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

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor
By Mark Seal

The crime:

In 1978, when he was seventeen years old, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to America from Germany as a foreign exchange student. He had no intention of leaving, and never did. Constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about pretty much anything, the longer he stayed in the U.S. the more bogus identities Gerhartsreiter adopted. Moving from coast to coast and back again, he finally settled on presenting himself as an obscure member of the Rockefeller family, which in turn led to his marrying a successful and wealthy woman with whom he had a daughter. Never able to maintain any of his disguises for long, the marriage broke down and his kidnapping of his daughter led to his ultimate arrest and exposure as a fraud, as well as a conviction for a murder he’d committed years earlier in California.

The book:

One of the reasons we read true crime is to pick up helpful advice on how to avoid becoming victims. Forewarned is forearmed, and in these True Crime Files what I like to focus on are the red flags we should be paying attention to.

Seeing as it’s unlikely we’ll ever cross paths with a serial killer, it’s worth taking more extensive notes on the criminal careers of frauds and con men. Chances are we’re all going to have to deal with these types, not just once or twice but several times throughout our lives. Few of them, to be sure, on the scale of Christian Gerhartsreiter, but it’s the extreme cases that help us better see the warning signs.

With hindsight it’s easy to wonder how anybody could be fooled by what later seems an obvious scam. But nobody is immune. I’ve been suckered a few times in my life, albeit for minor amounts. You should realize that everyone is vulnerable, and identify both general guidelines as well as know your own personal weak points, what might make you a soft target.

One Gerhartsreiter acquaintance puts it well: “A con man gets by because you want to believe what he’s telling you. That’s how a con works. People already have their preconceptions, and he just plays into what they’re thinking.” This is the essential point, and it’s the weakness any successful con is able to sense in others. We all believe in things that aren’t true because they fulfill some need or desire. And as Mark Twain observed, it’s precisely these beliefs that get us in trouble. Find out what those needs and desires are, and you can count on the mark doing most of the work.

For Gerhartsreiter this was made easy because what he could sense other people wanting was the same thing he wanted: Money. Status. Class. So what he was selling was a connection to all of the above, represented in a simple change of name to the overloaded James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller. A name that would open a lot of doors, at least among the kind of people who would love to open a door for a Rockefeller.

And so he didn’t even have to get it right. A student of American pop culture but not to the manner or the manor born, he dressed up like a cartoon version of a plutocrat, taking Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island as his model (honest!). Even children mocked his colourful attire, calling him “Purple Pants.” And sometimes the pants were red. And there was a preppy uniform consisting of a Yale cap, a sweater draped over his shoulders and tied at the neck, an Izod shirt (blue or red, with the collar turned up), and always Top-Siders without socks. Tootling about his adopted New Hampshire community on his Segway he must have seemed a total clown, but locals shrugged him off as a wealthy eccentric. “In twenty-twenty hindsight,” one resident later remarked, “there were so many visual hints that it was all wrong, and all phony, and just plain stupid.”

But it worked. One artist thought Gerhartsreiter’s ridiculous preppy persona “reeked of old money, good breeding, and impeccable taste.” But then the same artist, a self-professed expert on abstract expressionism, would be snowed by an apartment full of fake paintings by modern masters. “I was looking at them very closely,” he would explain. “I never had any doubts that they were legitimate, never thought that they were reproductions or anything.”

“Clark knew more about the history of art and aesthetics of art than most artists I meet,” the artist would later say in a released statement. Which is probably true. The death of expertise, indeed our rage against it, is something real, and in some cases can have painful consequences.

I don’t think Gerhartsreiter was as smart or well-read as he was made out to be, but he was a quick study and had, consciously or not, targeted a demographic where smarts didn’t matter because the people he came into contact with weren’t very smart or well-read either. He didn’t have a deep knowledge of anything, but in almost every situation he found himself in his interlocutors had even less. Before he adopted the Rockefeller mantle he claimed to be a member of the English peerage, a baronet and scion of the Mountbatten family who owned Chichester Cathedral. He even said he was thinking of moving the cathedral to the United States. People thought that was a wonderful idea. He had cards printed claiming to be the thirteenth baronet of Chichester. People were impressed. But “If the citizens of San Marino had been motivated to do some research, they might have discovered then and there that the eleventh baronet, Sir Edward John Chichester, was still alive, which meant that a thirteenth baronet cold not yet exist.” He could boast about having produced the TV series The Prisoner, despite the fact that it had broadcast when he was seven years old. He also boasted of producing the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but again the dates didn’t match up. He claimed to be the daughter of the actress Ann Carter, and talked about her death, when she was in fact very much alive. Perhaps the funniest moment though was when, claiming to have sailed for the America’s Cup team, he took some friends out on Boston’s Back Bay and didn’t have a clue how to handle the little sailboat he’d rented (he said his yacht was in the shop). They had to get towed back to shore by a kayaker.

So how hard is it to hang around people who don’t know much about anything? Not hard at all. And indeed, the higher Gerhartsreiter climbed the ladder the easier it got. Rich enclaves of inherited wealth are full of privileged dummies who “fall upward” (as Gerhartsreiter continually did) and are only interested in keeping up appearances. Being old money is mostly a performance, an act. You have to walk the walk, talk the talk, and dress the dress. But you don’t have to actually do anything. Gerhartsreiter was a despicable phony, but he was moving through a world of phonies. In what sectors is it easiest to fake it until you make it? Art and finance come to mind. And so he never stood out, even when dressing like a complete idiot. His very phoniness was perfect camouflage in the circles he moved in. Because if everyone around you is a phony then chances are pretty good you’re a phony too. Which means it’s best to not say anything.

Of course, the big con here, the whale that really made everything else possible, was his marriage to Sandra Boss, a very upwardly mobile, high-earning woman who was a graduate of Harvard Business School and a partner at the ultra-high-powered McKinsey & Company. How did Gerhartsreiter manage to sucker her and turn her into a cash cow for years? It’s something that his defence counsel drove hard at during his trial. It just didn’t make sense. Her excuse was that “One can be brilliant and amazing in one area of one’s life and really stupid in another.” Which is true, but the even easier explanation is that she wanted the name. She wanted to believe the pack of lies he was telling her. As one of her friends put it, “Everybody knew she was married to a Rockefeller, and she could be all modest about it, like she didn’t care. But she cared.” If he turned out to be a bully and a fraud, well, the name would make it worth it. Women have put up with far worse for less. And Boss did stick with him for a very long time, despite the fact that in most cases people grew sick of him quickly. Like a lot of people with superficial charm he made good first impressions but had no depth, so it was hard to make any relationship last.

Gerhartsreiter wasn’t a subtle or sophisticated fraud but a firehose of bullshit, flooding every zone he entered with lies. Would he have fooled me? I don’t think so, but not because I’m immune to bullshit. It’s just that if he really was everything he said he was I would have still despised him. Even as a college student he was dropping lines like “Do you know who I am?” In later years he would adopt the pose of “a very famous person” (who nobody knew) and threaten people with lawsuits for talking about him.

Clearly he was a narcissist. At trial his defence tried to paint him with “delusional-disorder, grandiose-type insanity” but all along he knew what he was doing. Even his daughter was only a pawn, someone he tried to mold into the snob he so enjoyed playing. He wanted money more than custody, but his need for attention, for recognition of what he felt was his superiority, kept driving him on. In reality he was just a useless twerp who was full of himself. These people usually give themselves away, and they’re becoming a lot easier to expose now that you can check their claims immediately online. We can thank the Internet for something, I guess.

Noted in passing:

The curator of a museum holding many of the works of the Cornish Colony describes “two great intellectuals” who lived in Cornish, J. D. Salinger and Salman Rushdie, who wanted to arrange a private showing. “Both Salinger and Rushdie asked me to open the museum on days when there would be no one here,” she said, “so they wouldn’t see people. And I opened the museum so they could go through.”

Oh please. They actually said, not that they didn’t want to face a crowd (which I would have thought highly unlikely), but that they didn’t want to “see people.” They didn’t want to avoid people seeing them (and I don’t know who would have even recognized the reclusive and camera-shy Salinger), but didn’t want to see other people. This is celebrity privilege dialed up to the max. And again you can see how Gerhartsreiter would fit right in.

Takeaways:

We all believe things that aren’t true. But you have to be aware of this natural predisposition, and always be asking yourself why you want to believe in something that you know is bullshit.

True Crime Files

The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Account of the Lululemon Athletica Killing
By Dan Morse

The crime:

On the night of March 11 2011 twenty-eight-year-old Brittany Norwood beat her co-worker Jayna Murray to death in a Bethesda, Maryland Lululemon Athletica store. Norwood claimed the store had been invaded after hours by a pair of masked men who had killed Murray and tied Norwood up in the course of robbing the place, but that story soon unwound and it became clear that Norwood had staged the murder to make it look like a break-in. Norwood was convicted at trial of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

The book:

This was a very dumb crime that was easily figured out by the police after Norwood’s initial explanation of what happened started to come undone. You have to put a lot of planning and work into such a complex false narrative to pull it off, and Norwood seems to have given little thought into what she was doing at all. And that’s where the real mystery comes in.

It’s the same mystery that Dan Morse returns to again and again in this book: Just why did Norwood kill Murray? And in such a savage way?

Murray was beaten on by at least five and maybe as many as seven or eight different weapons. Norwood just grabbed whatever was at hand, including a knife, a hammer, a wrench, and a merchandise peg (a short, bent iron bar with a plate at the end used to hang clothes from). Forensics figured Murray was struck over three hundred and thirty times. There were also slicing and cutting wounds that experts interpreted as signs of sadism. It’s estimated that the beating continued for around fifteen minutes.

Obviously this was an act of extreme rage. But investigators couldn’t figure out why Norwood went off like this. The lead prosecutor even made the decision to try the case without putting forward a motive: “he knew he had to leave out one important detail that might prey on jurors’ minds: he couldn’t tell them why Brittany killed Jayna.” Later, during their deliberations, the jurors did indeed puzzle over this but finally had to shrug their shoulders and move on. They didn’t need to know her motive. “You know what?” one of them said. “Maybe in ten or fifteen years, Brittany Norwood will come out and explain why she did this. But the fact of the matter is we don’t have to know.”

It remains a mystery – Norwood didn’t testify at her trial and refused to be interviewed for this book – but maybe not as big a one as Morse makes it out to be. The murder was not deeply premeditated but a crime of passion. And Norwood was a hothead already, whose life was coming undone. She enjoyed living a lifestyle beyond her means, and working in a high-end shop in a tony neighbourhood probably didn’t help with her bad financial habits (a.k.a. “a taste for nice things”): eating at pricey restaurants and bars, buying fancy clothes, getting a membership at expensive gyms, attending NFL football games (in good seats), and having her hair done by top stylists.

No need to ask how she could afford any of this. She couldn’t. By the time of the murder she had ambitions to become a personal trainer but was in fact working as an escort as a side hustle, finding dates on sugar-daddy websites. Having reached such a point, and then being confronted by Murray with being fired (for a second time) on proof of theft from the store, she lost her shit. Or as her attorneys more diplomatically put it, “Ms. Norwood became overwhelmed with emotion during a confrontation, and before she could regain her composure, she committed the unthinkable.”

Morse looks into the possibility of psychopathy as well, but I’m not sure I’d go that far. Norwood was immoral, self-centered, and had a lack of empathy and poor impulse control (her out-of-control spending is evidence of that). But I don’t think she was a full-blown psycho. She wasn’t a good person, but I think her meltdown was the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people. It played out in a spectacular and tragic fashion though.

Noted in passing:

Morse puts Lululemon Athletica in lowercase throughout the book. So “lululemon athletica.” I think this is the way the company styles it for branding reasons but I don’t think it’s necessary or appropriate for a writer or journalist to follow those same guidelines and I found it really irritating.

Lululemon is a successful Canadian brand of athletic wear. I don’t know much about them, even though they seem to be what all the women are wearing at the gym these days. I guess they’re a good product, but the whole lifestyle-branding thing they push makes them sound like a cult to me. And a creepy corporate one at that. But this seems to be the way brands work these days.

Takeaways:

Norwood had worked previously at another Lululemon location but been fired by the store manager for suspicion of theft and abusing the discount privileges given employees. However the company did an internal investigation and found there were other cases of “discount abuse” that did not result in termination so they overturned the store manager’s decision and reinstated Norwood, telling her she could work at another location.

This is not the way to do it.

I’ve dealt with difficult and maybe even crazy people in workplace environments. People who just get warnings or who get moved around. I’m not saying it should be easier to fire people in general, but what I do advise is avoiding any half measures in cases like this. You can’t call bad employees in for a little talk and think things are going to improve. You get your ducks in the row and once you’re sure, you fire them. Lululemon should have got rid of Norwood when they had the opportunity – that is, before she came to the Bethesda store – but they dropped the ball.

True Crime Files

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
By Monica Hesse

The crime:

From November 2012 to April 2013 arsonists Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick went on a rampage through Virginia’s Eastern Shore. They ended up setting over 80 fires, mostly burning down abandoned homes. Upon their arrest, Smith pled guilty while Bundick maintained her innocence. Both were convicted and sentenced to long prison sentences.

The book:

I thought this was a terrific book, shining a light on a crime (arson) that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. Given just how prolific Smith and Bundick were as fire bugs, however, this was a fairly well reported case and one that tells us a bigger story, which is what drew Hesse to it. “Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big names not only because of the crimes themselves, but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment.”

That story is the familiar one of a rural region suffering from long-term economic decline. This was reflected both in terms of the Eastern Shore’s population, which actually declined nearly 20 percent from 1910 to 2010, as well as in the nature of its industry, with potato farming replaced by chicken processing plants. Compared to the rest of the state, the Eastern Shore had lower numbers of college graduates as well as lower incomes, all of which helped make it a tinder box.

“In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.” All you had to do was strike a match and you’d have a story perfectly suited for what political observers were beginning to take note of as one of twenty-first century America’s defining qualities. “America fretted about its rural parts, and the arsons were an ideal criminal metaphor for 2012.” The Eastern Shore was Evan Osnos’s Wildland, or Donald Trump’s landscape of American carnage. It was the land of the left behind, and in this case that meant left behind to burn.

I have to wonder if I would ever have read or heard anything about some of these places if not for being a fan of true crime. The declining population of the Eastern Shore immediately reminded me of the similarly stagnant or falling numbers in South Carolina’s Lowcountry as described in Valerie Bauerlein’s account of the Alex Murdaugh murder case The Devil at His Elbow. Reading both books I found myself having to consult atlases to familiarize myself just with the location of their depressed regions, as I knew nothing at all about them. And I suspect I’m not alone in that. These are places most people don’t even drive through on their way to somewhere else.

In addition to the political allegory, American Fire is also a love story. To be sure a crazy, tragic sort of love story, but then love itself is always a bit bonkers and frequently ends in tears. The specific kind of crazy here wasn’t so much a case of folie à deux or shared criminal conspiracy like Bonnie and Clyde (though these paradigms are discussed) as it was a neo-noir. Seen through this lens, Charlie and Tonya are easily identifiable genre types: the lovestruck, hard-luck loser and the mysterious, corrupting femme fatale.

“The psychologists who study criminal couples have discovered that the partnerships are rarely equal ones. The crimes are usually spurred on by one dominant partner.” And that’s definitely the takeaway here. It was clear not just to everyone but to Charlie himself that Tonya was out of his league. He’d noticed her at bars but wisely “avoided her on purpose. Women like that he always ended up making himself a fool in front of, and it seemed safer to stay away entirely.” Alas, easier said than done, and one fateful night, with only “an eight ball of cocaine in his pocket and a vague plan to kill himself,” they hooked up. You could even say she saved his life.

Things might have worked out, but Tonya seems to have always wanted something more while Charlie’s insecurities developed into performance issues. Inadequacy and low self-esteem led to impotence. Or as he put it, his belief that she was too good for him led to his dick not working. After a while it seemed the only way she could get her kicks with him was by their driving around setting fires together. Arson became a surrogate for sex. And whatever else you want to say about that as a basis for a relationship, it’s basically unsustainable. After a while you’re going to run out of fuel.

It’s this love story that I think is the real selling point for American Fire. Hesse actually makes both Charlie and Tonya into sympathetic figures, though her dislike for Tonya does come through in some uncharitable comments at the end. My own sense was that their love and their crimes were both representative of the human wreckage left behind by the fires that have been burning in America for the past fifty years. And not always burning in such a spectacular fashion, but with Robert Frost’s “slow smokeless burning of decay.”

Noted in passing:

“It’s amazing how boring trials can be. How even the most salacious of crimes committed under the most colorful of circumstances can result in testimony that is tedious and snoozy.”

This is why we have books, and why books have editors.

Takeaways:

As flattering as it is to have a woman who is clearly out of your league taking an interest in you, you need to see it as a red flag. Charlie should have trusted his gut, as it’s safer “to stay away entirely.”

True Crime Files

Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto

The crimes:

“Down in the Ditch: Joanna Dennehy, Serial Stabber” by Charlotte Platt: a woman in southern England goes on a murder rampage with some help of from a pair of friends.

“Ruth Snyder: The Original Femme Fatale” by Ciaran Conliffe: in 1920s New York an unhappily married woman kills her husband in order to be free to marry her lover. After a sensational trial she ends up in the electric chair.

“Innocence Taken: The Murder of Karissa Boudreau” by Mike Browne: a Nova Scotian woman kills her daughter when the girl becomes an obstacle in her mom’s new relationship.

“Mahin: Monster or Victim?” by Mitzi Szereto: an Iranian woman drugs and strangles other women in order to steal their jewelry. She was in need of money as her husband was a worthless layabout and she had a disabled daughter.

“Twisted Firestarter” by C L Raven: a difficult woman in Wales deliberately burns down the house she rents an apartment in, killing the people (two adults, three children) in the apartment upstairs.

“On the Courthouse Steps: The Trial of Susan Smith” by Cathy Pickens: reflections on the famous 1995 trial of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her two children in a car she rolled down a boat ramp into a lake.

“Angela Napolitano: ‘I Am Not a Bad Woman’” by Edward Butts: an Italian immigrant woman living in northern Ontario kills her abusive husband with an axe.

“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” by Anthony Ferguson: a young woman with a thing for concealing her pregnancies apparently kills her fourth baby, though she maintains her innocence and the baby’s body is never found.

“Jolly Joseph: The Kerala Cyanide Serial Killer” by Shashi Kadapa: an Indian woman finds her path to social advancement made easier by poisoning everyone who gets in her way.

“Women Fight Back” by Tom Larsen: a pair of stories about (feminist?) women killing macho men in Mexico.

“Beauty and Beast” by Ily Goyanes: the life and trials of the sadistic Nazi death camp warden Irma Grese.

“Anno Bisesto, Anno Funesto” by Alisha Holland: Katherine Knight slaughters her on-again, off-again partner and cuts his corpse into pieces.

“Dead Woman Walking” by Joan Renner: in 1950s California the mama of a mama’s boy pays to have her son’s pregnant wife murdered so she can keep him all to herself.

“Mona Fandey: The Malaysian Murderer” by Chang Shih Yen: a money-hungry Malaysian witch doctor cuts an aspiring politician’s head off with an axe as part of a ritual meant to make him invincible.

The book:

For some reason women who kill have always been of special interest. As Mitzi Szereto puts it: “There’s something infinitely fascinating about women who commit murder. It pushes our buttons.” I remember when I was just starting out as a book reviewer in 1997 one of the first assignments I had was a joint review of Caleb Carr’s Angel of Darkness and Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. And just recently, for the True Crime Files, I reviewed Harold Schechter’s Fatal, which spent a lot of time in the early going talking about the differences between male and female serial killers.

Well, there’s nearly thirty years between those two bookends and I’m pretty sure the subject came up several times in-between. It does push our buttons.

I don’t think there’s any particular argument being put forward here about women who murder. Szereto canvases some of the usual talking points in her Introduction, like the differences (real or imagined) in opportunity and motivation, but mainly does so to show that they’re no more than general rules at best. So when Ily Goyanes kicks off her account of the sadistic Nazi Irma Grese by saying “When a woman kills, it is almost always for one of three reasons: financial gain, revenge, or pleasure,” we almost automatically think of exceptions. Exceptions that we wouldn’t have to go far to find, as there are several provided in this anthology. Sometimes, for example, and not to worry about being too precise about it, women who kill are just nuts.

Instead of advancing any kind of general argument, and as with the previous Szereto anthology I reviewed, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, the main emphasis here is on the “international” angle. There are stories from the U.S., Iran, India, Mexico, the U.K., Malaysia, Canada, and more. Yes, there are women who kill featured in all of them. But some are young and some are old, some poor and some well off, and their motives for murder have a similar variety, ranging from self-defence to psychopathy. In some cases it’s not even clear how responsible they were or what exactly they did. On that latter point, in her Introduction Szereto name-drops “Britain’s baby-killing nurse, Lucy Letby,” and in the first story Charlotte Platt also refers to Letby as “the serial killer nurse who killed seven babies and permanently injured six others.” Since this book was published in 2024 this is something they could say, as Letby had been convicted, but there are a lot of questions being asked about that case now. Canadian readers of a certain age may remember the investigation into the series of baby deaths at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the early 1980s and what a mess that turned into. I imagine there will be a fair few books coming out on the Letby case before long and it’s possible what we know about it will have to be revised.

Because the crimes recounted literally span the globe, one thing I found interesting was noting what seem to be cultural universals. To take just a few:

Investigating a serial killer case in Iran, the police ran into what, to Western eyes, will seem a very familiar problem:

As is the case in crimes such as these, people began to crawl out of the woodwork, all claiming to have important information that will help solve the crimes. Qazvin police receive several tips a day from supposed eyewitnesses, including melodramatic accounts from “victims” who say that they too, were taken by the killer, but had fought back, narrowly escaping death. Having no choice but to follow every lead, police investigate these claims, only to find that they’re bogus. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to invent stories or to provide false evidence to police.

Even in Iran. For some reason that surprised me.

Meanwhile, in India, another familiar script played out, that of state corruption. Need a forged will? Anything is possible “provided government officers, land registrars, and other authorities are willing to cooperate.” Need to stymie a police investigation after an autopsy report indicates poisoning? Perhaps the police sub-inspector can be bribed with money or “something more.” No matter where you live, you don’t have to be a particularly careful killer if you grease enough wheels.

Finally, the Mona Fandey trial was apparently a factor in speeding up the process of abolishing jury trials in Malaysia. I don’t think that’s likely to happen in the West (getting rid of juries, I mean), but the reasons for Malaysia taking this step may strike close to home. The Fandey trial was a circus, fueled not just by the bizarre nature of the crime but by the local celebrity of the people involved. As a result, it was a test case for the proposition that “the jury could be influenced by emotions and the media when reaching their verdict.” Better, Malaysia decided, to leave these matters in the hands of a judge.

This is the sort of information I enjoy learning about in an international anthology, and I found a lot of it here. Also, many of the individual crimes were ones I’d never heard of, probably again due to where many of them occurred. And finally the writing is mostly pretty good, with only a few duds in the line-up. Given that these are all new pieces of writing, I credit the job Szereto did in pulling them together.

Noted in passing:

“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” really was strange. Lane was a championship water polo player who got pregnant a lot as a young woman. One would have thought (that one being me) that pregnancy would have put a bit of a crimp in her training, especially as she didn’t want anyone knowing she was pregnant. This is something that’s hard to hide when wearing a swimsuit, but Lane was apparently built differently and perhaps people didn’t want to say anything. I’m not sure what the explanation was. But this part really surprised me:

It also transpired that Lane played in a grand final match while nine months pregnant. Anyone who knows water polo will be aware that it is a brutal sport. There is no way heavily pregnant woman should have taken part in such a match.

I second this. Water polo is a brutal sport, with a lot of grabbing and kicking going on below the water. It isn’t safe at all for a pregnant woman. But leaving aside how anyone nine months pregnant wouldn’t have shown wearing a swimsuit, or whether a woman in such condition should have taken part in such a match, the question I had was how she could have participated. This wasn’t some intramural match. Lane was playing at an elite national level. How could she even keep up?

Katherine Knight didn’t just kill her partner. She butchered him and cut his body up into steaks. In doing so she used tools and skills she’d become familiar with in her job at a slaughterhouse. This makes for an interesting digression. An academic study

found that counties in the United States that have a slaughterhouse, and are therefore home to slaughterhouse employees, have measurably higher crime rates, leading to more than twice as many arrests as a county without one. In fact, for every one thousand slaughterhouse employees in a factory, the surrounding area’s arrest rate can be expected to increase by 1 percent. Violent and sexual crimes also occurred at higher rates for slaughterhouse workers than those in similar industries, such as mechanics, truckers, and steel workers.

It’s believed this is due in part to the normalization of the extreme violence inflicted on animals – all in the name of the “greater good.” An employee may think: “I am killing this animal to feed the people,” with the violent methods being approved by their boss, their company, and their state. But the lines blur when these employees go home. Society has approved of, and even paid for them to kill, and, for some, the species becomes irrelevant.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it seems likely that some degree of desensitization occurs working in such places. Tobe Hooper was on to something.

Takeaways:

Why do women kill? Pretty much for all the same reasons men kill. They tend to use different methods, but things end up the same.

True Crime Files

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

The crimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

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

The crime:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

Murder of Innocence: True Crime Thrillers
By James Patterson

The crimes:

“Murder of Innocence”: Andrew Luster, the rich descendant of a cosmetics fortune, lived in California and spent his time surfing by day and drugging and raping women he picked up in bars at night. He also videotaped all of this. After jumping bail during his trial he was apprehended in Mexico and is now in prison.

“A Murderous Affair”: Mark Putnam, an FBI field agent in Kentucky, had an affair with an informant named Susan Smith. When Smith got pregnant Putnam strangled her. He pled guilty at trial and served 10 years of a 16-year sentence before being released for good behaviour in 2000.

The book:

I want to start off addressing a lot of things about this book rather than the book itself.

In the first place we have the name “James Patterson” on the cover. It’s not in quotation marks but I put them in because Patterson is a brand now and his name goes on the cover of a number of books that he oversees the production of but that he doesn’t write all of himself. In fact, I don’t know how much of them he writes or what the extent of his involvement is. In any event, Patterson is also the only name on the title page, and it isn’t until you get to the individual stories that you find they were written “with” Max DiLallo and Andrew Bourelle, respectively.

The cover also declares Patterson to be “the world’s #1 bestselling writer,” and that at least is a claim that is inarguable. He’s sold well over 400 million books and is the highest-paid author on the planet. You know the page at the front of some books where it lists “Other books by this author”? You don’t get that here, just a note telling you that “For a complete list of books, visit JamesPatterson.com.” I did. I couldn’t count them all.

In the “About the Author” blurb at the back of this book Patterson is also called “the world’s bestselling author and most trusted storyteller.” The first part of that statement is, as I’ve said, inarguable. I don’t know what it means to be a trusted storyteller though. Trusted to deliver a generic reading experience? Or trusted in some other way? And how do you measure trustworthiness? What would make Patterson more trusted than anyone else?

Patterson is, of course, primarily a novelist and this book is an exercise in growing the brand outside of his various fiction franchises into the lucrative world of true crime. Can we trust the author(s) not to be making things up? A note on the copyright page tell us this:

The crimes in this book are 100% real. Certain elements of the stories, some scenes and dialogue, locations, names, and characters have been fictionalized, but these stories are about real people committing real crimes, with real, horrifying consequences.

Whoa, there. You often read true crime books where the names have been changed to protect the innocent. That comes with the territory. But how much of these stories has been “fictionalized”? The “certain elements” mentioned – scenes and dialogue, locations, names, and characters – would seem to cover pretty much everything. I mean names and characters? There are people described here who don’t exist?

How can we even tell what is true and what’s made up? There are no notes on sources so no way to check any of it out. Did Patterson or one of the other authors do interviews? Did they do any original research? I don’t know.

I don’t ask these questions just as a knee-jerk response to true crime being written by novelists (which is how both of Patterson’s co-authors are also described). It’s also something triggered by the style of writing, which is very . . . novelistic. Here’s how the book begins:

Carey flutters open her eyes, but she can’t see much of anything.

Hot water is running down her fact. Swirls of rising steam engulf her.

Her head is spinning, and her legs and arms feel wobbly, like the Jell-O shots she and her sorority sisters make for their house parties.

Carey had been drunk before. And stoned. More times than she can count.

But this feeling, what’s happening to her right now, is different.

Very different.

Carey gropes blindly for something to hold on to. Her fingertips make contact with a wall of wet tile. She claws at the slick surface, feeling dangerously shaky. Then she forces herself to take some slow, deep breaths. And think.

Well, there was a Carey and it was her complaint that led to Andrew Luster’s initial arrest. And from reading about Luster’s crimes in other sources I looked up it seems as though most of the story told here checks out, as does the story about Mark Putnam’s murder of Susan Smith. That said, a note like the one on the copyright page is disturbing. Time and again in both stories I found myself wondering how the action and character’s thoughts could be related so novelistically and still be credible. In the second story, which is written in a noticeably different style that leads one to suspect that the co-authors really were doing most of the work, we find a passage like this in the early going:

Mark and Whittaker step out of the car to wait. The wild grass in the clearing is two feet high, and grasshoppers jump from stalk to stalk. The air is loud with insects and birds. They hear the long, low honk of a semi in the distance, probably a coal truck leaving a mine. Mark closes his eyes and tries to enjoy the sound of the insects and the warmth of the sun on his face.

How does he (the author) know this? Did he measure the grass? Keep in mind that this is a 2020 book and the events being described occurred in 1987. There’s just no way. Perhaps something like this actually happened, but that would be the best anyone could say. And then the action gets hot and heavy with Putnam and Smith making out in his car:

Mark reaches up and gently guides her face down to his. Their lips meet, and they begin to kiss slowly. She tastes his tongue and the sweat on his lips. His stubble scratches against her chin.

I had a hard time finishing “A Murderous Affair” and this is the main reason why. I know I’ve given up on books for less. And remember: this is ostensibly a work of non-fiction. And we’re not talking about little things like the taste of a lover’s tongue either. As a reader you just have to toss up your hands at the account given here of the murder of Susan Smith, which goes on for several pages. I didn’t believe a word of the dialogue or any of the escalation to violence that’s described, and can only assume it’s based, somehow, on Putnam’s confession (as I’ve said, there is no note on sources). And this despite the fact that Putnam does deserve a lot of credit for coming forward to confess to the murder even when he likely would have gotten away with it and his lawyer was advising him not to say anything. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy all of his spin on what actually happened.

This particular book is a tie-in to a series of true crime documentaries that showed on the Investigation Discovery channel and it reads a bit like a novelization of one of those documentaries where actual events get dramatized by actors. Or, in the Putnam case, made into the feature film Above Suspicion (2019). I don’t like that style of documentary, and I didn’t like the way this book was written either. At some point when writing true crime, or any non-fiction, you have to draw a line as to how far you’re going to let creative license go. And Murder of Innocence crossed over any line I would have drawn.

Finally, while I’m still going over this preliminary stuff, I have to call out the lazy title. Sure, a lot of true crime books have generic titles that may or may not give you any indication as to what they’re about, but the title here seems particularly off base. It’s the title of the first story, which is about a rich guy who gives girls a date-rape drug and then films himself having sex with them. Nobody is killed and Luster isn’t a murderer. I guess you could say that it’s the innocence of the women he raped that was murdered, metaphorically, but that’s a stretch. The title is just a generic placeholder.

But I don’t want anyone to think I’m knocking Patterson, or “Patterson.” He’s a popular writer for a reason. He’s not a great writer, but he’s an easy one. Very easy. And that counts for something, at least for a lot of people. As I’ve said, I found the second story here hard to finish but I’ll chalk that up to my having higher standards. If you want, you can call me a snob. If you’re not a snob and don’t care how much the facts have been massaged in the interest of writing something more cinematic, than this is a book you might enjoy.

Having said all that, and I warned you it was going to be a lot, what about the crimes that were committed? One thing that unites them is the way they both highlight an attitude toward others grounded in a sense of privilege. They are, sadly, not exceptional in any other way. The use of date rape drugs is reported to be fairly common, and is a global phenomenon. What Luster did reminded me a lot of the case of Lucie Blackman as recounted in Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness. That book (which is excellent) involved a young man (Joji Obara) possessing a large inherited fortune who regularly drugged and raped women he picked up at bars in Japan. Like Luster he also videotaped the events.

Meanwhile, men cheating on their wives is nothing new, and sometimes these affairs do end in murder. I think it’s more common for men to get rid of their wives to be with the new woman though. What made the Putnam case different was that he was reported to be the first FBI agent convicted of homicide. Like the rich rapists he probably thought he was untouchable, above suspicion. But as a note from Patterson that appears on the flyleaf puts it, in these cases “The bad guy always gets caught.” That’s another thing that’s shared by popular true crime titles. You want to see justice being served, especially when it involves people who seem to be above the law.

Privilege has become a moral and political pejorative of some weight in today’s discourse, and not without reason (see a good recent true crime example of toxic privilege here). But is privilege always such a poison? I don’t think so, but I do think it breeds a certain attitude towards others. The less privileged come to be seen as inferior or, worse, only there to be exploited. At the same time, having privilege gives one a sense of immunity from the consequences of one’s actions. People with privilege feel free of responsibility for any of the damage they might cause or any fear that they might be caught. Combine these two effects and you’ve certainly opened the door for all kinds of bad behaviour. A door that weak people will almost unconsciously walk through.

Noted in passing:

In my notes on The Count and the Confession I asked why lie detectors were even still in use. One answer I suggested was that they’re a $2 billion-a-year industry. It’s hard to understand why Putnam would have agreed to take such a test, especially given that the results would have been inadmissible in court anyway. I can only chalk it up to his wanting to be caught at that point.

Takeaways:

“True crime” is a genre label. It doesn’t necessarily mean the book is all true.

True Crime Files