Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History
By Mike Browne

The crimes:

“Girl Gone”: a man kills the parents of a 13-year-old girl and kidnaps her, but he is later apprehended and she is rescued.

“Spell Murder for Me”: a pair of lesbian lovers working at a nursing home decide to kill some of their patients.

“The Boozing Barber”: an alcoholic barber poisons a series of women with overdoses of ethanol.

“The Elementary School Murderer”: the Mary Bell case. Bell strangled a couple of pre-schoolers when she was only 10 years old herself.

“Bad Apples”: the murder of Sylvia Likens.

“Sing a Song of Murder”: an American serviceman stationed in Australia in the Second World War strangles three women.

“Antifreeze and a Cold Heart”: a woman poisons her husband with antifreeze and it’s discovered that she killed her previous husband the same way.

“The Oak Island Mystery”: people keep digging for gold or other buried pirate treasure they think is hidden on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island.

“Who Was the Persian Princess?”: a mummy turns out to be a deceased woman of more recent vintage.

“The Love Me Tender Murders”: a pair of young Elvis fans are killed in Chicago.

“Dark Water”: the body of Elisa Lam is found in the rooftop water tank of a hotel in L.A.

“The Unknown Man”: an unidentified man is found dead on a beach and nobody can figure out who he is.

“The Dyatlov Pass Incident”: a group of explorers are killed while hiking in the Ural Mountains.

“Northern Rampage”: a pair of teens kill some people they met on the road and then drive part way across Canada before killing themselves in the bush.

“The UFO Cult”: the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide story.

“Colonia Dignidad”: a bunch of Nazis set up their own little torture village in Chile after the Second World War and the government finds them useful.

“The Ripper Crew”: a foursome of Satanists butcher women.

“Lost Narcosatánicos”: a Mexican drug gang gets into voodoo and human sacrifice.

“Children of Thunder”: a man styling himself a prophet attempts to set up his own church, using murder to get a bit of seed money.

“The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918”: millions die worldwide from the flu.

“The Eruption of Mount St. Helens”: a volcano in Washington State goes off, killing more than fifty people.

“The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion”: a space shuttle blows up soon after launch.

“The Grenfell Tower Fire”: a high-rise apartment building in London burns up because of cheap siding.

“The Boxing Day Tsunami”: a massive earthquake (the third largest ever recorded) beneath the Indian Ocean spawns giant waves that destroy many coastal areas, especially in Indonesia.

“The Chilean Mining Accident”: a group of miners are rescued after spending more than two months underground.

The book:

Not what I was expecting.

Mike Browne, a native of Nova Scotia, is host of a podcast called Dark Poutine, which is primarily about Canadian true crime stories and “dark history” (a rather vague term I hadn’t encountered before). Given this, and the picture on the cover of a loon floating in a northern lake and the bibliographic information categorizing the book as “Canadiana,” I figured the line-up was going to consist mainly if not exclusively of Canadian crime stories.

That’s not what this is. Instead, many of the stories fall outside the category of what I’d call true crime, and only a few have a Canadian setting.

The twenty-five tales are divided into four categories: murders, unsolved mysteries, partners in crime, and “notable disasters.” Unfortunately, the labels aren’t very helpful. Category one is called “murder with a twist,” but the murders didn’t strike me as exceptional or linked to each other in any way. Category three is called “the madness of crowds,” but some of the cases are just a couple of people killing together while others deal with cults, criminal gangs, and even political movements. “Notable disasters” range from natural to man-made catastrophes, and I couldn’t figure out what the 1918 influenza pandemic, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, and the rescue of 33 Chilean miners in 2010 had in common.

Even some of the titles left me scratching my head. Why was the horrific Sylvia Likens case called “Bad Apples”? I feel like I was missing something. I assume “Dark Water” was a reference to the movie of the same name, but that’s a link that’s never explained so there could be something I wasn’t getting there too.

The overall effect was a bit like flipping through a Reader’s Digest in a doctor’s office. Browne is a fluid writer, but the sections are all pretty brief, around ten pages each, and there’s little if anything that’s new in terms of information or interpretation. And in the final section especially some of the disasters are just too broad and technical, not to mention already well known, to deal with in so short a space. Throw in the fact that there aren’t any pictures or maps and I came away a bit disappointed. The only case that was new to me was that of the Brownout Strangler, a figure who I then looked up on Wikipedia to find out more about. Isn’t that moving in the wrong direction?

Noted in passing:

At the Grenfell Tower fire: “Firefighters told bystanders to back away for their safety, but many stood their ground, shooting photos and videos on their cellphones to share on social media.”

During the Boxing Day tsunami: “Thai tour guides and resort employees began yelling for people to leave the beach and get to higher ground. As locals ran past them, some tourists, not realizing the danger they faced, walked toward the incoming wave, taking photos and shooting video.”

It’s easy to see behaviour like this as being a sign of the times, but if they’d had phones that took pictures and shot video in the nineteenth century people would have probably done the same thing.

Takeaways:

There is no gold, or treasure of any kind, on Oak Island.

True Crime Files