example, he took one friend out riding around Washington, loudly pointing out what good escape routes would be. The friend didn't realize until much later that Booth was making it look like they were discussing a plot against Lincoln. Booth did this routinely to people whom he felt were a threat to him, giving himself blackmail material against them should they discover his plans. That more than anything, that premeditated and carefully executed cruelty, makes me unable to feel any charity towards John Wilkes Booth.

Kauffman talks a lot about tyrannicide, which is what Booth thought he was doing, pointing out that a lot of pro-Confederate newspapers in both North and South were talking about Marcus Junius Brutus and William Tell, about the justified killing of out-of-control tyrants. (And given the way Lincoln's administration was dancing a vigorous can-can on the US Constitution and given the fact that many people--not just John Wilkes Booth--thought that Lincoln had had the 1864 election rigged, so that there was no legal way to get him out of office, although it's in stark contrast to the way Lincoln is now viewed, I can see how Booth came to think of him as a tyrant and to think of murdering him as tyrannicide, not something more base.) The most incisive sentence in this book, to me, is: "The irony was inescapable: Booth had hoped to kill Lincoln on the Ides and highlight his resemblance to Caesar; but instead, he shot him on Good Friday, and the world compared him to Christ" (251). This, in a beautiful nutshell, both explains Booth's lofty sense of self-importance and the way that his plan crashed down around his ears.

There's also a certain poetic justice to it. Booth seems to have been a man without any sense of irony whatsoever. The best example is one that also gets used in Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, where Booth, writing to his mother, describes himself as a slave because he had to work in the North. Any white American male who was capable, as Booth was capable in the 1860s, of making $30,000 a year ($421,348.16 today if you adjust for inflation) . . . the mere comparison is ludicrous. But Booth is absolutely serious; that is genuinely how wronged and oppressed he felt he was.

That lack of irony also explains one of the things that I find most interesting about Booth and his evolving scheme. He started out with a plan to kidnap Lincoln--this was in the days before the Secret Service or any sense that the President needed to be guarded (murdering the President of the United States wasn't even made a federal crime until 1965) and Lincoln was known for riding out of town completely by himself, so the idea itself was not inherently implausible, and Booth was not the only one who came up with it--but that plan metamorphosed as he failed to carry it out and the Confederate position became worse and worse. He went from kidnapping the President in an isolated place out in the country to kidnapping the President in a theater. (He had an elaborate scheme about who would lift Lincoln down from the box to the stage which is blackly hilarious; Lincoln was 6'4", and even though he was 56, they discovered at his autopsy that he still had the upper body of a powerful athlete--I would like to have seen Booth and Surratt and Powell trying it.) And then, after Appomattox, his plan metamorphosed again, from kidnap to murder. But, and this is the interesting thing to me, why a theater? It seems, as Booth's co-conspirators argued vehemently, the worst possible location for a kidnapping; even for murder, it's highly counterintuitive, although Booth made it work. But why would a professional actor from a family of professional actors, who had played theaters across the US and had theatrical friends everywhere, choose his professional home as the perfect place for assassination/tyrannicide?

There are two different ways to answer that question. One is to point out that Booth, being both a professional actor and an inveterate liar, and being also a person with an vastly inflated sense of his own importance, someone who essentially saw himself as being on stage in front of a rapt audience all the time, inevitably thought about his plot as a play. After all, he remembered to declare Sic semper tyrannis as he jumped from the box to the stage--and Kauffman notes that Booth , in actual performance of actual plays, liked to make dramatic entrances, and was in fact known for jumping down to the stage from as much as 12 feet. And on the run in Maryland, he was most interested in discovering--and most crushed by--popular opinion about what he'd done. Moreover, he understood instinctively how to use the theater to his advantage. It let him creep up behind Lincoln without anyone (including his victim) noticing, and the detectives who later made the cast of Our American Cousin perform the play again--and that has to have been the worst experience of any of their professional lives, performing a comedy in an empty theater while everyone involved is mentally counting down to the gunshot--proved that Booth picked his moment with precision to ensure that the stage would be clear for him to cross. And that--a clear escape route--is something that he could only have guaranteed by committing murder during a play. Only during the performance of a play can you predict exactly where the people involved are going to be at the moment of your choice. In that light, his choice seems so self-evident that you may be wondering why I even think it's worth commenting on.

But then there's the other side. Booth knew he was destroying himself in destroying Lincoln; he wanted public adulation (much as he claimed he didn't care at all), but he knew the government would hunt him down. So again why would he choose, deliberately and with intense premeditation, to commit the most destructive act of his life, both against his victim and against himself, in a theater, when he, his father, and two of his brothers were all famous actors--probably the most famous and adulated actors of their day? The Freudian line is tempting here, since Booth was assassinating the pre-eminent patriarch of the United States, a stern and unyielding father to the rebellious South, a father who Booth believed was playing favorites, cossetting the North and punishing the South. It is also obviously a blow against Booth's own (deceased) father, though Kauffman doesn't go into enough detail for me to make a strong case that Booth resented Junius Brutus Booth (although Junius Brutus did try to keep his sons from following him into acting as a career, with notably poor success). John Wilkes Booth did however most certainly resent his brother Edwin, who was a staunch supporter of the Union and even more successful an actor than John Wilkes himself. And if you think of Lincoln's assassination as a play, with John Wilkes Booth as both director and leading man in the ultimate performance of his career . . . to me, that kind of self-immolation, using the tools of his own trade to destroy himself, talks about a kind of self-hatred that goes well beyond Freud. And Booth, being as he was almost completely un-self-aware, I don't think ever recognized or even could have recognized the impulse to self-destruction underlying the moment when he put his .44 caliber Deringer against Lincoln's skull and fired.

(The only grim and bitterly cold comfort I can find is that Lincoln would never have known what happened to him. The bullet that tore through his brain didn't kill him instantly, but he was brain-dead from the moment Booth fired. I only hope he was enjoying the play.)

American Brutus isn't only about John Wilkes Booth. It's also about Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton and William Seward, about Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt and John Surratt. Kauffman traces out the long domino paths of cause-and-effect from the assassination of Lincoln and the near assassination of William Seward, the terrible damage Booth caused, all the people ensnared in his webs who fell with him when he fell. It's a book that I've been thinking about a lot since I finished it, which is maybe the highest praise I can offer.



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