Katherine Addison's Blog, page 39

UBC: Jackson, No Stone Unturned

No Stone Unturned: The True Story of NecroSearch International, the World's Premier Forensic Investigators by Steve Jackson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book suffers a little from not being sure whether it's the history of NecroSearch International or the history of the major cases NecroSearch had (by publication in 2002) helped solve. From a true crime perspective, it's interesting to read the course of the investigations and how the detectives searching for Michele Wallace, Diane Keidel, Cher Elder, and Christine Elkins came to the point of asking NecroSearch for help, but from a history-of-NecroSearch perspective, I'm actually way more interested in the experiments with pigs and the forensics of all their cases, not just these big dramatic success stories.

Other than that, this is competently written and engaging and certainly well worth reading.



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UBC: Cook, The Great Wisconsin Manhunt of 1961

The Great Wisconsin Manhunt of 1961 by Marshall Cook

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a very good piece of local history. The narrative voice has a pleasantly informal, storytelling air, Cook organizes his facts well, and he fits the extraordinary events of August 1961 into the ordinary flow and cycle of life and history in Sauk County.



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UBC: Guice, ed., By His Own Hand?

By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis by John D.W. Guice

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


(N.b., I'm writing this review on the one hundred seventh anniversary of Meriwether Lewis's death.)




This slim volume (as I believe the correct phrase is) consists of the arguments for (John D. W. Guice) and against (James J. Holmberg) the homicide theory in the death of Meriwether Lewis, supported and surrounded by non-partisan essays and with a selection of the relevant documents (which I personally would find more helpful if they had stuck to transcriptions and not bothered with photographing Lewis' diary and Clark's letters (beautiful handwriting though both of them had).

And the thing we need to talk about is what constitutes evidence of which.

1. Character assessments of Meriwether Lewis and whether he was or was not feeling suicidal when he came to Grinder's Reach are NOT RELEVANT to the question of whether someone murdered him. The fact that William Clark, Lewis's friend and exploration partner, and Thomas Jefferson, Lewis's patron and employer, both felt he was capable of killing himself and were certainly not surprised to learn that he had, while it lends credence to the idea that he might have committed suicide, has nothing to do with whether his death, on the evidence, can be judged self-inflicted or not. Just because he might have killed himself is not proof that someone else didn't beat him to it.

(1.a. Suicidal depression has nothing to do with "character" or "strength of will"; admitting that Lewis was prone to what we today would call clinical depression or major depressive disorder (or, possibly, was bipolar) is not a denigration of him as a person and casts no shadow on his accomplishments. So just leave that strawman out already, okay?)

2. What we have in the way of evidence is a collection of unreliable testimony from eyewitnesses, none of whom saw the shots fired (Lewis was shot twice, once in the head and once in the torso, with his own .69 caliber flintlock pistols; bonus point: a .69 caliber pistol ball is half an inch in diameter), and most of whom weren't there when Lewis received his fatal injuries. The exception is Priscilla Grinder, whose story seems to have changed depending on who she was talking to. Hearsay accounts from Captain Gilbert Russell (especially when he doesn't explain where he's getting his information from) are not evidence. It certainly seems like the 1848 Monument Committee, when they exhumed Lewis's body to rebury him beneath his monument in Hohenwald, Tennessee (milepost 385.9 on the Natchez Trace Parkway), saw something that made them suspicious, since they officially endorsed the murder theory, but they didn't explain themselves, and the National Park Service has steadfastly refused to allow a second exhumation. So that's not actually evidence either.

3. Yes, the Natchez Trace was dangerous. Yes, after dark on a night of the new moon in Tennessee is going to be pitch fucking black and Mrs. Grinder probably couldn't see much of anything happening in the yard beyond the door she refused to open. IF the version of her story in which Lewis wandered pathetically around the yard begging for water is the closest version to the truth. Which seems doubtful. The story she told nearest in time to the actual events, the story relayed by Neelly (who himself seems to have been a somewhat unreliable witness), is much simpler and, by Occam's Razor and what I know of the effects of (1) time on human memory; (2) leading questions from an interlocutor; and (3) the desire of an interview subject to tell a story that will please the interviewer, I suspect that that first version is true--or, at least, as close as we can get:

the woman reports that about three o'clock she heard two pistols fire off in the Governors Room. the servants being awakined by her, came in but too late to save him. he had shot himself in the head with one pistol & a little below the Breast with the other. when his servant came in he says, I have done the business my good servant give me some water. he gave him water, he survived but a short time, I came up some time after, & had him as decently Buried as I could in that place.
(150)

Could Priscilla Grinder be lying? Yes, of course, although she'd have to bring the servants in on the deal, and Lewis's personal servant John Pernier had no reason to go along with it, especially once he was away from Grinder's Stand. (Pernier did commit suicide--or, at least, Jefferson passed on the story that he committed suicide--in 1810, which might, or might not, be evidence of a guilty conscience.) Could James Neelly be lying? Yes, of course, although he'd have to bring the servants and the Grinders in on it, and that starts getting iffier and iffier as you go.

The case for homicide seems to rest mostly on inconsistencies in the eyewitness testimony and is significantly lacking in both suspects and motive (aside from highway robbery, but none of the evidence really seems to fit that. The case for suicide rests mostly on character testimonials and evidence from people who saw Lewis in the time leading up to his death. It's one of those irritating situations where I agree with Holmberg but find his argument completely unconvincing because he seems to have no ability to understand what constitutes evidence. Guice does a better job, but I'm not persuaded by him, either.

Most likely scenario: Meriwether Lewis, possibly on the downward swing of a bipolar cycle, possibly simply in a suicidal depression (either way, please remember, this is a mental illness; it has nothing to do with either Lewis's character or his situation as viewed rationally), used his .69 caliber flintlocks to kill himself. (I did like the testimony of the gun expert Guice found, who said, "Personally I am doubtful that anyone could shoot himself twice with such a weapon as the learning curve from this type of self-abuse would be quite nearly vertical" (94).) Homicide is less likely, but I could absolutely be convinced with the presentation/discovery of better evidence.



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UBC: Maclean, The Thirtymile Fire

The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Like Maclean's other books that I have read (The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57 and Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire) and, of course, his father's brilliant Young Men and Fire, the story of the Thirtymile Fire is the story of people doing the best they can in a tremendously dangerous situation, and what happens when, quite suddenly, "best" isn't good enough. Maclean is very good (and gets better from Fire on the Mountain through The Thirtymile Fire to The Esperanza Fire) at reconstructing the chain of decisions that resulted in catastrophe; both the South Canyon Fire and the Thirtymile Fire are histories of one tiny bad decision layered on top of another tiny bad decision until somehow you end up with dead firefighters. Only four people died in the Thirtymile Fire, but Maclean makes it clear that that was luck as much as anything else--luck and the random flukes of topography in the Chewuch River canyon.

It's sad and sobering how much of both the South Canyon and Thirtymile disasters were caused by bureaucracy, by resources (helicopters, tanker planes, etc.) that were available sitting unused until it was too late for them to do any good simply because nobody with the authority to do so ordered them out. A lot of decisions in modern wildfire-fighting get made by people who aren't on the scene, and that's necessary, but Maclean shows very clearly that it can also be dangerous right on up to lethal.



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Celebrating North Tonawanda Carrousel Animals 1883-1959

Celebrating North Tonawanda Carrousel Animals 1883-1959 by Elizabeth M. Brick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As Abraham Lincoln said, If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you'll like. I love carousels and carousel horses, so this exhibition catalogue with its excellent photography was exactly the kind of thing I like. If you, Gentle Reader, also love carousels, I highly recommend a visit to the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum in North Tonawanda, New York (website).



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UBC: Maclean, Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fire on Storm King Mountain in July 1994 (which has gone down to posterity as the South Canyon Fire due to a mistake that feels--with the perfect vision of hindsight--like an omen of all the snowballing mistakes to come) was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. It is also eerily similar to the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (written about so brilliantly by John Maclean's father Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire that I have never yet managed to write anything coherent about why I think it is the best American nonfiction book of the twentieth century). John Maclean makes those parallels explicit.

Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire are very different books, writing about the same tragedy happening for different reasons: the Mann Gulch fire killed thirteen smoke-jumpers because nobody knew the warning signs of a blow-up to watch for; the South Canyon fire killed fourteen firefighters (three smoke-jumpers, two helitacks, and nine hotshots), not because nobody knew the signs (Mann Gulch and tragedies like it had taught them those), but because (1) the topography of Storm King Mountain was such that the firefighters couldn't see what the fire was doing; (2) the fire was so mismanaged that the people on the ground were working without the information that might have saved them, the information that would have told them they needed to be watching for a blow-up, and (3) authority, decision-making, and actual knowledge of the fire were separated out in very bad ways. What both tragedies share, aside from the fluke of topography that made them split-second deadly, is critical underestimation of the fire's danger by everyone involved, firefighters on the ground as much as the people sending them out there.

Maclean père's book is about trying to figure out what happened in Mann Gulch, both what people did and why and what the fire did and why. Fire on the Mountain is much more an attempt simply to drag all the pieces of the story out where they can be seen. I do not for an instant think that Maclean fils had an easier job: the overlapping of jurisdictions, authority, and responsibilities between the BLM and the Western Slope Coordination Center never did entirely make sense to me, and it only got worse the more agencies and organizations got involved. It's also very difficult to describe topography in prose. It took me several times through Young Men and Fire before I got a grip on the physical attributes of Mann Gulch, and insofar as I understand Storm King Mountain, it's because I already have at least a rough understanding of Mann Gulch.

This is John Maclean's first book (if I've got his bibliography right), and it shows. He doesn't have the command over his narrative that he demonstrates in The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57; there's less clarity, less control. But it's still very good.



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UBC: Maclean: Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fire on Storm King Mountain in July 1994 (which has gone down to posterity as the South Canyon Fire due to a mistake that feels--with the perfect vision of hindsight--like an omen of all the snowballing mistakes to come) was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. It is also eerily similar to the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (written about so brilliantly by John Maclean's father Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire that I have never yet managed to write anything coherent about why I think it is the best American nonfiction book of the twentieth century). John Maclean makes those parallels explicit.

Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire are very different books, writing about the same tragedy happening for different reasons: the Mann Gulch fire killed thirteen smoke-jumpers because nobody knew the warning signs of a blow-up to watch for; the South Canyon fire killed fourteen firefighters (three smoke-jumpers, two helitacks, and nine hotshots), not because nobody knew the signs (Mann Gulch and tragedies like it had taught them those), but because (1) the topography of Storm King Mountain was such that the firefighters couldn't see what the fire was doing; (2) the fire was so mismanaged that the people on the ground were working without the information that might have saved them, the information that would have told them they needed to be watching for a blow-up, and (3) authority, decision-making, and actual knowledge of the fire were separated out in very bad ways. What both tragedies share, aside from the fluke of topography that made them split-second deadly, is critical underestimation of the fire's danger by everyone involved, firefighters on the ground as much as the people sending them out there.

Maclean père's book is about trying to figure out what happened in Mann Gulch, both what people did and why and what the fire did and why. Fire on the Mountain is much more an attempt simply to drag all the pieces of the story out where they can be seen. I do not for an instant think that Maclean fils had an easier job: the overlapping of jurisdictions, authority, and responsibilities between the BLM and the Western Slope Coordination Center never did entirely make sense to me, and it only got worse the more agencies and organizations got involved. It's also very difficult to describe topography in prose. It took me several times through Young Men and Fire before I got a grip on the physical attributes of Mann Gulch, and insofar as I understand Storm King Mountain, it's because I already have at least a rough understanding of Mann Gulch.

This is John Maclean's first book (if I've got his bibliography right), and it shows. He doesn't have the command over his narrative that he demonstrates in The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57; there's less clarity, less control. But it's still very good.



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UBC: Rule, The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up, and Other True Cases

The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The End of the Dream: Scott Scurlock (aka Hollywood), bank robber, Seattle 1992-1996
"The Peeping Tom": the murder of Kay Owens, Salem OR, 1971
The Girl Who Fell in Love with her Killer": Granite Falls WA, 1973 ("Barbie Linley," 15, was raped, shot three times in the head, and left for dead in a ditch. By some terrible miracle she survived . . . only to fall in love with and marry her rapist/nearly-murderer before his trial.)
"An Unlikely Suspect": King County WA, 1974 (the murder of "Vera English" by her 14 year old stepson)

Scott Scurlock is also the subject of an episode of The FBI Files , which I watched yesterday. Because I'm interested in storytelling, it was fascinating for me to watch the very different ways this story was presented. The FBI Files is, of course, all about the investigators and the investigation; Rule, although also interested in the investigators and the investigation (it was honestly awesome to be able to watch her protagonists being interviewed, to fit their voices and faces together with her descriptions), gives equal focus, and considerably more words, to the bizarre career of Scott Scurlock, from mildly wild boy in Virginia, to beach bum in Hawaii, to methamphetamine chemist in Washington State, to bank robber. (For some reason, The FBI Files describes him as a local actor, which he was not--or, at least, not in any legitimate sense.) Along the way, he built (or had his friends build for him) the "biggest treehouse in the world." Rule emphasizes the way that Scurlock used and discarded friends and lovers alike, and the way he absolutely destroyed the lives of his two accomplices, Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers. (Steve Meyers' brother, artist Robert Meyers, clearly gave generous interviews.) The FBI Files doesn't really care why Scurlock did what he did. Rule does, and she does her best to diagram out the reconstructed thought processes of someone who ticks off a bunch of items on the Hi! I am a Sociopath! list.

The shorter pieces in this book show how hard true crime writing actually is; the less space you have, the less you can create narrative tension, the less your story has any sense of payoff. And I don't mean that in a "good triumphs over evil" way, but simply structurally. The stories are all kind of flat, even when the events themselves are almost unbelievable. (A fourteen-year-old boy, wanted for murder, driving his victim's car, making it all the way from Washington State to Florida? A fifteen-year-old girl surviving being shot in the head three times, and then marrying the guy who shot and raped her?) This may be where being a gifted prose stylist can be your saving grace. Rule is a good and compelling writer, but she doesn't have the élan to her writing that William Roughead does, or Jonathan Goodman when he's on a roll. (Goodman is evidence that one can also have too much style to one's prose, but that's a different problem.) I'll reread Roughead, and Goodman's better pieces, simply for the pleasure of reading them, and that's not something I can say about Rule.



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UBC: Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I admit I have a blind prejudice against Ann Rule, because she is (1) prolific, (2) wildly popular, (3) published in paperbacks that look like the epitome of trashy true crime.

Now, I know better than all of this. I know prolific is no barometer of quality, I know popularity is likewise charted on a completely different axis, and holy freaking Jesus do I know that how a book is packaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the book itself. But of course that's how prejudice works; it's something that's wormed its way down past the rational intellect into the cognitive reflexes. You call yourself on it even as you think it, but you can't stop yourself thinking it in the first place.

It's very annoying.

I am trying to educate myself about true crime writing, having recognized thanks to reading William Roughead that it is a genre in nonfiction that gets denigrated much the way "genre fiction" does as "trashy" and "popular." It even has its token ambassadors to "serious literature" (e.g., Truman Capote) just as science fiction does, authors who are always cited as being brilliant despite the genre they work in. (Newsflash: if a writer is brilliant it is never despite working in a declassé genre. It is because they are working in a genre they love and value.)

So I've started trolling the used bookstores for classics. William Roughead and F. Tennyson Jesse and their colleagues are, sadly, beyond the resources of a casual search, but I've added to Donald Rumbelow and Victoria Lincoln, Jack Olson and Vincent Bugliosi and now Ann Rule.

Ann Rule is an incredibly compelling writer. I bought The Stranger Beside Me Friday afternoon and I finished it this morning (Sunday), despite the fact that it is 625 pages long, counting the Afterword (1986), The Last Chapter (1989), Update--20 Years Later (2000), and The Final Chapter? (2008). Ann Rule died last year, or I imagine the poor woman would still be adding to The Stranger Beside Me, still trying to convince young women that predators like Ted Bundy are NOT charming, NOT sexy, NOT romantic. They cannot be "saved" or "reformed" because what makes them kill is not something they can--or want--to control. I love the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, but I think it is an incredibly dangerous paradigm because it teaches girls that beasts can be tamed. And there are some beasts that can't.

Rule's story is as much about Ted Bundy's long drawn-out fight with the legal system as it is about his murders (and that long-running brawl through the Florida court system actually catches Bundy the monster in the spotlight more than once), and always the motif running, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, of her fight to understand how a man she considered a close friend could be the monster he so clearly was. She is extremely honest and open about her own ambivalence and about the way Bundy manipulated her; she includes extracts from his letters to her where you can see it happening. You can see the way he understands that if he pushes this button, he gets that response. And you can see the way--as you could see with Jesse Pomeroy in The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer--that he can't grasp the fact that the button won't always work. He can't grasp the idea that Rule--or anyone else--might be able to see what he's trying to do or that the efficacy of the button is dependent upon how Bundy himself is perceived. When he writes to her accusing her of exploiting him, she says:

Curiously, my immediate reaction was one of guilt. Emotion without rationale: What have I done to this poor man? And then I remembered that I had never once lied to Ted. I had my book contract months before he was a suspect, I told him about it when he became a suspect, and I reiterated the details of my contract to him many times in letters. [...] I believe that Ted felt that I could be manipulated into writing the definitive "Ted Bundy is innocent" book. [...] But the Miami trial had exposed his guilt with such merciless clarity. I had written what I had to write. Now, he was furious with me [...] That he had lied to me--probably from the first moment I met him--had not occurred to him. [...] then--for the very first time--I truly realized that he could not, would not, understand or emphathize [sic] or even care what my situation was. I had been meant to serve a purpose in his life; I had been the designated Bundy PR person--and I had failed to produce.
(520-21)

Bundy knew how to manipulate and--as his work with Rule at the Crisis Center where they first met demonstrates--he knew how to mimic compassion and empathy. And for some reason, for some part of his life, he got some sort of satisfaction out of doing so. (The fact that, when he first knew her, Bundy gave Rule some very insightful and helpful relationship advice will NEVER not be one of the creepiest things about him.) But he got more satisfaction, and something that was in some way deeply necessary to him, out of abducting, bludgeoning, strangling, raping . . . murdering young women who ticked off some critical number of attributes on an internal list.

This is an excellent book: readable, thoughtful, an honest depiction of the effect a serial murderer has, not only, most cruelly and obviously, on his victims and their families, but on law enforcement personnel, and on the murderer's own friends and family. (I am deliberately not using the term "loved ones.") And one of the saddest and most chilling parts of the whole doorstop book is in the afterwords and "final" chapters as Rule tries to sort through the women and girls who might have been killed by Ted Bundy--both the women who contact her because they think they encountered Bundy and escaped and the girls and women who are unsolved murders, unsolved missing persons, but whose cases fit Bundy's M.O. or who fit what investigators have been able to piece together of his timeline.

Or the murder he confessed to just before his execution in 1989, of a girl in Idaho who was apparently never reported missing and whose body has apparently never been found.

I watch the true crime shows I can find on Hulu. They occasionally do episodes with true crime writers, and the writers very rarely come off well. They tend to present as egotists or vultures or both, and I cringe for them, because I know that for 90% of them, that's not true. (I will not name names, because that's mean.) But Ann Rule didn't ( The New Detectives 3.1). She came across as an intelligent woman who was still struggling to understand something that no one fully understands and as someone who was trying to use her writing and her experience, and the social capital she'd accumulated, to advocate for victims and survivors and to try to educate people, especially women, so that they would not become victims themselves.

So, prolific? Yes. Popular? Yes. Trashy? No. Not at all.



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This. This is how much of a dork I am.

I have drawn a map (in MS Paint) of Fox's theory about what happened to Custer's battalion.




HIGHLY SCHEMATIC, but it did help me visualize what was going on.