Love Her to Death
By John Glatt

The crime:

Darren Mack was the wealthy owner of a Reno, Nevada pawn shop who stabbed his second wife, Charla, to death. They had been going through an acrimonious divorce, the terms of which were just being finalized. Angry at the settlement, Mack also shot the judge, Chuck Weller, who had presided over it. Weller was injured but recovered. Mack then fled to Mexico, but soon gave himself up. At trial, after much legal dancing around, he pled guilty and was sentenced to life.

The book:

This is a St. Martin’s Crime title, and I don’t want to knock them because I find them to be in general both highly readable and trustworthy, but they can also be pulpy and scattershot. We could start with the title here, which is just a catchy headline that doesn’t capture anything of the nature of the relationship between Darren and Charla. Darren was a full-blown narcissist who only loved himself, and he killed Charla out of rage at having to pay her a million-dollar divorce settlement. And even cornier is the broken string of pearls on the cover. What does that have to do with anything? Chandra wasn’t wearing pearls when she was killed; it was 9 in the morning and she was dropping her daughter off. And of course there’s a bubble promising “8 pages of chilling photos.” None of the photos are chilling, and they are mostly just tiny screen grabs from television coverage of the trial, poorly reproduced.

There are also quite a few typos, some of which led to real confusion. Like saying “employers” where “employees” is clearly meant, or an incidental victim describing herself as being “in the wrong place at the right time.” I suppose that might have been what she really said, but if so then she was confused.

That said, the writing is lively and the chapters short, which helps when dealing with what was a pretty standard, however tragic, case of domestic violence that only came to national attention because of Mack’s attempt at killing the judge and his subsequent run into Mexico. But it was never much of an “international manhunt,” and the media attention at Mack’s trial (Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, etc.) was wasted on what was an open-and-shut case that ended up with a plea deal. Nevertheless, the trial takes over the latter part of Love Her to Death, filling over 100 pages at the end of a 400-page book. There’s too much detail and quoting of transcripts here, especially with regard to arcane procedural matters that were of no consequence. But this is a trap many true crime authors have trouble avoiding.

A final point I’ll mention, and one that is of more substance, has to do with the difficulty I had in figuring out the actual timeline of the murder, and how it fit with the evidence. Breaking the fatal events down: Mack killed Charla in his garage, then shut the garage door, went into his house, and showered and changed his clothes, as it had been a very bloody business. He also dressed a wound he’d received on his hand. He then went back out and drove Charla’s car into the garage (she’d left it parked on the street in front of the house), while somehow leaving the inside of her car splattered in blood, both Charla’s and his own. Where did this blood come from? Also, there was a man in the house taking care of Mack’s daughter who left in a hurry when he saw Mack first come back inside after he’d killed Charla. But this same man says that when he left the house Charla’s car was already in the garage and the garage door closed. I’m sure somehow this all makes sense but I couldn’t get it straight.

I’ve said this was in many ways an unexceptional crime story but for Mack’s sniping at the judge. But if you wanted to find some deeper meaning in it I’d focus on his adopting the banner of the men’s rights movement. There are some legitimate concerns that this addresses, but Mack made a very poor poster boy for the cause, being the sort of whiny victim that fit into the predominant grievance culture of the time. Just listen to him inveighing against the injustice of the court system on a Web TV show (what we’d call a podcast now) just before killing Charla:

“For me, this is probably what people felt in Nazi Germany, where things started to slide very subtly, and then all of a sudden you find yourself being whisked away to concentration camps. That is the family court system, [and] my experience of it under Judge Weller reminds me much more about what I studied in school about Nazi Germany.”

In the years to come we’d hear a lot more of such nonsense, as every time things didn’t go our way we would blame fascists or Nazis, with every exercise of the rule of law bringing us one step closer to the gulag. The shamelessness of this posturing would be underlined by Mack in the three-hour (!) personal statement he made at his sentencing hearing. “The thing a lot of people don’t recognize,” he would tell the court, is that “I lost a wife too.”

The lack of self-awareness here is next level. His original defence was going to be something along the lines of temporary insanity, which was such a longshot even his attorneys had little confidence in it. The only diagnosis I came away with was that he was a narcissistic sex addict, but that doesn’t let you beat a murder charge. The only thing it leads you to is more of the same sort of behaviour that got Mack into all his troubles in the first place: blaming everyone else for mistakes that he made. We see this thinking everywhere today, and even the legal system can’t always effect a cure.

Noted in passing:

Mack was a narcissist of truly impressive proportions. I mean, he had both a personal assistant and a life coach, though I can’t see where any of them had much to do. He was also an amateur bodybuilder and at one point came in fifth place in a Mr. Reno competition. I wouldn’t have thought this too impressive a finish, but I guess it was Mack’s Mr. Olympia because he celebrated by commissioning “a life-size photo portrait of himself flexing his muscles, which he placed on the wall directly above the urinal of his master bedroom.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s weird. I mean, a life-size photo? Mack was 5’11”. The photo must have taken up the whole wall. When the police came to search his house they found it notable.

“It was right above his toilet,” Detective Chalmers said, “so literally as he’s peeing in the morning he can look at himself in his Speedos, flexing. That was one of the first indications to me that this person is obviously very egotistical.”

What took me aback almost as much though was that he had a urinal in his master bedroom. I’ve only seen urinals, which are a fixture for standing urination only, in public restrooms. I’ve never seen or heard of one in a private home. But then the detective later calls it a toilet so maybe this was just another case of sloppy editing and Glatt meant to say toilet the first time. The Mr. Reno competition is also later referred to as Mr. Nevada so it’s hard to tell which is right.

In any event, it’s very strange but fits with my own observation that the homes of rich people are almost always decorated in tacky and tasteless ways. And on the subject of the homes of rich people, the McMansion Darren and Charla lived in together was valued at around $1.5 million and had monthly mortgage payments of $8,300! Whew!

Takeaways:

Mack did do some rudimentary planning, even making up a rather damning “to do” list before killing Charla that euphemised her murder as “END PROBLEM.” In a moment of curious detachment he even initialed a change made to the list, as though altering a legal document. He also staked out the judge’s office and pre-selected the best place to set up his sniper station, while buying a plane ticket to Mexico in advance (he’d end up driving) and filling a suitcase with $40,000 in cash to effect his escape.

But after that his planning hit a wall. A pro would have known how to disappear. Mack just ran to one of his favourite swinger resorts and tried to get laid. And how long was that $40,000 going to last anyway? He didn’t even know how to speak Spanish. At least the gormless teens in Let’s Kill Mom tried to escape to Canada.

You often hear it said of such people that they “wanted to get caught.” I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that not everyone capable of planning a murder can really imagine being a killer, and all the work that it involves.

True Crime Files

Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias
By Jane Velez-Mitchell

The crime:

After a brief and torrid relationship, Travis Alexander broke up with his crazy girlfriend Jodi Arias. On June 4, 2008 she killed him, stabbing him 27 times and then shooting him in the head. After a highly publicized trial she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The book:

I’ve talked before about how hard it is to predict what true-crime stories are going to grab hold of the public imagination and become media sensations. Though I think it’s largely forgotten now, the Jodi Arias case was huge at the time. Not a crime of the century, not by a long shot, but a crime of the month, roughly on the same level as the trials of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony. But what was special about Jodi Arias? A spurned lover goes full Fatal Attraction and kills the guy who dumped her. Jane Velez-Mitchell, who covered the Arias trial for HLN, addresses this question midway through Exposed:

The public was intrigued with the murder, and the coverage in the media began to balloon. It had all the makings of a media sensation. According to the “National Data on Intimate Partner Violence” for the complete year 2007, there were more than two thousand “intimate homicides,” or homicides involving people who were either in or had been in an intimate relationship. In 25 percent of intimate murders in 2007 – more than five hundred in all – the victim was the male partner or ex-partner. What propelled the Jodi and Travis doomed relationship into such a disproportionate headline grabber, beyond the “ex-girlfriend murders ex-boyfriend” scenario? Travis and Jodie were a couple that appeared to be ideal – good-looking, smart, savvy, personable, sensible, religious – appealing in every way. Added to that was a relationship undercurrent that most of us can relate to on some level – insecurity, jealousy, flirting, and desire. Then add the forbidden love, the raunchy sex, the stalking, and the web of lies, with a twist of Mormonism, and the press could not resist. The fact that the murder was brutal, bloody, and partially documented in accidental photos added to the fascination of the red-hot story, and crime junkies could not get enough.

This all checks out but my guess is that it was the sexual angle (with a “twist of Mormonism”?) that drove most of the hype. Though I had to wonder just how “kinky” Travis and Jodi’s relationship really was. Velez-Mitchell plays up how “shocking” and “explicit” the details revealed at trial were, “while the audience blushed and the jurors squirmed,” but what was the reality? To me it all seemed pretty vanilla. Travis was an ass man, but while anal sex isn’t everyone’s thing, it’s pretty common. In the phone-sex recording he talks about tossing Jodi’s salad – an euphemism for anilingus popularized by the comedian Chris Rock, which Velez-Mitchell somehow tortures into “a slang reference that denotes anal sex delivered orally” – but I wasn’t sure if this was something he actually did. Nor is it clear if they ever engaged in even very light forms of bondage. There’s no limit to the public’s prurience, but is the average American so prudish that the mention of things like this makes them blush?

But the kinkiness, if that is what it was, was given a boost by Arias herself, who had an undeniable star power, at least as far as murderers go. Young and good-looking, she also liked playing to the spotlight, a desire for attention flagged by the prosecutor in his summation and which ended up doing her more harm than good. Given the case against her, she probably should not have taken the stand, and I wasn’t sure from the reporting presented here if this was something her lawyers tried to talk her out of. Was she a little bit proud of being declared, in Alexander’s words, a “prototype of sluttiness,” “the ultimate slut in bed,” and a “three-hole wonder”?

(I can’t resist an aside here on the history of the word “slut.” Today this has the meaning of a sexually voracious or promiscuous woman, but a hundred years ago it was commonly used to mean something quite different. In one of Agatha Christie’s novels a woman is referred to as being a total slut and it has no sexual connotations at all. It just means she doesn’t keep a clean house.)

But perhaps her decision to testify in her own defence was just another case of her not being very bright. This was an open-and-shut case, mainly due to Arias’s stupidity. Her (third) account of what happened was preposterous, and there were other times when she seems to have almost wanted to get caught. How did she even manage to take a picture of herself moving Alexander’s body? Velez-Mitchell says it was “probably by accident.” But even if it wasn’t by accident, how did she do it? Why was she still holding on to the camera as she was trying to lug Alexander’s body around? And why didn’t she just take the camera with her and dispose of it the same way she (successfully) did with the murder weapons? Why throw it in the laundry? Indeed, why even do a laundry?

Even her few attempts at thinking ahead backfired. The idea of filling up gas cans before she set out to drive from her place to Alexander’s so as not to leave a paper-trail of stations she’d filled up at along the way was a good one in principle. But the evidence of her taking the gas cans with her only went to proving premeditation, thus nailing her with murder in the first.

This was a timely book, so Arias hadn’t even been sentenced at the time of publication. All the same, I didn’t want it to be any longer. I think I’d had my fill of Arias by the end. But I thought Velez-Mitchell handled the material well. Author of a couple of previous books on addiction, I thought she was particularly insightful in accounting for Alexander’s fatal appetite for Arias.

Jodi elicited Travis’s reckless forbidden passion, which was what he craved about her. Unfortunately for her it was also what he loathed, as it came with more and more guilt each time. She was the vehicle of his moral corruption, and over time, the sexual fire sale that she offered him didn’t increase her value in his eyes – if anything, it brought her worth to an all-time low.

I don’t know if this is what was going on, but as psychological analysis I think it’s better than what we get in the epilogue, which offers a selection of hot takes from observers on what Arias’s problem was. I thought this only underlined how limited in usefulness such exercises are, as various labels like Borderline Personality Disorder (a really vague sort of catch-all), narcissism, psychopathy, or sociopathy, all get tried on. I thought the addiction model was probably a better fit. I mean, after breaking up Alexander apparently offered to hire Arias to clean his house, paying her $12.50 an hour for sixteen hours a week of work. That struck me as really strange, not to mention a bit cold. But maybe, as others indicated, she offered to clean the house for free, just as a way of staying close to Travis. Either way, it’s weird. When couples split up, they don’t stay together in this kind of relationship, and for good reason. It’s always best to make as clean a break as possible.

Noted in passing:

I wouldn’t call Dungeons & Dragons, at least in its classic form, a board game, but a tabletop role-playing game. There’s a difference.

It can be hard keeping slang straight. At one point Velez-Mitchell talks about how

Travis grew determined to get healthy and into great physical shape. He began an exercise regimen that consisted of long workout sessions and strenuous hikes and bicycle rides, while also eating more fruits and vegetables. He was even juicing and – after viewing a documentary on the horrors of factory farming – had cut back on meat.

What confused me here was the word “juicing.” I think it means that Alexander was using a juicing machine to whip up protein smoothies or some other supplement. However, “juicing” is also a term used to describe someone who is taking steroids for bodybuilding. They are said to be “on the juice.” This isn’t just something professional bodybuilders do, as I’ve known people as long ago as when I was in high school who were juicing in this sense. So a bit more information was needed here.

Takeaways:

Crazy in bed, crazy in the head.

True Crime Files

Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell
By Tom Clavin

The crime:

A period of swiftly escalating animosity between different factions in and around the town of Tombstone, Arizona culminated in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral that left three dead. That wasn’t the end of things, however, as the fighting and killing continued, with both sides looking to settle scores.

The book:

The story has of course passed into legend. Hollywood has had its way with it for nearly a hundred years, from movies like My Darling Clementine to Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. It even showed up as an episode on the original Star Trek called “Spectre of the Gun” that I remember well. The crew of the Enterprise were cast as the doomed Clantons facing off against the Earps and Doc Holliday, but Spock performs a mind-meld that convinces them that none of this is real so the bullets just pass through them.

In becoming a legend (or being Hollywoodized, which comes to the same thing) the story was simplified, to the point where it became an archetypal tale of good guys vs. bad guys. The real story, which has been covered in a number of recent books of which this is the latest, is more complicated. As Tom Clavin sums it up, “the ‘bad guys’ – Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury – weren’t all bad, and the ‘good guys’ – Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday – weren’t all good.”

I described the two sides as factions, which seems as good a term as any. On one level these factions were familial, with the Earps vs. the Clantons and McLaurys. But they were also political, supporting different candidates for local government (Democratic and Republican), and divided by location, with the Earps being city people living in Tombstone while the Clantons and their associates were ranchers. Finally, and this is a point more relevant to the story, the two factions had different side hustles. The Clantons were cattle rustlers and robbed stagecoaches. The Earps were gamblers and known by their detractors as the “fighting pimps.” Tombstone’s upper classes respected and needed the Earps, in the words of Wyatt’s biographer Casey Tefertiller, but they didn’t want to associate with them socially.

That the Earps were also at various times lawmen doesn’t seem to have meant much. Being a marshal was just another job, and didn’t even keep them out of jail. At the time, the question of what was legal boiled down to what you could get away with. Doc Holliday’s girlfriend even referred to “Wyatt Earp and others of his gang of legalized outlaws.” And if the Clantons stole cattle, well, they did it discreetly. And anyway

There was the view – which extended to the McLaury brothers, too – that because ranching in general was a tough living, if no one got hurt cutting a few corners, so be it. In southeast Arizona, a man did what he had to do to stay in business and feed his family. Allowances were made.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite live-and-let-live. In the resulting anarchy, with “the lower third of the territory . . . a boiling cauldron of competitors for cattle and power and money,” violence often broke out. This was the Wild West, and one contemporary descried Tombstone as “Six thousand population. Five thousand are bad. One thousand of these are known outlaws.” It’s actually surprising more people weren’t shot. But as Clavin points out, shootings were actually a fairly rare occurrence. What I found interesting was the way pistols were so often used in a fight as cudgels, with Wyatt Earp in particular being fond of striking men down with the butts. This is referred to in the book as buffaloing, which is the term they used for it at the time, but it’s more commonly called pistol-whipping today.

Overall this is a fun read that’s quite informative and one that explains a rather complicated situation in a way that makes it easier (if not always easy) to follow. And of course it’s a great story that throws John Ford’s dictum into reverse at nearly every turn, with the legend becoming fact.

Noted in passing:

A good example of the way history and myth can get intertwined to the point where there’s no sorting them out is in the famous line that Doc Holliday reportedly said to the gunman Johnny Ringo when Ringo challenged him to a duel: “I’m your huckleberry. That’s just my game.” Clavin calls this a “perplexing response,” but doesn’t question that Holliday actually said it.

Whether Holliday said it is still an open question. The origin of the quote is a book that came out in 1929, Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest by Walter Noble Burns. Burns doesn’t have the best reputation for reliability as a historian but he had interviewed Earp, who had told him stories about Holliday, so maybe it’s true. But some question if Holliday ever used the phrase.

Even murkier is the question of where the expression came from. Its meaning is pretty well agreed upon: “I’m the man for the job,” or “I’ll do it.” But how did it acquire this meaning? I’ve read different explanations. One has it that knights in medieval lore received huckleberry garlands from rescued ladies, identifying them as their defender or champion. Another source suggests that because huckleberries are small the expression originally meant that you were willing to take on any chore, no matter how menial. And yet another meaning that’s often referenced has it that the original term was “hucklebearer,” which referred to people who carried caskets at a funeral because the handles on caskets were called “huckles.” This makes “I’m your huckleberry” into a threat: I’m going to carry your casket. Apparently Val Kilmer (who played Doc Holliday in Tombstone) was frequently asked if he had actually said “I’m your hucklebearer” in the movie, which is something he denies in his memoir (of the same name): “I do not say ‘I’m your huckle bearer.’ I say, ‘I’m your huckleberry,’ connotating ‘I’m your man. You’ve met your match.’”

In any event, the expression as I’ve heard it used today leans heavily on the movie version. Which isn’t surprising given that it’s probably the only place many people have encountered it. It’s an invitation to a fight.

Another thing I took note of had to do with tarantulas. Apparently they

had a bad reputation because in the Italian seaport town of Taranto in the sixteenth century, residents suffered repeated bouts of a disease that produced a frenzy. What was named “tarantism” was believed to be from the bite of a particularly ugly spider. The inaccurate perception persisted into twentieth-century Arizona. Worse, it was viewed as a deadly enemy of humans, even though the fact is a tarantula rarely bites, and if it does, the bite is no more fatal than a bee sting.

I think I’d heard that about tarantula bites before, though looking into the matter online I guess there’s a fair bit of variety among different types of tarantula. But for the most part they aren’t killer spiders. I didn’t know about the name coming from Taranto though.

Takeaways:

You always have to ask whose law and order is being served by law-and-order governments, and who gets to label the good guys and bad guys.

True Crime Files