UBC: McLaughlin, The Postcard Killer

The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey by Vance McLaughlin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



McLaughlin has two problems:
(1) He has no idea of how to organize his facts to make a coherent and followable narrative. (Yes, o text editor, I know that "followable" isn't a real word. Hush.)
(2) He tries to present Hickey as a serial killer a la Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy, and his evidence, while it doesn't disprove the idea, doesn't support it, either. He has a man who clearly murdered three people and who may have murdered god knows how many others. The police of Buffalo, Lackawanna, Boston, Cleveland, Whiting and pretty much every point in between had lists of unsolved murders and disappearances they wanted to question J. Frank Hickey about. But he didn't confess, and the only thing they actually had to go on was that he was the kind of person who would have done it, not any real evidence that tied him to any of the crimes.

So. J. Frank Hickey was a horrible little man who raped and murdered at least two children and then blamed it all on the demon rum. Oh and then started sending taunting postcards to the parents of his final victim, leading to the discovery of the child's body (concealed, like Francis Saville Kent, in the vault of an outhouse) and ultimately to the discovery of Hickey himself. The evidence of his life indicates that he was both a sociopath and an alcoholic. He committed his first murder in 1883, when he was eighteen (unlike the others, this one had an adult victim and was not sexually motivated). He spent his adult life drifting from job to job (he learned very quickly that it was much better to quit before his erratic behavior got him fired) and preying haphazardly on boys. His second confessed murder was in 1902 and the third in 1911. I absolutely 100% agree that it seems likely Hickey committed other murders that could never be pinned on him, but discussing him as if we know for a fact things we can only speculate about makes me suspicious and untrusting, like a mule faced with a tarpaulin.

Hickey was not executed. The jury could not agree on whether he was sane or insane in the legal sense, and the judge, reprimanding them like a pack of schoolboys who'd broken a window pane and wouldn't 'fess up, told them pretty much flat out that he wouldn't dismiss them unless they reached a verdict. McLaughlin seems to feel that Judge Brown didn't mean it that way, but I read what the man actually said and I agreed with the jury: I do not feel justified in discharging you. It seems to me if you could consider with rational and common sense the logical phases, stripped of their undue excitement and passion, or anything preventing the application of the ordinary rules of common sense, that you ought to be able to agree. [...] It is too distressing a thing to send out to the world that a jury of Erie County could not agree in a case of this kind, and I am not going to send you out (McLaughlin 165). What recourse did the poor jury have? They battled grimly on, sane vs. insane, until someone suggested a compromise on second-degree murder. None of them believed in it, but they were all beaten down to the point of accepting it as a compromise.

And then--how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless judge--the judge reprimanded them for that, saying: Ordinarily it is quite the uniform practice to extend the thanks of the court to the jury for their care and consideration in reaching a conclusion. [...]The public and the court do not feel satisfied with this result. For those of you who have earnestly endeavored to provide a different result, the court extends the most appreciative and sincere thanks for your efforts.
Hickey spent the last nine years of his life in prison--which at least meant that he could not find any more boys to prey upon.

McLaughlin's narrative is hard to follow and surfacey. He wants to analyze Hickey, throwing around modern psychiatric and criminal profiling terminololgy, but he doesn't, for instance, spend any time talking about the more distressing contents of the postcards Hickey sent George Joseph, thereby bowdlerizing his own research before anyone else has a chance to complain. This book should have been fascinating, but was only disappointing.



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