The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto

The crimes:

“Snowtown” by Anthony Ferguson: a bank building in a dusty Australian town becomes the storage facility for the “bodies in barrels” serial killers, and subsequently becomes a dark tourism destination.

“A Tragedy in Posorja: When ‘People’s Justice’ Goes Horribly Wrong” by Tom Larsen: a lynch mob storms a police station in Ecuador, killing three people falsely believed to be child kidnappers.

“About a Boy” by C L Raven: in the 1920s a teenage boy kills a couple of little girls in a Welsh town.

“Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic” by Edward Butts: a woman in a small town in Ontario is convicted of poisoning her husband.

“I Kill for God” by Mitzi Szereto: a mentally disturbed man goes on a shooting rampage in Washington state, killing six people and injuring several others.

“The Summer of ‘The Fox’” by Mark Fryers: a spate of home invasions and rapes terrorize the English town of Leighton Buzzard in the summer of 1984.

“Who Killed Gabriele Schmidt: The True Story and the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder” by Alexandra Burt: a young girl is killed in a town in central Germany.

“Bullets and Balaclavas: The Long, Cold Orkney Shooting” by Charlotte Platt: a teenager wearing a balaclava walks into a restaurant and kills the owner by shooting him in the head.

“The Black Hand and Glass Eye of Earlimart: A Killer’s Perspective” by Christian Cipollini: a hitman tells the story of his murder of a small-town drug dealer.

“Crime Has Come to Penal!” by Iris Leona Marie Cross: a brutal home invasion and murder in Trinidad.

“The Voodoo Preacher” by David Brasfield: in 1977 a minister is shot dead while attending a funeral in Alexander City, Alabama.

“La Bella Elvira: Murder in the Tuscan Hills” by Deirdre Pirro: a young woman is killed in postwar Italy.

“The Doctor, the Dentist, and the Dairyman’s Daughter” by Paul Williams: a young woman dies in a town in Wales and a local doctor is suspected of her murder in what might have been an abortion gone wrong in 1884.

“In the Home of the Cannibal” by Joe Turner: an aspiring cannibal advertises online for a willing victim, and finds one.

“Nameless in Van Dieman’s Land” by Stephen Wade: the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

The book:

As with a lot of these themed anthologies you’re led to ask what the significance of the connecting idea is, and how it might influence the way we think about crime in general.

In the present case, are these stories of small-town crime just meant to show the “dirty fingerprint,” in the language of Mitzi Szereto, on the “postcard images of picturesque town squares, parades down Main Street, bake sales, [and] church socials”? To reveal the dark side of places where it’s assumed “people look out for each other” and a time when “neighbor helped neighbor and people and property were treated with respect, and no one had to worry about locking doors”?

Well, Miss Marple had a thing or two to say about how crime and the universality of human evil undermines that vision of small-town life. I think we have to dig deeper.

So for starters, what is a small town? Does it depend on where the town is located? To take the first two stories, the current population of Snowtown, Australia is 356. The population of Posorja, Ecuador is 15,000. From what I could gather, they are very different communities. And it’s also the case that a lot of the crimes described here didn’t take place in small towns. Snowtown, for example, was only a place the killers stored the bodies of their victims, and many of the other killers we meet lived in homes outside of towns, in semi-rural areas.

We also span the globe in this book, with what are Australia’s two most notorious crime stories providing bookends, a couple of trips to Germany, one to Italy, two stories from Wales, a few set in the U.S., and some exotic locations like Trinidad, Orkney, and Canada also in the mix.

And what of the passage of time? Is the myth of the idyllic small town inextricably linked to “the values of the past, [and] the ‘good old days’”? Here as well the stories cover a lot of ground, being culled from headlines drawn from anywhere in the last century and a half. What does a small town in Wales in the 1880s have in common with a small town in Trinidad in 2018? Are small towns everywhere and at any time that much the same?

It’s an interesting question, but to be honest I don’t think it’s one this volume is all that interested in addressing. Instead, this is pretty much just a pot-pourri of crime stories characterized mainly by its geographical diversity. And that is in turn one of the more interesting connecting threads. The first story introduces us to the idea of “dark tourism”: the international rubberneckers of the true crime world. For the most part the towns here are not regular tourist destinations. I think Port Arthur might be the only place normal people would care to visit. But if you’re a reader of true crime and don’t like to travel you should enjoy this sampling of off-the-beaten path locales. If nothing else, you’ll learn a bit along the way about places you might not know anything about. I know I did.

Is dark tourism wrong? Years ago I remember my father and I going for a drive to see where Albert Johnson Walker lived in Paris (Ontario), but I think that was mainly because it was near where my father grew up. Most such places don’t have much to tell us though, or relate very much to the crimes they witnessed. The only stories where I thought place was really relevant were the lynching in Ecuador (with the background of that country’s indigenous justice movement), the home invasion in Trinidad (an island paradise that has become “a crime-ridden hellhole”), and the walk-through tour of Armin Miewes’s dilapidated farmhouse — or rather mansion (43 rooms?) — with Miewes’s pornography still left lying around years later. That struck me as weird.

Another connecting thread, and one less welcome, was the first-person voice adopted by many of the authors. I’ve mentioned before how much I don’t like this development, and how the “true crime memoir” is a sub-genre I avoid like a case of the clap. These stories don’t go that far, but many have a memoir flavour. To give you some idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a sampling of first lines:

I remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame.

In 1984, as a six-year-old child, I moved to a small town in the South of England, where I would remain for the next twenty years.

We all have a story to tell about the summer of 1983: I was on vacation; I visited my grandmother; I took the train to Paris. I have told my very own story numerous times over the past thirty-seven years, a story that has morphed into the very reason I write about crime.

I had been temporarily resident in London, England, for eleven years and was fearful of returning to my home country.

It was a roasting Alabama day in June of 1977. I was three years old and living in a house down the street from the House of Hutchinson funeral home at the moment a vigilante shot Reverend Willie Maxwell in the face in front of two hundred mourners.

I went to this place as a tourist. I came away from it a true crime writer.

I wish non-fiction writers didn’t do this so much. In some very special situations it works, but most of the time I just want to say to them “It’s not about you.”

That said, I really enjoyed this collection. The international flavour (something that Mitzi Szereto’s anthologies tend to specialize in) was a plus, as was the fact that aside from a few of the more notorious cases, I wasn’t familiar with the crimes being discussed. Also, the fact that several of the crimes were either unsolved or their resolutions still open to dispute, added a bit of an edge. There were a couple of real clunkers, as you’d expect from a collection of what are all-new pieces, but overall the quality of the writing was pretty high.

Noted in passing:

In the story “Crime Has Come to Penal!” a married couple, along with the husband’s mentally ill adult  brother, are brutally murdered (shot, throats slit) in their home. In the house at the time were the couple’s two children: a four-year-old girl and her infant (eight-month-old) brother. The rotting bodies of the adults were not discovered for four days, and in that time the little girl “cleaned the infant, changed his diapers, and bottle-fed him with milk from the open can that was found on the living room floor. She also gave him juice and snacks.” To be sure, both kids were in bad shape when they were discovered, but the girl did keep her brother alive.

That’s an impressive little girl! But the author points out that just a few months earlier a similar case had occurred in California, when a four-year-old girl cared for her two-month-old brother for three days following the murder-suicide of their parents.

Damn. Those are some resourceful four-year-olds!

Ranging as far afield as we do here, I picked up some proper geographical nomenclature. It is, for example, no longer considered correct to refer to the Orkney Islands as the Orkneys. The islands now simply go by the collective name of Orkney. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that residents of Trinidad and Tobago are known as Trinbagonians (or “Trinis” for short).

The bodies in the Snowtown case were put in barrels of hydrochloric acid, which didn’t have the desired effect of dissolving them but instead preserved them. Apparently what the killers should have used was sulfuric acid. The author chides them for being not too bright, but I would have probably made the same mistake. I’m not a chemist!

Takeaways:

When it comes to the violent expression of our basest emotions, human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.

True Crime Files

The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty
By Valerie Bauerlein

The crime:

Alex Murdaugh, a prominent lawyer in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, shot and killed his wife and son just as the series of frauds he’d perpetrated on his clients over the previous decade was unwinding. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

The Devil at His Elbow is the second book I’ve read on the Murdaugh murder case. It came out exactly one year after John Glatt’s Tangled Vines, most of which was written before Murdaugh even went to trial. You have to get out of the gate pretty fast to beat John Glatt to press on a hot crime story! But even Glatt was behind the curve in our up-to-the-minute media environment. As reported here, two different Murdaugh podcasts launched within days of the murders, “along with multiple Reddit threads and Facebook pages on which amateur sleuths picked apart the case.” Those must have been some piping hot takes.

What Valerie Bauerlein offers is a more thorough and I thought better-written account of the events, with particular attention given not only to the family background but the broader cultural environment. The following scene-setting is an excellent example:

The Murdaugh law firm was an engine that ran on suffering, specializing in personal injury and wrongful death in a place with no shortage of it.

Rural South Carolina had shamefully dangerous roads, thousands of miles unspooling through the swamp with no tax base to support repairs. Poor folks with rusting clunkers and little insurance navigated narrow and crumbling roads with no shoulders. Those same residents often worked in industries like trucking and logging that survived on the workers’ willingness to do dangerous work for low pay. The wrecks, the on-the-job injuries, the multiplicity of other woes that defined the lives of so many people in a poor and rural area – all of it was distilled into lawsuits that enriched the firm.

Hampton County had a population of roughly twenty thousand people when Alex’s great-grandfather was elected solicitor in 1920. When Alex signed the Pinckneys on as clients in 2009, the population was exactly the same. Hardly anyone ever moved away. Hardly anyone ever moved in. The place existed  in a state of suspended animation. Hampton had no department store, no Walmart, no bowling alley, not even a Ramada Inn, only a few mom-and-pop motels that had been hanging on since the fifties. The closest mall was in Charleston, more than an hour away. The tallest structures were two smokestacks from a shuttered factory. The only grocery for miles was a Piggly Wiggly that smelled like fried chicken.

I’ve never shopped in, or even been anywhere near a Piggly Wiggly. Do they all smell like fried chicken? Is that something they specialize in?

In any event, given those demographics you can imagine how jury selection went. With such a small pool, not to mention such a headline case, finding twelve people who you could expect to be neutral was a challenge. “Nearly all of the potential jurors had some connection to someone involved in the case, leaving Judge Newman to decide how close was too close.” Friends? Cousins? Co-workers? They all made the list. I wonder why, given the circumstances, a motion wasn’t made to move the trial to another jurisdiction, especially given the prominence of the Murdaugh family locally.

What I found myself most interested in, going through this case in more depth a second time, was the matter of motive. To be sure, Murdaugh’s life was spiraling out of control. His son Paul had recently been the cause of a boat crash that had led to a fatality, requiring the family to go into overdrive covering it up. There was his ongoing heavy drug use. There was the fact that his financial crimes, amounting to the theft of some $11 million from clients, were on the cusp of being exposed. There was the health of his parents: his mother with dementia and his father dying only days after the murders. This all must have been very stressful. But how did he jump from this state of chaos to the murder of his family? And in such a brutal manner? There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he hated his wife and son or wanted them out of the way for any reason.

Here is Bauerlein’s account of the initial address to the jury made by Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor:

Alex Murdaugh, the prosecutor said, was a person of singular prominence who had never been questioned about anything his entire life. When he stumbled into a series of very bad land deals and was pinched for cash to fund his extravagant lifestyle, Waters argued, it had been easy enough to start stealing. Alex was addicted, yes, but his addiction was to money, and he stole millions of dollars over the course of a decade to maintain the illusion of his own image.

His thievery had gone unchecked until the boat crash. Then Mark Tinsley had pushed for his financials and Jeanne Seckinger had asked for answers about the missing check. That evening, Waters said, Alex had killed Maggie and Paul to buy himself time. He had valued his family name more than his family itself.

He had killed Maggie and Paul to buy himself time? How would that even have worked? And buy time to do what? This was a crime so senseless I don’t know what to make of it. My conclusion is that for all his wealth and status, Murdaugh was just a drug-addled moron who had a breakdown that expressed itself in the worst possible way. And the thing is, he might have got away with it given how weak the case against him was. I mean, I think it was obvious to everyone that he was guilty, but there was surprisingly little proof. He managed to do a good job getting rid of any evidence, of which there must have been a lot. The main thing against him was the video proof that he had lied repeatedly about being at the scene of the crime around the time of the murder, which is something he couldn’t explain. Then he took the stand – rarely a good idea – and doesn’t seem to have handed in a convincing performance as an innocent man.

I thought Glatt’s book was fine, but early, and if you’re looking for what’s likely to remain the definitive account of the case then I’d definitely recommend this. There are some digressions that I thought were unnecessary, like all the stuff on the lawyer representing the family of the deceased girl in the boat accident, but most of the early background material reads well and the pace picks up nicely in the second half with the investigation and trial. There were a few places with novelistic flourishes that I couldn’t find any source for, but they were relatively minor and easy to skim. I don’t think this is a case that will last in the public memory long now that there are no more headlines and the Netflix and Lifetime adaptations have aired, but I’m glad we have this responsible and well-handled a record of it.

Noted in passing:

“The courtroom was kept at 67 degrees, prompting some in the audience to wear puffy coats.” Oh please. I keep my house at 60 degrees in the winter. At 67 degrees I’m wearing a t-shirt. And yet the bailiff here would give a blanket to certain jurors here “on days when the courtroom was particularly chilly.” Why didn’t they just bring sweaters, or wear jackets? Clothes they could put on or leave in the jury room?

For what it’s worth, a recent survey of 2000 Britons found that the ideal temperature to set your home at is 19.5°C (67.1°F). But a report from the World Health Organization recommends 18°C (64.4°F) as “a safe and well-balanced indoor temperature to protect the health of general populations during cold seasons.”

Takeaways:

Drugs and guns don’t mix with anything, and especially not with each other.

True Crime Files