Best American Crime Writing
Guest editor Nicholas Pileggi

The crimes:

“The Cheerleaders” by E. Jean Carroll: the tragic lives of cheerleaders at a high school in Upstate New York.

“Our Man in Mexico” by Charles Bowden: a DEA agent working on the Mexican border gets dirty. It comes with the job.

“Should Johnny Paul Penry Die?” by Alex Prud’homme:  a brutal rapist and murderer with a mental disability sits on death row.

“The Outcast” by Pat Jordan: hanging out with O. J. Simpson in Florida.

“Fatal Bondage” by David McClintick: J. R. Robinson escalates from a life of fraud to kinky sex and serial killing.

“Flesh and Blood” by Peter Richmond: ex-NFL player Rae Carruth puts a hit out on his pregnant girlfriend.

“A Prayer for Tina Marie” by Robert Draper: a young woman with lots of personal issues kills her two small children by throwing them off a cliff.

“Bad Cops” by Peter J. Boyer: the L.A.P.D.’s Rampart scandal (bad cops involved with drugs and murder).

“The Chicken Warriors” by Mark Singer: a look into Oklahoma’s cockfighting subculture.

“The Crash of Egyptair 990” by William Langewiesche: a depressed pilot crashes the plane he’s flying, killing everyone on board. Under political pressure, Egyptian authorities don’t accept that narrative.

“Judgment Day” by Doug Most: a man who killed a convenience store clerk twenty-five years earlier faces his parole board.

“The Killing of Alydar” by Skip Hollandsworth: a famed racehorse breaks its leg in what was probably not an accident and then has to be put down.

“The Chicago Crime Commission” by Robert Kurson: an ex-cop now working for the Chicago Crime Commission is still committed to taking down the Outfit, which in the twenty-first century is seen by many as a quixotic quest.

“Under Suspicion” by Atul Gawande: thoughts on delivering better justice through science.

“X Files” by Julian Rubinstein: an Israeli-American TV salesman becomes a high-profile ecstasy dealer but his gangsta life implodes.

“The Day of the Attack” by Nancy Gibbs: an on-the-ground account of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“Anatomy of a Jury” by D. Graham Burnett: a university prof serves on the jury of a murder trial in New York City.

The book:

I was sorry to see this series canceled. This was the first volume (2002), and it was still called Best American Crime Writing. In 2007 it would change its title to Best American Crime Reporting. I’m not sure, but I think 2010 was their last year. When I went to look it up, I couldn’t find any mention of it on the Best American Series Wikipedia page, even under titles “formerly included in the series.” It’s like they hadn’t just canceled the series but tossed it down a memory hole.

That’s too bad, as it was an excellent annual anthology. There was always a good mix of stuff from top-shelf publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and GQ as well as less well-known regional outlets. The different sorts of crime, and perspectives on them, were also enjoyable, even if some stories seemed to go outside the series’ remit. In this book, for example, there’s a story on cockfighting but cockfighting, however disreputable, isn’t a crime, or at least wasn’t in Oklahoma at the time.

Because these are examples of crime reporting they are very much of the moment, which led me to go to the Internet to find out how some of them turned out. For example, in 2008 Penry reached an agreement where he is now serving three consecutive life sentences and is off death row. Subsequent U. S. Supreme Court jurisprudence has held that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities is unconstitutional, but the question of defining intellectual disability and whether a person is eligible for the death penalty remains the tricky part.

Some of the stories I didn’t care for. The 9/11 piece by Nancy Gibbs felt slapdash and overly dramatic, but apparently it was written in a day or two on a tight deadline after the attack. Something about Burnett’s account of jury duty sounded familiar and when I checked (I had to check) I found I’d reviewed his book-length treatment of the same material over twenty years ago. I called it “pretentious, self-dramatized nonsense” then, and reading over my review I’m inclined to agree with my younger self. With the benefit of hindsight, it also stands as an early example of the genre of true-crime memoir that I’ve since come to despise so I’d probably be even harsher on it today. But that’s a judgement I won’t be putting to the test as reading the story sure didn’t want me to go back and take another look.

For a collection like this it’s hard to point to much in the way of connecting threads. At least among the early stories though I did find the recurring theme of bad fathers to be interesting. In the O. J. Simpson story the refrain that he’s a family man becomes a sort of punchline delivered by his lawyer at regular intervals. When J. R.  Robinson was released on parole in 1991 (he’d been convicted of a series of frauds) his supervising psychiatrist described him as “a devoted family man who has taught his children a strong value system.” That wasn’t meant as a joke, but it registers as bitter irony. Tina Marie may have been sexually abused by her stepfather, and is, at least on some level, described as searching for a father for her young children before giving up on the quest, and them. And Rae Carruth is the ultimate bad dad, thinking nothing of having his latest baby mommy murdered. I’m sure being a father isn’t always easy, but these are all examples of epic fails. And bad parenting is really what gets a lot of things rolling downhill.

It’s a first-rate collection, and as I said at the top I’m sad the series didn’t stick. With most news media, “if it bleeds, it leads” is still a good rule of thumb that especially holds true in cases of crime writing/reporting. Maybe what this series needed was more violence. Honestly, I don’t understand why it wasn’t more successful. Perhaps the writing, which only on a couple of occasions strays into “literary” territory, was a little too polished and highbrow. When targeting a genre audience it’s important to know your market.

Noted in passing:

In 1993 Robinson moved into a mobile home development in Missouri named Southfork after the family ranch on the TV show Dallas, which had ended its run a couple of years earlier. The streets were all named after characters on the show: Sue Ellen Avenue, Cliff Barnes Lane, etc. I thought this was so bizarre I went online to see if it still existed. I’m not sure if it does, but there are apparently other such communities in other states even today. I just can’t imagine.

Everyone, or nearly everyone, who has had the misfortune of actually having to deal with an insurance company (aside from just giving them money) knows how difficult and unpleasant a process it can be. No, they don’t just show up on your doorstep with a cheque to compensate you for your loss. They’d like to, but there’s some fine print that says they can’t. And then there’s the deductible and other issues like if you’re going to replace whatever it is you’ve lost and with what. So whatever money you do get turns out to be a joke.

That is, unless the payout is really, really big. Then they don’t care at all. They’ll just give you a boatload of money, no questions asked. This is the standard operating procedure that at least one insurer pushed back against in Dead in the Water, while others just figured it was easier to give the scuttled ship’s owner whatever he wanted, despite the fishy circumstances. It was also the case in the story here about the racehorse Alydar. Again there was plenty of reason to be suspicious, but the insurer made no attempt to investigate or challenge the initial findings with regard to Alydar’s death and simply paid off the claim.

“It was as if those who made a living off the big horse farms – like the insurance adjusters and the veterinarians – realized it was not in their best interests to rock the boat,” Tomala [the FBI agent who pursued the case] says now. “Why risk losing any future business by asking too many questions?”

This is exactly the line taken by the ship insurance companies. Basically they’re fine with eating huge losses from rich clients but will rarely miss the chance to nail the little guy to the floor. That’s the way the system works. It’s the way it’s designed to work.

Takeaways:

You should probably be suspicious of anyone who presents himself as a devoted family man. Devoted family men are not that common, and they certainly don’t brag about it.

True Crime Files

In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders
By James Jessen Badal

The crime:

A serial killer stalked Cleveland in the 1930s, leaving chunks of his dismembered victims scattered about in different places. He was never captured, and to this day it’s still debated how many people he may have killed, though he’s usually credited with an even dozen.

The book:

In his Introduction to what is still the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the Cleveland killings, James Jessen Badal mentions how he complained to a newspaper staff writer “about the sheer amount of digging sometimes required to nail down relatively minor facts,” and how he “could work for days hunting information that would yield only half a sentence of finished text.” “‘You’re writing a book of record,’ he [the staff writer] remarked casually – his way of reminding me such frustrations went with the territory.”

In the Wake of the Butcher is the kind of book that true crime aficionados really appreciate, being “a book of record” on the famous series of killings that rocked Cleveland in the 1930s. Badal mentions Philip Sugden’s masterful The Complete History of Jack the Ripper as a sort of model, which is aiming high indeed but I don’t think he’s far off. A later, more popular book, American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper by Daniel Stashower, covers a lot of the same ground (while putting more of a focus on Ness), but I still prefer Badal’s work not just as a source but for its quickness and readability.

Of course, being a book of record does involve the odd “just the facts” data dump. For example, this isn’t how you want to set a scene:

Monday, September 23, was a pleasant fall day in Cleveland with a high of 71 degrees. After school at about 5:00 in the afternoon, two young boys – sixteen-year-old James Wagner of 4511 Gallup Avenue and twelve-year-old Peter Kostura of 4465 Douse Avenue – tossed a softball back and forth along the upper edge of Jackass Hill, a sixty-foot slope on the south side of Kingsbury Run where short stretches of both East 49^th and East 50^th meet the gully.

Thankfully, there isn’t too much of this. Instead, Badal moves things along briskly and the material is well organized around chapters dealing with each of the discovered bodies followed by a round-up of the possible suspects.

There’s no denying it’s a puzzling case. There was an abundance of evidence, but it pointed in different directions and the police didn’t have the forensic capabilities to test it as thoroughly as they would today. And so questions proliferate.

So, for starters: “When he disposed of his victims, the Butcher seemed to manifest an odd combination of obsessive neatness and casual sloppiness. Or, despite appearances, was everything carefully arranged? Was there some dark, obscure personal meaning behind every detail of the scenes he left behind?”

Moving on to other basic questions: Was there any significance to the way the bodies were cut into pieces, or was that just something the killer did to make their disposal easier? Was there a sexual element to the killings, given that some of the male victims had been emasculated? But then women were killed as well and there was no evidence of specifically sexual violence. Some heads were never found – did the killer keep them, or just dump them some place where they were less likely to turn up? And why did the killer drop off body parts, even from the same body, in different places? Why were they wrapped up or put into boxes? “Is there some pathological explanation for this,” Badal asks, “or are the reasons purely practical?” Why was there evidence that some of bodies had been chemically treated? Did the Butcher kill all of them or were some of the bodies stolen from a morgue? Was there a single killer, or a pair of killers at work? Or perhaps a killer cult? Were the victims linked in some way? And who were the victims? Only two, possibly three, were ever identified. Were they all transients?

All of these questions have to be kept in mind when evaluating the various suspects. Though in fact there seems to have been only one suspect  who was seriously considered. Despite the arrest and eventual police murder (as it almost certainly was) of the pathetic Frank Dolezal, he almost assuredly had nothing to do with the killings. Nor did any of the other individuals Badal mentions. Which leaves us with Dr. Francis (Frank) Edward Sweeney.

Sweeney fit the very basic profile that detectives came up with, ticking the boxes of being a former doctor, a big man, and mentally disturbed. Eliot Ness, for one, seemed convinced of his guilt. But despite hauling him in for extensive (and extra-legal) questioning, there was never any hard evidence connecting him to the murders. One thinks of the oft-quoted wisdom of Sherlock Holmes (oft-quoted by Holmes himself): that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I’ve never understood this, as when you rule out the impossible all you’re left with is the possible, which is not necessarily the truth, or the actual.

The reason such an aphorism is misplaced in the case of the Butcher is that it suggests that when you rule out all the other suspects, the only one left, Sweeney, must be the perp. But this is a step that goes much too far. Sweeney is only the most likely of the available suspects. “I roughly estimate that we have checked approximately 7300 suspects in connection with these crimes,” the lead detective on the case, Peter Merylo, would relate in his memoirs, “and it is very doubtful whether the real torso killer was ever amongst them.” Of course, at this distance, and with all of the original police reports having disappeared, it’s impossible to be conclusive, but I’m inclined to agree.

I’ll end with just a couple of notes on the supporting material. On the plus side, for those with strong stomachs there are lots of pictures, including grisly shots of body parts both in situ and at the morgue. On the other hand, there are only a few maps and these are lousy: difficult to read (unless you’re already familiar with Cleveland streets) and with none of the key locations marked (accompanying text tells you where to look). So a hit and a miss there.

Noted in passing:

Americans have gotten bigger over the last several generations, growing both taller and wider. Obesity has been described as an epidemic, affecting some 1/3 of the population and contributing to a decline in average lifespans for the first time since they started keeping records of such things.

What has also changed is the public perception of obesity. Once upon a time appearing to be well fed was a sign of one’s affluence, which it may still be in certain parts of the world. But in the U.S. being overweight is now largely seen as a marker of lower class lifestyles involving little exercise and lots of junk food.

Given this sad state of affairs, it was interesting to return to the world of yesteryear when people, and especially poor people like the denizens of Kingsbury Run, were smaller. This is where Badal’s attention to detail turned up something interesting. Here are the height and weight of some of the Butcher’s (adult male) victims: 5’11”, 150 pounds; 5’11”, 165 pounds; 5’5”, 145 pounds; 5’10”, 145 pounds; 5’5”, 155 pounds; 5’7”, 145 pounds. No evidence of super-sizing there.

By comparison, in 2020 the average U.S. man’s weight was 195-200 pounds.

Takeaways:

There are suspects in any unsolved crime. And some of those suspects may seem more likely than others. But you have to keep in mind that the “most likely suspect” can only be a judgment made from a line-up of available suspects, and in many cases, “none of the above” might be likelier still.

True Crime Files

Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
By Michael Bilton

The crime:

From 1975 to 1980 Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper by the press, killed thirteen women and assaulted many others. The police investigation was widely recognized as having been badly mishandled, leading to a formal inquiry into what went wrong. Sutcliffe himself died in prison in 2020 of COVID-19-related complications.

The book:

A lot of true crime books are ephemeral, rushed into print to take advantage of the particular notoriety of a case in the public’s mind. As a general rule, and it’s only a general rule, the ones that look back with the benefit of hindsight tend to be better. Michael Bilton’s Wicked Beyond Belief is a case in point. It’s more concerned with the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, and draws on a lot of first-hand reporting as well as the Byford Report, which was completed in 1981 but not released to the public until 2006. Bilton had seen the report before then, however, and incorporated some of its findings into the first edition of this book, which came out in 2004. Then in 2006 an updated edition was published with a chapter on the capture of John Humble (“Wearside Jack”), the individual who had pretended to be the Ripper and sent hoax letters and tapes to the police while Sutcliffe was active. So while speculation continues about things like just how many murders and assaults Sutcliffe committed, I think this book will probably stand as the most complete account of the case. At over 700 pages it certainly should be.

That said, it is very much directed at one aspect of the case: the investigation. The depth of detail in Bilton’s coverage, and the length of the investigation, make this the mother of all police procedurals. But luckily for readers, the Ripper killings spawned two classic works of true crime, one being this book and the other Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, a tour de force of immersive journalism which tells the story more from Sutcliffe’s point of view. Some of Burn’s conclusions haven’t held up (his book was published in 1984), but it’s an amazing bit of work that’s full of insight.

Bilton’s book forces us to experience, along with the police, what was a chronicle of frustration. Sutcliffe was interviewed by the police as a person of interest nine times before he was finally arrested on a minor charge having to do with driving with stolen plates. And yet in the final year of the investigation he wasn’t even on a list of “high-grade suspects.” The various threads linking Sutcliffe to the murders were never pulled together.

But what also becomes clear here is that the police not only drove hard, but did some great work as well. The tracking of the five-pound note found at one of the crime scenes and the mapping of the dialect and accent of the voice on the hoax tape to a precise neighbourhood being perhaps the most impressive examples. Unfortunately, the (pre-computerized) system for keeping track of all the leads the police were getting soon broke down under the weight of too much information. The task force also ignored some of the most promising avenues while speeding down a number of dead ends (for example: putting too much emphasis on a specific model of car, and believing the hoax letters and tape to be genuine). Finally, they also had a long run of very bad luck. For example, Sutcliffe’s family gave him alibis, perhaps inadvertently. Witnesses made false or misleading identifications. That sort of thing.

Sutcliffe himself is someone I find to be a real curiosity. He was apparently very low-key and calm in his demeanour, with a stultifying and sterile home life, but his crimes were brutal in the extreme. Beating, stabbing, and biting his victims. Trying to decapitate one with a hacksaw and stabbing another in the eye. Stomping and kicking others. Meanwhile, the sexual motive is blurry. The strange leggings he’d fashioned certainly suggest a kink, but the women don’t seem to have been raped. He targeted prostitutes because they were available, not to have sex with them, either before or after his assaults. Near the end the killing seems to have become almost a chore, though his methods were no less savage.

As I’ve said though, Bilton’s focus isn’t on Sutcliffe but on the debacle that was the investigation. That debacle, with its enormous publicity and expense as well as attendant political fallout, combined to make this “the most important case in British criminal history.”

Noted in passing:

Survivors of Sutcliffe’s attacks described a man with a “Jason King” moustache. This forced me into some online sleuthing, as the television crime/spy drama Jason King only aired for a single season (1971-72) and I’d never heard of it before. In the show, the actor Peter Wyngarde plays Jason King, an author who gets mixed up in various thrilling adventures. He had a long, droopy moustache like Sutcliffe’s but no beard. To be honest, I don’t see much of a resemblance, but as a clue it was better worth following up on than many of the other false leads the police hunted down.

Also, a condom is called a “contraceptive sheath” in England. I thought we got the word “rubber” from over there.

Takeaways:

Bilton helpfully includes in an appendix transcripts of the two police interviews of Sutcliffe where he confessed to the killings. Or at least to most of the killings. What’s interesting about what he says in the interviews is that despite giving himself up he still manages to be extremely dishonest. Some of this is psychologically understandable, even relatable, especially as it pertains to his sexual motivations. But he also lied about things that he seemingly had no reason to lie about. In his first interview, for example, when asked about the murder of Marguerite Walls he responded “You’ve got a mystery on your hands with that one.” But later he had to admit that he’d killed her as well.

I don’t think he’d forgotten. There’s a tendency among the general public anyway to see jailhouse confessions as being reliable, especially where nothing is to be gained from lying. But Sutcliffe wasn’t just a homicidal psychopath, he was a habitual liar as well. Indeed he pretty much had to be the latter out of necessity. Such people don’t stop lying because they’ve been caught. In some ways, I think they basically forget how to tell the truth.

True Crime Files

The Billionaire Murders: The Mysterious Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman
By Kevin Donovan

The crime:

On the morning of December 15, 2017 the bodies of Barry Sherman, the billionaire founder and owner of Apotex, a generic pharmaceutical company, and his wife Honey were found in their North York (Toronto) mansion. They had been strangled in what appeared to be a double-homicide. To this date no one has been charged in the killing.

The book:

The police investigation got off to a rough start, bizarrely assuming that the deaths were the result of a murder-suicide. I can’t understand how this happened, and Kevin Donovan seems to be just as mystified. My own hunch is that, as so often, laziness was more at fault than incompetence. But in defence of the police (and regular readers will know this isn’t something I do reflexively), a couple of things about the initial timeline of the case, items that Donovan glides over to the point where they’re nearly invisible, really leapt out at me.

The bodies of the Shermans were discovered by the realtor who was showing their house to prospective buyers. She was immediately advised by the cleaning lady, who she’d asked to verify that the Shermans were dead, to call the police. She didn’t, and instead called her boss. Then she tried to get in touch with the four Sherman children. “Finally, after a delay of almost ninety minutes from the discovery of the bodies, a call was made to the Toronto Police 911 system.” Within a minute the police were on their way.

My jaw dropped at this. Given the shock of the situation – the bodies of the Shermans had been arranged in a macabre tableau by the side of the home’s underground pool – I think most people would have been phoning 911 as fast as their fingers could punch in the numbers. To have delayed making that call for so long was something I could hardly believe. Then later that evening, when a police detective came to a family gathering to speak to the children, he was questioned why “he was so late in coming to speak to them.” When the detective responded that he had to pick his kids from daycare this “admission struck family members as an indication that the police did not consider this a high priority case.”

From my own experiences dealing with the police, having someone meet with the family later the same day doesn’t indicate any great delay. Coupled with how long it took for the police to be notified of the discovery of the bodies I can’t imagine they were impressed.

The second point in the timeline I flagged was that later that same evening the family received a phone call from a friend advising them to hire private investigators to look into the killings. They were also advised to put “pressure on the police” by getting in touch with friends in high places. What’s striking about these moves is that they came before there was any public reporting of the murder-suicide theory. Only twelve hours after the discovery of the bodies, an adversarial relation to the police (and the media) seemed already well advanced, and that through no fault of the police or the media. The wagons were being circled.

Donovan found the family’s antagonism to the media beyond his understanding, something he could not fathom. My guess is that it comes from a new attitude among the very rich that if you have enough money you get to “control the narrative.” It also goes by the name of entitlement and privilege. I was shocked, again, to find that Donovan’s request to interview the Shermans’ son was rebuffed unless Donovan “agreed in writing to allow him editorial control over any portions of the book or newspaper story that concerned him.” On what planet, I had to wonder, was the son living on to even consider making such a request of a journalist? It’s no place I’ve ever visited.

As of Donovan’s writing, and indeed of my writing this review, the case remains unsolved. This is one way that cases like these hang around. They give rise to all kind of speculation. Everybody has a theory. Donovan’s penultimate chapter, “The Most Likely Scenario,” puts forward a basic outline of how the murders went down, without naming who he thought was behind them. This is understandable, since having finished the book, and followed the case irregularly the few times it’s been in the news, I don’t see any likely suspects. Barry Sherman certainly made enemies, but people who hated him enough to kill both him and his wife? Donovan does narrow things down somewhat though:

Did Barry and Honey Sherman know their killers? I believe so. After spending a year and a half delving into this case, I believe that the killer or killers had an intimate knowledge of the Shermans, including their routines. I also believe that the killer or killers were not trained professionals and that the attempt to make it look like a murder-suicide was a poor one, though it obviously worked for a while.

I’m not sure about that final point. Killing people isn’t easy, and the killer (or killers) here seem to have done a good job of it. Obviously, they didn’t get caught. Furthermore, it’s not clear to me if the aim was to make the deaths look like a murder-suicide, but if it was, working “for a while” was all that was required. I think it’s very possible, perhaps even likely, that whoever actually did the killing was a hired gun.

All of which only gets us so far. Hence the fascination with cases like this. A fascination that’s unlikely to go away, as cold as the trail becomes. I think Donovan’s book is an excellent account of what we know so far, well written and fair minded. The way it’s structured, alternating chapters for most of the way between telling the story of the Shermans and the investigation, helped make up for the fact that I wasn’t that interested in the Apotex story. I didn’t come away with any theory of my own on who was responsible, but if I were a betting man (and I’m not) I’d bet that we will find out eventually. I think more than one person, and probably more than two, know what happened and somebody will talk. But we’ll probably have to wait a while.

Noted in passing:

I remember that as home prices skyrocketed during these years I often found myself asking “Who is buying all these multimillion dollar properties?” The average price of a house in the city I live in was nearly $700,000 at the time of the Sherman murders, and continued going up over the course of the next five years. That’s the average! And my hometown is cheaper than Toronto. Was the average family able to afford housing at this price? And if not, who was feeding this frenzy?

My sense was that the high prices were being driven by big money looking for investment properties or just a place to park some cash. Not a lot of people could afford to buy an average-priced home at this time, especially in cities like Toronto. So was it a relatively few people with a lot of money who were making the market?

The Shermans weren’t average homebuyers. (The house they were killed in was listed for $6.9 million – underpriced, in Barry’s opinion – and they had plans to build a new mansion in Forest Hills that was going to cost them around $30 million all-in.) But apparently they did buy a lot of houses. For example, their youngest daughter “through a series of companies headquartered at Apotex, purchased several residential properties in Toronto (each cost between $2 million and $4 million), which she rent[ed] out to tenants. Sherman friends say Barry supported her financially in this venture as a way to provide her income she could consider her own.” Elsewhere in the book various other instances are given of his involvement in buying multi-million dollar properties in different sorts of arrangements. “Barry did so many unusual things with real estate,” one family friend tells Donovan.

Takeaways:

The difference between being rich and being poor is that when you’re poor nobody cares if you live or die and when you’re rich people want to kill you. Most people would still prefer to be in the latter group.

True Crime Files