True Crime read in 2016 ~ Reviews welcome here Part 2

[Koren]

Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story by Shanna Hogan
5 stars

I know there was a big deal made about this crime at the time and the trial was all over the news and court tv but I didn't really pay that much attention to it. So the book was all new to me. The author does a great job of making us feel like the victim is someone we would like to know. He was a great guy with a lot of flaws. One of those flaws was getting mixed up with Jodi Arias. I liked how the author explains the beliefs of the Mormon religion. The investigation and trial are nicely condensed. I felt like there was a lot of leg work done in researching this book and not taken from news and transcripts. Very interesting case.

[Koren]

Language of Evil by Robert Beattie
2 stars

This True Crime book is laid out so that every other chapter is a transcript from the interrogation. The chapters that were in the author's own words were fairly interesting. If the author would have kept to this style I think it would have been a pretty good book. During the 'transcript' chapters the author gets too detailed. For instance, here is an excerpt from page 56:

His chair is facing east with the chair back flush against the west wall. His knees are facing northeast. The chair where Doug Woods will sit is facing south, directly toward Murray.

Holy cow! Do we really need that much detail? Pretty boring stuff to me.

The accused is a professor of linguistics. Supposedly this makes him good with words, which is suppose to set this crime apart from others. Personally, I didn't see this in the transcripts, but perhaps I was too bored to really notice, as I skimmed most of them.

[Fishface]

Dear Scrod, if you're not describing a crime scene, why in the world would you care which way someone's feet were pointing?

[Fishface]

Patrick Kearney: The True Story of The Freeway Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers, by Jack Rosewood
2 measly stars

I read this in about half an hour last night, as soon as I opened the envelope it arrived in. I have to say it was rather a disappointment. It's basically nothing more than a slightly-better-copyedited version of Tony Walker's seminal The Trash Bag Murderer. But it's much smaller, less complete and less detailed, and there are still more than a few usage and copy errors in here. The writing was pretty clumsy, honestly. There are fewer photos, too, and I was most disappointed of all that there was no more about the victims in here than Walker was able to give us in his autobiography. In fact, the information we do get appears to be identical to Walker's and looks as if it was taken straight from his book. This one is a little easier to read, but if you want to know about Pat Kearney, I recommend Walker over Rosewood, frankly.

[Rita]

Fishface wrote: "Patrick Kearney: The True Story of The Freeway Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers, by Jack Rosewood
2 measly stars

I read this in about half an hour last night, as soo..."

Holy cow indeed, I have got to read this one ASAP!

[Fishface]

Rita wrote: "Fishface wrote: "Patrick Kearney: The True Story of The Freeway Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers, by Jack Rosewood
2 measly stars

I read this in about half an hour l..."

If I were you I would read the book he clearly took all his information from, The Trash Bag Murderer.

[Fishface]

Corroborating Evidence, William T. Rasmussen
2 stars

The content of this book borders on the delusional. The author appears to really believe that every single note sent in by a crank claiming to be the killer of the Black Dahlia was, in fact, sent by the killer. He thinks listing the aliases of a Black Dahlia suspect in a column, alongside a column of the initials of those names, constitutes some sort of proof that he killed Elizabeth Short. He believes that Georgette Bauerdorf -- raped and strangled, then dumped facedown in her bathtub -- was clearly killed by the same man who bisected, mutilated and publicly posed Betty Short. He also believes that the killings of Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan in Chicago MUST be related, not only to each other, but to the Cleveland Torso Murders and to the Black Dahlia AND the Red Lipstick Murder, because there simply couldn't be more than one guy in the same country at the same time committing such perfectly icky murders. What I like best about all this is that he staunchly believes that the Cleveland Torso Murders were committed by a 14-year-old kid. He did actually raise some interesting questions -- and he managed to cast more doubt than I already had over the conviction of Bill Heirens -- but he shouldn't have called this book CORROBORATING EVIDENCE. He should have called it RANDOM, UNRELATED FACTS.

[Fishface]

Family Blood: The Murder That Shattered an All-American Home, Lyn Riddle
2 measly stars

This one was only so-so. The case should have been fascinating but the writing just didn't click with me at all, and ultimately the case failed to hold my attention. I know what you're saying: Parents massacred? Kids under suspicion? Girlfriend complicit? What's not to be fascinated by? The main gap in this story is that it's all court transcripts, with very little in the way of interviews with the people involved. Even talking to friends and neighbors would have made a big difference -- it's implied that the community was deeply shocked and affected but we didn't hear much about that. The little we did get in this area did make the book worth finishing. This family dynamic is a lot like the one I saw in Son, with similarly disastrous results. But I'd recommend Son!

[T.]

Ii ended up giving this book five stars because of its sheer size and length. Schechter's detailed investigation into the "work" of the world's serial killers feels expansive, but it is somewhat repetitive as well.

I mean, I get it. Several of the killers have overlapping MOs and whatnot, but it seemed as though the author picked a few of his favorite serial killers and worked them into the entirety of the book.

HOWEVER, that said, I'd still recommend The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers as an introduction for people who'd like to get beyond reading about Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer.

[Fishface]

So tell me, T., are there a lot of really obscure names in that massive work? It's hard to find anything out there beyond the repetitive "Here are bios of the same 10 serial killers you already know everything about" type of work.

[Shelley]

Finished A Voice out of Nowhere by Janice Holly Booth
4.5 Stars

This is definitely not the usual true crime. The book covers a crime, of course, but it's more than that. It follows the rapid progression of schizophrenia in a young man who kills his family and takes the reader along. I came away with a much better understanding of schizophrenia. Obviously it's a tragedy but I include the killer with the victims in that.

Juries of lay people should not be the ones to decide if someone was insane at the time of the crime. That should be decided by a panel of qualified and trained judges. It didn't happen in this case but most of those trials just end up as a dueling match between psychologists/psychiatrists for the defense and the prosecution with untrained jury members having to make sense of it all. That makes no sense to me at all.

[Bonnie]

Shelley wrote: "Finished The Darkest Night: Two Sisters, a Brutal Murder, and the Loss of Innocence in a Small Town by Ron Franscell
5 Stars

This guy knows how to write! It's very ..."

This is one of my favorites as well.

[Fishface]

Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away with Murder, by James B. Stewart
5 stars!

This was truly a 5-star read -- a well-written, well-researched and utterly frightening true story. The story never dragged for a minute, even when the author was describing the CYA politics of the medical profession and the many hands the evidence passed through without anyone ever noticing the glaring fact that people were being murdered under their noses. A rather sly comment the author made towards the end -- stating essentially that MDs see themselves as fundamentally different from other people and thus above suspicion -- really summed it all up for me. This book hit me even harder because I read it so close on the heels of Paralyzing Summer: The True Story of the Ann Arbor V.A. Hospital Poisonings and Deaths, a case mentioned in this book as well.

[Koren]

Fishface wrote: "Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away with Murder, by James B. Stewart
5 stars!

This was truly a 5-star read -- a well-written, well-researched and utterly frighten..."

I read that one a while ago and agree with your review. Good book.

[Koren]

Weep for the Living by Anne Butler
2 stars

The author runs a bed and breakfast and her husband is a retired prison warden who shoots his wife in the abdomen. She survives to tell the story. As I true crime story I don't believe this is very well-written. There is very little information leading up to the incident, but a lot about her recovery afterward. There is also little about the investigation and the trial is mostly transcripts. Apparently, the last 50 pages are answers to a request by the author to tell how they know the author and how they felt after the shooting (including 2 letters by her children). I think this might be a better story if told by someone impartial. There is just really a lot here about how she felt and her medical journey afterwards.

[Fishface]

Did you at least come away feeling you know why it happened?

[Koren]

Fishface wrote: "Did you at least come away feeling you know why it happened?"

Well, the author makes it sound like they had no problems before the incident and he was trying to kill her to get her money. She really didn't go into depth about it. The book seems to be more about her than the crime and comes across as being very self-centered to me.

[Fishface]

Was her bank account that big? Or did he take out life insurance on her?

[Rita]

SILENT WITNESS: The Karla Brown Murder by Don Weber
And Charles Bosworth, Jr.

I cannot say enough about this story and the determination of this Prosecutor to solve this brutal murder. After researching the details and a painstakingly recount of the official transcripts, records and documents plus memories of the people who knew this case took many years to have enough evidence for a grand jury as they had more than one suspect. At last, after tracking those who knew the victim, they got their first break in the form of an FBI Profiler.

. With the help of extra-ordinary forensic science and riveting courtroom techniques it all finally came together. A compelling story and a must read!
5 Stars

[Fishface]

A Tale of Two Lives - The Susan Lefevre Fugitive Story, by Marie S. Walsh
5 stars

This was a genuinely frightening expose of the Michigan prison system, told by someone who was picked up in its jaws --twice! -- and shaken the way a terrier shakes a rat. Unlike most of the rats, she got away alive, and unlike most prisoners anywhere on the planet, she had the education and wherewithal to tell us her story. Like Carmina Salcido in Not Lost Forever: My Story of Survival, her story is extremely unlikely and full of twists and turns nobody could have seen coming. Where a lot of prisoners' memoirs are transparently self-serving B.S. or skirt the question of guilt or innocence completely, Susan Marie appears to tell us all the most painful, embarrassing parts of her own story so we can understand how an utterly middle-class kid born in the 1950s found herself looking down the barrel of a 20-year prison sentence for a crime she didn't commit, with the full knowledge and consent of the prosecutor and even her own attorney. I hope this story is a whopping lie but I'm afraid it's probably all true. The way she whitewashes her experiences at places like DeHoCo underlines that impression. having spoken to people who have been there longer than she was, I know it's a lot worse than she described. And she reminds us over and over that there are thousands of other people who found themselves in exactly the same boat, who didn't escape, whose stories we will never hear.

[Fishface]

Dissecting Death: Secrets of a Medical Examiner, by Frederick Zugibe
4 stars

This was a good read on a number of very interesting crimes handled by the author in his practice as an upstate New York forensic pathologist. He tosses in a few cases at the end that he didn't handle personally, but comments on at varying levels of exasperation. He's a good, readable author, even though he's one of those guys who never says "fast" when he can say "at a high rate of acceleration." All the cases are interesting in some way -- not just in his opinion, for some arcane reason that would only catch the attention of a forensic pathologist -- and he makes the science easy to understand, even though it felt like a bit of a throat-punch when he said that a competent specialist in his field needs to explain his facts to juries as if they were a classroom full of fifth-graders. I recommend this one.

[Fishface]

Fatal Fascination: A Choice of Crime, by Nigel Balchin, C.S. Forester, Eric Linklater and Christopher Sykes
3 solid stars

In some ways this was a tough book to read, because I am not really brushed up on my Napoleonic history, let alone the Icelandic Sagas -- the true-crime stories in here came from sources like those. The four authors did a valiant job of packing a great deal of information into their relatively short articles on some very interesting cases, but I wondered throughout how much of what I was reading was just a mid-twentieth-century take on cultural norms too far removed for the authors (or me) to understand. The exception of course was the case of William Joyce, but that article had an unfortunate tone of "you all know who and what I'm talking about because it's been so much in the news," when that has not been true for well over 50 years now. As Will Cuppy might point out, these stories point up the fact that Homo sapiens hasn't changed much since the late 800s.

[Mike]

Here's a list of best true crime of 2016. Please vote for any that you read and liked. Thanks.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

[Fishface]

Mike wrote: "Here's a list of best true crime of 2016. Please vote for any that you read and liked. Thanks.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1..."

So are these the best ones someone happened to read this year? Because some of these titles have been around a lot longer than 2016...Most of these are marked "want to read" on my own bookshelf but I did vote on the ones I knew...

[[deleted user]]

Who complied that list? And what were the qualifications to make it on the list?

Thanks,

Chris

[Koren]

C.L. wrote: "Who complied that list? And what were the qualifications to make it on the list?

Thanks,

Chris"

It looks like Mike created the list. There are only 2 on the list that I have heard of.

[[deleted user]]

Thanks Koren.

[Fishface]

Chrisp's True Crime Miscellany
4 stars

A great read. Full of facts, figures, and curious anecdotes about crime. I have to say I wasn't pleased with the illustrations at times; Chuck Starkweather looked as if someone planted a sledgehammer in the middle of his face, and the illustrator managed to make Ted Bundy look kind of hideous.

[Rita]

I started and finished Sickened by Julie Gregory.

[Rita]

I just finished POSSESSED by Kathryn Casey. All her books are fascinated and this one especially so. With extensive searches and wide-spread characters that crossed the Infamous Texas Stiletto Murderer path, Kathryn Case expertly weaved the senseless and brutal murder that made the news around the country and beyond. I could not put this book down and always, reluctant to finish it. A riveting read and a story all true crime fans must get.
5 Stars