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

The crime:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

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

The crime:

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

The book:

I had deeply divided feelings on this one.

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

On the other hand . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

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

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

True Crime Files

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

The crimes:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

Empty Promises and Other True Cases
By Ann Rule

The crimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-Up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia
By Paul Palango

The crime:

On the night of April 18, 2020, Gabriel Wortman got dressed up as an RCMP officer and into a car made to look like a police cruiser, then went around shooting up the community of Portapique, Nova Scotia. The next day his murder spree continued as he hit the road. By the time he was finally shot by police at a gas station he had killed 22 people. In the days that followed the RCMP would come in for a great deal of criticism over the way they handled the situation and many questions remain unanswered.

The book:

As the subtitle indicates, this is not a narrative history of Wortman’s 13-hour rampage, setting out to provide a definitive account of what happened and why. That’s a story that may never be told, some of the reasons for which are gone into here. Instead, what we get is more of a reporter’s notebook on the tragic events and their fallout, with much to say about the RCMP’s response to it and its media coverage.

Though I’ve never been one to rush to the defense of the police, I initially resisted being taken where Paul Palango was clearly going, which is that the RCMP were involved in a cover-up of their actions (and possibly a cover-up of some deeper relationship they might have had with Wortman). This is the sort of thing that is usually sneered at as conspiracy thinking, with calls for tin-foil hats and the theme from The X-Files playing in the background. But that’s unfair, as conspiracies do exist and in fact can be perfectly mundane, which seems to have been the case here.

“The more research we did,” Palango writes, “the clearer it was becoming evident that this was no conspiracy theory, as my detractors would have it, but rather a bona fide conspiracy.” The thing is, conspiracies are often equated in the public’s mind with highly-involved and sinister machinations when in fact they are often just part of the normal operation of many large bureaucracies or big corporations (Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”).

That seems to have been the case here, as the RCMP, an almost entirely unaccountable organization, has become the preserve of what Palango (borrowing language from The Wire) derides as “house cats”: public employees who have become comfortable in well-appointed sinecures. Within such a government bureaucracy, the code of silence and CYA (Cover Your Ass) are the only operational rules. One rises through the system not by being productive or particularly good at one’s job but by being well connected (family matters in the RCMP) and by steadily advancing to positions that come with higher pay and better benefits but that are really just empty titles without any duties or responsibilities. And all the time the force becomes more and more top-heavy, with proportionately fewer boots on the ground. And these house cats cost a lot of money. One of the numbers Palango throws out is that government employees who move for work (soldiers, civil servants, and Mounties) cost the public purse $500 million a year. Wow! $35,000 per homeowner! That’s a hell of a perk.

In short: welcome to the blighted and bloated world of middle management and office administration. A world that isn’t a conspiracy so much as just the kind of thing you get given the natural and universal habit of people in positions of power and privilege to use those positions to feather their nests. One needn’t attribute to malignancy what is simple laziness and self-interest.

Where conspiracy enters the picture is with the cover-up. Or, as Palango puts it, “a massive cover-up . . . one that tested the natural laws of conspiratorial physics.” Is this going too far? To be sure, police were put in a difficult situation, as Wortman was no ordinary mass killer. There was a lot of confusion on the ground. But right from the get-go the Mounties had trouble keeping their story straight and clearly misinformed the public on several occasions as to what they knew and when they knew it (Palango isn’t reluctant to call them out for “lying”). With the help of a deferential and even pliant media they sought to put forward their own narrative while attacking anyone who would question it.

The official story about Portapique was shaping up to be a perfect modern fairy tale – the Monster and the Maiden. It was a macabre morality play and just about everyone in the media was eager to put it to music. The RCMP’s excuses for its failures were treated with less than an ounce of skepticism. The belief that the media have a duty and responsibility to hold institutions accountable seemed to be overridden by the undeniable and unhealthy deference to authority that permeates much of the Canadian psyche.

So true. So very true. Sing it, Paul!

For example, that reference to the Monster and the Maiden is directed at something Palango spends a lot of time trying to understand: what was going on between Wortman and his wife just before he went on his homicidal bender. Unfortunately, he keeps coming up against the “feminist lens” that was being used to portray her as a victim of domestic abuse. Palango refers to this as “coddling,” but it worked, and it’s still unclear what happened to her on the night of April 18.

As we all know, there are powerful incentives for claiming victim status. Victim credentials absolve you of all responsibility for your actions and allow you to make calls upon public sympathy that can be further exploited. The most egregious example in this case was the number of Mounties who claimed stress leave immediately after Wortman’s rampage. Apparently there were seventy of them. Seventy! In order to deal with their trauma they took the summer off, which came with a bill to the province of Nova Scotia of $3.75 million for hiring replacement officers. Meanwhile, as Palango reports, “The ‘sick’ Mounties got full pay and lounged around their vacation properties, many posting photos on social media.” This shit has to stop. I’ve posted before about the abuse of diagnoses of PTSD and I’ll just repeat here that it’s a disgrace. But I digress.

Given the combination of silence and misinformation the public began to lose trust in the official line. And this is the really bothering point. We live in a post-truth age of alternative facts and false narratives, thinking that shadowy elites in the media and the deep state are lying to us about everything. So when we see a case where something is clearly wrong about the story government spokespeople and newspaper editorials put forth, it deeply damages the foundation of our social bonds. I mean – and I say it this time without irony – if you can’t trust public institutions like the CBC and the Mounties, and I don’t think we can, then who can we trust? Put another way, what if all the sketchy-sounding podcasters who inveigh against the mainstream media and who are always “just asking questions” turn out to be right? Or if not right, at least have a point? This is something Palango is very aware of, pointing out “repeatedly that this is the kind of situation that leads to the flourishing of so-called conspiracy theories.”

It’s not a good place to find ourselves in. There was, inevitably, a board of inquiry into Wortman’s rampage. The Report of the Mass Casualty Commission came out in March 2023 (after this book was published) and it was highly critical of the RCMP, but this is not accountability. At some point something has to be done to restore public trust in such basic institutions as the police and the media or we are in trouble. It’s interesting that just a year before 22 Murders came out there were a couple of other Canadian true crime books that also raised disturbing questions about police (mis)conduct: Justin Ling’s Missing from the Village, on the Bruce McCarthur case that shook the gay community in Toronto, and Silver Donald Cameron’s Blood in the Water, which focused on the ineffectiveness of the Nova Scotia RCMP in dealing with a Cape Breton ne’er-do-well who ended up being killed (I reviewed both books together). Something isn’t working here, and whether you agree or disagree with Palango’s approach you have to give him credit for addressing what has become a real and growing problem.

Noted in passing:

A couple of points came up while reading 22 Murders that I’ve addressed before, but they’re worth returning to for further context.

The first has to do with how swiftly some crimes, no matter how sensational at the time, disappear from our memory. Wortman’s murderous rampage was a huge story, especially in Canada where these kinds of mass killings aren’t everyday occurrences. That said, I have to admit that only a few years after these events I’d already confused them in my head with the 2014 shootings in Moncton, when Justin Bourke shot five RCMP officers, killing three.

Palango has his own experience of this on a visit to a local pharmacy a little over a year after Wortman’s spree.

The thirtyish pharmacy assistant knew a little about me from the pharmacists, who knew a lot about what I had been doing.

“I hear you’re writing a book,” she said. “What’s it about?”

“Gabriel Wortman,” I said.

“Who?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The Nova Scotia massacres,” I responded. Noting that she was still drawing a blank, I added, “The shootings last year.”

“Someone got shot?” she asked with a look of both astonishment and concern.

It’s surprising the assistant hadn’t heard of the shootings, but maybe not so surprising that she didn’t twig to Wortman’s name. This brings me to the second point I wanted to bring up: the policy in many media outlets, in Canada and internationally, of not providing the names of mass shooters in news reports.

As I’ve said before, I understand where this is coming from, especially in cases where a killer is looking to gain notoriety for a repugnant cause, for which they’ve prepared a manifesto. Think cases like Anders Behring Breivik, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant. It’s also true that, with celebrity, or attention, as the only coin of the realm, one doesn’t want to give such individuals anything that smacks of a posthumous victory, much less a platform. That said, deliberately setting out to turn mass killers into anonymous unpersons strikes me as too ideological, while taking the news media away from its core duty to report all of the facts. We don’t call Hitler “the German dictator” by convention. No, the “five Ws” of journalism begins with “Who?” and that’s the way it should be. Alas, in 2020 this was no longer true, or even considered best practices:

A month or so after the massacres, just about every major news outlet had taken the same “ethical” position that it was not going to name Gabriel Wortman. He would only be known by his initials or some euphemism – the shooter, the madman or the denturist. His was a name not to be spoken.

On the front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald the official editorial policy was announced: “we will only publish the murderer’s name and photo responsibly, when it serves the public good.” This struck me as very dangerous. Who decides what serves the public good? I can get on board with not publishing photos of the crime scenes, but the name of the perpetrator? As Palango puts it, “The rationale for this proud self-censorship was that naming Wortman would only glorify his actions and provide a model for others like him.” How so? Wortman wasn’t looking to go out in a blaze of media glory. He didn’t leave any manifesto or suicide note that I’m aware of. What sort of a model for others would his name provide? His use of a car made up to look like an RCMP cruiser was widely reported, with pictures of it popping up everywhere, and that’s the only aspect of the case that I would have thought another mass shooter might want to imitate.

I’m just not buying it. In such cases the killer’s name is part of the story, and it belongs in the story and not hidden behind some virtue signaling by the press. As Palango demonstrates, there was already far too much ideological and political shaping of the narrative of these events going on in the press and in statements made by the authorities.

Takeaways:

Does it matter that the truth is out there if nobody cares?

True Crime Files

El Jefe: The Stalking of Chapo Guzmán
By Alan Feuer

The crime:

For nearly thirty years Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, commonly referred to by his nickname El Chapo (“shorty” or “stocky”), was one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, being the leader of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel. After a long and colourful history of evading and escaping the law he was finally tracked down and apprehended by Mexican and American authorities in 2016, extradited to the U.S., and sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

I didn’t like this one much. It’s very limited in scope, telling the story of the pursuit of El Chapo from the perspective of American FBI and DEA agents. So don’t expect to find out much about the operation of Guzmán’s empire, or what was happening in Mexico. Also, Alan Feuer’s reporting deals primarily with the various ways agents tried to locate and track the boss through his communications network, which is something that either wasn’t explained all that well or was just over my head since I couldn’t follow any of the details. At no time did I fully understand how the monitoring of Guzmán’s messaging system actually worked.

As for the gangster lifestyle, for all of his money, influence, celebrity, and power it doesn’t seem like Guzmán enjoyed himself much. He was, of course, always on the run, and lived a fair amount of the time in very primitive conditions, even in caves. Then there was the constant threat of violence from other gangs and having to respond to ever-changing market conditions, or the more mundane work of a CEO. It all sounds like a grind to me, not to mention dangerous.

But the Hollywood image of a drug lord – think of Pacino’s Scarface in his trashy Florida mansion – looms large in the popular imagination. And I guess there’s some truth to the tales of excess. Pablo Escobar had his hacienda, stocked with hippos and other exotic creatures. And El Chapo had a gold-plated AK-47 and lots of mistresses. But mostly the life just seems, like Guzmán himself, nasty, brutish, and short.

Even so, Guzmán seems to have been aware of the Hollywood mythology, and sought to promote it. One of the more interesting sub-plots here involves the fact that he kept a screenwriter on staff and was planning on making a movie about himself (with the rather unoriginal working title of El Padrino, Spanish for The Godfather). One of the raids to grab him was even thrown for a loop when it was discovered that Sean Penn had scheduled a visit at the same time. Penn was interested in interviewing Guzmán for Rolling Stone while Guzmán and his team were hoping the Hollywood actor would want to get involved in their film project.

This conflict between Guzmán’s notoriety, or celebrity status and his need to stay anonymous and hidden is one of the more interesting parts of his story. As Feuer puts it, “The ‘paradox of visibility’ was paradoxical only in the sense that Guzmán never wanted to be invisible; he wanted to be seen.” But I don’t think this is quite right. Guzmán did want to be invisible some of the time. He just also wanted to be famous. This is typical of most celebrities: they want to be in complete control of their brand, enjoying all the perks of fame without any of the downsides. But that’s not the way it works. At least not yet.

This isn’t a book about Guzmán though, so we don’t get any deeper into his psychology on this matter. Instead, the main reflection I was left with had to do with Guzmán as folk hero. Not so much for being a provincial big shot, the hometown boy who made good and gave a boost to the local economy while showing up the federal government as corrupt and incompetent fools, as for his fighting against the ineluctable web of digital surveillance. The story here is of an incredibly complex and long-running police investigation that was basically driven by tech people and all their wonderful toys and software. Guzmán was alert to the dangers, and seems to have done a good job protecting himself, but if you want to communicate in the digital age you’re going to be vulnerable to hackers. As terrible a person as Guzmán was, this does make you almost want to root for his escape. Because if he couldn’t free himself from the web, who can?

Noted in passing:

As Guzmán expanded his drug trade into Canada we’re told by Feuer that “It hadn’t gone unnoticed that a kilo of cocaine sold for almost ten thousand dollars more in Montreal and Toronto than it did in Chicago or Los Angeles.” This surprised me a bit. Cocaine costs that much more in Canada? So I did some Internet sleuthing and found that prices for cocaine (this is mostly from the Global Drug Surveys that can be accessed online) vary widely not just between countries but different regions within countries. Overall though, it seems that Canada, which consumes a lot of cocaine, enjoys (if that’s the right word) low cocaine prices. The main rule seems to be that the further the distance from the source (Colombia, say), the higher the price. So cocaine costs a lot in Australia and Dubai. I don’t think Canada is a very difficult country to smuggle drugs into, but I’m guessing most of the cocaine we get comes through the U.S. first so crossing two international borders drives up the price. Still, the amount of mark-up that Feuer cites sounds high.

“Whenever his safety and schedule permitted it,” Feuer writes, El Chapo “loved slipping off to havens like Los Cabos where he could eat well, drink among his friends and have his pick of the local professional talent.”

Is this use of “talent” widely understood? My own understanding is that what’s being referred to are escorts or prostitutes, but that’s mainly an inference from the word’s use in the porn industry, where “talent” refers to performers, with everybody else being business or tech support. I didn’t think “talent” meaning prostitutes was that common an expression, capable of being tossed off here in such a casual way. But I might just be out of the loop.

Takeaways:

Certain human beings have the power to hold a gaze. Without even asking for it, they command our attention, the most valuable commodity we have. . . . Guzmán had been right about one thing: the world had been watching him, much like it had always watched him, millions of people, across the planet, for nearly thirty years. The important questions – Why had it been watching? Did he deserve it? And what was the point of all that concentration? – never seemed to have occurred to him. Perhaps he took it for granted. Or perhaps he understood what we did not: that no matter what he did and no matter what he said – no matter what happened – all of us were going to look at him.

True Crime Files

Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders
By John Glatt

The crime:

Scion of a long line of powerful South Carolina lawyers, Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and youngest son in June 2021, just as he was about to be exposed for having stolen millions of dollars from clients in order to pay for his drug habit.

The book:

For reasons not worth getting into I had CNN on a lot in the background when this case exploded with wall-to-wall coverage. I didn’t pay much attention to it then, figuring a book was soon on its way, from which I would learn more. That book didn’t take long to arrive, though I can’t say I was keenly anticipating it. From what I could gather, it didn’t seem like a particularly remarkable crime. Why had it caught the public’s interest?

I think mainly because it fit a popular archetype: “a roller-coaster of murder plots, financial crimes, and drug addiction, straight out of a Southern Gothic novel.” The story of a powerful family’s decline into criminality, madness, and degeneracy may have had people thinking of Faulkner or even Poe, but I don’t think either of those authors is ever mentioned. Instead, Glatt goes further back and likens the fall of the house of Murdaugh to Greek tragedy. In fact, I think he makes that connection four times (and once, just for good measure, to Shakespeare). Is this a fair comparison?

The Murdaughs were big fish in the small pond of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, so I guess they qualify as being of tragic stature. Of Alex Murdaugh Glatt writes that “His greed and hubris were limitless,” which has an Aristotelian ring to it. But by the time of the main events recounted here the family was guttering out in a big way, to the point where it’s hard to see how Alex and his son Paul were functioning at all given the amounts of booze and drugs they were consuming. Alex was also more of a Shakespearean villain than a hero with a tragic flaw. In a final judgment that made me sit up and take notice Glatt concludes that “Whether or not Alex is a sociopath is not for me to say, but in all the true crime books I have written, I have never come across anyone as dark and totally devoid of conscience as he appears to be.”

That’s a bold claim – I believe this is Glatt’s twenty-fifth book – but it has some merit. The curious thing I found was that despite shooting his wife in the back with an AR-15 and then standing over her body and “firing again and again,” and then blasting a shotgun at his son’s head and chest at point-blank range, the murders seem not to have been crimes of passion. I didn’t even see where Murdaugh was particularly angry at either of them. They had just become inconveniences. That’s cold.

Was it the drugs Murdaugh was taking? There seems to have been little evidence that his mental or moral functioning was greatly impaired. To be sure he was an addict, but I don’t see where that changed his personality much. Where did all his rage come from? Or was it rage?

Nor was what was happening on the financial front easy to understand. This is usually a place where true crime books shine. My basic question was just why Murdaugh was in such financial distress, or, as described by Glatt, “drowning in debt.” He was presumably well remunerated as a partner in the large law firm his great-grandfather founded back in 1910. Then, by the nearest accounting we get here, he stole some $10 million from clients over a roughly ten-year period. Was it all going for drugs? I guess it’s possible. He claimed at the end to be spending up to $60,000 a week on pills, taking more than two thousand milligrams of oxycodone a day. That adds up, but I don’t think he could have been medicating that heavily for a decade. Glatt mentions how he was also involved in some kind of drug dealing operation, but if so it apparently wasn’t making him rich or else he was too busy getting high off his own supply.

While he and his wife liked to live large (as an exercise in family branding she posted pics of their opulent lifestyle on Facebook “to burnish the Murdaugh image”) it just seems to me that with that kind of money in such a relative backwater he should have had more to show for it. I mean, his home property was a whopping 1,772 acres, complete with hunting lodge and dog kennels, but was put up for sale after his arrest for only $3.9 million. I know neighbourhoods near where I live where a decent-size detached home on a suburban lot will put you back close to that. My point being that with a million bucks you could have been a very rich man in the Lowcountry, and Murdaugh had a lot more than a million.

Overall I thought this was just a decent, quick look at the case, thankfully without too many of the howler typos that often mar such timely productions. I guess the end of Chapter 39, which tells us that “Prosecutors and the defense are now busily preparing for Alex’s upcoming murder trial,” was originally conceived as being the end of the book, as we do get an account of the trial immediately after this. And while there weren’t many typos, I did get a smile out of Murdaugh’s lawyers arguing that he should be “afforded a release on his own reconnaissance.” That’s great.

An interesting aside: In one of Glatt’s previous books – Love Her to Death – an estranged wife looking for a divorce is killed when her husband talks her into meeting him in person, something that she wanted to avoid. That’s what happens here as well, as Maggie, who was also considering a divorce, didn’t want to go see Alex alone but felt obliged. There’s a warning for you, ladies! If you’re nervous about meeting your soon-to-be ex on your own, listen to your gut.

The bigger point that’s illustrated though is that of the corrupting effect of privilege. At bottom, privilege means a freedom from consequences, and a little of it can let you get away with a lot. The Murdaughs had a lot of it, and the suspicion shared by many is that they may have even got away with murder. The deaths of Stephen Smith, Murdaugh housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, and Mallory Beach have all been connected to the family, and Glatt provides enough background on each case for readers to make up their own mind as to what, if any, culpability they may have had.

There is, however, always a point where you can’t take things any further. In the case of privilege that point is a long, long way down, but just as the Peter principle has it that you rise to the level of your incompetence, so the privilege principle holds that the only thing that can really erase one’s privilege is the total destruction of oneself or others. Insulated by his wealth and social position, Murdaugh got to live in a bubble that atrophied any sense he had of personal responsibility or morality. Power just isn’t good for people: not for the people who don’t have it and suffer at its hands, and not for the people who do have it and who are debased by it. But still everybody wants some.

Noted in passing:

When he was in prison Murdaugh made a lot of calls, to family members mainly, talking about financial matters and encouraging his remaining son to return to law school. These calls were recorded, as I suppose is usual. What I did not think was usual was that the recordings of these calls were considered to be in the public domain. Indeed, I was quite surprised to find out that reporters filed a Freedom of Information request for the recordings of these calls and it was approved. They were subsequently released.

Murdaugh’s lawyers then “filed a federal lawsuit in US District Court in South Carolina to prevent any further calls going public, citing the federal wiretapping statute. It stated that although inmates were made aware that every call would be monitored and recorded, they were not told it would go public.”

This sounds like a valid complaint. While an inmate has no expectation of privacy when it comes to prison calls, I wouldn’t have thought the calls were public information. But after a pause allowing for a judicial ruling, a higher court agreed to release more calls. In his notes, Glatt refers to these “highly revealing jailhouse phone calls to his family” as providing “a real insight into his true character.” Which I’m sure they did, but I’m still not sure it’s right. Unless the material in the call has some bearing on the case, or can be interpreted as relating to the planning of some further crime, it seems to me that the press has no business publishing what are private conversations, no matter how psychologically revealing they may be.

Takeaways:

On the subject of family fortunes there’s an old saying that the first generation makes the money, the second conserves it, and the third loses it. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” is the adage. And like many an old bit of folk wisdom, there seems to be some truth to it. According to a couple of reports I found online from the 2010s, some 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and 90% by the third.

In other words, family decline is real. This is something borne out in the history of most dynasties, business and political. Even without their violent end the Murdaughs were locked on a familiar downward spiral, aided and abetted by Alex and Maggie’s staggering incompetence as parents. Paul’s death was tragic, but it’s hard from the evidence to see how he was going to turn things around.

The founder or patriarch of a family dynasty is usually at least a figure possessed of some qualities, though he may be an immoral scoundrel. The second generation are just inheritors. And by the time you get to the third generation – or, as in the case of the Murdaughs, the fourth and the fifth – you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel with spoiled degenerates who were rotten with privilege, destructive of wealth, and not much good for anything.

True Crime Files

Knowing Right from Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughtan
By Richard Moran

The crime:

In January 1843 a disgruntled Glaswegian named Daniel McNaughtan killed Edward Drummond, private secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel, by shooting him in the back. Apparently McNaughtan mistook Drummond for Peel. At trial, McNaughtan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. There was an outcry against the verdict, which resulted in the formulation of the long-lived McNaughtan Rule: that a defendant could only be found guilty if, at the time of his criminal act, he was suffering from such a disease of the mind that he could not appreciate the nature or quality of his act, or that if he did not know that what he was doing was right or wrong.

The book:

This is a short book, but it reads like a long one. I don’t mean that in a bad way, to suggest that it’s boring. It’s just very focused and dense. If you have an interest not only in legal history but in early Victorian issues like Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League then you’ll enjoy all the detail, but these are complicated matters that I think assume some familiarity with the period on the part of the reader. And then there’s more background provided in the extensive appendixes, which even include a transcript of the House of Lords debate on McNaughtan. If you’re like me, you’ll be taking a lot of notes.

Mainly however the book provides a very full accounting of the case itself, and one that Richard Moran gives a significant revisionist spin to. Some indication of where things are heading comes with the dedication: “To the young Scotsman from Glasgow whose search for political and social justice brought him face to face with the ultimate question of right and wrong.” That young Scotsman (actually he was 30 years old, which I don’t think was young by Victorian standards) would be Daniel McNaughtan.

The first point Moran makes is that McNaughtan wasn’t crazy. Indeed, nobody thought he was crazy at the time. Even Queen Victoria (who was sensitive on the subject after having being recently targeted twice by assassins) thought the idea absurd, writing in her diary that McNaughtan was “clearly not in the least mad.” Of course, the understanding of what it meant to be mad was a little different in her day. The then current theory of mind had it that the brain had two compartments: one for intellect and the other for the “moral faculties.” Thus it could be argued that McNaughtan’s moral faculty, the ability to properly distinguish between right and wrong, was impaired while his intellect was still functioning. As for evidence of such impairment, at trial it was argued by his defence lawyer that his love for children and habit of feeding pigeons in the park were “early indicators of a ‘predisposition to insanity,’ portraying the former as a peculiar delight in the ‘innocent ways’ of children and the latter as an odd ‘humanity toward the brute creation.’” Also suspect was his “custom of bathing daily in the nearby river Clyde.” This was said to relieve “the torturing fever by which his brain was consumed.”

None of this strikes a twenty-first century ear as very persuasive, and it’s hard to disagree with Victoria’s common-sense understanding of the matter. But if McNaughtan wasn’t crazy, why was he trying to kill the prime minister?

For Moran it’s clear that McNaughtan’s actions were politically motivated. Which is in fact what McNaughtan claimed they were: a way of fighting back against the persecution he felt he had suffered at the hands of the ruling Tories. So why then did his case become the leading case for over a century on the issue of mental illness and criminal responsibility? Because the political administration wanted it that way. This is where the really revisionist part of Moran’s book comes in to play. “The time has come to challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the McNaughtan case. Far from representing an enlightened humanitarian view of criminal responsibility by a judge and jury concerned with the welfare of a mentally ill defendant, the verdict in the case was mainly the result of political considerations.”

In a nutshell, McNaughtan claimed he had been harassed and persecuted by the Tory government, and there may have been some merit to the charge. But for the Victorians being anti-government was itself a form of madness. At least that’s the way it was seen in establishment circles. Only a few days after McNaughtan’s trial one John Dillon was arrested for threatening to shoot the chancellor of the Exchequer. Upon his arrest he declared that at his trial he would “not plead insanity, but injustice.” But as Moran notes, “The very act of threatening violence against a public official was sufficient for the Victorians to view Dillon as insane. Even the knowledge that his complaint was legitimate did not alter their opinion of his mental condition.” But there was an even stronger argument for proceeding against McNaughtan the way the Crown did:

Beyond serving the purpose of prolonged incarceration [there is no fixed sentence for those found criminally insane], the insanity verdict can function to deter potential political offenders. It was not necessary for the Tories to execute or imprison McNaughtan in order to discourage others from committing similar crimes. All that was necessary was to make him unattractive as a role model. The insanity verdict accomplished this in the most effective manner. By defining McNaughtan’s crime as outside the realm of human reality, the insanity verdict neutralized him as a model for others. While there was at least some disagreement over the desirability of assassinating the prime minister, there was virtual agreement that mental illness was undesirable. The insanity verdict robbed McNaughtan of his political credibility and negated the symbolic and instrumental aspects of his crime. In this sense it was a much greater penalty than death. The impossibility of having one’s political message properly understood must remain the most powerful deterrent to political murder.

The world would be made safe then through a process of judicial labeling. McNaughtan wouldn’t be a martyr to a cause but politically neutered by being locked away as a nut.

But Moran doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t leave it that McNaughtan was politically motivated and not insane. He goes a step further and argues that McNaughtan was, or at least might have been, justified. This is quite a radical step and it’s worth quoting Moran at length here:

Instead of searching for the pathological motivation in McNaughtan’s mind, we might ask how so many of his countrymen who shared his political perspective and proscriptive analysis stood by and watched as their families and friends suffered from the effects of political and economic exploitation. The important psychological dimension requiring explanation might well be the capacity of so many people to deny quietly the desperate political realities of early Victorian England.

The acknowledgment of assassination as a political weapon is a difficult notion for most people to accept. It violates our social and political norms, causing many of us to adopt the extreme position that political murder can never be justified. Still, when confronted with the specter of Adolf Hitler, most people concede that his assassination would have been a morally acceptable act and his assassin a person deserving of considerable praise. It is often said that in a democracy there are other ways to express dissent, that violence is not the way to influence the course of government, that political influence is exerted through elected officials. Regardless of the possible validity of this point of view, it must be recalled that early Victorian England was not a democracy but a constitutional monarchy. Much of Peel’s political life had been devoted to preventing England from embracing representative government. As a Chartist committed to universal suffrage, McNaughtan could not be expected unconditionally to honor the political rules laid down by an aristocratic government to ensure its hegemony. It makes little sense to suggest that McNaughtan should have continued his futile effort to vote Peel out of office, especially since Peel, a staunch defender of the corrupt boroughs, had repeatedly ridiculed the attempt by the working classes to petition Parliament for the right to vote.

What is at issue here, however, is not whether McNaughtan was justified in attempting to assassinate Peel, but whether the intention to do so was inherently irrational or illogical. A definite distinction must be made between the two. McNaughtan’s belief that Peel’s death would have a positive effect on Britain was not a “peculiar notion” he alone entertained.

From here, Moran argues for allowing defendants, in narrowly defined circumstances, to argue for the political or moral justification for what are admittedly criminal acts. This is not meant as a “get out of jail free” card for social justice warriors of whatever position on the political spectrum, but is instead put forward as an alternative to mislabeling as madness what are political acts; a mislabeling that is itself political.

Noted in passing:

Drummond didn’t die right away but took five days to expire, after the best doctors in England did what they could do hasten him along with excessive bloodletting through the application of leeches. Was there ever a more Victorian passing than this?

On Wednesday morning Edward Drummond was informed that he had less than an hour to live and that he must now put his trust in the Lord. Drummond’s reply was characteristically stoic: “The sooner the better – I don’t feel pain.” Turning to his sister, who was sobbing by his bedside, he said: “We have lived long and happy together, and my only regret is in parting with you.” With a faint smile he added: “That ugly French word malaise expressed most fully my burden.” After taking a sip of wine mixed with potassium water, Edward Drummond, a bachelor whose entire adult life had been devoted to public service, died in the arms of his maiden sister.

Takeaways:

You don’t have to be crazy to want to kill someone.

True Crime Files

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder
By Daniel Stashower

The crime:

Mary Rogers was a 20-year-old woman, famous for her good looks, who worked in a tobacco store in New York City. Known as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” she disappeared on July 25, 1841 and her body was found floating in the Hudson River three days later. Autopsy results indicated she might have been strangled. Various explanations for her death were put forward, including a slightly fictionalized version by Edgar Allan Poe in his story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The case, however, remains unsolved.

The book:

The murder of Mary Rogers is famous in the annals of true crime, though I don’t think that’s because of Poe’s story, which isn’t very good. There are two types of unsolved crimes that fascinate us, the ones that everyone has a theory about (Jack the Ripper, JonBenét Ramsey) and the ones that seem to frustrate every theory. The Mary Rogers case falls into the latter category. It’s a conundrum.

The chief explanations that have been put forward fall into the following three categories, and it’s worth noting not just how unlikely they all seem but how different they are from one another. That gives some idea of how much uncertainty there is.

In the first place there is the theory that Rogers was killed by a gang of ruffians. This is the scenario that Poe derides, and it seems unlikely for many of the reasons he gives. Just for starters, when you’re dealing with a group of criminals it’s far harder to cover all of your tracks.

The second theory has it that her fiancé Daniel Payne was the killer. This was reinforced by Payne’s suicide a couple of months later, and the ambiguous note he left behind: “To the World – here I am on the very spot. [His body was found near the spot where Rogers was thought to have been murdered.] May God forgive me for my misspent life.” Unfortunately, Payne had an alibi for the day Rogers was murdered, and he had no clear motive.

The final theory is that Rogers had sought an abortion that had gone wrong somehow, and her body had to be disposed of. There are variations on this, but again while there have been some interesting bits of evidence pointing in this direction it’s a stretch to make it fit with what we know and seems mostly to be an idea driven by a moralistic “wages of sin” political agenda.

I don’t think any of these theories are very good. The murder of Mary Rogers is just one of those cases that throws up roadblocks at every turn. Even the two suspects who were brought in for interrogation (a young sailor named William Kiekuck and the philandering operator of an engraving shop named Joseph Morse) ended up both being conclusively cleared. My own sense is that Rogers was probably killed by someone she knew, on a date that went bad. When she’d left her house the morning of the day she died she’d said she was going to visit her aunt, which she was not. But beyond that I’ve got nothing.

The book is subtitled “the invention of murder,” which was also the title of a book I reviewed back in 2011 by Judith Flanders. Now obviously people had been murdered long before 1841, but what I think Stashower is getting at (and it’s not a point he specifically addresses) is that this was a time when violent crimes were becoming media events, what we can now look back on as the invention of true crime as a genre. To be sure there has always been a lot of public interest in crime. Crime and execution broadsides were wildly popular in England in the 18^th century, to go back just a bit. But in the mid-19^th century things were really taking off. Indeed, as a headline the murder of Mary Rogers would be supplanted quickly by John C. Colt’s murder of Samuel Adams, an even more sensational crime and one that had legs given its well-publicized trial.

Keeping with the period detail, Stashower does a good job evoking a world before the advent of modern policing and the creation of an effective criminal justice system. Until the passage of the Police Reform Act in 1845 (some of whose provisions were made in response to the Rogers case) New York City’s policing could almost be described as medieval. Or, in Stashower’s accounting, law enforcement

had not progressed much beyond the seventeenth-century “rattle watch,” the brigade of uniformed men who patrolled the streets with noisemakers, calling out the hour and the latest weather report. At the time of the Mary Rogers murder, New York did not have a centralized, full-time professional police force. Instead, a pair of constables was assigned to each neighbourhood, together with roundsmen and marshals who cobbled together a living out of court fees and private rewards. Their efforts were supplemented by a patchwork corps of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers and retired servicemen, who patrolled the streets and stood guard outside sentry boxes.

Poorly paid, some officers looked to pick up rewards for the return of stolen property, “which in turn led to charges of collusion between criminals and police over the spoils.” I’m sure something like this was going on, as it probably still is.

Given how amateur policing was, it’s no surprise that a general public not raised on CSI and Law and Order had a more relaxed attitude toward the importance of securing a crime scene. This helps explain the shocking – to a modern understanding – behaviour of the three men (Henry Mallin, James Boulard, and H. G. Luther) who discovered Rogers’ body floating in the Hudson:

Reluctant to touch the corpse, Mallin and Boulard snatched up a wooden plank from the bottom of the boat and attempted to use it as a hook to tow the body back to shore. After several attempts they managed only to strike a series of flailing blows, tearing at the white fabric of the dead woman’s dress. Tossing the plank aside, they managed at last to fix a length of rope under the corpse’s chin. The two men then rowed back to shore, trailing the body behind the boat. Unwilling to risk contact with the rotting flesh, they declined to drag their cargo out of the water. Instead they fastened their towrope to a heavy boulder and anchored the body to the shore, so it would not float back out into the river. This done, the pair spent several moments watching the battered corpse bob up and down at the end of its tether. After half an hour or so, Mallin and Boulard decided that there was nothing more to be done. Leaving the body anchored to the boulder, they rejoined their friends and wandered off along the water’s edge.

After a “large crowd” gathered along the shoreline to gawk at the floating corpse “a pair of stouthearted bystanders screwed up their courage and waded into the water to pull the body onto land.” But that wasn’t to be the end of things, as one reporter on the scene observed:

On shore, the body suffered further indignities as a long line of morbidly curious bystanders filed past. Some of them prodded the corpse with their feet while others poked at it with sticks. One “rude youth” went so far as to reach down and lift one of the legs, offering “unfeeling remarks” to his companions.

The local coroner appeared on the scene within an hour, but because he had to wait for the arrival of a justice of the peace before he could do anything with the body, it could only be removed from the water and placed in the hot sun, where it rotted away at an accelerated pace until after 7 o’clock that night. All things considered, it seems as though the coroner did a pretty good job with what he had to work with.

Stashower does a good job too with telling the story. Normally I’d be a little wary of the literary crossover; it turned out well in Margalit Fox’s Conan Doyle for the Defense but was made a hash of in Casey Sherman’s Hell Town. It mostly works here because Poe took such an interest in the case and it’s interesting to see what he made of it. Poe was a genuinely odd fellow, and that’s probably putting it far too mildly, but I never thought his detective Dupin’s method of ratiocination amounted to much and it doesn’t seem to have worked here. Basically Dupin just reads the same newspaper reports that Poe himself was reading, so what he came up with was a bit of armchair sleuthing and a set of conclusions that had to constantly be revised in the light of further evidence.

Poe is widely credited with having invented the detective story, and one of the curious things Stashower points out is that contemporary reviewers complained “that there could be no great skill in presenting a solution to a mystery of the author’s own devising.” What’s even more surprising is that Poe took this criticism to heart, and thought such stories only led, in his words, to the reader confounding “the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” This is one of the things that inspired him to have a go at the Rogers case. Of course, nobody thinks like that today, and the only ingenuity that a reader will attribute to a writer of detective fiction is their ability to create a clever and complicated plot.

Noted in passing:

When Poe attended the University of Viriginia in 1826 he “had to contend with the hardships of the university’s ongoing construction, including crowded, unheated buildings and questionable sanitation. There were, however, numerous compensations. Thomas Jefferson, then eighty-three, was very much in evidence as the university’s first rector. Poe would have dined with him on several occasions, and would have been among the mourners when the former president died on July 4 of that year.”

I’m no big fan of today’s resort-style university campuses, but I really don’t see how having an elderly celebrity like Jefferson hanging around on campus for part of the school year offers much in the way of compensation for the other shortcomings mentioned. How big a plus was it to get to mourn at Jefferson’s funeral, if Poe indeed did? And did Poe ever actually dine “with him,” or was he just sometimes in the dining hall at the same time?

It’s not entirely clear whether Payne was a suicide or if he mistakenly overdosed on laudanum. Or even if the laudanum he took was the exact cause of his death. The jury at the inquest delivered a verdict that was a true masterpiece of saying everything and nothing, declaring that death had occurred owing to “congestion of the brain, supposed to be brought about by exposure and irregularity of living, incident to aberration of mind.”

Takeaways:

Was C. Auguste Dupin not just the first detective (a word that might not have been in use before this time), but also the first fan of true crime writing? Poe was imagining his audience into being.

True Crime Files

Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Age of Reckoning
Ed. by Sarah Weinman

The crimes:

“A Brutal Lynching: An Indifferent Police Force, a 34-Year Wait for Justice” by Wesley Lowery: the cold case murder of a Black man in Georgia is solved simply by following up reports of how one of the killers had been bragging about it for years.

“The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work” by Samantha Schuyler: a Black activist is killed in Florida and the police don’t seem to care very much.

“‘No Choice but to Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison” by Justine Van Der Leun: some women may only be guilty of “acts of survival.”

“The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime” by Michael Hobbes: it’s never been a better time to be a corporate scofflaw.

“Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women” by Brandi Morin: there’s a need for better reporting on and police investigation of MMIWG.

“How the Atlanta Spa Shootings – the Victims, the Survivors – Tell a Story of America” by May Jeong: pocket bios of the victims and survivors of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, who were mainly Asian immigrants.

“Who Owns Amanda Knox?” by Amanda Knox: after becoming an unwilling focus of the media as well as the Italian judicial system, Amanda Knox considers the alternate life of her celebrity.

“Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter” by Diana Moskovitz: a Miami true crime writer turns out to have been more a person of her time than a pioneer.

“The True Crime Junkies and the Curious Case of a Missing Husband” by RF Jurjevics: a woman’s Facebook post about the disappearance of her husband triggers an Internet investigation that turns up a darker story.

“Has Reality Caught Up to the ‘Murder Police’?” by Lara Bazelon: the Baltimore homicide detectives who inspired David Simon’s creations Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire turn out to have had a less than stellar track record.

“Will You Ever Change?” by Amelia Schonbek: inside a program that pairs survivors of domestic violence with surrogate offenders for therapeutic dialogue.

“The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row” by Keri Blakinger: a radio program is broadcast very locally out of a Texas prison.

“To the Son of the Victim” by Sophie Haigney: a reporter recalls her brief interaction with the son of a shooting victim.

The book:

Well, if that “age of reckoning” didn’t give it away then I’ll give it you in a word: this is an anthology of woke true crime.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. What editor Sarah Weinman has wanted to do (here and in her earlier anthology Unspeakable Acts, to which she considers this to be “a companion volume and an extension”) is to expand on the popular understanding of “true crime” to bring in less familiar elements and storylines. In particular, she sees this collection as “a testament to the discomfort we live in, and must continue to reckon with, in order to hold the true crime genre to higher ethical standards and goals.” Whew! That’s setting a high bar. Does the book deliver?

Things get off to a bad start. The Introduction is by Rabia Chaudry of the podcast Undisclosed, and she duly brings the killing of Hae Min Lee up, patting herself on the back for clearing Adnan Syed. This is a case that still divides people though, and I personally lean toward thinking that Syed was at the very least involved in Lee’s murder. Chaudry herself has also been the target of some fair criticism for her advocacy and I can’t say she’s a voice I trust very much. Her Introduction also wrong-footed me from the get-go: “The debate about whether the true crime genre, across all forms of media, does more harm than good in society is long-standing and contentious.”

A long-standing debate? Sure there have been critiques of true crime, but Chaudry’s evidence for a debate is pretty thin, or what the grounds of such a debate might be. A couple of sources are quoted for the claim that consuming true crime content is bad for us, but then these are quickly dismissed. A tone is set of looking for an argument, even when none is available.

One point Chaudry brings up is worth flagging though because it plays an important part in several of the stories to come. This is the critique that “monsters like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer have left permanent marks in pop culture while their victims have been forgotten.” There’s nothing new in this observation and it’s been given a lot more play in the demand for new perspectives not just in true crime reporting but in every facet of our culture, perspectives that seek to tear down the celebrity of (typically white male) villains while prioritizing the stories of their victims.

This is a moral position to take, and also one that very much feeds off of the priority given to victims, however broadly defined, in our culture. Perhaps the most prominent recent example of this in the context of crime reporting was New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s refusal to name the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings and her urging others to “speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought notoriety but we, in New Zealand, will give nothing – not even his name.” This is a directive heeded by May Jeong in her piece here on the Atlanta spa shootings where the killer (Robert Aaron Long) is only referred to as “the suspect” while the reporting itself is almost entirely given over to pocket bios of the people he killed.

This is not just a moral position to take – most killers are monsters and their victims innocent – but it’s also one that has a political argument behind it as well. Should the media broadcast or even make available the manifestoes of mass killers like Elliot Rodger, Anders Breivik, and Brenton Tarrant? A fair question. In a culture like ours, where celebrity is the coin of the realm, there’s something wrong about using one fame or notoriety to promote hate. At the same time . . . it is the coin of the realm. This is something everybody understands. Theodore Kaczynski by his own admission became the Unabomber because he knew it was the only way he could get people to pay attention to his manifesto.

That said, I don’t think true crime writers, or the genre in general, make heroes out of wrongdoers. But the matter of celebrity and what gets our attention leads to a further point. We read true crime because it deals with the exceptional: the pathologies of human nature and behaviour. We don’t read about serial killers because we admire them but to learn something about them, like what went into making them and how they can be identified. Meanwhile, what can be learned from their victims, who are all too often simply people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time? It’s not that we don’t care about them, it’s just that they’re normal, and we’re not that interested in normality.

But while defensible on some levels, I think there are serious caveats to be entered when reading true crime that comes at us from the margins, as woke or victim-based.

In the first place, and I’ll use Jeong’s piece as the test case, it’s writing that has an agenda and it can strain too hard to score political points, occasionally becoming tendentious in the extreme. Here, for example, is a description of Long’s hometown:

Woodstock, Georgia, was Cherokee country before its original inhabitants, who had been in the area for 11,000 years, were displaced by white settlers around the mid-1700s. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, codifying into law the forcible removal of 15,000 Cherokee people from what is today their namesake county. The white settlers panned for gold in nearby rivers, purchased Black people as slaves, and opened chicken processing plants, still in operation nearly two centuries later.

Woodstock today enjoys a median family income of $76,191, and is almost 80 percent white. It is the hometown of at least two notable figures: Dean Rusk and Eugene Booth. Rusk, who later became secretary of state, was responsible for splitting the Korean peninsula in two using a foldout map from a copy of National Geographic. The line “made no sense economically or geographically,” he later admitted, but it allowed American occupying forces to take control of Seoul, a decision that would divide families for generations. Booth was a nuclear physicist and core member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing as many as 250,000 civilians, according to some estimates. Woodstock is proud of their native sons, naming a middle school after Rusk.

What is the point of all this? Does Jeong not eat chicken? How personally responsible was Dean Rusk for the division of the Korean peninsula? Where was he supposed to draw the line on the map? Should Seoul have been given to North Korea? Was Booth wrong to work on the Manhattan Project? What does the dislocation of native tribes from Woodstock 200 years ago have to do with Long’s motives? Is it just meant to be taken as being all part, somehow, of the same racist, imperialist matrix?

Second, does the erasure of the killer’s name make this a better piece of reporting? Does it add something by subtraction? It’s hard not to feel like we’re reading an ideologically cleansed version of the first draft of history here. And it’s the sort of policy that goes beyond true crime reporting. There are no Wikipedia pages, for example, for Elliot Rodger, Brenton Tarrant, or Robert Long but only for the 2014 Isla Vista Shootings, the Christchurch mosque killings, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings respectively. I think that must be part of the site’s editorial guideline. Is it justified? And finally there’s the fact that Jeong’s article on the shootings is 25 pages long, providing biographical sketches of six of the seven women killed and of the one man, an immigrant from Guatemala, who was injured but survived the attack. Jeong also has a couple of pages where she talks about her own Korean-American family. The one man who was killed, along with the other woman, have their names mentioned briefly in a single paragraph together. They were the only two white victims. This isn’t a full story or accounting then. But what kind of a story is it?

Third: I don’t think it should make a difference where the author is coming from. I prefer most true crime writing that adheres to traditional standards of objectivity, and (as I’ve said before) there are few things I despise more than the trend toward “true crime memoir.” But this sort of writing, which often plays up group identity, invites authors to stake their writing in their own experience. And so Jeong adds that section I mentioned on her own family’s American experience as Korean immigrants, and Mallika Rao does the same while writing on an Indian family in Texas.

I understand Rao’s point, that Texas cops don’t understand something that she does just “by virtue of being born to Hindus in Texas,” but how far can we take this? Rao mentions how the defence counsel for the mother accused of killing her child was going to call an expert witness to say that the defendant “had all the markings of a truth teller, a woman in grief.” But Rao doesn’t “need an expert to tell me that. I felt it just by watching her.” Because of some cultural fellow feeling? Superior empathy? Then only two pages later she takes the trial transcript to task for using the word Hindu instead of the correct Hindi to describe the language the accused was speaking in. “As I saw that repeated typo, I wondered if the error had been the court reporter’s or if it had been spoken by those in charge of Pallavi’s fate, in that courtroom. I wondered how much of any case is built and tried on fact and how much on feeling, instinct. No one in the court had been of Indian origin except the defendant and her husband.”

Is this an injustice? Are the only feelings and instincts that can be trusted those of individuals from the exact same cultural background or ethnic identity? Should all true crime writing become a form of memoir, a personal identification between the author and the victim (never, of course, the perpetrator of violence)?

And what if the roles are flipped from the usual script? How are we to handle the “True Crime Junkies” story, where the villain of the piece is a predatory woman who destroys the life of an innocent man? Should we say her name? Should we be more interested in telling his story? What would we learn from that?

So I did have some caveats. But this is a nice anthology with some good stories in it and some fine writing. I found the piece on white-collar crime, the one by Amanda Knox, and the True Crime Junkies story, to be particularly thought-provoking. And even Jeong’s take on the Atlanta killings was quite good, only needing six or so pages taken out of it. But in the final analysis I’m not sure the case was made for this being representative of true crime writing that’s setting “higher ethical standards” or even providing more truthful (fuller? more objective?) accounts. Instead, what it highlights is the fact that every piece of writing, of whatever genre, comes from a particular point of view, if not with a full-blown agenda.

Noted in passing:

The essay by Lara Bazelon on how the writer and show runner David Simon presented an airbrushed picture of the Baltimore police in his 1991 non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (which in turn led to the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Streets and the HBO show The Wire) struck a familiar note with me. Simon had followed a group of Baltimore homicide detectives around for a year but hadn’t reported on any of their misdoings, a pattern of conduct that would lead to many ruined lives, overturned convictions, and tens of millions of dollars in judgments against the city.

Was this inevitable? A former head of the Baltimore Innocence Project calls the book “a cautionary tale for embedded journalism.” Simon’s collaborator Richard Price, in a foreword to a later edition of Homicide, asked “Are writers like us . . . who are in fact dependent in large part on the noblesse [what an odd choice of word] of the cops to see what we have to see, are we (oh shit . . . ) police buffs?”

I think Price is letting writers off easy by calling them fans in such a case. As journalists covering war zones have been pointing out for decades now (Robert Fisk was one of the most outspoken), being “embedded” with the military puts one in a hopelessly compromised position. Indeed, the whole point of embedded journalism, and I think the term was first used with regard to media covering the first Gulf War, was for the army, and the state more broadly, to control news coverage. What nobody (or at least nobody working for the military) wanted was “another Vietnam.” The army wasn’t letting reporters be embedded for altruistic reasons but rather as a way of co-opting their voices and controlling the coverage.

The reason this had a particularly familiar note to me though has regard to a different context. As I’ve written on at length in other posts (please see here, here, and here), reporters and biographers writing about living figures who are given special or exclusive access to their subjects are always compromised. Access comes with strings attached. If you’re going to write about the armed forces, or the Baltimore police, or some celebrity, no matter how minor, and they let you follow them around or give you an interview, it’s because they are looking to shape the narrative and are expecting you to follow their ground rules. It’s a symbiotic relationship, with the writers as parasites that are only allowed to function if they perform some useful task for the host.

Takeaways:

Perspective matters when it comes to the writing of true crime, and changing things up does add a lot to our understanding of matters relating to the criminal justice system. However, not all that a different point of view adds is helpful or instructive, and it’s also the case that sometimes something can be lost.

True Crime Files