The Best American Crime Reporting 2007
Guest Editor: Linda Fairstein

The crimes:

“The Loved Ones” by Tom Junod: were the operators of a New Orleans nursing home that didn’t evacuate before Hurricane Katrina struck guilty of negligence? Or did they care too much?

“The Inside Job” by Neil Swidey: the owner of a construction and landscaping business hires an accountant from a temp agency who proceeds to embezzle millions from him, largely without him even being aware of it.

“The Talented Dr. Krist” by Steve Fennessy: the perpetrator of a ghastly kidnapping does his time and even becomes a doctor, but can’t help getting into trouble.

“The Case of the Killer Priest” by Sean Flynn: a priest in Toledo is charged with having killed a nun a quarter-century earlier.

“Double Blind” by Matthew Teague: British efforts to infiltrate the IRA are so successful the double agents don’t even know whose side everyone is on.

“The School” by C. J. Chivers: an account of the Beslan school massacre in North Ossetia, as experienced by various survivors.

“A Kiss Before Dying” by Pamela Colloff: a high school football player in Texas kills his ex-girlfriend by shooting her in the head with a shotgun and throwing her body in a stock pond, apparently all in accordance with her wishes. He is acquitted at trial.

“The Devil in David Berkowitz” by Steve Fishman: the Son of Sam killer finds God in prison, or so he says.

“The Man Who Loves Books Too Much” by Allison Hoover Bartlett: a swindler steals rare books from second-hand bookshops across the U.S. He’s caught, but remains largely unrepentant.

“Dirty Old Women” by Ariel Levy: female teachers have affairs with underage male students.

“Who Killed Ellen Andross?” by Dan P. Lee: a pair of high-profile medical examiners face off in the murder trial of a husband accused of killing his wife.

“Fatal Connection” by David Bernstein: a Chicago escort is murdered not by one of her clients but by her financial adviser.

“Last Seen on September 10” by Mark Fass: a woman living in Lower Manhattan goes missing the day before the attack on the World Trade Center. Her family think she died in the bombing but others have their doubts.

“My Roommate, the Diamond Thief” by Brian Boucher: a man rents out the bedroom in his one-bedroom apartment to a mysterious fellow who turns out to be a jewel thief on the run.

“The Monster of Florence” by Douglas Preston: an American writer living for a while in Florence befriends an Italian journalist and they start looking into the case of a serial killer who terrorized the area years earlier. This gets them both into trouble with the authorities.

The book:

Like all the entries I’ve read in this (now sadly defunct) series, it’s great. I didn’t think there was a bad story. Levy didn’t do much with her quick look at teachers-in-heat, and Boucher’s piece is also a bit light, but they’re also the two shortest stories and still manage to be interesting and fun.

On the other end of the scale, C. J. Chivers on the Beslan school massacre is the longest piece and still feels as though it needed more room. It really should have been a book, complete with photos and maps, as it’s basically a collage of first-person accounts (or “a museum of words,” as Chivers puts it) and isn’t always easy to follow. Meanwhile, the fact that at least two of the stories included here – the ones by Bartlett and Preston – were later turned into successful books gives you some idea of the quality of the material.

I don’t go into such an anthology expecting much in the way of continuity in terms of the subject matter, so I was surprised to find a strong recurring theme. Perhaps guest editor Linda Fairstein had a predilection for a particular kind of crime story. However it came about, a lot of the stories deal with a betrayal by individuals in a position of trust.

We begin with the operators of a nursing home who put their residents at risk as a hurricane bears down on New Orleans. Next up an accountant embezzles funds from her employer. Then we have a bad doctor and a killer priest. Also we’ll have teachers having sex with their students and a financial advisor who steals money from his client before killing her. And finally the Italian police in “The Monster of Florence” demonstrate not so much ignorance and corruption (though there was probably some of that) as provide evidence that they’re not the kind of people you’d want to put in a position of authority.

A lot of this is a sort of sub-set of a message that a lot of true crime writing carries: that you can’t trust anyone. Put another way, “if delusion is our enemy, it equally may be said that trust is no friend of clear-thinking” (this is from the Introduction by the series editors). Or, as Duncan says of the treacherous thane of Cawdor:

There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.

Indeed there is no art, as Duncan is about to find out by putting his trust in Macbeth. He’s learned nothing. That said, we learn from books as much as example and experience, which is one of the things that I think gives true crime real value. If not an art, there’s a skill to reading people that we can always get better at. It begins with realizing that there’s no one deserving of “an absolute trust.”

Noted in passing:

In my notes on Kathryn Casey’s She Wanted It All I talked about some of the stupid ways that not-very-bright criminals find to blow their ill-gotten money. I thought of that again reading about Angela Platt bilking her boss for millions and then spending it on not just a new house, a big-screem TV, and time-shares in Florida and the Bahamas but also “the kind of bizarre crap you’d expect to find if you could journey through Christopher Walken’s brain”:

A hot rod fashioned into a green monster with teeth the size of fence pickets. A 1931 Plymouth with the faces of Bonnie and Clyde and lots of bullet holes painted on it, bearing the Rhode Island license plate UMISED. Collections of rare guns and wretched movies. Talking trees inspired by The Wizard of Oz.

OK, I’m not sure what this has to do with Christopher Walken, and I have a small collection of wretched movies myself, but this sounds pretty bad. And there was more! Platt also had a life-sized statue of Al Capone wearing a white suit and chomping on a cigar. For her brother’s wedding she hired the entire Riverdance touring troupe (at a cost of over a quarter million dollars) and Burt Bacharach (nearly $400,000) to perform. Given that her boss hardly even noticed the money she was siphoning off to pay for all this, I really had to laugh.

I’d forgotten how David Berkowitz had been caught. A woman had seen his car being ticketed on the night of one of the killings and reported it. When police investigated they turned up a lot of suspicious information relating to Berkowitz, and when they tracked down the car (Berkowitz hadn’t changed his plates) they found he’d left a gun lying unconcealed in the back seat.

It’s interesting how these routine traffic violations have played a role in catching famous bad guys. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was caught because an officer noticed that his car had false plates. Timothy McVeigh was only stopped while leaving Oklahoma City because he hadn’t attached plates to the vehicle he was driving. It’s the little things that trip you up.

Takeaways:

While not everyone is a potential killer, it’s a safe bet that nobody is exactly what they seem to be. In any event, you should always question people in positions of trust and authority unless you know they’ve earned it. They rarely have.

True Crime Files