Review: Mitchell, The Class Project

The Class Project: How To Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls by Bob Mitchell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book suffers from all the stereotypical flaws of self-published works: poor cover design, poor interior design, spelling errors and typos abounding...

It's the story of the murder of "Linda Andersen" by her daughters "Sandra" and "Beth" (since the girls were sentenced as juveniles, Canadian law prohibits their identities ever being made known), a carefully premeditated and executed murder, and the girls would have gotten away clean if the older sister had been able to keep her mouth shut. What makes the case particularly appalling is that several of the girls' friends knew what they were going to do ahead of time and offered advice and encouragement. One of them may have supplied the Tylenol-3's with which Sandra and Beth drugged their mother before drowning her in the bathtub. Nobody told the cops. Nobody told a parent. Nobody said, "Hey, wait a minute." And all the evidence is logged in MSN chats.

Mitchell writes like a reporter, so there isn't a lot of nuance or analysis, but the amount of direct quotation he does allows you to see how these girls talked, what they said and how they said it. What annoys me most about Mitchell is that there's a fundamental question at the root of the story: was Linda Andersen a hopeless alcoholic (as her daughters saw her) or was she a hard-working mother whose thankless daughters were never satisfied with what she did for them (as her friends and extended family saw her)? Were the Andersen family finances a wreck because Linda spent all the money on alcohol (daughters) or because her daughters demanded designer clothes (family)? And Mitchell, for all the things that he lays out as flat as asphalt, never explicitly says that Beth and Sandra were correct (although the fact that they spent the day of Linda's murder getting her drunk on vodka and lemonade is suggestive)--or never explains how the evidence shows that some of what Beth and Sandra said was correct (Linda drank too much) and some of what the family said was correct (Beth and Sandra felt entitled to a lifestyle their mother couldn't afford), which is the most realistic option. But "most realistic" isn't necessarily the same as true. Did Beth and Sandra have genuine reasons for feeling that no one would help them, since all the adults in their lives refused to admit their mother had a drinking problem--or was it in fact true that their mother didn't have a drinking problem? If I'm supposed to end this book uncertain about the answers to these questions, I would really have liked Mitchell to tell me that the evidence was ambiguous and I'm supposed to feel that way, instead of me being left feeling like Mitchell didn't do his job.



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