Katherine Addison's Blog, page 35

UBC: Rule, Worth More Dead

Worth More Dead and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Worth More Dead"

The bizarre and appalling career of Roland Pitre, who never liked to get his own hands dirty, but who conspired to kill his lover's husband (then turned state's evidence to testify against her, even though there doesn't really seem to be convincing evidence that she was the person conspiring with him), then conspired to kill his ex-wife, then hatched a grotesque plot to kidnap his teenage stepson and hold him for ransom, keeping him imprisoned in a tiny secret room Pitre built in the basement bathroom of his girlfriend's house. (Rule doesn't think the teenage boy was ever going to make it out of that plot alive, and I agree with her.)
"'It's Really Weird Looking at My Own Grave'": Timberlane WA 1979

One girl was raped and murdered; two others were raped and escaped with their lives. The surviving victims were able to identify William Gene Scribner as their rapist. When the police were processing the murder scene, they found evidence from one of the survivors. Scribner had taken both of the later (surviving) victims to the site of the murder to rape them.
"Old Man's Darling": Denver CO 2003

Teresa Perez, 40, murdered her lover, Justyn Rosen, 80 (no, not a typo, eighty) because he would not leave his wife for her. Since she chose to shoot him in the parking lot of a police sub-station (and shot a police officer for trying to intervene), she committed suicide by cop.
"All for Nothing": Issaquah WA 1989

Don't put it all on women. Hell hath no fury like a person scorned. Successful business man loses his shit and murders a woman he was dating (he much more seriously than she) and a man who may or may not have been having an affair with her. (The male victim was a popular Seattle news personality, Larry Sturholm, and Rule bends over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I dunno. When you are going to the Cayman Islands without your wife of twenty-two years, and you are taking with you a woman whom your wife has never heard of, and you somehow omit to mention to your wife that this other woman is going, letting your wife drop you off at the airport and then renting a car to go pick up your friend . . . I think it's not unreasonable to say your motives are less than pure.) Pawlyk, who'd never met Larry Sturholm before he killed him, stabbed each of his victims more than 100 times, then tried to commit suicide himself--but couldn't bring himself either to cut deeply enough or to actually take a lethal quantity of sleeping pills.
"A Desperate Housewife": Renton WA 1998

Every Woman's Nightmare, next verse, same as the first. Woman trapped in emotionally abusive marriage with a controlling, fault-finding, obsessively jealous spouse, asks for a divorce and gets killed for it. (Her (female) friends begged her not to talk to Bob alone; she told them she was sure Bob would never hurt her. Prosecutors think she was beaten to death with a baseball bat.) Bob Durall, like Steve Sherer (from Empty Promises and Other True Cases), hid his victim's body, then faked concern for his "missing" wife--but didn't fake it particularly well. At his trial, having insisted on testifying in his own defense, he told a story so implausible that I'm sure his attorney wanted to commit seppuku on the spot.


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UBC: Rule, Without Pity

Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is mostly reprints from Ann Rule's Crime Files vols. 1-8, but it includes three new cases, and several of the reprints have updates.

The reprints are:
"Campbell's Revenge" (A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases)
"One Trick Pony" (You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases)
"The Last Letter" (You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases)
"I'll Love You Forever" (A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases)
"Murder & the Proper Housewife" ("The Most Dangerous Game" ("The Killer Who Never Forgot . . . or Forgave" ("The Lost Lady" (A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases)
"The Stockholm Syndrome" (Empty Promises and Other True Cases
The new cases are:

"The Tumbledown Shack": Chelan WA 1975: This one is creepily similar to "The Beach" (in Last Dance, Last Chance and Other True Cases), which also occurred in 1975, approximately 300 miles away. Two young women camping alone in an isolated location, surprised and murdered by a stranger. Tina Jacobsen and Gael Burton were stabbed to death in April in Moclips WA by William Batten; Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner were stabbed to death in September in Chelan WA by someone who might or might not have been Jack Lee Stolle. Stolle clearly had guilty knowledge--he knew things that hadn't been released to the media--but his story was also wrong in places, and he would never either confess his own guilt or admit that he had been told about the crime by someone else. He died in prison without ever coming clean.

Johnson and Weidner were traveling with their dogs, Charlie and Silas (one reason they were confident in their own safety). Silas was also killed the same weekend (though his remains were too decomposed to determine cause of death); Charlie was still guarding Beverly Johnson's body when she was found.

"Dead and on Tape": Seattle WA 1973: Nick Kyreacos died in what appeared to be a shoot-out with a police officer (Rule used a pseudonym, but the power of Google tells me his name was David T. Smith). Unbeknownst to the officer, however, Kyreacos had a tape recorder concealed on his body, and what it recorded was not a shoot-out. The officer murdered Kyreacos, then shot himself twice (carefully) to make it look like Kyreacos had attacked him--in effect framing him for his own death. The trial did not uncover the officer's motives.

"Fatal Obsession": Bainbridge Island WA 1970?: Old National Bank VP kills his wife, their toddler son, their dachshund puppy, and himself, apparently in the grip of a psychotic break. As best anyone can tell, he believed at the time of his death that he had to sacrifice himself and his family in order to save the world. He killed himself by stabbing himself four times deeply in the chest--dramatically atypical of suicides--so that detectives were very nearly misled into looking for an outside assailant.



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UBC: Rule, Kiss Me, Kill Me

Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Kiss Me, Kill Me"
This is a wide ranging piece, more of an essay about cold cases than Rule's usual detailed examination of a single crime. She starts and ends with Sandra Bowman, who was brutally murdered in her own apartment just before Christmas 1968, and whose murderer wasn't identified until 2004. Along the way she examines the 1966 murder of Lonnie Trumbull (who Rule is convinced was murdered by Ted Bundy, although so far as I know there's only circumstantial evidence against him); Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Tuski (1969), murdered by John Canaday (who shares his name, ironically, with an art critic who wrote several crime novels); Eileen Condit (1970); Heidi Peterson (1974); Katherine Merry Devine (1973)--who Rule also thought had been killed by Bundy, but in 2002 DNA proved her killer was William E. Cosden, Jr., who was then already serving time for a 1976 rape (and had been found not guilty by reason of insanity in another rape/murder case in 1967); Hallie Ann Seaman (1975); Sylvia Durante (1979), murdered by William Bergen Greene, who claimed not guilty by reason of Disassociative Identity Disorder, although the evidence strongly suggests that he was a psychopath who happened to be a very talented actor--that was the jury's conclusion, anyway; Kristen Sumstad (1982), a thirteen-year-old raped and murdered by a fourteen-year-old, John Athan, who was convicted in 2004 because the police were able to get a saliva sample from a licked stamp; Mia Zapata (1993), murdered by Jesus Mezquia; and finally circles back to Sandy Bowman, who was murdered--DNA showed in 2004--by John Canaday. This is an excellent essay, maybe the best of Rule's shorter pieces that I've read."The Postman Only Killed Once": Walla Walla WA [she doesn't give a year and I can't find the case online]
Man murders his 16 year old wife with a--fortunately poorly-thought-out and unconsummated--plan to stage more murders to make it look like there was a serial killer at work. He also made--poorly-thought-out and unconsummated--plans to bomb the lead detective's house when he realized police were getting close."What's Love Got to Do with It?": Seattle WA 1969
Audrey Ruud and Patrick Fullen lured Karsten Knutsen to their apartment, where they robbed and murdered him, then fled from Seattle to Sanibel Island, where they were caught. Fullen died in prison; Ruud was released after 22 years."Old Flames Can Burn": Seattle WA 1968
Man strangles one of his female friends and almost stabs another to death because . . . ?"The Lonely Hearts Killer": Los Angeles CA 1957
This essay is at least half a homage to Pierce Brooks, the detective who first put together the idea of a serial killer--a killer who targets strangers who (mostly) fit a certain profile. Brooks' archetype was Harvey Glatman, who posed as a photographer for true crime magazines in order to get his victims to willingly submit to being tied up. And he took pictures. Shirley Bridgeford, Judy Ann Dull, Ruth Mercado, and very nearly Lorraine Vigil are his known victims. (Dorothy Gay Howard , the Jane Doe of Someone's Daughter, may be another Glatman victim; she wasn't identified until 2009, five years after Kiss Me, Kill Me was published.)"The Captive Bride": Seattle WA 1978
twenty-year-old woman murdered (shot nine times in the back) by the crazy abusive stalker husband she was trying to divorce; he served fourteen years, was paroled, and--hey--got married again, despite having insisted to the woman he murdered that he literally couldn't live without her. Rule ends this case with an impassioned plea to people trapped in abusive relationships to get out and get help."Bad Blind Date": Seattle 1970
Victoria Legg made a bad decision. She accepted a date with a man she didn't really know, because he looked like an ex-boyfriend whom she trusted. Turns out, her date was a guy out on the far end of the mentally disturbed spectrum--who may genuinely NOT have been able to tell right from wrong when he raped her and beat her to death. (M'Naughten is a lousy rubric for sanity, honestly.)"The Highway Accident" (reprint from A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases)
"You Kill Me---Or I'll Kill You": Silverton OR 1975
Rule is apologetic for including this case because it's both so gruesome and so grotesque. "Kent Whiteside" had a masochistic sexual fantasy about being gutted by a "naked beautiful slut." He picked a young woman (more or less at random as far as anyone can tell) and decided to force her to kill him by threatening to kill her. Problem was, as it turns out, he wasn't bluffing. He literally disemboweled her and a friend who had the bad luck to be sleeping on the couch. Almost unbelievably, the friend survived. Despite pleading guilty to murder, "Kent Whiteside" was pardoned a few years later. Rule suggests that there was bribery or undue influence involved, which seems like a not unreasonable conclusion."'Where Is Julie?'": Bonneville WA 1987: Julie Weflen's disappearance is still unsolved.



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UBC: Rule, Last Dance, Last Chance

Last Dance, Last Chance and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"Last Dance, Last Chance": Buffalo NY 1999: Anthony Pignataro capped off a long and despicable history of medical malfeasance by attempting to murder his wife as part of a convoluted plot to clear himself of culpability in the death of a woman who came to him for breast-augmentation surgery. Despite the phenomenal amount of arsenic Deborah Pignataro's doctors found in her system, some twenty times the naturally-occurring rate of arsenic in the human body, she survived. Pignataro pled guilty and was paroled in 2013.
"The Accountant": In Seattle in 1948, Jack Gasser murdered Donna Woodcock (beaten, raped, strangled with her own bra, and sexually mutilated after death). Sentenced to life without possibility of parole, he was nevertheless paroled in 1962. He violated his parole in 1964 and was sent back to prison, then was paroled again in 1969. Got an accounting degree; got a job as a state auditor, traveling around Washington state; got married. Got divorced in 1981. Murdered another woman in 1982. (And as Rule points out, there are plenty of unsolved murders between 1969 and 1982 that might be his work as well.) As of 2003, he was 74 and still imprisoned.
"The Killer Who Begged to Die": James Elledge beat a motel owner to death with a ballpeen hammer in 1974. He was paroled and reincarcerated, paroled and reincarcerated, paroled for the last time in 1995 and murdered again in 1998. He said there was something evil in him that he couldn't control. He refused to allow his defense attorney to argue against the death penalty and refused to allow him to file appeals. Elledge died by lethal injection in 2001.
"The Beach": Moclips WA 1975: William Batten picked up two girls hitchhiking, took them to Moclips, then that night found them where they were camping on the beach and murdered them. He was caught partially because of the knots he used to tie their hands, which were exactly the same as the knots he'd used eight years previously when he kidnapped several young boys, tied them to trees, and threatened to castrate them. (He was sent to Western Washington State Hospital's sexual psychopath program and "released shortly thereafter." Rule's had things to say about the culpable negligence of that particular program in earlier books in her Crime Files series.)
"The Desperate Hours": Kent WA 1963: man murders his girlfriend's mother because he thinks she's broken up their relationship, murders his best friend in order to steal his car (which then doesn't start), then invades the home of a woman alone with her three small children, kidnaps her, forces her to drive him to his brother's house, then when the brother (not realizing that the poor woman is a captive) refuses to help, forces her to keep driving him until law-enforcement officers mercifully force them off the road. Psychiatrists argued about whether he was psychotic, schizophrenic, sociopathic, and whether he was or was not legally sane. He was found sane and guilty and sentenced to death in 1971. The death sentence was commuted to life, and the "life" sentence, as per usual, fell a fair ways short. He was paroled in 1991.



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truepenny @ 2016-12-31T17:59:00

Empty Promises and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Empty Promises": Bellevue WA 1990: murder of Jami Hagel Sherer by her abusive stalker husband Steve
"Bitter Lake": murder of woman and her toddler son by her stalker ex-boyfriend
"Young Love": teenage boy threatens ex-girlfriend with bomb, but blows himself up
"Love and Insurance": gay man murdered by his roommate (lover? close friend?) for a $500,000 insurance policy
"The Gentler Sex": woman and her girlfriend murder her husband for the insurance money; another woman attempts to hire a hit man to murder her husband before he can divorce her (Murder Is Cheaper Than Divorce--she didn't care that he was divorcing her; she didn't want to have to divide her assets).
"The Conjugal Visit": the terrible history of Carl Cletus Bowles
"Killers on the Road": the equally terrible history of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine, who in 1967 murdered three people and nearly murdered a fourth--all complete strangers--simply because they could
"A Dangerous Mind": A man strangled his seven-year-old niece; investigators discovered a long history of his getting away with, or getting only very lightly punished for, sexually-motivated violence against children; his family (including the little girl's parents) continued to defend him. He committed suicide after his sentencing hearing.
"To Kill and Kill Again": Gary Gene Grant murdered two teenage girls and two six-year-old boys (the girls were separate crimes, the boys were together) for no motivation that even he could understand.
"The Stockholm Syndrome": Subject of a 1983 made-for-TV movie called The Awakening of Candra, Ann Rule's only novel, Possession, and (I think?) an episode of Forensic Files (I know I've seen the story re-enacted, so it was either Forensic Files or The New Detectives): Thomas Leslie Brown encountered a young couple fishing in the Oregon woods; having shot the young woman's husband and her dog, he spent three days dragging her through the mountains, raping her when he felt like it, and brainwashed her into believing that she had witnessed her husband's accidental death. It took her months to get reality sorted out again.



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UBC: Siegel, A Death in White Bear Lake

Death in White Bear Lake by Barry Siegel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Siegel is much more enamored than I am of the irony of the fact that in 1965, when three-year-old Dennis Jurgens died as the result of brutal and sustained abuse and the community failed to do a damn thing about it, White Bear Lake was named an "All-America City." Yes, yes, very ironic. But remarking on the irony would have been sufficient; the lengthy history of White Bear Lake and the chronicling of the campaign in the All-America City competition added unnecessary length to an already very long book. That part bored me.

The rest of the book was fascinating: the appalling train wreck of how Harold and Lois Jurgens were ever allowed to adopt a child in the first place, much less achieve their grand total of six (one died, the other five ran away); the way the system failed to protect children from Lois Jurgens over and over again; the revolution in the understanding of child abuse in the late 1960s; the cold case investigation (before "cold case" was a term in common usage) in 1986 that eventually led to Lois Jurgens' conviction on charges of third-degree murder (homicide committed in the course of a felony (aggravated assault in this case) but without the intent to kill; the jury was sure she was responsible for Dennis' death, but not sure beyond a reasonable doubt that she had intended to kill him). Siegel keeps control of his large cast of characters and his sprawling narrative; he's as nonjudgmental as he can be about bad decisions made by a large number of people while still pointing out that these were, hey, bad decisions.

Dennis Jurgens' death is kind of like Kitty Genovese in slow motion. Neighbors and family members knew that Lois was abusing him in all kinds of ways; they could provide eyewitness testimony to investigators both in 1965 and in 1986. But nobody thought it was their place to interfere. Everybody was waiting for somebody else to step up. And nobody did, either before or after he died--not until his birth mother discovered what had happened to him and started yelling.



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UBC: Fletcher, What Cops Know

What Cops Know by Connie Fletcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an oral history of cops--specifically Chicago cops. As with Fletcher's Every Contact Leaves a Trace, what makes this book fascinating is the voices of the cops she interviews, how they talk about what they've experienced.



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UBC: Fletcher, Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Connie Fletcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really liked this book, but I don't have much to say about it. It's an oral history of forensics, and I especially loved the feel it gives you for the voices of the people who do this work and the language they use (which varies widely, as one would expect) in talking about what they do.



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UBC: Rule, A Fever in the Heart

A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"A Fever in the Heart": Yakima WA 1975: the murder of Morris Blankenbaker & the highly ambiguous death of Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore
"The Highway Accident": Salem OR 1976: man tries to make his wife's death look like a car accident, not knowing the police have already found the murder scene
"Murder Without a Body": Rainier OR 1976: Vicki Brown's body was never found, but the cops found a sufficient corpus delicti to prosecute and convict her murderer.
"I'll Love You Forever": Auburn WA 1974: woman falls prey to sociopath; her daughters brought a successful civil suit against him before the cops could put together a criminal case--but after he managed to squander most of the wealthy victim's estate. He died in prison and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
"Black Leather": Roy WA 1979: a sadistic sexual psychopath's last victim manages to turn the tables on him
"Mirror Images": the horrific lives of Carl Harp (rapist and sniper) and James Ruzicka (rapist/murderer), who met in prison, became friends--insofar as either of them was capable of it--and shared a pseudonym, "Troy Asin." Harp died in prison (most likely suicide, but there's an outside chance he had help) and Ruzicka is serving consecutive life terms.

"A Fever in the Heart" demonstrates as clearly as any of her work the point where Rule and I don't mesh. She's interested in the people; I'm interested in the case. Mostly, this isn't a problem, but in this particular story she's so interested in the people--particularly Olive Blankenbaker, the victim's mother, who asked her to tell the story--that she does a lousy job of presenting the case. And the case is, in a horrible way, fascinating.

Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore was a phenomenal high school wrestling coach. Blankenbaker was one of his wrestlers, later a coach himself and Moore's friend. When Moore's first wife finally divorced him for being possessive, controlling, and manipulative, Blankenbaker let Moore stay with him and his wife for a few weeks "while he got back on his feet." Moore repaid him by seducing Blankenbaker's wife (pseudonymously called Jerrilee--and I'm going to call her that, even though I'm using everybody else's surname, because she shared surnames with both victims and it's too damn confusing, even though it's a patriarchal convention I loathe; just watch how rarely women get called by their unadorned surnames in anything you read). Jerrilee left Blankenbaker and married Moore, but less than a year later, she realized what a horrible mistake she'd made, divorced Moore, and went back to Blankenbaker. They were getting ready to be remarried when Blankenbaker was murdered. Moore was obsessed with Jerrilee and had told her he knew she'd come back to him if it weren't for Blankenbaker; she--and the cops--immediately suspected him, and even when his alibi held (he was in the hospital the night of Blankenbaker's murder), she and they were convinced he was behind it. He insisted he wasn't, insisted that he was trying to solve Blankenbaker's murder, that he was being stalked himself and was getting death threats. Jerrilee, the last time she was weak enough to speak to him, told him she didn't believe him, and he was trying to tell her he could prove it when she hung up on him. Moore could never grasp that she wasn't going to come back to him no matter what he did; he truly believed that Blankenbaker had been the obstacle in his path, not that he himself had driven her away.

Moore died less than a month after Blankenbaker of a gunshot wound that probably wouldn't have killed him if the .22 hadn't ricocheted off his rib and torn a hole straight across his body from left to right, through both lungs and the pericardium. (Low caliber bullets can do amazing things inside the human body.) The Yakima detectives working the case eventually dragged out the truth: Moore, who was like a god to his wrestlers, had gotten one of them to murder Blankenbaker and then, in pursuit of his delusion that he could "prove" his own innocence, browbeat that same wrestler into shooting him. Moore didn't intend that shot to be fatal, and one of the very important questions at trial was whether Angelo "Tuffy" Pleasant had also meant Moore to survive. Or not.

Angelo Pleasant (surely one of the most ironically misnamed people of all time) confessed to Yakima detectives on tape, then tried to recant his confession (throwing his younger brother and his best friend under the bus as the "real murderers"), but didn't have the intellectual stamina to maintain his new story under sharp and relentless cross-examination. It was hard to tell--and I think it was hard for Rule to tell--whether Pleasant was a conscienceless murderer or someone so malleable that Moore could verbally pin him to the mat and force him to do things he genuinely didn't want to do. Moore was a vile human being who hoist himself with his own petard.

Rule starts with Blankenbaker and her narrative meanders and loops and has to go spiraling off in all these different directions because Blankenbaker (to talk in terms of story-telling craft for a second) may be her hook, but he's not the throughline. In an awful, cruel, tragic way, Morris Blankenbaker is almost incidental to his own murder. Pleasant had nothing against him; he killed him because Moore wanted him dead. And Moore didn't care about Blankenbaker; he saw him only as the thing keeping Jerrilee away. And Jerrilee, in the worst tradition of courtly love, is also weirdly peripheral to the story; Pleasant barely even knew her and he said openly he didn't care about her one way or the other. She was Moore's idee fixe, the cruel beloved who appears in so much Renaissance lyric poetry, capriciously spurning the poet/knight until he proves his devotion. To give credit where it's due, Renaissance poets prove their worth by writing poetry, not by browbeating their former students into murder, but the cognitive schematic is the same. Feminist critics talk about the way the beloved in Renaissance lyric poetry is deprived of subjectivity, never allowed to be independent of the poet's desire for her, and that's exactly what Moore did to Jerrilee Blankenbaker. She had no subject position of her own in his conceptualization of her, no independent will that would keep her from returning to him if he just got rid of the other guy.

So most of the story is Moore and the steadily widening gap between Moore and reality, but Moore isn't the throughline either, because the investigation of his death made the investigation of Blankenbaker's death a whole new ballgame. But Pleasant, the murderer, isn't the throughline, because the motivation for Morris Blankenbaker's murder had nothing whatsoever to do with Angelo Pleasant himself.

You can see why Rule didn't think she knew how to tell this story, and I don't for a second pretend I would have done any better in her shoes.

But looking at what she did write, I think her throughline was staring her in the face in the person of Vern Henderson, a Yakima detective who was one of Moore's former students; was Blankenbaker's best friend; was--like Pleasant--an African-American man in a community that was 95% or more white; who found the shell casing at the scene of Blankenbaker's murder; shared investigative duties on the Blankenbaker/Moore case; and worked Angelo Pleasant into the right state of mind to confess. Henderson saw Jerrilee make the mistake of meeting with Moore after she'd returned to Blankenbaker, so although he wasn't close to Jerrilee (the poor woman exists in Rule's narrative almost exclusively in terms of her relationships with Blankenbaker and Moore), structurally he holds all the pieces of the story. If you follow Henderson, you get everything, and that isn't true of any of the other players. Also, if you follow Henderson, you stay focused on the case, but--because his life was so intertwined with Blankenbaker's, Moore's, and Pleasant's--you don't lose sight of the people. QED.



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UBC: Newton, Waste Land

Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate by Michael Newton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's all compiled from secondary sources; on the other, Newton collates his sources carefully, talks about discrepancies, and is clearly doing his own thinking, which I appreciate. He's an engaging writer, and he lays out the facts of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate's killing spree about as clearly as can be hoped for. I guess my problem is that I can't get a good read on how trustworthy he is--just because it's well-written doesn't mean it's a reliable source.

And the nature of the Starkweather/Fugate case foregrounds the question of reliability, with Starkweather's umpteen different confessions, all of them muddled, and Fugate's proclamations of terrorized innocence, so starkly at odds with basically EVERYTHING ELSE (including the self-contradictions in her testimony). Today she could probably make a case on Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm not even sure that that was what was going on. The fact that she and Starkweather dreamed up a clumsy "hostage" scenario before they even left the Fugate home tends to militate against the plausibility of any claim that Caril Ann Fugate, fourteen years old or not, knew exactly what she was doing. But, on the other hand . . .



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