Review: Strong, Erased (2008)

Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is about what Strong (and her co-author Mark Powelson) calls "eraser killers," taking Scott Peterson as her type case: men who not merely murder their wives and girlfriends, but who go to elaborate lengths either to make the body disappear (erase the woman) or to make the murder look like something else: a suicide, an accident, a natural death (erase the crime). Strong has assembled an almost overwhelming cornucopia of such cases, which is part of her point, as the subtitle, Missing Women, Murdered Wives,shows. She says that we have no way of knowing how many eraser killers GOT AWAY WITH IT, never prosecuted because their deception was successful or (as with the disappearance of Kristin Smart) the police don't have enough evidence.

Strong argues that eraser killers are a particular subset of psychopaths, high-functioning psychopaths who DON'T have a history of criminal behavior, but who also have high degrees of narcissism and Machiavellianism. (I'm a little unsure about using "Machiavellianism" as a psychiatric term, but she's following the lead of a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and, okay, it does mean exactly what she's using it to mean.) They're men who are pathological liars (one such man had deceived his wife that, WHILE THEY WERE MARRIED, he had (a) finished college, (b) applied to medical school, and (c) been accepted, and he killed her three days before they were supposed to relocate so he could attend) with a strong dose of Peter Pan. They very frequently kill their pregnant partners because they don't want the responsibility of fatherhood. They're Teflon-coated. And they are experts at mimicking emotions like love. Everyone thought Scott Peterson was the perfect husband... until Laci Peterson disappeared.

This is a fascinating, horrifying book (the studies that found homicide was the #1 or #2 cause of death for pregnant women), and Strong uses her dreadfully abundant material well.



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