Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation
By Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane

The crime:

For a period of three weeks in October 2002 a pair of men – John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo (the latter aged 17 at the time) – terrorized the Washington D.C. metropolitan area by killing 10 people and injuring several more in a series of random sniper attacks. Prior to the sniper outbreak they had committed a number of other deadly attacks across the U.S. After their conviction on multiple counts of murder Muhammad was executed by lethal injection and Malvo sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

I think the word “terrorized” in the title is particularly apt. While it’s hard to think of Muhammad and Malvo as domestic terrorists since they didn’t seem to have any political agenda, they really did scare the hell out of people living around D.C. in these weeks. Sudden death might strike anyone randomly, even out-of-doors in public areas like parking lots and gas stations. Where was anyone safe? Only staying at home with the doors locked and the curtains drawn.

I say this off the top because for all the horror of these crimes, there was also something comic about the snipers’ reign of terror. I even found myself laughing at their failed attempts to take credit for the murders and so get the attention of the media. They were the biggest news story in the country and tried on multiple occasions to open lines of communication to the public and the police but couldn’t get anywhere. No one would believe they were the snipers. Wandering from pay phone to pay phone, they called the tip line, the FBI (four times), and CNN, all in vain. “Frustrated at their inability to be taken seriously,” they felt that the only thing they could do was escalate.

This must have really made them angry. Unlike terrorists looking to draw attention to a cause, Muhammad and Malvo were just into playing God. They even instructed the police to “Call me God.” They liked to exercise absolute control over the lives of others. And they couldn’t get anyone to take their calls!

This desire to play God is all the motive I can come up with. Muhammad was the prototype of the violent, bitter loser whose life had reached a breaking point. Things may have kicked off with his trying to kill his second ex-wife, who he was in a custody battle with, and then spiraled out of control after that. As one ATF agent speculated in the early days of the investigation, “the shooter was one very angry guy, on some kind of personal mission.” For his part, Malvo made some claims to having a larger political agenda and dying for “the revolution,” but this was only after he’d been caught, and much of what he had to say simply didn’t make any sense. For example, declaring that he hated white people but killing people of various races.

Profilers weren’t of much use. Even the ones who took to the airwaves:

The consensus of TV profilers was that the person responsible for these shooting was most likely a white man with a military background, familiarity with firearms, and a grievance. Detectives chuckled that it was the same profile the experts always seemed to produce, no matter what the case. One retired FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, could see no real motive. “You’re down to the thrill of the kill,” he said. “Playing God. Having the power over these individuals. Life and death. That’s real heady, a real rush. He’s on a high now.”

Does any of this bring us closer to understanding the odd relationship between the two? Muhammad presented Malvo as his son, and friends who saw them together thought their interactions were very much a “father-and-son deal.” In jail Malvo would also insist that he be called John Lee Muhammad and be referred to as Muhammad’s kid. People considered him to be “enchanted” or under a “spell.” Was there more to their relationship than this? At trial, Malvo’s attorney took the line that Malvo had been groomed, even “sissified” by the older man, “just as surely as a potter molds clay.” But while there was speculation about a sexual relationship this was hotly denied (“We Jamaicans don’t play that”) and one could even wonder about how dominant a figure Muhammad was. It’s still unclear, for example, who did the shooting, though I think the common understanding is that Malvo was the usual trigger man as he was a better shot. It’s also the case that Malvo was the one who made the phone calls to the media. Was this a case of folie à deux, or shared psychopathy? Obviously it was to some extent, but I’m still unsure of the actual dynamics. And it’s unlikely we’ll ever know more.

(As an aside, it’s mentioned at one point that the police were having difficulty fitting the killings into one of the “five standard motives for homicide.” I wasn’t aware of these, but they’re listed as greed, power, revenge, hate, and escape. These seem too general to be very helpful to me. I would have thought there’d be quite a bit of overlap, for example, between power, revenge, and hate.)

Adding to the mystery of motive is the fact that this was a very odd murder spree. I can’t think of any other cases quite like it. Subsequently there were a pair of serial sniper attacks in 2003 (in Ohio and West Virginia), but they weren’t really comparable. There had been four victims in total in those two cases, and both times the sniper worked alone. And of course Charles Whitman had killed more than a dozen people when he shot up the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, but that had been a single event. The D.C. snipers were something different.

That uniqueness, and the terror that I started off talking about, is one reason why their rampage is still remembered today. At least I remember it well. Talking to a couple of friends (both older than me) while I was reading this book, however, I was surprised that neither of them had any recollection of the attacks at all. To be sure, many crime stories attract an enormous amount of media attention at the time, and over the course of a trial, only to be completely forgotten a few months, or even weeks later. How many people remember Scott Peterson, Casey Anthony, or Jodi Arias today? Only true crime junkies. But I would have thought this case on another level.

The book itself is adequate, or even better than that, being written by a pair of Washington Post reporters who covered the story. In a just-the-facts manner the bullet path for each killing is described precisely, which is a surprisingly effective approach. The opening killing of James D. Martin sets the tone:

The bullet struck Martin square in the back, slicing through his suit jacket and dress shirt and leaving a tiny hole in his skin one-eighth of an inch wide, smaller than the head of a plastic push pin. It cut through vertebra T7, below his shoulder blades, and severed his spinal cord, instantly paralyzing his lower body. Slowing down, it tore a slightly upward path, perforating his aorta, the main trunk of his cardiovascular system; the pulmonary artery to his lungs; and the pericardium, the membrane surrounding his heart. There was little deflection en route and almost no fragmentation as the bullet burst through his sternum, making a hole three-quarters of an inch by one-half inch shaped like a piece of broken glass. Later, at the autopsy, the medical examiners would find on his neck a tiny shard of gray metal that looked like lead.

Martin began to fall as soon as his spinal cord was cut. The catastrophic drop in blood pressure cause by his other wounds would have then led to swift unconsciousness. The brain carries only about a ten-second reserve of oxygen. A witness heard him moan and saw him crumple onto his left side, losing his glasses. He struck his face on the blacktop, gashing his nose and forehead.

If the keynote for these killings was terror or fear, it’s moments like these that underline their horror. I think it’s explicit without being exploitive, and authenticates the violence in a way that really brings it home.

Noted in passing:

When Muhammad was finally apprehended his wallet contained “a phone card, Muhammad’s Washington State driver’s license, three fake ID cards, and $32 in Canadian money.”

I guess he had the Canadian money because he’d been living for a while close to the Canadian border, but it’s never mentioned in this book if Muhammad ever visited Canada and he certainly hadn’t been there recently. According to Malvo’s testimony the two had planned to escape to Canada at some point so maybe there was a reason for it, though $32 wouldn’t have taken them far.

But why do people keep thinking they can escape to Canada anyway? What do they think Canada is? I mentioned this before in my review of Let’s Kill Mom but the killer kids in that book lived in Texas and weren’t too bright so you could perhaps forgive them for thinking Canada was a sort of Cuba with snow. Muhammad should have known better, and probably did.

Takeaways:

It’s best to ignore attention-seekers, and narcissists in general. But be ready for when they blow up.

True Crime Files

Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story
By Rich Cohen

The crime:

Fotis Dulos was charged with the murder of his wife Jennifer, a wealthy heiress whose family fortune had funded Fotis’s business (building luxury homes) and playboy lifestyle. The two had been involved in a bitter divorce battle, including a fight over custody of their five children. Jennifer’s body, however, was never found and Fotis committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.

The book:

You don’t have to look to hard to see what made this case such a media sensation at the time, with the courtroom surrounded by broadcast anchors and sound trucks. “It was the wealth and privilege, the beauty of the participants, that made it tabloid fodder. The mansions, the money, and the unsolved mystery: Where is Jennifer?” But these same factors also created a backlash:

Some criticized the dozens of national news stories about the case as overkill, saying they were published only because Jennifer was beautiful, wealthy, white. They even had a name for the phenomenon: “missing white woman syndrome.” But it was more than just the surface details that made the story mesmerizing. It was the horror, the universal nightmare, the way death arrived amid the quotidian details of an ordinary American morning. Jennifer had restraining orders, bodyguards, and every possible resource, but when someone is determined to do you real harm, no amount of money can protect you.

I’m not sure though that there was much more here than the “surface details.” Or, as Rich Cohen puts it in his note on sources, “the granularity of the status markers.” Without that backdrop of money, or what Jennifer’s family called “bank” (the privilege, the status, the elite lifestyle) this was one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest, true crime story in the book: angry, controlling husband kills his wife in the midst of bitter divorce proceedings. Nor would I take the case as standing for the proposition that “no amount of money can protect you” in such situations. Yes Jennifer had some security, but she could have used more. This was premeditated murder, but Fotis wasn’t some criminal mastermind with a foolproof plan.

The everyday nature, however tragic, of the crime itself leads to the question of why we find the suffering of rich people more interesting than those of others. We don’t live like them and so can’t relate on that level. So maybe we just like to see how dysfunctional our socioeconomic elites are. To have all that wealth and privilege and still be trapped in such an unhappy life does make you consider what’s really important. It’s interesting that one of Jennifer’s early boyfriends, Tom Beller, recognized this and described her life as the proverbial gilded cage:

Life was too easy with Jennifer, explained Tom, who believe in the upside of the downside. Discomfort builds character, giving you the needed material to write. There was no grit with Jennifer, no sand in the gears. That bothered Beller; the relationship felt like a trap, like a feather bed he couldn’t escape.

I think money, or the good life more generally, really is this kind of a trap. But of course that has never stopped anyone from trying to get more of it. Certainly one such person was Fotis Dulos. An ambitious Greek immigrant, the good life in America (and he first met Jennifer when they were students together at Brown) turned his head completely. “He wanted the most and the best: big houses, luxury travel, power boats, yachts.” But for all of his talk of being an Old World and Old School man of traditional patriarchal values, he was really just a Eurotrash gigolo who liked to play at being a playboy and man of business. In fact, without Jennifer’s (and specifically her father’s) money he would have been a quick bankrupt. I honestly don’t know what women saw in him, but I guess he was cute and had charm. I wouldn’t have thought that was enough to get him as far as he got though.

In the case of Jennifer it seems to have been most obviously a case of “baby rabies.” She was a woman in her 30s who wanted to settle down and have a bunch of kids. This meant she was “just about out of time” and had to get going. Fotis was available. Indeed not just available:

A psychopath is a chameleon. He sees what you want, then becomes that thing. It’s unfortunate that Jennifer Farber met Fotis Dulos when she was vulnerable, when she feared her window on motherhood was closing. Fotis’s talent was to recognize Jennifer’s problem and turn himself into the solution.

That said, Fotis seems to have had no trouble pulling other attractive women anytime he felt the need. Were they just stupid? “How crazy is this dumb girl?” one observer asked of the lover who took Jennifer’s place. Were they chasing notoriety? Or were they like the woman who became his girlfriend after his arrest, a graduate magnum cum laude with a successful career in wealth management who was attracted to the “doomed, forsaken, damned, and dangerous”? The technical term for this is hybristophilia and it’s just one of those things you have to shake your head at.

Fotis’s own psychopathy took some odd turns as well. He went to his grave with a suicide note insisting on his innocence (the murder was “something I had NOTHING to do with”). I thought this strange in at least a couple of ways: to still be claiming innocence when his guilt was obvious, and for killing himself. But according to one expert Cohen interviewed it makes sense, or is at least “typical of the behavioral profile of a psychopath. No remorse. These are people who see the world through the filter of narcissism – no matter what, they are the victims.” Or, in terms we’ve all become more familiar with: “It’s like a suicide note written by Donald Trump. It’s everyone’s fault but his own.”

Another psychiatrist further observed: “That is what makes them [narcissistic psychopaths] suicide risks. You would think somebody so egotistical would not kill themselves, but they will if it’s to protect their ego and self-image, which to them is more important than living.” That’s something else you have to shake your head at. Their self-image is more important than their life. The image becomes a sort of idol that they worship, something greater than the self. I think this is connected to the way some narcissists go on about their “legacy.” What they really want is to be immortal, and a legacy is the only way this can be accomplished. So they become willing to sacrifice anything to that end. In life, the one thing they can’t stand is being ignored. In death, the worst fate they can imagine is to be forgotten, or to leave the stage with any stain on their reputation.

This is a good book, in large part because Cohen is writing about a world he felt connected to. This makes him different from his audience. As I began by pointing out, few of us have any real awareness of how the very rich live, and so we can’t relate to them on that level. But Cohen can, and it’s what drew him to the story:

Though the world is big, the world is also small, and while reporting this story, I kept running into reflections of my own experience. Maybe that’s why I became so fixated not only on Jennifer’s disappearance and death but also on her life. In reading about her, in visiting the places she had been and talking to the people she had known, I felt like I was seeing the story of my own generation in a convex mirror – distorted but recognizable.

I don’t know which of the two worlds Cohen says Jennifer inhabited – uptown or downtown – he identified with the most, but in both cases he manages to present himself as something of an insider. Not in any kind of a gossipy way but just as someone who knows the lay of the land, the rules and the roles. I found the insights he provided, particularly in the behaviour of Jennifer’s father, to be of real value in coming to a fuller understanding of the case and its tragedy.

Noted in passing:

“A mistress is more expensive than a wife.” Well, it depends. A mistress is certainly cheaper than an ex-wife.

“According to Wikipedia, J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash is the story of ‘car-crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.” According to Wikipedia? Come on, Rich. Read the book. Or at least watch the movie.

Before Michael Jordan shaved his head in 1988, men clung to their hair, no matter how little of it they happened to have. If three wisps remained, they prized those wisps, which they gelled and combed back to front. Such men were in search of “coverage.” In some cases, that meant long in back, spare on top. In others, it meant miracle treatments, Rogaine, implants, or hair plugs. But after Michael Jordan shaved his head and appeared on TV as a chrome-domed futuristic warrior, a certain sort of man, seeking to join the ranks of the powerfully neat, shaved the wisps and faced the world pure and bald – on the field, in front of students, and in the courtroom. For the most part, these bald professionals tended to be of a certain class – aspirational graduates of schools not one but two tiers below Ivy. They were strivers, the last believers in the dream. They drove BMWs and Audi 2000s and played adult softball on the weekend. While others downed Gatorade or talked about stocks on the sideline, they wiped the seat from their bald heads with a single confident towel stroke.

Sure this is a caricature, but caricature works by exaggerating some truth. That said, I felt it was being a bit mean.

There was some good news to come out of this sordid affair, and it has to do with a situation that I’ve noted several times already in these True Crime Files.

Just to cut and paste a bit of background: in two previous books by John Glatt (Love Her to Death and Tangled Vines) I’ve made mention of how bad an idea it is for women to meet up with their exes, or soon-to-be-exes, on their own. In both of those books the wives in question ended up being murdered. In The Doomsday Mother there was a gender reversal in that it was Lori Vallow wanting to meet with her estranged husband Charles. Charles had a bad feeling about this, and even mentioned to Lori’s brother Adam some misgivings. He ended up being shot to death by Lori’s other brother Alex.

In this book Fotis had befriended another fellow, named Mawhinney, who was in the midst of a bitter divorce. They may have entered into some kind of agreement, with Fotis getting rid of Mawhinney’s wife, a woman named Monica, if he would return the favour and take care of Jennifer. To this end Fotis met with Monica at a restaurant and tried to convince her to come back to his house where, he told her, she could meet with her husband and reconcile. Since Monica had taken out a protective order against her husband she sensibly wanted no part of this, and turned the offer down despite Fotis’s insistence. When she got home she reported what had happened to her lawyer and to the police:

“Dulos abruptly paid the bill and left when [Monica] “felt she was being ‘baited’ and was uncomfortable with the fact that Dulos kept inviting her back to his residence. She stated that she believed that Dulos was ‘indebted’ to Mawhinney and that she believed Dulos was working on behalf of Mawhinney to get rid of her. She believed ‘Mawhinney wanted her dead.’”

You think? In fact, there was evidence that they’d already dug a grave for her. So just to underline a lesson that’s now come up several times: don’t agree to meet an ex on your own! When it’s over, it’s over.

Takeaways:

I know it’s a double standard, but a consciously hypergamous man is always a contemptible figure. What’s more, they know how other men view them and that just makes them worse.

True Crime Files

The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place
By Kate Summerscale

The crime:

John Reginald Christie lived on the ground floor of a building at 10 Rillington Place in London. In 1949 a man named Timothy Evans lived on the top floor of the same building along with his wife Beryl and newborn daughter Geraldine. When Beryl and Geraldine were discovered to have been strangled, Evans was tried and found guilty of their murder and executed. Christie was a key witness at his trial.

In December 1952 Christie strangled his wife Ethel. In 1953 he would go on to kill another three women, concealing their bodies behind walls in his apartment. Shortly after he moved out the bodies were discovered and after a brief manhunt he was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder of his wife. He was hanged in 1953. Subsequent investigations strongly suggest that Christie had also played a role in the murder of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, a crime for which Timothy Evans was posthumously pardoned.

The book:

I want to kick off with a bunch of comments specific to this book.

First: Where are the pictures? I’ve mentioned before in these True Crime Files how photos shouldn’t be considered an extra in a true crime book, any more than maps are in a military history. So why are there none here? Is it because Summerscale finds something prurient or in poor taste about photos? Perhaps in some cases that’s a valid criticism, especially if we’re talking about crime scenes. But why not a picture or two of Christie? Or of the house in Rillington Lane? At a couple of points in the text Summerscale makes reference to pictures, why not show them? We’re told that a newspaper published a panoramic photograph of Rillington Lane, “shadowy and stark as a film noir set.” Don’t just tell us about it! We also have a picture that appeared in the papers at the time described to us as “Christie in his garden, dwarfed by hollyhocks, his cat Tommy on his shoulder and his dog Judy at his feet.” That sounds interesting too. Where is it?

If not including pictures was a conscious decision made for some reason other than expense (and I find that hard to credit since Summerscale is a bestselling author and this is a major hardcover release), it may have been a desire to avoid the “peepshow” or voyeuristic effect. But why is this book even called The Peepshow? The main connection seems to be to a book published by Fryn Tennyson, a crime reporter who covered the case. Otherwise the notion of a peepshow doesn’t have much to do with these killings. Christie did like to take nude pictures of women but there’s no attempt made to build a psychological profile out of this.

Moving past the title, why is the book’s epigraph taken from the story of Bluebeard? Specifically, Bluebeard’s warning to his new bride to stay out of the room containing the bodies of his previous wives. As with the notion of a peepshow, I don’t see the connection to the Christie case. It’s true that at the time at least one newspaper did refer to Christie being “the Bluebeard of Notting Hill,” but this was mere sensationalism. Neither Evans nor Christie were Bluebeard figures. Not even close. And Summerscale doesn’t help her case by attempting to shoehorn in references to the classic fairy tale. After the police left 10 Rillington Place, for example, a pack of neighbourhood women tried to break into the place:

Perhaps their raid on Christie’s house was an act of defiance. Like Bluebeard’s wife, the trespassers wanted to enter the killer’s lair. They wanted to see for themselves the scene of domestic horror in which Ethel Christie had been trapped, and into which those young women had stumbled. Christie’s acts were as irresolvable as a dream or a fairy tale, difficult either to assimilate or to dispel.

An act of defiance? Defiance of what? The property rights of the guy who actually owned the building and was looking to sell it? They were just a bunch of nosey neighbours, destructive rubberneckers looking for a cheap thrill. And what about Christie’s acts made them irresolvable? The bodies were all recovered and Christie was tried, convicted, and executed. This is all just nonsense and again there is no connection to Bluebeard at all.

Moving on from issues I had with The Peepshow to say something about Summerscale more generally as a true crime writer, I’ll confess I’m not a fan of the way she likes to expand her focus in order to take in parts of the story that are only marginal to the main course. Here this takes the form of biographical sketches of two of the reporters covering the case: Harry Procter and the aforementioned Fryn Tennyson. Now these two were interesting characters in their own right, but I didn’t want to read a book about them and in the end they didn’t add anything to my understanding of the Christie case. And once again I was left wondering why Summerscale keeps doing this.

But now back to Rillington Place.

The year was 1953 and England was . . . a very different place. The Second World War took a heavy toll on Britain, and London spent a long time rebuilding from the Blitz. In the U.S. Eisenhower had just been sworn in as president and Leave It to Beaver was only a few years away, political and cultural landmarks of what is now seen in a rosy rearview mirror as a golden age of American greatness. Things weren’t as sunny back in dear old Blighty. Notting Hill and North Kensington have now been gentrified, with Hugh Grant even having a bookshop in the former location, but at the time they were slums. “The ugliest and the most unsafe and the most negro-populated part of London,” in the words of (the progressive, for her time) Fryn Tennyson. “I’ve been in plenty of tough areas in London,” a local business owner said to the Daily Mirror, “but this beats the lot.” I was frankly surprised at the “rank squalor of Rillington Place” described here. 10 Rillington Place was a three-story building (with the confusing British habit of not numbering the ground floor, so the second floor is the first) without electricity so that the rooms were lit with gas. The single lavatory was basically an outhouse. And here’s an account of one of Christie’s victims spending a night at his place, in the company of her boyfriend:

The temperature fell below freezing that night, and they all stayed in the kitchen, the only warm room in the flat. Ina sat in the deckchair strung with rope, Christie perched on a wooden board laid over a coal bucket, and Alex sat in a small wooden armchair. Ina and Christie remained in the kitchen for the next two nights, while Alex slept on the mattress in the bedroom.

Christie’s trial, one paper reported, would reveal a lot of this “shabby underworld of bleak lodgings and even bleaker homes.” But England wasn’t just a primitive, physical wreck. It was also a backward place in its public morality. I mentioned Tennyson’s casual racism, but that is as nothing to what a judge had to say at the trial of a Black man who was renting Christie’s place and also dealing in marijuana a couple of years later. He was arrested in the company of a (white) woman who had some reefers in her handbag. Apparently the man had been showing the flat to curious sightseers. The judge expressed outrage:

“You showed her where the bodies are stored, I suppose. . . . You are a foul beast. It’s a pity we cannot deport you. Very often people like you get hold of these fools of little white girls and supply them with Indian Hemp. Then the girls become the sluts you see in the court from time to time, and later on some of you live on their immoral earnings.”

This from a judge, speaking from the bench! The “little white girl” in the case apparently faced no charges. The man got six months in jail.

The grim social and cultural context doesn’t explain Christie, though it does put his racism into perspective. He was, as Summerscale finally concludes, a figure both familiar and exaggerated, conventional and unique:

Christie was a grotesque cartoon of the old-fashioned Englishman. Like many of his class and generation, he had seemed to adhere to a rigid moral code: he was emotionally reserved, courteous, disapproving of immigrants, prostitutes, pubs and strong liquor, devoted to his pets and his garden, deferential to his social betters, admiring of the police and the army. Because he appeared in many ways so conventional, some commentators were at pains to define his difference. A doctor who attended the Old Bailey trial on behalf of the Daily Herald described him as a “necrophiliac sado-masochist, a hair-fetishist and a psychopath.” A “psychopath,” a term popularised by the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley in 1941, was an individual who appeared normal but was incapable of feeling love, remorse or shame. To label Christie in this way was to identify him as intrinsically alien, and to distance him from the society that had helped forge him, in the same way that calling him a “monster” or a “creature” discounted him as an exception.

It’s hard, but not impossible I think, to sort this out. The key is in understanding that Christie didn’t just present as a conventional or old-fashioned Englishman but really was one in many if not most ways. Summerscale’s evocation of the blighted nature of life in the ‘hood in 1950s London helps us see how this worked. And it might have worked for a lot longer but for the fact that Christie wasn’t very bright and was largely without resources.

The final point Summerscale addresses, as best she can, is Christie’s culpability in the murder of Beryl and Geraldine Evans. She discusses a note uncovered in her researches containing a report of Christie’s “confession” to a guard to both of their murders, but it’s next to impossible to figure out how much stock to put in this as Christie kept changing his story based on whatever temporary advantage he thought he could gain. That said, I thought Summerscale’s scenario was at least a plausible explanation for what really happened, and at this point plausibility is the best we’re going to get.

Noted in passing:

Christie worked a lot of odd jobs, often as a low-level government functionary, suggesting to me that he wasn’t much good at anything and didn’t get along with others very well. At the time of the murders he was unemployed. For a while during the war he worked as a police auxiliary in London, where the more unpleasant aspects of his personality came out:

When Christie was working for the Metropolitan Police war reserve force, from 1`939 to 1943, he had taken pleasure in his role as a law-enforcer. Mrs. McFadden remembered how bossy he had been, in his high-collared blue uniform and peaked cap. He would chastise neighbours for the slightest chink in their blackout curtains, she said: “He threatened to report practically everybody in the street.” A colleague at the Harrow Road police station agreed that Christie’s uniform “gave him a certain status and a sense of power over ordinary people.” He flashed his warrant card about, said his fellow officer, and boasted about the number of people he had arrested.

Whatever sort of closet case Christie was sexually, he was definitely a closet authoritarian. Give these guys a uniform and they think they’re God. We all know the type.

Takeaways:

Respectability is a front that’s almost always hiding something.

True Crime Files

Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
By Abbott Kahler

The crime:

In the late 1920s-early 1930s a bunch of German drifters took up homesteading on the then deserted Galápagos island of Floreana. First to arrive were Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch. They became minor celebrities back home and were soon followed by another German couple: Heinz and Margret Wittmer. Then an eccentric Austrian, the Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet, showed up, along with two lovers: Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Phillipson. The Baroness declared herself the Empress of Floreana and talked of plans of building a hotel there.

The islanders had trouble getting along, and in 1934 the Baroness and Phillipson both disappeared, never to be heard from or seen again. Shortly after, Lorenz hitched a ride on a boat off the island but he and the boat’s captain shipwrecked on another island, where they both starved. And a little later Friedrich Ritter died of food poisoning.

The book:

I got this one out of the library after having seen the 2013 documentary film called The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden. As an unsolved crime story with a surprising amount of evidence in the form of letters, memoirs, and even home movies, there’s plenty of meat on these bones to pick over, and a dramatic version of the same events was even released in 2025, directed by Ron Howard and starring Jude Law as Friedrich Ritter.

Eden Undone came out in 2024, and while it presents a fuller accounting of what happened there still aren’t a lot of answers. To the point where it’s fair to ask if this is really a “true crime” book. Murder is in the subtitle, though technically we don’t know if the charge fits. A couple of people disappeared. Another got sick and died from food poisoning. Was there a murder, or murders? It’s widely assumed, I think fairly, that the Baroness and Phillipson were murdered. But their bodies were never found, and while the idea that they left the island by ship is far-fetched (no ship had been seen visiting Floreana at the time, and neither missing person was ever seen or heard from again), it’s just possible there was some kind of accident. We really don’t know.

That uncertainty is part of what makes the story so interesting. But the stuff we do know is just as intriguing. Life on Floreana was a sort of petri dish, very much like one of today’s reality-TV shows, a real-life Survivor or Big Brother. As such, what it provides is a fascinating study in small-group dynamics, one with lots of psychosexual overlays.

The smell of sex permeated Floreana. One visitor referred to the Baroness’s “hotel” as a “festering sex complex.” Lorenz and Phillipson were her toy boys, with Lorenz being the odd man out in their messy ménage. Apparently all three slept in the same bed together, and the Baroness still wasn’t satisfied, as she tried to seduce both Ritter and Heinz Wittmer as well. If Floreana was an Eden, I think it’s fair to say that she was the serpent in the garden, or the apple of discord, to switch metaphors. She wasn’t any great beauty, but she flaunted what she had and there was little competition. Freidrich and Heinz were probably hungry for something different. Another visitor, upon leaving the island, observed how “man seems to need the conquest of his mate. To be too sure is to become stale. It apparently is more interesting to live with your neighbour’s wife than with your own. There is a real basis in psychology here which can be critically analyzed.” Indeed there is, as even the Bible had something to say about coveting your neighbour’s wife. It’s forbidden fruit, and there we are back in the garden. The fact that both the other couples had adulterous origins probably only made things easier for them to stray.

That said, the Baroness seems to have squandered her competitive advantage by being a royal pain in the ass who rubbed everyone the wrong way, at least eventually. Lorenz was clearly a man past his breaking point by the end of his stay on the island. Dore noticed the gradual development of his “deadly hatred” toward the Baroness and I don’t think she was making that up (though I wouldn’t trust her on much else). Phillipson, probably because there’s less of a written record, remains a cipher to me. Friedrich was a crank, tyrant, and hypocrite, in no particular order. Isolation is the only practical option for such a personality. His plan for being a settler was to have no plan but to “be driven by our id – our inner demon – and its whims.” That’s not always the best idea. Dore, who I would have thought far too ill to have managed under such circumstances, was a self-dramatizing type who had some weird kind of codependency going on, with love-hate feelings rhythmically flaring up. The Wittmers were at least a semi-stable family unit, which probably explains their continued residence on the island. Their descendants still live there today.

Sorting through all of this is difficult, in part because the pile of documentary evidence I mentioned tends to point in different directions. In their letters and memoirs the different players tried to spin the story their own way, and often misrepresented or lied about what happened. As I’ve said, I think there’s a most likely scenario that is understandable, but if the true explanation was something a lot weirder I can’t say I’d be surprised.

Noted in passing:

Whatever you think of the personalities involved, and I think they were a mixed-up bunch, I have to confess to being impressed at how well they made a shift of it. Life on Floreana was a hardscrabble existence, isolated and with few amenities. Ritter was a doctor, but a bit of a quack and medical care was limited anyway. Add to this the fact that Dore had multiple sclerosis, that Margret Wittmer arrived on the island in an advanced state of pregnancy and that the Wittmers’ son was a sickly child, and it’s truly remarkable what they accomplished. I don’t think you could take many people today and plunk them down in such a situation and expect as much. As previously noted, this is the stuff of reality TV now, shows that (however they’re billed) are carefully controlled experiments.

A hundred years ago the islanders were celebrities, and for some reason popular among American millionaires who liked to visit Floreana on their yachts, but in terms of their capabilities I think they were probably pretty average urban citizens of the time. The average was just a higher level of general competence back then.

Takeaways:

If someone indicates that they want to be left alone, you should respect their wishes and leave them be.

True Crime Files

The Best New True Crime Stories: Crimes of Passion, Obsession & Revenge
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto

The crimes:

“I’ve Seen the Dead Come Alive” by Joe Turner: a moody teenager crosses the country to meet a girl he met online who shared his interest in “horrorcore rap.” She is less impressed with him in person and he kills her, her parents, and her best friend.

“Petit Treason” by Edward Butts: in Ontario in the 1870s a woman kills her abusive husband. Despite being an at least somewhat sympathetic case she is sentenced to hang.

“The Crime Passionnel of Henriette Caillaux: The Murder that Rocked Belle Époque Paris” by Dean Jobb: a Parisian society lady shoots and kills the editor of a newspaper, under the assumption that he was going to publish some of her personal correspondence.

“A Young Man in Trouble” by Priscilla Scott Rhoades: the driver of a Brinks armoured car decides to take off with a shipment of “bad money” (old bills slated for destruction).

“The Madison Square Garden Muder: The First ‘Trial of the Century’” by Tom Larsen: Harry Thaw shoots the starchitect Stanford White dead for having corrupted his wife.

“Facebookmoord” by Mitzi Szereto: a social media dust-up between a pair of teenage girls in the Netherlands turns fatal.

“Death by Chocolate” by C L Raven: in Victorian England a woman goes on a rampage poisoning chocolates.

“The Gun Alley Murder” by Anthony Ferguson: a disreputable bar owner in 1920s Melbourne is executed for the murder of a 12-year-old girl. Witnesses against him seem to have been mainly motivated by the offer of a reward for their testimony, and in 2008 a posthumous pardon was issued.

“The Beauty Queen and the Hit Men” by Craig Pittman: a woman has her husband killed as part of the fallout from a messy divorce.

“Because I Loved Him” by Iris Reinbacher: the Sada Abe case. A Japanese geisha/prostitute kills her married lover and cuts off his penis, which she takes with her as a keepsake.

“A Crime Forgiven: The Strange Case of Yvonne Chevallier” by Mark Fryers: a French woman shoots and kills her husband, an eminent politician, when their marriage hits the rocks.

“Bad Country People” by Chris Edwards: a bitter divorced woman enlists the aid of her family in killing her ex and his new wife.

“The Life and Demise of England’s Universal Provider” by Jason Half: the founder of a successful chain of department stores is killed by a man who claims to be his son.

“Revenge of the Nagpur Women” by Shashi Kadapa: at a court appearance, a brutal Indian crime boss is torn to pieces by a mob.

“A Tale of Self-Control and a Hammer” by Stephen Wade: a British man kills his wife with a hammer, perhaps out of jealousy but more likely because he wanted to free himself to start over with his lover.

The book:

I quite liked a couple of the other true crime anthologies I’ve read that were edited by Mitzi Szereto (Women Who Murder and Small Towns), but I felt this one came up short.

Just the title suggests a lack of focus. Crimes of passion, obsession, and revenge? That covers a lot of ground, as most crimes are either crimes of passion or committed for personal gain. And even then “personal gain” could be someone’s obsession. (A third category, mental illness or insanity, might fall into or overlap with crimes of passion too.) Then take into account that some of the cases here – like the Brinks guard driving off with bags of cash – still seem to fall outside the book’s broad remit and you basically have a true crime potpourri.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and the stable of writers that Szereto works with are capable enough, but it makes it hard to see the book as a whole as illustrating any one particular theme, even as broad as the triple-barrelled passion, obsession, and revenge. As with her other collections there’s a refreshing geographical diversity (a story each from Japan, India, Australia, and Canada, with two from France), and a number of historical cases as well. Among the latter are some celebrated crimes that I think most true-crime buffs will be familiar with, like Harry Thaw’s murder of Stanford White (the first “crime of the century”), the Caillaux affair, and Sada Abe’s mutilation of her dead lover. I didn’t think they were necessary to go over again here. Then there are a number of more contemporary stories, a couple of which – “The Beauty Queen and the Hit Men” and “Bad Country People” – that I found too involved and confusing to follow in this format. I like short true crime stories, but if the cast of characters is too big then as a reader you can quickly get lost.

There are few general observations that are new. One story, “Death by Chocolate,” even begins with the evergreen adage “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” (A quick digression. The origin of that phrase is a play by William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697). The actual lines read: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,/ Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.”) The point being one that most people understand and probably even have some experience of. People fall in and out of love. Nobody likes being ditched. When this plays out in cases of murder we most often see men disposing of wives so that they can move on and women taking revenge on husbands who are looking elsewhere. And while poison has been the method of choice for most women in such circumstances (“the perfect way to escape an abusive marriage . . . cheaper than divorce and easier to get away with than bludgeoning an abuser”), in modern times we see guns being used just as often.

There wasn’t much I made notes on. One item that stuck out was in the Australian case of “The Gun Alley Murder.” This was an infamous miscarriage of justice that was apparently at least partially motivated by the large reward offered. As economists tell us, humans respond to incentives. In this case a number of “witnesses” (dubbed “the disreputables” by defence counsel) provided testimony that seemed made up, either for the reward or because of a grudge they had with the defendant. This made me wonder how often rewards actually work. I think most people, if they have information relevant to the solving of a crime, bring it forward freely. In some cases the reward is meant to overcome the stigma, or risk, involved in being a snitch, though I don’t know how often that’s what’s being weighed.

What else does offering a reward do? I suppose it gets attention, but that’s it. This puts rewards in much the same boat as awards in the arts. Those are meaningless and rarely go to the best work, which would be produced anyway. So they’re basically just a form of advertising. Rewards for tips leading to an arrest may work in the same way.

I was curious as to what percentage of these rewards make a difference so did a bit of looking online. According to one report, “A review by the Los Angeles News Group involved a total of 372 rewards offered by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council from January 2008 to April 2013 to solve violent crimes. Only 15 of these rewards were actually paid out to people who provided information that led to convictions.” That doesn’t seem very productive, though I guess you haven’t lost anything if the money doesn’t get paid out. I also found a 2019 NPR story focusing on the Crime Stoppers organization where the people interviewed called rewards “not wildly productive,” even though it’s impossible “to determine how much of a factor Crime Stoppers’ rewards play since tips and payouts are anonymous.”

It seems like we should have a better idea how well rewards work, given that, as the Gun Alley case shows, such incentives can also be abused and lead to perverse outcomes.

Noted in passing:

The sexualisation of young women is not a phenomenon of the Internet age. Evelyn Nesbit was posing for artists and photographers, sometimes in the nude, before making it as a cover girl for major magazines when she was only 16 (“or maybe younger,” as Tom Larsen puts it). Lana Turner was famously discovered when she was playing hooky from high school at the age of 15 (which I believe she later “corrected” to 16, for legal reasons). A casting director was captivated by her physique (read: her bust) and she appeared in her first film the next year in a brief role that earned her the nickname of “Sweater Girl.”

In the 1870s social hierarchies were very much still part of the law:

At that time, the murder of a husband by his wife was still known by the old English common law term “petit treason” (which also included the murder of a master by a servant, and the murder of an ecclesiastical superior by a lesser clergyman). Next to high treason against the monarch or the state, it was officially the worst crime a person could commit.

Something of this attitude persists in the greater criminal liability for shooting a police officer than killing a man on the street. We still have our hierarchies when it comes to things like insurance, health care, and the law. Some lives are worth more than others and considered deserving of greater protection.

Takeaways:

Perhaps the French are more sophisticated in their permissiveness toward men taking mistresses, but that hasn’t stopped Frenchmen paying a price for such behaviour.

True Crime Files

Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation
By Dean Jobb

The crime:

In 1920s Chicago a lawyer named Leo Koretz who had a taste for the finer things in life – married women, nice clothes, big houses, expensive dinners – went into the financial scam business. What this involved was selling shares in a non-existent company called the Bayano River Syndicate that he said had discovered oil in a remote part of Panama. The scam operated as a Ponzi scheme, paying rich dividends out of the money pumped into the stock by new investors. Just before being exposed, Koretz fled Chicago, abandoning his wife and family, and opened a hunting lodge in Nova Scotia under a new identity. He was eventually discovered and returned to the U.S., where he pled guilty to charges of fraud and was sent to prison. He died shortly thereafter, some say from suicide after eating a box of chocolates that put him into a diabetic coma.

The book:

The psychology of the Ponzi scheme has always puzzled me. Not the psychology of those who invest in them; they’re only in it to make a quick buck. Are they suckers? Some of them. But ignorance, if not bliss, is still advisable in such situations, and Koretz didn’t appreciate doubters. So either way, that part is easy to understand.

What I have trouble understanding is what the person operating the scheme is thinking.

As anyone who considers the matter even for a moment knows, a Ponzi scheme always carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The music has to stop. Scams where new money is paid out as supposed returns on investment are “doomed to collapse” because of an inherent flaw: “There is never enough money for all . . . and the inflow of new money must ultimately dry up.”

Knowing all that, what is the end game? Do the  fraudsters who run such schemes just find themselves stuck on a treadmill they can’t get off? Do they think there’s some way they’re going to be able to defer the inevitable crash, if not indefinitely at least until something else comes up? I don’t know.

Koretz seems to have been a particularly complicated case. After his arrest he would claim that he almost came to believe in the oil fields himself:

“I talked Bayano, and planned Bayano, and dreamed Bayano, so that I actually believed the stuff. The idea grew and grew. Every day I spoke more of it until, finally, I was confident. It almost seemed that I had those thousands of acres and that oil down there in Panama.”

Ah, yes. It “almost seemed.” I think in the case of Charles Ponzi this might be close to the truth. But Koretz wasn’t as high on his own supply of bunko. “I knew the bubble would burst,” he also later confessed. And he did have a plan for getting away with it. Not that well thought out a plan, to be sure, but still a plan.

It began by sending a team of his most prominent investors on a trip to Panama to inspect the oil fields for themselves. He told them they would be surprised by what they found, and sent a final cable to them saying only BON VOYAGE, signed by THE BOSS. (In turn, the investors’ cable home would summarize their findings: “NO OIL, NO WELLS, NO PIPELINES, NO ORGANIZATION.”) I had trouble figuring this trip out, and the cruel mockery in that “BON VOYAGE.” The investors felt that being sent to Panama “had been a ploy to get them out of the way while Leo planned his escape,” but I think he must have already made his plans to get away by then and I don’t see where it helped him much to have them out of the country. When later asked about why he’d arranged this wild goose chase when he knew what the investors would find, he replied that he “was disgusted at myself and disgusted at the people who had wealth and demanded something for nothing. . . . And I was indifferent as to how the matter ended.”

There may be some truth in this. I don’t think he was indifferent to his likely fate, as he tried hard to avoid it. I’m also not sure how disgusted he was with himself. But his disgust at the people he conned rings true, in part because he must have seen a bit of himself in their wanting something for nothing.

This is a really good book, but I found it hard to be sympathetic toward Koretz. For example, he restricted his list of investors to friends and family. These were the people he took advantage of? He did give family members large gifts of cash just before he disappeared (money that they, miraculously, returned to the authorities), but targeting those closest to him instead of random strangers reveals a certain degree of heartlessness. It came as no surprise to me that he ditched his wife and children when he pulled a runner, not even bothering to get in touch with them while living a life of pleasure in Nova Scotia.

Women made up a big part of that life of pleasure. And here too one finds it hard to warm to Koretz. Canadian observers referred to his “fickle and insatiable appetite for women,” that saw him “passing from one woman to another like a hummingbird in a flower bed.” He was a good dancer, but aside from that the only source of attraction would have been his ostentatious wealth. That, and what later pick-up artists would describe as “negging”: “I am always indifferent to them,” he’d explain about his way with women, “and sometimes I am downright rude, but it just seems to make them want me more than ever. I don’t know what I do to make them behave so foolishly.” But of course he did know. Jobb notes how it’s “the same reverse psychology he had had used so effectively to sell millions of dollars’ worth of bogus stocks.” A con man is always playing a con.

Did he have any good qualities? Jobb thinks so. “Leo, whose ambition and self-confidence knew no bounds, could have been a top-flight lawyer, a business leader, or perhaps a powerful politician. He chose, instead, to become a master of promoting phony stocks.” Is this true? This is one of the abiding mysteries I find about the criminal mind: why people who could make money honestly choose to instead take up a life of crime, which they work every bit as hard at. This leads me to think that they probably couldn’t be successful with a legitimate job. The Illinois state’s attorney, for one, expressed surprise at the success of Koretz’s con: “people seemed to throw their money at him. . . . Koretz is not what one might call a brilliant man. . . . He is not fascinating or particularly impressive. But people threw their money at him! That’s what astounds me.” Yes, this is judging Koretz after the fact, but I don’t think Koretz was “particularly impressive” in any regard. As so often in such cases, his status and power was a gift bestowed upon him by people who should have known better.

I’ll confess I don’t recall ever having heard of Koretz before reading this book. Jobb argues that this is unfair. We still talk about Koretz’s Chicago contemporaries Leopold and Loeb, and Al Capone. And while another financial scammer operating at the same time, Charles Ponzi, became more famous,

Leo had devised his more elaborate and more brazen schemes more than a decade before Ponzi came along; he was a marathoner who was running long after Ponzi’s hundred-yard-dash ended in a prison cell. Fame and notoriety, however, went to the fraudster who stumbled first and died last. It is fitting, perhaps, that a man who spent much of his life cheating others was cheated out of his rightful place in the history of financial scams.

“In terms of the scale of their frauds, staying power, and sheer audacity, Leo Koretz and Bernie Madoff stand apart in the pantheon of pyramid-building swindlers.” At least grant the man a bad reputation.

If Koretz has been forgotten in the mists of time, the Bayano River remains equally hidden from view, “almost as remote and little known as it was when Leo made it the talk of Chicago.” A lot of Panama is still pretty wild, including the nearby Darién Gap, an area so called because it’s the only break in the longest road on the planet: the Pan-American Highway, running from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina. According to Wikipedia the Gap is considered to be “one of the most inhospitable regions in the world.”

But even though the location of the Syndicate’s oil fields was well off any beaten track, Jobb says that a bit of research in one of Chicago’s public libraries would have turned up the fact that Panama wasn’t a major oil producer. Nor did anyone bother to talk to players in the oil industry – people likely to know about a pipeline spanning the Isthmus of Panama and oil fields producing 150,000 barrels a day. Of course today you could go on the Internet and call up satellite images of the Syndicate’s oil fields to see what was going on for yourself. But while in the 1920s willful blindness was easier to maintain, it still took some effort. This is the bitter truth underlying most cons: They’re rarely victimless crimes.

Noted in passing:

The state prison at Joliet that Koretz was sent to was a grim place, with dark, tiny cells where inmates had to use a bucket instead of a toilet. And apparently they didn’t like con men:

How well he [Koretz] would hold up in prison, and for how long, was an open question. Con men were among the lowest of the low in Joliet’s hierarchy, shunned and almost as detested as sexual offenders. They tended to be older and better educated than the men locked up with them, and had betrayed the only things that mattered inside – loyalty and trust.

This surprised me. I would have thought that being a con man would be seen as having some cachet: using your brains instead of violence to take advantage of people who were just greedy anyway. So I was curious enough about this to check Jobb’s source, which turned out to be Nathan Leopold’s prison memoir Life Plus 99 Years. I guess he’d know.

Takeaways:

Cons today are both easier and harder to pull off than they were a hundred years ago. Easier because scammers can use the Internet and social media to infinitely expand their reach. But harder because the same technology makes it quick and easy to check things out. In a time when so much information is literally at investors’ fingertips there’s no excuse for not taking advantage of the tools you have and doing some basic research into claims that would seem to ask for it.

True Crime Files

Someone You Know: An Unforgettable Collection of Canadian True Crime Stories
By Catherine Fogarty

The crimes:

“Murder in the Morgue: The Two Faces of Steven Toussaint”: the supervisor of the morgue at the University of Toronto Medical School kills his co-worker, burns down some churches, and then disappears. His body is found a year and a half later.

“Deadly Secrets: The Murder of Gladys Wakabayashi”: a jealous wife kills a woman she suspects her husband is romantically involved with. Years later, she is tricked into confessing as part of an elaborate police sting.

“Lost Boy: The Murder of Nancy Eaton”: a descendant of the wealthy Eaton family befriends a troubled teen who ends up killing her.

“Sins of the Son: The Disappearance of Minnie Ford”: a woman is killed by her brutish son and her body thrown in a lake.

“A Mother’s Love: The Ma Duncan Case”: a mentally disturbed mother gets upset at her son’s marriage and arranges for the pregnant bride to be murdered.

“Enemy Within: The Murder of Glen Davis”: a wealthy philanthropist is murdered by a grasping heir. It turns out the killer was left nothing in his victim’s will.

“Behind the Laughter: The Phil Hartman Story”: a popular comedian is shot in bed by his wife. She later kills herself.

“Back to Reality: The Murder of Jasmine Fiore”: a contestant on a crass dating show kills his wife and throws her body in a dumpster.

“Hollywood Horror Story: The Murder of Iana Kasian”: a rich fellow trying to make it in the entertainment business kills his fiancée in a horrific manner.

“Murder in the Suburbs: The Case of Lucille Miller”: classic case from the 1960s about a woman killing her husband by drugging him and putting him in a car that she torches.

“Black Widow: The Many Lies of Evelyn Dick”: notorious Canadian case of a woman who killed her infant son and then seemed to have some role in the killing of her husband. She was found not guilty of the latter murder at trial and subsequently disappeared.

“No Way Out: The Jane Stafford Story”: a woman kills her abusive spouse, and her trial sets a major legal precedent for “battered wife” cases.

The book:

I wonder what makes a crime story “Canadian.” If it takes place in Canada? If it involves Canadian criminals, or Canadian victims?

I raise the question of labeling just to introduce what you get in this book. The subtitle refers to “Canadian True Crime Stories” but we could be more precise and say that it’s a collection of murder cases. And specifically they are cases that illustrate the point that most homicides are indeed committed by someone the victim knew. “Interpersonal and intimate partner violence accounts for most murders in our country. While we are all taught about ‘stranger danger’ as young kids, the reality is that we are more likely to be sleeping with, socializing with, related to or married to our killer. And that is deeply disturbing.”

The twelve cases are divided into four sections relating to killers who are the friends, kids, lovers, and spouses of their victims. But again the classification scheme doesn’t seem totally on point. You could argue that each of the three murders in the third section were cases where someone killed their spouse, so they could just as easily have been included in the fourth section. Instead, what distinguishes the stories in the third section is the strange coincidence that they all deal with murders involving ex-pat Canadians living in California. All that sunshine does things to us.

(I should expand on a point here. When I say that the cases in the third section were arguably spousal killings I mean that Jasmin Fiore apparently had just had her marriage to Ryan Jenkins annulled (though there are no records of this) and that Iana Kasian was only Blake Leibel’s fiancée. What I also want to add here is that both these women were killed after their relationships had fallen apart but when they agreed to meet with their exes in a gesture of conciliation. As I’ve said before, this is not advisable. If you’re splitting up, you should make a clean break and never get together with your (violent and abusive) ex again. And you definitely should avoid meeting with them alone.)

As far as the writing and research goes I thought Catherine Fogarty did a good job relating the facts and not dragging things out unnecessarily. There were places though where I wished she’d done a bit more digging, especially with regard to cases that are now decades old. The first case here, for example, left me with a lot of questions. Starting with whether the killer’s name was Steven or Stephen Toussaint. Both spellings are used. Meanwhile, all of the sources are news reports from 1998-99 and they don’t offer any resolution on a number of points. Did Toussaint kill himself? How? We’re only told that his body was badly decomposed, but it still seems odd to me that they couldn’t determine any cause of death. And why did it take so long to find his body? Fogarty wonders about this herself, as the body was discovered (18 months later) only 500 meters from where Toussaint’s car had been abandoned and there’d been a supposedly extensive search of the area. We’re only told the body was in an overgrown, wooded area. Were the search parties just too lazy to get into the weeds?

With increased hindsight you might expect some of these questions to be more fully explored. Another point that came up in the next case, also from the 1990s, bothered me. Just how did Jean Ann James dispose of so much physical evidence when she killed Gladys Wakabayashi? There must have been a lot, and James had been the “number one suspect” of the police. She said she’d burned her bloody clothes in the incinerator at her son’s school, but this was an explanation that was later proved false because there was no incinerator at the school and anyway the amount of blood there must have been would have gotten everywhere. To have cleaned up so well is remarkable. Fogarty assumes James threw her clothes in a dumpster, but there must have been more to it than that. I guess we’ll never know.

Aside from being Canadian true crime stories dealing with cases of murder committed by people close to the victim, another theme I found popping up was that of the double life. This made me wonder how much the notion of a double life is something real and how much of it is a myth. To be sure, we all have public and private selves. Or personalities that are different at work and at home. Dickens noticed that a couple of hundred years ago. So do we all lead double lives?

Not in the sense that I think most people use the term, and certainly not as you find it employed in true crime writing. In that latter context what it usually means is the good neighbour/family man who is a serial killer or homicidal psychopath on the side. But it could also mean something more innocuous. Was there anything exceptional in the marriage of Phil and Brynn Hartman? “Behind their perfect-looking family façade, there was trouble – tension, jealousy and addiction.” Indeed their marriage was on the rocks. But this is common if not more the rule than the exception in any marriage. Or take this description of Stephen Toussaint:

He was a hard-working family man with an effervescent personality and a great sense of humour. But beyond Sunday school and bowling nights, there was another side to Stephen Toussaint that neither his family nor church were aware of. He was a man of dark secrets.

What were these dark secrets? All we seem to know is that he was an alcoholic, which had in turn affected his work at the morgue. Which in turn led to his murdering a co-worker. Toussaint had a drinking problem, but a double life? Was he two different people, at work, at home, or at the bar?

To some extent everything about us is always a façade. The point a collection like this drives home is that we all have secrets and that nobody, not even those closest to us – children, spouses – knows us fully. And even if such perfect knowledge existed, there’d always be a random element impossible to predict.

Noted in passing:

Glen Davis was shot in the stairwell of an underground parking garage. Yes, it was around 1:45 in the afternoon, but does this count as being “gunned down in broad daylight in a busy area of the city”?

Ryan Jenkins mutilated Jasmin Fiore’s body, specifically removing her teeth and finger joints post-mortem, to prevent recognition. He did not reckon on the fact that breast implants have serial numbers printed on them that could be used to confirm her identity.

Takeaways:

Given that you can never really know someone, you should observe their behaviour and assume that this will remain consistent over time. In the most notorious case here Jane Hurshman fell for Billy Stafford because she was impressed that he was “kind, gentle and listened to Jane talk about her marital troubles.” In fact he was notorious for being a violent and abusive drunk. Jane knew about his “less than stellar reputation” but . . . “love is blind.” It cannot afford to be.

True Crime Files

Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story
By Ron Franscell

The crime:

In 1976 Alice Prunty met Gerald Uden and they were married soon thereafter. It was the fourth marriage for both, and both had children from their earlier marriages. What Alice didn’t tell Gerald until after the wedding is that she’d killed her last husband, Ron Holtz, claiming abuse at his hands. Gerald was understanding. Later, Gerald became tired of making support payments to his ex-wife Virginia, who had custody of his two sons. So, perhaps egged on by Alice (who disliked his ex-wife intensely), he killed all three of them in 1980.

Authorities strongly suspected Alice of killing Holtz and Gerald of the triple homicide of Virginia and his two sons, but none of the bodies were found so after moving to Missouri the homicidal couple went on living the rest of their lives in peace as the case grew colder. But police never lost interest in it, and after much digging around (literally and metaphorically) they managed to find Holtz’s body where Alice had thrown it in an abandoned mine shaft. That was in 2013. Alice was charged and convicted of Holtz’s murder and would later die in prison. Gerald would confess to the murder of Virginia and the two boys and be sentenced to several life sentences. The bodies of his victims were never found.

The book:

By coincidence I came to Alice & Gerald after reading a series of books about criminal couples, each of which raised the same question about the apportioning of guilt. Here’s a recap:

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel: Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus lived together and had a side hustle stealing works of art from museums all around Europe. Anne-Catherine seems to have operated mostly as a lookout while Stéphane did all the work.

Guilty Creatures by Mikita Brottman: Brian Winchester killed Denise Williams’s husband Mike and then married her. After a few years together they split up and Brian copped a plea, implicating Denise in Mike’s murder. She was initially found guilty of first degree murder but then had the judgment overturned, though her conviction for being an accessory to murder remained.

American Fire by Monica Hesse: starting in November 2012 Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick went on a months-long arson spree, burning abandoned homes on Virginia’s East Shore. At trial, Smith claimed he did it all for love and that torching houses was Tonya’s thing. Tonya didn’t have much to say.

In Alice & Gerald the issue of who was the dominant partner is again raised, and it seems as though most of the people close to the case agree that Alice was the one pulling the strings. That’s the sense I had as well, but it’s possible that the way Ron Franscell was telling the story led me to that conclusion. Plus, after reading some of the discussion in Guilty Creatures, I was on my guard against the “Eve factor”: “The way that when a man and a woman are part of a crime together it is generally the woman who is thought to be the mastermind, the Eve who tempts Adam.”

What makes it hard to say in the case of Alice and Gerald, especially given how cold a case it was, with the murders having taken place forty years before being brought to trial, is the fact that Alice played everything close to the chest. In this she was very much like the women in the other cases I just mentioned. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, Denise Williams, and Tonya Bundick all clammed up after their arrest, not talking to police or to reporters. If nothing else, this suggests they were at least smarter than their partners in crime. As I’ve said before, if you’ve been arrested, for pretty much anything, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut. Taking this principle a step further, I was particularly impressed by the fact that Alice refused to take a polygraph or lie-detector test as “a matter of principle.” When Gerald was later brought in for questioning he kept to the same line: “No polygraph. It’s not about my guilt or innocence. It’s just a matter of principle.” The detective questioning Gerald noted the similarity in response and assumed, probably correctly, that they’d been coaching each other. But, for them, this was absolutely the right move. In the first place, polygraphs are worthless (Alice later told investigators that she’d researched them and found they were “notoriously unreliable”), and in the second they didn’t want to answer questions or talk to the police anyway.

On the question of guilt, you could argue it either way. Taking Alice’s side, her murder of Ron Holtz could be seen as being what she said it was: a response to domestic abuse. Holtz was a violent head case who had spent a lot of time in mental hospitals (which is where he met Alice, where she worked as a nurse). On the other hand, Alice was a killer before she even met Gerald, and given her hatred of Virginia it’s hard to believe she wasn’t encouraging Gerald to do something to get rid of her. And it’s also pretty obvious that she knew what Gerald had done after the fact and didn’t just keep quiet about it but helped him to cover his tracks by writing phoney (and cruel) letters to Virginia’s mother.

In sum, while it’s hard to say who was the dominant partner I think the evidence shows that neither of them had much in the way of empathy, and thought nothing of murder as a way to dispose of people they found to be an inconvenience. Or an unnecessary expense. Gerald reckoned killing his boys would lead to savings in child support of $14,000: “He knew because he’d added it up: $150 for ninety-two more months.” As one of Alice’s children put it when describing his reaction to first meeting Gerald, “This guy is really weird. Not like a child molester weird or anything, just spooky weird . . . just spooky. . . . Like he has no feeling.” Not stupid then, but missing something.

I’ll confess that when I started in on Alice & Gerald it put my back up a bit. The Prologue felt overwritten in its evocation of place:

Wyoming [in the 1960s] was a place to land without baggage, where one could hide and never be found, a kingdom of dirt where giant hollows in the earth might swallow up a man (or woman) entirely, an ambiguous landscape of infertile dreams and pregnant hopes. The landscape was vast, desolate, and mysterious, festooned with hidey-holes that were forgotten or never known.

It was a spot on the edge of the Big Empty where your dog could bark forever or you could piss on the side of the road or shoot your gun at the moon or call yourself by another name. None of The World’s ordinary rules applied. Whatever your badlands fetish, you could practice it unmolested in this impossibly empty place.

I rolled my eyes at “infertile dreams and pregnant hopes,” but after a while Franscell’s voice grew on me. A native of Wyoming, he writes in a way that brings out the local colour. Here, for example, is his description of the spot where Virginia and the two boys will be murdered: “Virginia pulled off into the cheatgrass shoulder this side of the canal. The water ran sluggish and buckskin brown, full of sandrock dust, caliche, horseshit, and other high plains compost. There was so much dirt in the channel that you could damn near plow it.” In other places I had to look up the meaning of “butt-sprung” (old and worn out), and shook my head, smiling, at squalls that “can strike faster than a rattler on meth.” I entered into the spirit of this enough so that in a later ode to the “impossibly empty place” that is Wyoming I had no problems at all. And there was an important point being made connecting the murders to the desolate geography.

Wyoming poses a unique challenge for cops in all missing persons cases, cold nor not.

Anybody who’s driven through Wyoming’s boundless terrain has imagined how easy it would be to lose oneself in int.

And more than a few have fantasized about losing someone else out there.

The state’s average population density of six people per square mile (in contrast, New Jersey has 1,200 people per square mile) is an unfair mathematical measure. In fact, the state encompasses thousands of square miles where nobody lives, nobody goes, and nobody ever will.

In other words, Wyoming – the least populous and most incomprehensible of the lower forty-eight states – is the baddest of badlands. There are more places to hide dead people than live people will ever find.

Given this bad-ass landscape, all the more credit goes to the dogged police work that had to persevere through generations of different investigators to finally dig out the truth. They didn’t have much to go on, aside from their conviction that Alice and Gerald were guilty as hell. This was something that was obvious right from the first interviews they sat down for at the time of the murders, and it was reinforced in every subsequent interaction. But how to prove their guilt? For that the police would need a body, and even after identifying the probable location of Ron Holtz’s final resting spot, recovering his remains wasn’t easy, or cheap. It’s not often that I get a chance to compliment the police in these True Crime Files, so I’m happy to give them a shout out here.

In addition to the police work there was also the concern of Virginia’s mother, Claire, who did everything she could to keep the investigation going. “The universe loves a stubborn heart,” is Franscell’s tributary line. In a lot of the cases I’ve talked about you’ll find family members taking on this kind of a role. Mike Williams’s mother in Guilty Creatures and Kari Baker’s “angels” (her mother and sisters) who refused to accept the coroner’s verdict of suicide in her death (as recounted in Kathryn Casey’s Deadly Little Secrets). The sad irony is that Claire died shortly before Alice and Gerald were brought to justice, and the bodies of Virginia and the boys were never found. Instead, what undid the killers was the discovery of Holtz’s body, a man who nobody seemed to care about. Indeed, when the police tried to follow up on Holtz’s disappearance they found that his family were “so unconcerned about their son and brother, who’d been such an asshole all his life, that nobody even reported him missing.” The wheels of justice sometimes turn in mysterious ways.

Noted in passing:

The invocation of Shakespeare to lend weight to what are often just sleazy stories of domestic violence can be overdone. I mentioned this in my review of Guilty Creatures and it comes up again here. One of the three epigraphs comes from Macbeth: “The attempt and not the deed confounds us.” It’s a quote I’ve used myself on occasion, but what relevance does it have here? Alice and Gerald weren’t undone by their attempt to commit murder, but by the discovery of Holtz’s body. They weren’t convicted of attempting anything, but of committing murder. Then in his Acknowledgments Franscell refers to this as a “bizarre story of Shakespearean proportions.” How so? Bizarre yes, and tragic for the victims. But in what sense are the “proportions” Shakespearean? Does he mean heroic? Larger than life? Because I don’t see either.

The only point when I did feel Shakespeare’s presence was when Gerald confessed to shooting Virginia and his two sons in the head, with the unfortunate result that their bodies bled all over the inside of his car. “They didn’t suffer. But I had no idea the human body contained that much blood,” he tells the investigators. That does sound like an echo of Lady Macbeth’s “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

When the police had Alice nailed for the murder of Ron Holtz there was renewed interest in the premature death of her previous husband, ascribed at the time to hypertension and kidney failure. The husband’s corpse was exhumed so that pathologists could test for the presence of ethylene glycol in the tissues.

Ethylene glycol is the primary compound in ordinary automobile coolants and antifreezes. In the past century, it has also been a favorite poison – especially for husband-killing wives, according to forensic data – because it’s in every garage, it’s colorless and odorless, it tastes very sweet, and its toxic effects can be misdiagnosed as something else.

I guess if the forensic data says this is the poison of choice for husband-killing wives then it must be true. It was a point that made me think of the story “Antifreeze and a Cold Heart” in the collection Murder, Madness and Mayhem by Mike Browne about a woman who killed two husbands this way. Husbands may want to keep the antifreeze locked up if they think their marriage is on the rocks.

Takeaways:

One violent person without a conscience is bad enough, but when they find a soulmate it’s double trouble.

True Crime Files

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
By Michael Finkel

The crime:

From 1994 to 2001 Stéphane Breitwieser had a career as “one of the greatest art thieves of all time.” Usually in the company of his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus he stole nearly 250 works of art from over 170 museums in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He didn’t try to sell any of the items but kept them in the attic apartment in his mother’s house that he lived in with Anne-Catherine. While in prison after he was caught his mother threw many of the sculptures he’d stolen in the nearby Rhône-Rhine Canal (from where they were later recovered) and burned the paintings.

The book:

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Stéphane Breitwieser before this, but according to Michael Finkel, who I have no reason to doubt, he was one of the most prolific art thieves in history. That he didn’t consider himself to be an art thief but rather an “art liberator” or “art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style” was just a kind of criminal casuistry, though it is fair to say that he was a different kind of art thief. Whatever other lies and rationalizations Breitwieser gave for his looting of so many priceless treasures, it’s clear he didn’t do it for the money. And this despite the fact that he had no money of his own, only working odd, minimum-wage jobs like waitering or pizza delivery while sponging off of his mother and grandparents and collecting government welfare payments. It was the kind of life that, in addition to fostering his narcissism and sense of entitlement, freed him on a more practical level from caring about making a living and allowed him to spend most of his time doing what he loved.

At this point I want to step in and reassert a point I never tire of making: that for almost any criminal, or wicked person, to be successful they need help. Here’s how I put it in my review of A Plot to Kill:

Bad people are everywhere. But all too often the people who escape blame are their enablers.

…

It is not enough, to use the old line often misattributed to Edmund Burke, that for evil to succeed all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing. Evil needs a hand. Evil needs its suckers, dupes, and people who just want to be in on whatever the scam is because they think there’s something in it for them.

The question of to what extent Anne-Catherine was Breitwieser’s partner-in-crime remains open. Probably more than she let on, but perhaps not a lot more than just being a lookout. More interesting, and stranger, was the relationship between Breitwieser and his mother. To some extent she was his chief enabler. For starters she allowed him to live in her house, which is where he stored all his loot, turning it into an attic “treasure chest” or cave of Ali Baba. At least to some extent she must have known what was going on, but preferred to turn a blind eye. And then, after her son (her only child) was finally captured, she took it upon herself to destroy or attempt to destroy all the evidence. Out of hate, she told the court, but more likely out of love. With reference to this final crime, a French prosecutor would declare that “She is the central figure in this horrific disaster, the person who should be held most accountable.”

I couldn’t help thinking of a criminal type I’ve identified as “the boys in the basement.” I did a post on this phenomenon here, and a follow-up here. What I was addressing in these posts was the number of cases where young men who became mass murderers were often found to have mothers who appeased, accommodated, and enabled them into a kind of adult babyhood. In many cases the mothers in question shared a lot of similarities, for example being divorced, professional care-givers who seemed to enjoy keeping their adult children at home. Mireille Breitwieser (née Stengel), divorced, had been a nurse specializing in child care (Anne-Catherine, perhaps not coincidentally, was a nurse’s assistant). In a description of a videotaped interaction between mother and son Mireille appears as a submissive servant for him to boss around, and I find it telling that she even continued to cook dinner for him all the time he was living in her house. Breitwieser himself admitted he was “spoiled rotten,” and a state psychiatrist assessed him as remaining “immature.” “Coddled by a mother who caters to his whims,” another doctor opined, he had remained (in Finkel’s paraphrase) “a brat.” One suspects Anne-Catherine finally broke up with him not because of his dangerous kink (that is, stealing precious works of art) but rather just because he was never going to grow up. His mother had a firmer hold on him than she ever would.

In sum, while Stéphane doesn’t tick all the boxes for a boy in the basement, as a “boy in the attic” I think he belongs in the same discussion.

Moving further into the psychodrama, Finkel spends some time speculating on the exact nature of Breitwieser’s obsession. Was the compulsion he felt to steal works of art, and it was a compulsion, a kind of kleptomania? One psychiatrist says no, as kleptomaniacs typically don’t care about the specific objects stolen, and their thefts are followed by feelings of regret and shame. Was he a case of Stendhal syndrome? No, because that was only a nineteenth-century literary conceit anyway.

Was he an extreme kind of aesthete? That was his own diagnosis: “Breitwieser’s sole motivation for stealing, he insists, is to surround himself with beauty, to gorge on it. . . . He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place.” And if that sounds a bit sexual I don’t think that’s by accident. Stealing was, in its mix of compulsion and addiction, akin to sex, and the stolen objects had their own sort of afterglow that he liked to bask in back in the attic, placing favourites next to his bed. Or, better yet, “So many great works of art are sexually arousing that what you’ll want to do, Bretiwieser says, is install a bed nearby, perhaps a four-poster, for when your partner is there and the timing is right.”

I don’t know if there’s any way to sort this out. I like Finkel’s conclusion that Breitwieser more closely resembles the people we know who have made careers out of stealing books than he does a typical art thief (“In the taxonomy of sin, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine belong with the book thieves”). And seeing collecting as an obsessive-compulsive disorder is also valid. What’s fair to say is that Breitwieser truly was passionate about art and that he felt absolutely compelled to steal it. He literally couldn’t stop himself, even in situations where he knew he wasn’t just being risky but stupid.

But for years he stayed lucky. Sure, he was good at what he did. He had several qualities that proved indispensable: confidence, dexterity, and the ability to stay calm under pressure, to think fast and improvise when he met with obstacles. Because he mainly targeted smaller, local museums those obstacles weren’t insurmountable. The works he “liberated” weren’t that difficult to snatch. Alarms seem rarely to have been in place, and the slicing of the silicone glue at the edges of a Plexiglas case or the undoing of a few screws was often all it took.

As for the security guards, I don’t want to trash people who are already the butt of so many jokes. In fact, the purpose of a security guard is mostly to act as a “visual deterrent.” Meaning that the site of them is supposed to scare would-be criminal types off. Not because a guard is a physical threat, but because they are potential witnesses. They are usually young people or retirees, with little to no training, and not very motivated because they’re making minimum wage. The hardest part of the job is fighting off boredom or just staying awake. Breitwieser had actually been a guard at one point so he knew they didn’t pose much of a challenge.

The final factor in Breitwieser’s spectacular run of success was luck. Everything just seemed to go his way, even when he was caught once in Switzerland and allowed to walk. But these things catch up with you. As Finkel puts it: “No one gets away with bold crimes for long. Luck always runs out, it’s inevitable.” After a spectacular run, Breitwieser’s luck turned against him in a big way. It was only a series of unfortunate (for him) events that led to his capture. After stealing a bugle from the Wagner Museum in Switzerland, Anne-Catherine insisted on returning to the scene of the crime so she could erase any fingerprints he might have left. She wants to go alone but he insists on driving her. She tells him to stay in the car but he gets out and goes for a walk around the grounds. He is spotted by an old man walking a dog who had noticed him the day before. The police arrive and take him away.

By this point, however, Breitwieser may have just been growing tired of the game, no longer pursuing particular works of art out of some great passion but just grabbing items in a lazy and opportunistic way. At the end, Anne-Catherine would tell investigators, “his stealing had become ‘dirty’ and ‘maniacal.’ His aesthetic ideals about idolizing beauty, treating each piece as an honored guest, have descended into hoarding.” He treats the stolen works carelessly, damaging and even destroying them. The joy is gone. You have the sense in the end that he was only going through the motions, his addiction having reduced him to an automaton.

It’s often at this stage in any criminal spree that it’s suggested that the perpetrator, perhaps subconsciously, wants to be caught. I don’t think that’s what was happening here, but there may well have been something of the “rule of ten” I’ve written of before going on. Breitwiester wasn’t a professional thief. It wasn’t his job and he seems to have been a genuinely lazy fellow with a poor work ethic anyway. For him I think it was a sort of release of youthful energy, sexual or otherwise, and after six or seven years that energy had pretty much run its course.

The Art Thief is a really good book, well written, insightful, and a quick read. My only complaint would be that the full-colour photo section only contains pictures of some of the items Breitwieser stole. There are no pictures of Breitwieser or any of the other people in the book, or of the museum rooms he stole from, which I think would have been interesting. Leaving that one caveat aside, Finkel’s telling of the story also benefits from the ten years he spent covering it. That long a gestation allows for some distance, which is something I think most veteran readers of true crime appreciate. This isn’t a timely book meant to cash in on a sensational trial that’s making headlines. It has the luxury to be more reflective.

I also thought Finkel did a great job navigating the sources to come up with an objective account. This was all the harder as Breitwieser talked a lot. He allowed himself to be interviewed by Finkel and indeed even wrote his own book about his life as an art thief. His side of the story is all out there. But the women in his life, his mother Mireille and girlfriend Anne-Catherine, haven’t said anything to anyone. Some of the stolen pieces were never accounted for. Do either of them know what happened to them? How much did they know about what Breitwieser was doing? Everything? More, I’m sure, than they were willing to let on. “I am stupefied by her perjury,” one prosecutor declared in court about Anne-Catherine’s testimony. But by that time both women had gone into lockdown. I doubt interviewing them would have revealed much, but I was left with the sense that this is where the real story was.

Noted in passing:

While in prison in Switzerland Breitwieser does not “shower nude like everyone else,” but rather “washes in his underwear.”

I’m not sure why Finkel tells us this but I’m glad he did because it lets me talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while.

I grew up playing sports, and in particular was on the swim team both in intercity competitions and in high school. That meant spending a lot of time in locker rooms and in group showers. Everybody got naked. In the years after high school I became a bit of a gym rat and have almost always had a membership at a fitness club wherever I’ve lived.

Up until the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020 showering was as it has always been. You showered in the nude. Every now and then you might see someone showering in their underwear but this was very rare. And in the sauna or steam room you wrapped a towel around your waist, but otherwise that was it. Even if you were shy, there was no real need for modesty at the gym where I work out because the showers are all individual cubicles with closing doors. You’re all by yourself in there, and you can wrap yourself in your towel when you come out.

When the pandemic shut all the gyms down I took the next four years off, only returning in 2024. And I immediately noticed that norms had changed, dramatically. It is now the case that very nearly everyone is showering in their underwear. Everyone! Every now and then you might still see someone (like me) showering in the nude, but they are the exceptions. Just the day before posting this review a young fellow, I would say just into his early 20s, came out of the showers in his shorts and his t-shirt, soaking wet. I couldn’t believe it. Five years ago I think I would have asked him if he was OK. Now I was just glad he’d taken his shoes and socks off.

What has led to this change in behaviour? And how did it happen so rapidly? I note that it’s a practice that’s been adopted by men of all ages, from the very young to the very old. Are they watching so much porn that they feel body-shamed at only being average? I honestly can’t say. What I can say is that I think the whole idea of taking a shower while wearing clothes is ridiculous.

Takeaways:

With the high cost of housing more and more adult children are living with their parents out of necessity. And in some cultures this can even be a good thing, with intergenerational support working both ways. But a mother enabling or coddling a man-baby is always a bad idea, damaging to both parties. It usually turns into a poisonous and perverted love-hate relationship, with the family home becoming a nursery of vice.

True Crime Files

Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida
By Mikita Brottman

The crime:

Mike and Denise Williams were a Florida couple who were good friends with Brian and Kathy Winchester. Mike went missing while duck hunting one day in December 2000 and was thought to have fallen out of his boat and been eaten by alligators. It later turned out that Brian Winchester had been carrying on an affair with Denise. He had killed Mike and, five years later, after divorcing Kathy, married her. He and Denise had a messy falling out, leading to their divorce and Brian being charged with kidnapping her. Brian then confessed to the murder of Mike Williams in a plea deal that gave him immunity. In 2018 Denise was tried, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life for killing Mike, but a later appeal overturned this because there was no evidence she’d actually been involved in the murder. Her conviction for accessory to murder remained, however, for which she was given a 30-year sentence.

The book:

It’s interesting how the title emphasizes guilt. That’s not something you hear a lot about in true crime stories. We’ve become so used to the psychopath: someone unable to feel empathy who just kills and goes on with his or her life without feeling any pangs of conscience. Conscience is more of a literary trope, belonging in classic works like Crime and Punishment. It’s not something you encounter as much in real life. At least I don’t see much of it. People don’t even say they’re sorry anymore. An apology means taking responsibility, which might lead to being sued.

Introducing the notion of guilt – not guilt in a legal sense but as a moral reckoning – helps foreground the question that lies at the heart of Mikita Brottman’s telling of this tawdry tale. Were Brian and Denise tortured souls, either before or after the murder, or were they just thoughtless, sleazy people? Was Brian’s confession a genuine come-to-Jesus moment, a way of expiating a sense of guilt that had weighed on him for years? Or was it just a way of getting back at Denise? Did Denise not want to divorce Mike because it went against the Bible’s teachings? Or because she didn’t want to take the financial hit? (“Better to be a rich widow than a poor divorcée,” as Brian put it.) And how did Denise feel about marrying the man who killed her husband? Guilty? Complicit? Or did she think about it at all?

These are the questions that Brottman worries away at, and in doing so I think she takes the more literary route I mentioned, giving the protagonists a moral or spiritual depth relating to their faith that I thought they didn’t fully deserve. But I’ll admit to not being sure about that, as I never want to judge people, even murderers, so harshly that I don’t give them the benefit of a doubt.

In order to explore this question of guilt Brottman has to imagine what might have been going on in their heads. Here’s how that goes. First, Denise’s adultery:

They’d both been taught that abstaining from sex before marriage would lead to spiritual, physical, and emotional satisfaction. All their lives, they’d struggled to follow the Bible, and when the time came for them to reap their reward, it wasn’t there. They felt cheated.

Now a door had opened. Forbidden sex, it turned out, was a lot more exciting than anything that happened at home. At the same time, they couldn’t set aside what they’d learned in church – that adultery was a terrible sin. They could go to hell for what they were doing – which made it even hotter.

On the one hand, this is plausible. Forbidden fruit and all that. And a lot of people who go down this road don’t know in advance that they’re going to end up feeling cheated either way: following the rules or breaking them. We’re talking about sex here, and that’s all just hormones. I don’t think we need to invoke “the complications and paradoxes of desire.”

Then, after Brian kills Mike, he achieves a kind of post-coital clarity:

There was no feeling of exhilaration, no relief, no sense of achievement in pulling off the plan, no excitement about the prospect of finally having Denise all to himself. None of it was how he’d imagined it would be. All he could think about was the shock and horror of what he’d done. He regretted the murder right away. It weighed on him every day of his life.

Did it? And how much?

Their own way of making sense of or even justifying what they were up to led, of course, to rationalizations. Only here those rationalizations were tinged, I think in a way many would consider heretical, with faith: that God wanted them to be led astray as part of some mysterious plan he had for their salvation. That if the murder was arranged as an accident it would be a kind of “test” that God had prepared, both for Mike and for the two of them. Then, after the murder, they recommitted to doing more church work:

In terms of profit and loss, their biblical credit balance was in negative figures; they had to build it back up through religious devotion, as well as monetary tithes. Their recommitment to the church was also a symbolic attempt at moral cleanliness, a desire to sanitize themselves, to rewrite their story. It was a kind of hand washing or exorcism, a cleaning of the self after encountering a contagious force of evil. Never mind that the force was their own.

How much of this should we credit? “To the faithful, transgression has a special force and valency that’s absent from secular life.” Does it? I don’t think so. I don’t think you need to have any kind of faith to have a moral compass. And this leaves aside the question of how faithful Brian and Denise ever were.

I just don’t like this kind of thinking, where being a person of faith somehow puts you above the common run of sinners, the people who don’t even know that they’re sinning. You find this in writers like T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene and it puts my back up. Perhaps it isn’t always humbug, but in this case it sure feels like it. For Brian, Brottman tells us, “Guilt, the invader, pushed apart the cracked barriers of his conscience.” He was “not as well defended as his wife [Denise]. His armor was thinner, his capacity for repression less profound.” Really? Or was he just practicing a sort of strategic blame-shifting after it was clear that the “mutually assured destruction” of the guilty secret he shared with Denise was a token in play after their divorce? “Their pledge [to each other] was unbreakable because there was no way out. Their prenup was a murder.” But unbreakable pledges can be broken, and you can always argue over a prenup in court.

I think Brottman pitches the spiritual drama too high. She often has chapter epigraphs drawn from the Bible or Shakespeare, and even at one point describes Mike’s mother entering the courtroom at Denise’s trial “like Cleopatra sailing by on her barge,” an allusion to Anthony and Cleopatra which I thought ridiculous in context. What the story more closely resembled, and it’s a connection Brottman also makes, is the world of film noir and movies like Double Indemnity (yes, there was a big life insurance policy involved here too). In this view Denise became the femme fatale or Black Widow, which is the lens the media took to seeing her through. I found this perspective on the story reminiscent of American Fire, another tale of a criminal couple who shared a “kind of love that is vaguely crazy and then completely crazy and then collapses in on itself.” The only “essential truth” being that when they (Charlie and Tonya, Brian and Denise) started off they were in love and “by the time they finished, they weren’t.”

Sticking with American Fire, we might also note how in both cases it was the man who pled guilty and his partner (both in life and in crime) who maintained her innocence and subsequently attracted the lion’s share of media opprobrium. Denise’s attorney describes this as the “Eve Factor”: the way that when a man and a woman are part of a crime together it is generally the woman who is thought to be the mastermind, the Eve who tempts Adam. There’s the Bible again, but it’s also the standard noir plot:

When lovers plot to kill the wife’s husband, or the husband’s wife, although the woman might help plan the murder, it’s almost always the man who carries it out. But the woman is punished equally, if not more so, and unlike her co-conspirator, she’s publicly sex shamed. She’s scorned, ridiculed, and condemned, described as a Black Widow, a Jezebel, or a Delilah. Examples are easy to find.

Then, dialing things down even lower, we get to a final layer: the public (now mostly online) finding Brian and Denise to be “trashy and ugly; their story . . . lurid and tawdry, a cheap tabloid scandal.” But, naturally, a “guilty pleasure.”

Noted in passing:

I mentioned how police originally suspected that they couldn’t find Mike Williams’s body because it had been eaten by alligators. But he had disappeared on a particularly chilly day in December and it turns out that alligators do not generally feed during the winter months due to the colder temperatures. Specifically:

Most herpetologists agree that between November and late February, alligators, even in Florida, go into a state called brumation – a kind of semi-hibernation in which their metabolism slows down to conserve body temperature, and they no longer need to eat.

Search parties did encounter active alligators at the time in question so the police felt this was still at least a possible explanation for not being able to find a body, but apparently it is very unlikely alligators would be active at all in the existing conditions. They only look to maintain their body temperature and aren’t interested in food.

In 2008, with the investigation into Mike’s disappearance ongoing, authorities contacted a forensic psychologist with a Ph.D. “who used her intuitive powers to envisage what might have happened to Mike.” She said he had been shot in a bedroom by a woman with a revolver. In fact he was shot out on a lake by a man with a shotgun.

If you read enough true crime you’ll find this happens a lot. When the police are at a dead end they’ll talk to psychics. But it always surprises me. This is the twenty-first century. Why do this?

Takeaways:

I’ll throw out a couple of quotes here, both relating to the theme of “us and them” we experience when reading true crime:

It’s easy to assume that familiarity robs a story of its intrinsic interest, but the contrary is true – events are uniquely engrossing when they’re closer to home. The more alike we are, the more hypersensitive we become to tiny differences. . . . We don’t want to accept how similar we are to someone who’s done something reprehensible, so we exaggerate minor distinctions to separate ourselves from them. We try to find an otherness to disguise our sameness.

And:

People are murdered because they are loved, because they were once loved, or because they stand in the way of love. When a person kills another out of the blue, if they’re not mentally ill, we assume they must be in the grip of some great passion: rage, desire, jealousy, greed, or lust for revenge.

Most of us don’t commit murder, even though we might sometimes want to, because our fear of the consequences outweighs the impulse or the desire of the moment. It seems impossible to believe that two otherwise rational, God-fearing people would decide to kill someone rather than contemplate divorce. But it happens all the time. People aren’t reasonable. God-fearing people sometimes least of all.

True Crime Files