Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
By Edward J. Larson

The crime:

A media circus came to Dayton, Tennessee for a couple of weeks in July 1925 as high school teacher John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution in a state-funded school. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served on the defence team. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, a verdict that was later overturned on a flimsy technicality so that there was no conviction to be appealed.

The book:

In my review of Blood & Ink I brought up the subject of a “trial of the century.” I don’t know if the Hall-Mills trial was ever referred to as such, but the author Joe Pompeo uses it as a chapter heading in that book. In any event, the Scopes Trial took place the year before and Edward Larson notes how calling it the trial of the century was already a “shopworn designation,” especially since Darrow’s previous case, the Leopold and Loeb trial that took place just the year before, had been widely referred to in the same terms.

Was the Leopold and Loeb trial the first trial of the century, or the first trial to be named as such in the media? I don’t know. But the Scopes Trial was a big deal and so probably belongs on a shortlist of contenders for that title. There is a strong counterargument to be made against its inclusion in such a list though. Just for starters, it was always meant to be a media event – a symbolic statute, a show trial – and very little was at stake. Technically it was a criminal misdemeanour case, though as the Chicago Tribune would sniff at the time, “It is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood.” But then, they were saying that because they were broadcasting it live via radio and they wanted to allay concerns that this wasn’t in some way improper. Then, after the verdict, the media were quick to dismiss the whole show as a sort of nine days’ wonder. The New York Times would say that the abrupt end of the trial saved “the public from having its ears bethumped with millions more of irrelevant words.” This from the paper of record that, as Larson observes, had “used as many as five telegraph wires at a time to carry reports from Dayton.”

Another point against its century status is that it was unclear, even at the time, what the trial was actually about or what the different sides were trying to prove. For Bryan, the issue had to do with the principle of majority rule. “It is the easiest case to explain I have ever found,” he wrote to a fellow prosecutor at the start of the trial. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it” (emphases in the original). Darrow was playing for different stakes: “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory, a knockout which will have an everlasting precedent to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”

Given these different agendas, both sides were able to claim victory: “The prosecution claimed a legal victory; the defense a moral one.” At the same time, neither side was satisfied: the defence complaining that nothing had been settled while supporters of the statute “could scarcely hail a ruling that all but directed prosecutors not to enforce the law.” Which makes you wonder to what extent a win-win is always a lose-lose.

A final point against calling it a trial of the century is that the verdict seems never to have been in doubt. This was evidenced by its immediacy:

The jury received the case shortly before noon and returned its verdict nine minutes later. They spent most of this time getting in and out of the crowded courtroom. “The jurors didn’t even sit down to think it over,” one observer noted, “but stood huddled together in the hallway of the courthouse for the brief interval.”

Nine minutes! I’m not sure, but that must be some kind of record, especially for a case this long.

Given the larger-than-life personalities of Bryan and Darrow the table was set for high drama, but the great debate between the two comes off, at least to my ear listening to it a century later, sounding scripted and pointless. Maybe it’s the effect of having Inherit the Wind playing in my head (a text that’s duly questioned here). But more than that, you really can’t defend the Bible as history or science. Religion doesn’t make any kind of sense if you look at it that way. So all the back-and-forth about when God created the world is silly, as I think most people understood at the time.

But, to advocate for the other side, you can still make an argument for its “trial of the century” status. But this is mainly because of its long cultural afterlife. “Dozens of prosecutions have received such a designation over the years,” Larson concludes, “but only the Scopes trial fully lives up to its billing by continuing to echo through the century.” That probably has more to do with political developments though, and in particular the rise of evangelicalism as a political force in the U.S., than with the trial itself. In the battle between modernists and fundamentalists that the Scopes trial represented it seemed at the time as though the fundamentalists had been thoroughly beaten. They would, however, rise again, gaining strength from a resurgent Southern pride and sense of regional identity.

Given its now “mythic” status, it’s nice to have something like an authoritative version of the events setting the record straight. That said, I can’t say I enjoyed Summer for the Gods very much. It’s not a great read and the characters are poorly drawn. Darrow comes off a bit worse for wear and Bryan a bit better. The secondary players are indistinguishable and the legal maneuvering difficult to follow. It did win the Pulitzer Prize for history and I’m guessing that was for its research.

Noted in passing:

I don’t think Bobby Franks is properly described as a “former schoolmate” of Leopold and Loeb. He lived across the street from Loeb, to whom he was related, and went to the same high school Leopold had attended, but he was quite a bit younger.

Takeaways:

Trying to establish the “truth” of a religion, whatever that might mean, is pointless. And even if that were your goal, a criminal trial wouldn’t be the place for it.

True Crime Files

The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius
By Scott C. Johnson

The crime:

Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, an Indonesian of Indian descent who was partly educated in the U.S. and who for most of his working life resided in England, seems to have made a living (how, I’m not sure) out of impersonating various Hollywood power players. His main scam involved calling up individuals looking to get into the movie business and pretending to be a big-shot producer offering them a break. He would then send his marks running around Indonesia, racking up expense bills that he profited from in some way. After being tracked down by a private security firm and a reporter on the case he was arrested in Manchester.

The book:

I had deeply divided feelings on this one.

On the plus side, I thought the story itself was fascinating, and the gradual uncovering of the scam by Scott C. Johnson played a bit like that of the journalists tracking down the mail-fraud operation in A Deal with the Devil, which was a book I loved.

On the other hand . . .

I didn’t think Johnson did a great job explaining the operation of Tahilramani’s scam. Perhaps, as the book was written before there’d been any trial (we leave with “Harvey” still awaiting extradition to the U.S.), little was known or could be said for sure. Johnson did try his best to follow up various leads, but I found myself scratching my head as to how money was being made off of the people Tahilramani was sending on various wild goose chases. Kickbacks on taxi fares? If most of the money spent went to what would have been legitimate expenses on any trip (travel, accommodations) how much of it went into Harvey’s pockets? The FBI estimates he might have made around $5,000 per person he sent to Indonesia, and maybe a million dollars over the years, but that strikes me as perhaps inflated and in any event no more than a guess. He was almost certainly lying when he told Johnson that there was another figure further up the chain of fraud who was making the real money, but it’s a lie that makes more sense than the truth.

The point is stressed by Johnson, however, that Tahilramani wasn’t in it for the money. Which then leads to an attempt at understanding exactly why he was doing it. Was it only for amusement? He confessed to that much. Did he have “a penchant for deception”? Given all of his pseudonyms (among others: Harvey Taheal, Gavin Ambani, Anand Sippy, Gobind Tahil) and the sheer amount of time he spent calling people (the better part of every day was spent on the phone) one feels that there was something like an addiction in play. Was pretending to be someone else empowering, or even an expression of gender dysphoria (he specialized in impersonating women, and when caught he claimed he would take his punishment “like a man, or a woman, it’s the same thing to me”)? Perhaps there was some of that too. Did he just like yanking people’s chains? Absolutely. Was he sadistic? This is a label Johnson applies a few times, though to me it doesn’t feel right. Sadists, at least in the classic understanding of the term, derive some sexual stimulation from inflicting pain on others, and Tahilramani seems to have been asexual. Indeed he claimed to be impotent and there’s no evidence here that he ever had intimate relations with anyone of either sex. Of course, it goes without saying that he had no friends.

But while Tahilramani is a hard character to figure out, it would be a mistake to extend him any sympathy or respect. In the case of the former, it’s part of every villain’s playbook, at least in the twenty-first century, to claim victim status. Tahilramani seems to have been gay, and may have been subjected to some form of gay conversion therapy while institutionalized in Indonesia, but that’s as far as his victim credentials extend. When being interviewed by Johnson he “hammered away at the victim narrative” of his life by blaming his sisters for the way he turned out, which seems to be far from the mark. What he understood, however, is the way being a victim gives one a pass for any amount of bad behaviour. We are even told that he held the view that Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie producer he admired, was “a tragic victim of the #MeToo movement,” which tells you something about the kind of lessons he took from that.

As for respect, that was even extended to Tahilramani by one of his marks. An aspiring screenwriter named Gregory Mandarano (who’d go on to write a script about the Con Queen) initially

expressed admiration and even awe at what his deceiver had been able to achieve. It had been a feat of spectacular creativity, a virtuoso display. As the years went on, his view began to change and, in the end, he felt disappointed – not so much by what he had suffered, but by what the scammer had failed to achieve. As a character in one of Gregory’s screenplays, Harvey could use his grifting talents to perform some truly ingenious, worthy crimes. If only the truth had been different, he might have created “something of value.”

By “ingenious, worthy crimes” I think something like the crimes of a Tom Ripley is meant. But then Harvey wouldn’t have been caught, and in the end nothing of value would have been created except I guess a life as a work of art.

Harvey was good at doing voices. I’ll give him credit for that. But the bottom line as I see it is that Tahilramani was just someone who held an intense hatred of the human race almost from birth. I don’t know where such bitterness comes from. He was born into a family of privilege and his parents both doted on him. His mother’s love in particular was an example of “rare codependency.” When you spoil people (young or old, makes no difference) it rarely turns out well. But this is a point I’ve remarked upon before.

The result was the kind of person an acquaintance of mine once described as “a black hole of shit.” One of his sisters, who perhaps knew him better than anyone, refused to refer to him by name, calling him only “the Monster.”

She saw him as a social predator devoid of empathy or remorse, a man without conscience who viewed other people as sources of personal gratification and gain. He was unable to love, a manipulative liar who had alienated his entire remaining family. He had no friends, no one to rely on. She described him as a “malignant tumor,” and said that even employing the terms brother or relative to describe their biological kinship was itself “cruel.” People who wished him harm, she said, were justified.

Even more succinct a condemnation is the assessment made by an “old acquaintance”: “He was, she believed, a dark malignancy in semi-humanoid form, glomming on to souls and retching on their dreams.”

Not, properly speaking, a human being at all then, but a form of life, like a “cancer” or “malignancy,” that feeds on humans. The final section of Johnson’s book is simply given the name “The Entity,” deriving from his sister’s description of her brother as “an evil entity.” Which I think is good, even if it does constitute a sort of throwing up of one’s hands.

What bothered me the most about The Con Queen of Hollywood though was the way Johnson kept trying to shoehorn in bits of his own family history, for no reason whatsoever that I could see. His father was a CIA agent and his mother had been sexually abused (I think) by his grandfather. None of this has any connection at all to Tahilramani’s story. Now I didn’t mind his account of tracking Harvey down to the apartment he was renting in Manchester, England. That was fine, and Johnson was aware of how it marked “the moment I stopped being merely an observer and became a character in his [Tahilramani’s] story.” But the family background was an unnecessary distraction and I felt like it led to the book losing focus on the portrait being drawn of the Con Queen, and indeed drawing us away from a better understanding of him.

Noted in passing:

Scammers have been around forever, and as with so many other unpleasant things we have today the Internet has only made the problem worse. What the story here underlines are the various ways this has happened. For one thing, there is no longer a barrier “that once separated the relative safety of ‘reality’ from the constant intrusions of online life.” Our virtual and real lives have merged. In addition, while the Internet has a global reach (Tahilramni had victims on six continents) it also fosters “the illusion of proximity”: “people who would otherwise be far removed and inaccessible are made to seem closer and more familiar.” And of course the cost of such scams is reduced to nearly zero, while at the same time making them exponentially more damaging.

How to defend yourself? Well, to be brutally honest there is no defence aside from staying off the Internet entirely. Even a group of Navy SEALs were taken in by Harvey, and indeed made to put on sexual performances for him (that they considered such behaviour to be at least somewhat normal is another sad fact of the digital age). But one bit of advice I remember from the early days of the Internet might help: your online presence should not be about you, but about what interests you. In the days of carefully curating a personal online presence (or brand) this is worth keeping in mind, especially if you’re really engaged with social media.

While some [of Harvey’s] victims were talented photographers, by and large their true dominion was social media. They had mastered the art of self-promotion, and were comfortable posting – advertising – the details of their lives. Masters of the selfie, they crossed back and forth between journalism and the more nebulous but profitable world of branding. . . . [Harvey’s] deep knowledge base could be scraped off the internet, an open vault where ambition and oversharing collided. Once in possession of a mark’s professional trajectory, along with the names of past collaborators or clients, [Harvey] could weave a tale to suit each one.

Again, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid risk completely. But you need to be aware of the risk and try to limit your exposure to it.

Takeaways:

I think one of the hardest things for any parent to do is to recognize that their child is, in fact, a completely worthless piece of shit and menace to society. Parents are, all too often, the enablers of last resort for such monsters. Which, in turn, leads into the point I made earlier about the disastrous effects of codependency.

All the more credit then to Tahilramani’s father Lal, who on his deathbed cut his son out of his will and “urged his daughters to distance themselves from him. He explained that they would face two great challenges in life: cancer [a family predisposition] and Harvey.” Again the link between the Monster and malignancy. Lal told his daughters he was sorry for what they’d gone through and that if there was any silver lining it was that they had already seen “the worst human in our midst.”

This is the correct response to have, but I’ve only personally known a couple of parents who have gone so far. The thing is, you owe your child a lot, but not a blank cheque supporting a lifetime of bad behaviour. So don’t bother with “tough love.” Just cut the damn cord and move on, even if it’s the last thing you do.

True Crime Files

The Bayou Strangler: Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer
By Fred Rosen

The crimes:

Between 1997 and 2006 Ronald Joseph Dominique raped and murdered (mostly by strangulation) 23 men and boys in the bayou region of southern Louisiana. In order to avoid the death penalty he pled guilty to eight counts of murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

In his book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950 – 2000, Peter Vronsky describes that time frame as a sort of demonic golden age of murderous predators, both in terms of their activity and their fame. Here’s how I summarized the point Vronsky makes in my review:

The numbers are remarkable. In the 1950s there were 72 reported serial killers in the U.S. In the 1960s, 217, in the ‘70s 605, in the ‘80s 768, and in the ‘90s 669. But then a trailing off, with 371 in the 2000s and 117 in the 2010s.

There’s more to the story than just these statistics. Anyone who reads much in this area will know that these same epidemic years (1970-2000) didn’t just produce a greater number of serial killers but all of the names that are still most recognized today: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Richard Ramirez (the Night Strangler), Jeffrey Dahmer, and many others known almost exclusively by their nicknames: the Hillside Strangler, the BTK Killer, the Green River Killer et al. But since Dahmer, what killers have caught the public’s imagination and the media’s eye in the same way? Vronsky lists off eighteen of the more prominent, only to say “If you haven’t heard of them, you are not the only one. Some didn’t even have monikers.” I count myself among the ignorant, pulling a blank on all eighteen.

Have serial killers changed? Has the way we cover them changed? Or are we just not as interested as we used to be?

And as for after those eighteen post-Dahmer killers I pulled a blank on, here’s another list from Vronksy:

The few hundred “freshmen” serial killers (as opposed to “epidemic era” Golden Age carryovers) apprehended over the last twenty years are just as anonymous as those arrested in the 1990s following Jeffrey Dahmer. Who has heard of Terry A. Blair, Joseph E. Duncan III, Paul Durousseau, Walter E. Ellis, Ronald Dominique, Sean Vincent Gillis, Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr., Mark Goudreau, William Devin Howell or Darren Deon Vann?

Did you catch the name of Ronald Dominique dropped right in the middle there? Because it’s this anonymity that Fred Rosen begins with as well. “You’d think,” he begins, that “the serial killer who killed more victims than any other serial killer in the United States during the past two decades . . . would have been enough to generate books, movies-of-the-week, films, TV-magazine broadcasts, and podcasts.” But that didn’t happen in the case of Dominique.

Why not? “The sexuality of the killer and his choice of victims got in the way.”

I’m not so sure about this. John Wayne Gacy makes Vronsky’s list of famous killers of the golden age, and of course Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the best-known serial killers in history. Both were gay. I think the thing about Dominique is he just wasn’t very interesting in any way. His crimes were merely brutal and callous, without anything about them to make them stand out. He wasn’t a cannibal or a killer clown but just a short, chubby loser without any friends who lived in a trailer hooked up to his sister’s power, drifting from one dead-end job to another (meter reader, pizza delivery guy, etc.) before finally being arrested in a flophouse. The fact that he was for a time a drag performer who liked to dress up as Patti LaBelle was about the only bit of colour in his drab existence. As Rosen’s references to films and movies-of-the-week suggest, Dominique had no star power. Even his crimes weren’t media sexy, with no signature elements, which left the police able to work in relative peace because the murders weren’t being played up. Indeed, they were barely covered at all.

Invisibility is a super power enjoyed by many serial killers. I don’t mean this in reference to Dominique’s mostly invisible victims, though that was in play here. A lot of serial killers prey on victims who are not immediately missed when they disappear. I think Rosen is probably right when he says that “Dead black men, gay or not, doesn’t sell on the news,” and that “If Dominique had only chosen different victims, whose lives were more valued by society, then the state might have acted earlier.” But that’s not what I mean by invisibility.

What I mean is that Dominique was himself someone who nobody cared about. When finally arrested few people believed him capable of killing so many people, and this was not a moral judgment. He was just so unprepossessing. This in turn allowed him to work quietly for nearly a decade without anyone seeming to notice. He didn’t seek notoriety by writing letters to the police or to newspapers, but at the same time he did little to conceal his tracks. Even his use of a condom when raping his victims was probably attributable to his fear of infection, as he was a pronounced hypochondriac, rather than a desire not to leave any DNA evidence.

In such cases I’m reminded of the scene in The Collector where the kidnapped Miranda says to her captor Freddie “Look, people must be searching for me. All of England must be searching for me. Sooner or later, they’re going to find me.” He coolly replies: “Never. Because, you see . . . they’re looking for you, alright, but nobody’s looking for me.” Like Dominique, he was invisible.

And so “the worst serial killer of the new millennium” is someone even true-crime buffs may know nothing about. Rosen tries to build him up, saying things like “If Dominique were a nineteenth-century gunslinger, he would have twenty-three notches on his gun,” but it just doesn’t work. Dominique wasn’t a gunslinger, but a violent, lonely, and bitter gay man who may have been motivated to kill people as much by boredom as anything else.

I can’t say I really liked the book. I found it disappointing. Perhaps a lot of this was because I had been looking forward to it, seeing as I’d never heard of Dominique before this. But I subsequently felt like I got more information out of a 40-minute documentary I watched on his murderous career than I did from Rosen. I appreciated the book clocking in at under 200 pages, but one effect of being so quick was that the events started to blur and it got hard to keep track of Dominique’s location and employment at various times. The photo section at the back was inadequate and I felt like maps of the region would have been really helpful. There were also a number of little flourishes I didn’t care for, like the aforementioned references to the notches on a gunslinger’s gun. Another moment came when an acquaintance of one of the victims describes him as being “a little off mentally” and so incapable of selling dope. “Not that you had to be smart to be a drug dealer,” Rosen can’t help adding. I thought this was being flip. I think that to be a successful drug dealer (meaning at a minimum one who is capable of making a bit of money and staying out of jail) you probably do need to be pretty smart.

Noted in passing:

“Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer”? This struck me as a bit of cover-bait sensationalism on at least two counts. First: what was the competition? While I’m no great student of serial killers, I had heard of the infamous Axeman of New Orleans. Wasn’t he more gruesome? He did hack people to death with an axe, after all. Second: is “gruesome” the right word? The dictionary definition is “inspiring horror or repulsion,” but I think every serial killer does that. The actual etymology goes back to a Germanic word for “shiver.” Personally, I’ve always linked it to gore. But Dominique didn’t butcher his victims. In fact, he seems to have been a tidy killer, leaving very little in the way of physical evidence behind. Rosen tells us that during his taped confession, “the gruesomeness of [Dominique’s] crimes made even seasoned pros cringe,” but I don’t know what evidence there was for that. Dominique raped his victims and then strangled them, disposing of their bodies later by throwing them on the side of the road. Which, while brutal behaviour, isn’t what I’d characterize as gruesome.

Sticking with preliminaries, the epigraph comes from Ernest Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” This is a blustering bit of machismo taken from a column Hemingway wrote for Esquire magazine about fishing that later turned into the core of The Old Man and the Sea. I don’t know what it has to do with Dominique’s hunting humans. He certainly didn’t hunt armed men, the most dangerous game, but rather, like most serial killers, sought out the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

In my notes on Monster I was impressed at the number of gay bars in big cities. Apparently there were 8 in Milwaukee at the time, and over 70 in Chicago. According to Rosen, in the 1990s there were “exactly two gay bars” in the town of Houma, Louisiana. This surprised me, as the population of Houma was only around 30,000 at the time, and it doesn’t seem like it was a very “metro” community. I live in a university town of just over 140,000 and when I checked online we didn’t have any gay bars, but only LGBTQ-themed nights at a couple of establishments.

The attempt to take fingerprints from one of the victim’s skin is something that one of the detectives learned from watching CSI. “Somewhere,” Rosen writes, “CSI star and producer William L. Peterson must be smiling. His TV show was helping to solve a real-life serial-killer case!” That’s a feel-good moment, I guess, but it made me wonder why a homicide detective hadn’t picked up on this from any of his training.

Takeaways:

If a stranger asks if he can tie you up, the correct answer is always No.

True Crime Files

Empty Promises and Other True Cases
By Ann Rule

The crimes:

“Empty Promises”: Jami Hagel married Steve Sherer in 1987 but things didn’t go well. Sherer turned out to be a nasty drunk and a violent control freak. Jami disappeared in 1990 and ten years later Sherer was convicted of her murder, though her body was never found. Later, while in prison, Sherer tried to hire someone to kill his in-laws.

“Bitter Lake”: a brutish man beats his ex-girlfriend and her 3-year-old son to death.

“Young Love”: when a young fellow’s girlfriend breaks up with him and heads off to university he continues to stalk her and eventually blows himself up in her dormitory.

“Love and Insurance”: a gay librarian meets up with a man who promptly gets him to take out a life insurance policy.

“The Gentler Sex”: two stories both dealing with women who enlist partners in plots to kill their husbands. The second woman doesn’t realize she’s trying to hire an undercover cop to do the hit.

“The Conjugal Visit”: a convicted kidnapper and killer escapes from a motel while enjoying a conjugal visit . . . with his niece. Such visits were new at the time and the system clearly had a few bugs.

“Killers on the Road”: a pair of bad guys rob a bank and go on a murder and kidnapping road trip.

“A Dangerous Mind”: a woman lets her brother stay with her in Seattle, forgiving of the fact that he is a violent psychopath. He kills her daughter.

“To Kill and Kill Again”: 18-year-old Gary Grant kills and rapes a couple of young women and then a couple of even younger boys.

“The Stockholm Syndrome”: a young couple meet up with a killer while out camping. He kills the husband and gets the wife to go along with a cover story until she breaks free from his sinister influence. This was also the final story in the Rule collection Without Pity.

The book:

“Empty Promises” runs just over 200 pages and the nine other stories 30-40 pages each. This made sense as there wasn’t as much to them. Ann Rule does her usual proficient job with the material, but it’s very familiar ground, especially for her millions of devoted readers.

But then let’s face it, most murders are pretty routine. As Poirot explains to Hastings in Peril at End House, there are really only a couple of motives for murder, excluding “homicidal mania” and “killing done on the spur of the moment.” The two motives are (1) gain (that is, greed), and (2) crime passionnel: hate, “love that has turned to hate,” or jealousy. Or, as Rule lays it out when describing female killers (and the point she starts out by making is equally applicable to men):

There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love – very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair – or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out the wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.

I don’t know if this is strictly true, but the point about “love or money” – Poirot’s “gain” or crime passionnel – is spot on. Most murders are committed by people who know their victims, and take place in domestic settings. And so the same situations repeat again and again, and we see the same red flags being ignored by those at risk.

The early stories here are of the relationship variety, with the last few being examples of “homicidal mania.” And the relationship angle is always pretty much the same. Rule even gives a road map in her Foreword:

we can see long before relationships escalated to a point where murder was committed, there were lies. There are people, both men and women, who pretend to be someone they are not. They make commitments, agreements, assurances, pledges, and vows – promises – to get what they want. When they abuse the trust of those who believe them, those empty promises often lead to violent death.

This is a bit of a shoehorning to get the book’s title into the mix, but the basic point about escalation stands. Before things get to murder there are usually lots of red flags. In previous reviews I’ve done for the True Crime Files I’ve flagged some of these. For example, my takeaway from All That is Wicked was that

If your whole family is against you marrying someone, best give the matter further consideration. If they become even more insistent that you leave your spouse when the marriage goes south, you should admit you made a mistake and get out before things get any worse. Because they will.

Definitely advice Jami Hagel might have taken in the title story here. Though as I also said in my notes on She Wanted It All, there’s no talking to someone who has convinced him or herself that they’re in love. And this is a point I know I’ll be making again.

Another red flag has to do with partners suddenly taking out large life insurance policies on you. I mean, you’d think that one was pretty obvious but it seems not to have made much of an impact on the unfortunate librarian in “Love and Insurance.” Indeed, life insurance policies play a major role in several of the stories here. Not saying that life insurance is a bad thing, but these policies definitely lead to what’s known in the industry as a moral risk. Rule underlines the takeaway here: “Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read ‘And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance . . . with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me.’”

Other lessons to be learned from relationships that go south in such a dramatic fashion? Well, “open” marriages are probably a bad idea. And if you are planning or in the midst of a divorce it’s best to make a clean break. Don’t go back to the house or agree to a private meeting with your ex (or soon-to-be ex). This is what led to the murder of Charla Mack as recounted in John Glatt’s Love Her to Death. Again, Jami Hagel received due warning about this. Her mother didn’t want her seeing Steve again but she arranged a meeting where he immediately stole her purse. Then she went back to her house after her lover pleaded with her not to. In the story “Bitter Lake” the victim is also warned about meeting up with her brutish ex-boyfriend “but she believed she could handle him.” There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here. If it’s over, it’s over. Don’t just move on, run away and don’t look back.

So if the sort of information you can glean from these cases isn’t new, it is at least useful. That’s one of the benefits of reading enough true crime that it comes to seem generic: the key points and takeaways get drummed into your head. And the early cases here are quite generic, for all their tragedy. Even the book’s cover is a throwaway effort. I originally thought that big red maple leaf meant there was going to be some Canadian content, but there’s none of that. Then there’s a picture of a computer mouse and cord, but most of the stories are quite old, set in the 1970s. And even in the newer ones PCs don’t play any part. So no maple leaves and no computers. That’s a really misleading cover. A wedding ring does play a role in “Empty Promises” and another ring has a particularly nasty part to play in “Bitter Lake,” but that’s it for relevance.

Noted in passing:

“Experts on domestic violence have a rule of thumb; it takes seven beatings before a woman or a man will find the strength and the courage to leave.” I’d never heard of this before. It struck me as high. I would have thought a “three strikes and you’re out of there” rule would have been more the norm. I’m also familiar with the saying that if a spouse or partner hits you once, they’re going to do it again. So once should be enough. I don’t know if it’s always a matter of having strength or courage to leave though. I think a lot of people fool themselves into thinking things are going to get better, and they’ve already got so much invested in a relationship they don’t want to just write it off as a sunk cost in a failed joint enterprise. Of course they should, but that’s another matter.

Takeaways:

You’re most likely to be killed by someone you know, and indeed someone you’re living with. Staying single has its upside.

True Crime Files