Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders
By Anne E. Schwartz

The crime:

Jeffrey Dahmer killed (at least) sixteen men and boys mainly in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, working out of a small apartment in Milwaukee. A necrophiliac and cannibal as well as a serial killer, his case is one of the most notorious in the annals of American crime.

The book:

Some preliminary matters are worth talking about.

In the first place, Monster is described on the copyright page as having been “originally published as The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough” in 1991 and again in 2011. Such a quick publication date (Dahmer killed eight of his victims in 1991, when he was really spinning out of control) is something you often see with timely books, and the original title really was in need of a do-over, but the information still didn’t make sense to me as I don’t think The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough was published until June 1992. Which would make sense as Dahmer’s trial was only in January 1992. As far as I can tell, this is the same book as “originally published” in 1991 (or 1992) and 2011 (a second edition), with the addition of an Afterword bringing the story up to 2021, the publication date for Monster.

I bring up this chronology because it’s a bit misleading thinking of this as a 2021 book. It’s still basically the book that Schwartz, a reporter at the time who broke the story for the Milwaukee Journal, wrote thirty-plus years ago. Which means it’s not a full account of the case and there were a number of places where it seemed like some clarification might have been in order. Were all of Dahmer’s victims gay, for example, or were some only gay-for-pay? Did he have sex with his first victim, Steven Hicks, or was he rebuffed? Did he drill holes in the skulls of his victims before killing them in order to turn them into zombies, or did he do this only after they were dead? We’re told that one court-appointed psychiatrist thought it unlikely he did it while his victims were still alive, but wouldn’t this be easily ascertained? For what it may be worth, I believe Dahmer himself admitted to doing this to his victims while they were drugged. In any event, I don’t bring this up out of any ghoulishness, but it makes some difference if Konerak Sinthasomphone had been so lobotomized when he was returned to Dahmer by the police. Was a hole in the skull something the paramedics didn’t identify? Also, Zombie, the Dahmer-inspired novel by Joyce Carol Oates, took the drilling business as a major plot point, so I was curious.

The new (sub)title says this is going to be a book about the “Jeffrey Dahmer murders” but it’s not really focused on the murders. In each case these are presented in a perfunctory manner, obscuring matters like those I just mentioned. Again, this isn’t an appeal to go into excessive detail, but some points in the story needed to be nailed down better as there are different versions out there. This was what I meant by bringing up the matter of when the book was written. After thirty years, an authoritative book on Dahmer should be possible, but I don’t feel like this is it.

Instead of digging deeper into Dahmer’s biography, psychology, and criminal career, Schwartz turns more in the direction of a reporter’s memoir, something that would later become a marked trend in true crime.

In Schwartz’s case some of this is actually quite interesting. It’s jaw-dropping that on the very night of Dahmer’s arrest she just breezed into his apartment (“for a single man’s dwelling, it was tidy”), and got to look around. Being on the police beat and knowing some cops apparently has its advantages. Indeed, it was a source within the police who first tipped her to something big going down, which turned into what literally became the scoop of a lifetime. That Schwartz was also there on the ground in Milwaukee also allowed her to report knowledgeably about the way the case played out in terms of city politics, given the fact that so many of Dahmer’s victims were gay and Black. On the specific matter of police culpability in the tragic case of Sinthasomphone’s near escape she provides a full defence of the officers involved, which I thought had some value but really failed in the end to present an objective account. Personally, I don’t think the police were criminally negligent, but there’s no doubt they screwed up.

This isn’t a bad book, but to return to my main point: after thirty years you’d expect a fuller treatment of the case then you get here. The attempt to go “Inside a Murderer’s Mind” is only cursory. Dennis Nilsen is a good starting point, but there’s little follow-up. Some notice might also have been taken of Dahmer as a cultural phenomenon that has seemingly only grown, looking at texts like the aforementioned Zombie, the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (admittedly this came out a year later), and Derf Backderf’s comic My Friend Dahmer and the subsequent film they made of it. Backderf’s personal account of Dahmer’s high school years is a particularly valuable source that needs to be taken into account.

Put another way, Schwartz should be recognized as having had the first word on Dahmer, and she did a good job covering the story. But even as late as the 2020s the last word on this monster has yet to be written.

Noted in passing:

Dahmer’s parole officer rarely had any meetings with him, electing to just contact him by phone. This was due in large part to the fact that Dahmer lived in a rough part of town and the officer didn’t feel safe visiting him in person. I thought this a bit slack. Don’t a lot of people on parole live in rough parts of town? Isn’t visiting them part of the job?

As a single gay male on the prowl, Dahmer frequented a number of Milwaukee gay bars. I was surprised to hear so many different ones mentioned by name, but according to one source Schwartz talks to there were 8 in the city in the early ‘90s. This struck me as a lot. By coincidence, I read Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman a couple of weeks after this book, where she says that Milwaukee had a “tiny gay district” when Dahmer was active. If you have 8 bars that sounds like a fair size village, not a tiny district. But then Schwartz mentions that Chicago, which Dahmer visited on at least one occasion, had 76 gay bars at the time. I would have never guessed that even a city as big as Chicago would have so many.

Takeaways:

“‘Oh, my God. How horrible! How awful! Tell me more.’ Those comments conveyed the mood of the city in the first couple of weeks.”

True Crime Files

Without Pity: Ann Rule’s Most Dangerous Killers
By Ann Rule

The crimes:

“The Tumbledown Shack”: the still unsolved case of two young women found murdered in a remote shack in 1975. A man confessed, but he was mentally unstable and the police were never sure if he was telling the truth.

“Dead and on Tape”: a paranoid petty criminal records his own murder at the hands of a dirty cop.

“Fatal Obsession”: a bank manager (well, vice president of personnel) has a breakdown and kills his wife and son.

“Campbell’s Revenge”: a giant brute goes to prison for raping a woman. He gets early work release and returns to kill her and her child along with a neighbour.

“One Trick Pony”: a man decides to kill his wife rather than bother with a costly divorce. He tries to make it look like one of her horses kicked her in the head, a story that the police buy but that her sister doesn’t.

“The Last Letter”: an Alaskan businessman falls in love with a younger woman, who he eventually divorces his wife to marry. He becomes an alcoholic, loses all his money, and kills her, but not before mailing out a dozen or more copies of a long letter he’d written blaming her for everything that happened.

“I’ll Love You Forever”: A con man marries a wealthy widow, takes out an expensive life insurance policy on her, then throws her off a cliff.

“Murder and the Proper Housewife”: a woman hires the grown-up version of a kid she used to know to kill her friend’s estranged husband. Because that’s what friends are for, I guess. “To this day, I’m not sure why they did what they did,” Rule says in her introduction.

“The Most Dangerous Game”: a pair of naïve Seattle teens run away from home to rough it in the Cascades. In winter. The cold turns out to be the least of their worries though when they meet up with a weirdo who tries to kill them.

“The Killer Who Never Forgot . . . or Forgave”: race car-driver husband kills his wife and baby after taking out a double indemnity policy on their lives. Just a stupid and sad story.

“The Lost Lady”: Marcia Moore, a wealthy New Age/spiritualist, disappears while experimenting heavily with ketamine. Her remains are later discovered but there are no messages sent back from the other side and it’s never determined what actually happened to her.

“The Stockholm Syndrome”: a young couple go camping in the woods and a psycho drifter kills the husband and gets the wife to go along with his story of it being an accident. Later, she recants.

The book:

This is a collection of stories previously published in volumes 1-8 of Ann Rule’s Case Files. Things kick off with three new cases, and there are brief introductions and even briefer updates to a few of the reprints to basically just let us know if the perps have died in the meantime. In other words, the book itself feels very much like a cash grab, with the publisher banking on Rule’s name to repackage some old material.

There doesn’t even seem to be any thematic cohesion. Look over the case summaries and see if you can find any connecting threads. In a very brief introductory Author’s Note Rule tells us that “Some [of the perpetrators] are wealthy and some are drifters, but they all have a special gift with words, a rather negative talent that lets them hide what they really think from friends, enemies, victims, and even detectives – for a while.” Was that the case with Charles Rodman Campbell? Or the bank manager in “Fatal Obsession”?

Nor does the title help much. I doubt very much if these were Ann Rule’s “most dangerous killers.” Some of them weren’t even killers, but just attempted murder. Then there are the comic pair in “Murder and the Proper Housewife.” They were nearly as big a danger to themselves. And why Without Pity? I suppose anyone who plans murder is missing some degree of empathy, but even here it feels like this was generic verbiage and just part of the packaging, in no way a reflection of the book’s contents.

You’ll have guessed I wasn’t thrilled by this one. Even the photo section is terrible, with pictures so blurry I honestly had no idea what some of them were supposed to be of, despite being labeled. But sticking with the text, if these were the greatest hits from Ann Rule’s Case Files I don’t feel inspired to go back and read any more (though I probably will). I also trust Rule’s judgment in determining which cases were worth full book-length treatment and which weren’t. None of these did (though her one novel, Possession, was based on the case related in “The Stockholm Syndrome”). I think part of what turned her away from exploring these particular cases in more depth is that there just wasn’t enough in the way of character and motive to go on. I found myself particularly mystified by the events of “Dead and on Tape.” What was going on there? Did anyone ever find out?

If there’s no common thread there are at least some recurring themes. The most interesting of these I found to be the American urbanite’s nightmare vision of the backwoods, the lost traveler landing up in Deliverance or Texas Chain Saw Massacre country. The girls who went to orchard country at harvest time and ended up dead in “The Tumbledown Shack.” The even younger girls who went roughing it in the bush in “The Most Dangerous Game.” The young couple who were ambushed when led off the beaten path in “The Stockholm Syndrome.” If true crime caters to our curiosity with horror it’s no surprise that there’s a strain of it that’s shared with one of the most popular tropes in horror films: the sinister cabin in the woods, the wrong turn off the highway, nature not as a source of spiritual renewal but as destroyer.

Noted in passing:

In the first story, “The Tumbledown Shack,” Washington’s Lake Chelan is called “the second largest inland lake in America.” When I read that I didn’t understand what it meant. I’d never heard of Lake Chelan and when I went to look for it in a compact atlas I keep handy I couldn’t even see it marked.

It’s a long, thin body of water but is nowhere near the second largest lake in the U.S. In fact, when I went to check on Wikipedia it ranked 97^th in size. Even if you discount binational lakes, like four of the five Great Lakes and Lakes Champlain and St. Clair, it’s still way down the list. This made me wonder where Rule was getting her information. Does “inland lake” have a special meaning? Aren’t all lakes inland by definition? I did find one website that said that the designation “inland lake” excludes the Great Lakes, but I wasn’t sure why. Because they have an outlet to the ocean? Even if that is part of the definition I still don’t think Lake Chelan ranks so high.

Takeaways:

When a wife or husband is murdered, the surviving spouse is usually the prime suspect, and for good reason. That being the case, taking out an insurance policy on one’s wife only a month or so before killing her is being a little too obvious.

True Crime Files

A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein
By Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper

The crime:

While awaiting trial at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, the notorious sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on the morning of August 10, 2019. The official story is that he hanged himself, but questions have since been raised.

The book:

With any unsolved crime you’ll be able to find plenty of armchair sleuths willing to tell you that they know whodunit. They know the real identity of Jack the Ripper. They know that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. They know who killed JonBenét Ramsey. And they know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

All we can do is assign probabilities to the various theories in each of these cases. My own feeling is that Epstein really did kill himself, but that’s only on a balance of probabilities. It’s not something I’d say has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. As has been endlessly pointed out, his demise was surrounded by a web of suspicious circumstances: what the authors describe as “a confluence of egregious mistakes” and what then Attorney General William Barr called “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” Most notably, the guards who were supposed to be checking in on Epstein every 30 minutes left him alone for 8 hours while they slept or were online shopping, all while the video camera monitoring his cell wasn’t working.

A general rule I’ve invoked before is that we shouldn’t ascribe to malice what is more easily explained by incompetence and laziness. That may be all that was happening here – and I loved how the prison guards’ union tried to defend its members here by complaining about how “severely overworked” they were, a condition that made such an event as Epstein’s death “inevitable.” That said, I can understand seeing darker forces at work.

I’ve already given some of my thoughts on the Epstein case in my review of Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice. Goodman and Halper are more gossipy, though not conspiratorial, but they also delve into some of the other points about Epstein’s case (that is, other than his “convenient death”) that remain most mystifying. In particular, his sexuality and how he made his money.

When considering Epstein’s sex life I found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock. There has been a lot of in-depth biographical research into Hitchcock but the matter of his sexuality has never been clarified. Indeed, it’s been reported as being all over the map. Some say he was impotent and asexual (he described himself as “Hitch . . . without the cock”), others say he was a sexual predator, and still others offer up that he was gay.

The same range of interpretations have been placed on Epstein. He apparently received “massages” three to four times a day, and one woman who knew him says that he explained to her that he needed to have three orgasms a day. “It was biological, like eating.” One of the masseuses, however, also said “he can never get fully hard, ever. . . . I don’t know if that’s some sort of thing that’s wrong with him, but it definitely was not normal.” Was there some connection between this and his plan to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies? Why insemination? Was he, as several people who were close to him and knew him well insisted, gay? And was he so ashamed or closeted that he adopted a macho persona to compensate? That was the theory of one associate, who immediately adds that it’s only speculation.

The second point has to do with how Epstein made his money, and more broadly what exactly it was he was good at and whether he was all that smart.

Julie K. Brown writes that “One thing that most people agree on was that Jeffrey Epstein was brilliant.” Really? What exactly did they mean by that? Epstein wasn’t some autodidact genius. It’s not even clear he was above-average smart. He was good at math and could play the piano. To be sure, intelligence can be measured in many different ways and take many different forms, but while smart people are often associated with being good at math and music I still think they’re very different things.

Nor was he particularly book smart. He’d dropped out of college, and while surrounding himself with prominent intellectuals for exclusive get-togethers this was all for show. As his “best pal” Stuart Pivar, himself a scientist, put it: “He brought together scientists for the sake of trying to inculcate some kind of higher level of scientific thought, even though he himself didn’t know shit from Shinola about science. . . . He never knew nothing about anything.” Large donations got him designated as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, but it was just a title meant to impress people.

Did any of that matter? Not if he was good at making money, or making rich people richer. But was he? As the authors here insist, his business “most assuredly was not – and never was – money management.” Like everything else about him, his financial acumen seems to have been in large part a fraud and a con. What did people pay him for then? It’s questions like these that lead to deeper speculation, some of it related to his sexuality. Rumour was apparently rampant, for example, that he was his chief benefactor’s secret lover, and that he was blackmailing other rich and famous personages with secret surveillance tapes he’d made.

It’s a short book and a quick read, with an obsessively right-wing political bias. The chapter on Bill Clinton’s links to Epstein is the longest in the book, with contempt dripping from nearly every paragraph. It’s even suggested that without Trump’s election in 2016 Epstein would have gone free, since “the whole reason . . . or at least one of the rationales” for the Miami Herald running their “Perversion of Justice” series was to take down Alex Acosta, Trump’s labor secretary.

Even on a more personal level the Clinton-bashing is egregious, with the hunt for dark connecting threads between the two “friends” (they actually didn’t like each other) taken down to the level of insisting on their shared personality traits. Yes, in a facile and not very significant way. Personally, I thought something more might have been made about how both Epstein and Trump used charities and foundations as piggy-banks (the Clinton Foundation, in comparison, was a model of probity). I think it’s also likely that Epstein and Trump shared similar attitudes toward women: not liking them very much, paying them (as little as possible) for sex, and otherwise just using them as trophies. Clinton certainly had issues relating to women as well, but they seem to have been of a different order.

Finally, I did get a guilty kick (the book has a number of guilty kicks) out of the depiction of some of the most distinguished intellectuals and academics in the world being such shameless money-grubbers.

Noted in passing:

Epstein didn’t care about his legacy. This is a subject that interests me, and that I’ve written about with relation to American politicians in the Trump years. I feel like it’s related to the old question of how we can be good without God. If we’re just here to make as much money and live as large as possible, wouldn’t we all behave really badly? It’s similar to the question of fame. Is it an absolute good, so that it doesn’t matter what you get to be famous for as long as it gets you attention that you can monetize? In any event, here’s Epstein’s deep thoughts on the matter: “I don’t care about my legacy. The minute I’m dead, I’m dead. It’s over. . . . I don’t care what people think of me. I only care about what’s happening to me while I’m alive.”

Takeaways:

I still lean toward suicide, but it’s easy to suspect the worse of the worst people in the world. By which I mean not Epstein himself but his enablers. As the authors conclude:

It’s only fair to say . . . that we will probably never know the true story in full. The reason for this is simple. Consider this question: Who would you believe to tell you what happened? The elite, the press, our political leaders, or law enforcement? These are the institutions every American has been told since childhood that can and should be trusted, because they have the best interests of all people at heart. But these are the very same institutions that shielded Jeffrey Epstein for years.

The Epstein case didn’t break public faith in these institutions, but it revealed a hole in the social compact that had been growing for years.

True Crime Files

Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story
By Julie K. Brown

The crime:

A full accounting of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein will probably never be made, both because he’s dead now and because any accomplices (of which there must have been many) will want to keep the details hidden. At the very least he was involved for many years in underage sex trafficking and sexual assault. He died in prison, under mysterious circumstances, in 2019 while awaiting trial.

The book:

True crime has a cathartic function, in the Aristotelian sense of a purging of the emotions of pity and fear. But a book like Perversion of Justice aroused another feeling in me: anger. I got so angry reading it that it was hard to finish. What Julie K. Brown, the reporter for the Miami Herald who broke the story (or re-broke, by not letting it slip away), chronicles is an outrage to any understanding of justice or decency. Much of what was going on remains hidden by people intent on covering their own asses, but enough corruption has now been revealed to make you sick.

Even basic questions like how rich Epstein actually was and what he did to get so rich remains a mystery. How did he make his money? As his extensive Wikipedia entry puts it: “The exact origin of Epstein’s wealth is unknown.” Apparently he was a kind of money manager, but it’s not clear what this entailed, how good he was at it, or whether what he did was all legal. Some of it at least was very shady.

What really seemed to be going on was that he operated as a kind of parasite on the very rich. As one early observer remarked: “He was very smart and he knew how to woo people, how to schmooze. He’s personable and makes good company.” Not the sort of skill that one would have thought paid so well, but rich people are as susceptible to flattery and being manipulated as anyone else. A lot of them just gave Epstein their money. And I don’t mean gave it to him to manage, but just . . . gave it to him. Of course, to outsiders this made no sense. “I tried to find out how did [Epstein] get from a high school math teacher to a private investment adviser,” one unimpressed businessman remarks, “There was just nothing there.” Was there something suspicious then in his attachments to rich and powerful men, especially given all that later came out? Indeed there was, but all we can do is speculate now.

Epstein himself was a creepy guy who did nothing to conceal his perversions, which is another thing that makes you question why people would associate with him. An arrogant social climber, his hyperactive sex drive makes one wonder when he could have done any real work, had this ever been his ambition. Brown reports that girls were being brought to him “morning, noon, and night” and he was having sex “three or four times a day.” Which may sound nice to some, but really isn’t healthy.

But massages (which is how things usually got started, if they weren’t just a euphemism) were only a perk. The very rich, and even the semi-rich, have two abiding anxieties that always have to be addressed. In the first place, they have to feel secure in their lives of affluence and privilege. Private islands and offshore accounts can help with this. You certainly don’t want the government getting their dirty hands on your stash. Second, their wealth has to be justified in some way. This is mainly the work of staffers and a pliant press. Epstein knew the game here very well, presenting himself as a sort of intellectual philanthropist, despite having little claim to either title. Particularly nauseating were his forums on how to save the world from such challenges as climate change, which involved jetting celebs to the private Caribbean island that he’d had bulldozed in order to build his pedo playpen, paying off fines or donating to charity to get around environmental regulations.

In short, Epstein was a phoney. But isn’t great wealth always a bit of a fraud? Thinking about Epstein’s rise to a position of such wealth and status reminded me of how completely the myth of a meritocracy has been exploded in our own day. This is a subject I’ve written about in recent book reviews, most notably of Christopher Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. But it goes back to such cases as the collapse of Enron (see my review of Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins). Were the corporate heads of Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room? Only at being frauds. Which, granted, does require a certain kind of intelligence. But Team Enron were heralded as financial geniuses!

The belief that rich people have to be smart is hard to kill (though I’ve tried). That the emperor has no clothes is, I think, the defining fable of our time. But who was going to point out Epstein’s nakedness? Wealth provides a high degree of insulation, both from the media and the police. Epstein even bragged of owning the police, and it was not an empty boast, while Brown’s book shows how much of an effort it was just to bring Epstein’s case back into the public eye of the mainstream media.

“I didn’t really, at the time, believe that any media network would have succumbed to pressure to ignore or drop such an important story,” Brown confesses at one point. “I was, however, naïve and wrong.” It’s because of all the hard work she did, and the risks she took, that I cut Brown some slack for injecting so much of herself into the narrative. There’s a lot of me-journalism here, with most of it irrelevant to Epstein’s story. The way newsrooms were being squeezed in the twenty-first century is an important point worth addressing, but do we really need to know about Brown’s dating life with her Mr. Big? Or her kids getting into college? None of this adds anything to the book, even in just telling us where Brown is coming from as a reporter.

A final way that the Epstein case was emblematic of the times we live in was how it fit with the explosion of interest in pedophile sex rings. I’ve also written about this before, and it really is a cultural curiosity. Of course it would fully flower around the same time in the base mythology of the QAnon movement, but I can’t explain its roots given that Epstein is probably the closest reality has come to the kinds of stories that were so big in contemporary novels and TV shows. But Epstein’s crimes weren’t as lurid: he didn’t kill anyone (that we know of), and it’s hard to say if he was only part of a larger ring of rich and well-connected predators. Were his pals just casual acquaintances? Marks? Co-conspirators? Guilt by association went a long way with Epstein.

Even if his posse weren’t all onboard the Lolita Express (the name soon given Epstein’s private jet), the fact remains that Epstein had no shortage of powerful enablers. The most grating of these being in the criminal system and legal profession. Of course, the excuse made by criminal defence lawyers who have clients like Epstein is well rehearsed. Even if lawyers know their clients are guilty of terrible crimes an accused still has the right to a full and fair defence in a legal system that rightly puts the burden of proof on the state. The problem in this case was that Epstein had, at least in practical terms, greater resources than the state prosecuting him, and he used those resources to run a defence that while not breaking any formal rules involved the wholesale corruption of the system of justice: hiring friends of the prosecutors, essentially bribing others, attacking witnesses and complainants even before the case came to court or tampering with them in other ways. This is the sort of behaviour that I should have thought lawyers would have been bothered by or even refused to be involved in. I’m not sure if any of them demurred in the slightest.

Noted in passing:

Epstein was Jewish, which for some reason means he has to be linked to the Holocaust. But really, why? His grandparents on both sides were Eastern European Jews who emigrated to the U.S. around 1900. Some forty years later, as Brown reports, many of his maternal grandparents’ extended family were executed by the Germans. This seems a tenuous connection to me, and it’s never said what effect this might have had on Jeffrey. In A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein the authors go further, describing Epstein’s parents as among “the lucky few from their respective families who had not perished in the Holocaust.” But both of Epstein’s parents were natives of Brooklyn, his father and mother born in 1916 and 1918 respectively. Of what significance is it to Epstein’s story to make them into Holocaust survivors?

Takeaways:

“This is not unique to one party over another. The divide is not Republican versus Democrat; it’s the rich and powerful versus everyone else.”

True Crime Files

Best American Crime Writing
Guest editor Nicholas Pileggi

The crimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

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

The crime:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

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

The crime:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

Takeaways:

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

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

True Crime Files

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

The crime:

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

The book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted in passing:

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

True Crime Files

Killer Cults: Stories of Charisma, Deceit, and Death
By Stephen Singular

The crimes:

Nineteen stories of charismatic gurus and false prophets, most of whom were only interested in grabbing money and acquiring lots of submissive sexual partners.

The book:

I don’t see there being much of a market today for a book like this, or any of the Profiles in Crime series of which it is a part. For starters, there are already a couple of anthologies dealing with the same material and even with the same title already out there. In this one the entries on the different cults are little more, and sometimes even less, than you get on a Wikipedia page, the writing is nothing special, the editing poor (it’s the Book of Revelation, not Revelations), and the few pictures are of low quality. There’s only a very brief introduction and no conclusion or summary, so we get little sense of any big picture of the cult phenomenon. Stephen Singular suggests at one point that “a common thread in almost all of them [these cults] is an attempt to control sexual behavior.” But even here more needs to be drawn out. To be sure, many, if not most, of these cult leaders were sexual predators. But to what extent was an out-of-control libido the driving force behind their cults?

Of course, in any book of this nature you’re not expecting a deep dive. But even so the analysis is cursory. I couldn’t even be sure how much research Singular (a veteran true crime author) put into it. The sources referenced at the back seemed very inadequate, mostly consisting of news stories pulled from the Internet. In the section on Jim Jones reference is made to Jeff Guinn’s book The Road to Jonestown, but it isn’t listed in the sources. Nor is Tim Reiterman’s Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. In the section on Charles Manson, missing as sources are Vincent Bugliosi’s classic Helter Skelter and Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. In the section on Aum Shinrikyo particularly noticeable is the absence of any reference to a couple of pertinent books on the subject and on cults in general: Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche and Robert Jay Lifton’s Destroying the World to Save It.

There were at least a couple of directions that Singular might have gone in that occurred to me while I was reading. The first he does touch on, but again only briefly. This has to do with the advent of the Internet and cults going online. The Heaven’s Gate cult was a pioneer in this regard, though their web-page looks laughable today. Singular mentions how The Order had a vision of spreading their white nationalist message online but in the mid-1980s they weren’t there yet. It would take time, but that future has now arrived, as witness the dark fandom of the Columbine cult. But has this made cults more dangerous, or does the intense personal charisma of the leader get watered down, to the point where he or she just becomes another star of YouTube, or Instagram influencer?

The other point I would have liked to hear discussed more has to do with America as the natural home or breeding ground of modern cults. So much so that even people from as far away as India (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) would come to the U.S. to set up their cult communes. Is there something in the American psyche, its status as (in Kurt Andersen’s name for it) Fantasyland, that lends itself to the sort of magical thinking and instinctual worship of gurus? Or something about the link between cults and the anti-government movements and conspiracy thinking that have always been so much a part of the American cultural tradition?

These are the sorts of questions Killer Cults doesn’t ask. Instead, it remains a light read that won’t tell you anything new about the famous cases it discusses and will only whet your appetite for seeking out more information on its more obscure cases elsewhere.

Noted in passing:

What is the link between cults and the products of pop culture? Charles Manson thought the song “Helter Skelter” from The Beatles’ White Album contained a hidden message about a coming race war. Adolfo Constanzo based his brutal crime cult on a 1987 flick called The Believers starring Martin Sheen and Jimmy Smits that I have only the vaguest recollection of today. The Heaven’s Gate cult took its lead from Star Trek mythology, with its members thinking of themselves as parts of an “Away Team” as they killed themselves. Why do so many people put so much faith, or even find any meaning, in such crap? I know that’s a question every outsider asks of any belief system, but Star Trek? I guess fandom and cult membership have to be plotted on a spectrum.

Takeaways:

Not every cult leader is just a scammer looking to score a fleet of Rolls-Royces and a harem of young lovers. Unfortunately, the true believers are no less toxic than the cynical ones.

True Crime Files

A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History
By Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken

The crime:

Maria Duval was the name and face behind one of the biggest mail frauds in history. People (usually the elderly and vulnerable) sent money to her hoping that her psychic powers would bring them good fortune. But when a pair of CNN reporters tried to track down Ms. Duval they found that she was just a front for a much deeper scam being operated by a variety of mysterious and shady characters.

The book:

I don’t say this very often, but this is one of those books I couldn’t put down. It sucked me in and I kept reading it all in a rush.

I think it helped that it was a mystery, and no less satisfying for being a mystery without a full solution. Ellis and Hicken are intrepid reporters, and seem to have been having a lot of fun along the way while trying to track Duval (or “Duval”) down, but as with any great conspiracy story we only get past one wall (or e-mail address, or shell company) to find another standing behind it.

This is what I found so fascinating about A Deal with the Devil. I think everyone agrees that we live in a time that’s rich with magical thinking and dense with conspiracy theories. What doesn’t get enough attention are the background cultural factors that contribute to this.

In some ways it all goes back to the way the world itself has become more complicated through science and technology, making us feel increasingly alienated from and powerless in the grip of tools that we use and depend on every day but don’t understand a thing about. But there is a political and economic side to this as well, as we feel both left behind and in the dark by governments and big corporations that operate so much in the shadows that there’s often no way even investigative reporters working for major news outlets can figure out what it is they do.

This leaves A Deal with the Devil reading a bit like a Pynchon novel for the Google Street View age. All the indeterminacy and mystery in our everyday lives naturally leads to unexpected lapses into credulity and conspiracy mindsets. Near the end of their investigations the authors are even entertaining one tip from Romania suggesting that a cult of Satanists might be behind the whole thing. Shades of QAnon! But the truth, though less sensational, is even more unnerving: a cabal of international money people and crime bosses running a global scam taking in hundreds of millions of dollars. If this is so, might there not also be some truth to ESP and the power of magic crystals? Given the existence of such real conspiracies, wouldn’t it be a kind of survival technique to just believe everything?

The one part of the book I felt resistance to came at the end where the authors finally get to meet Maria Duval and find the perfect image for the wall of unknowingness they’ve come up against in the blank eyes of an old woman afflicted with dementia. There is a suggestion made of this being a final irony, in that Duval herself might be seen as a victim of the fraudsters who bought her name and monetized it by attaching it to their scam. That may be, but I had zero sympathy for Duval. She cashed out and was in no way a victim in all of this.

Noted in passing:

Is it the case that native speakers can’t hear themselves speaking with any kind of accent? That they just see their own accent as “normal”? I think this might happen, which is why I was surprised when the authors (both born and bred in the United States) described the Canadian characters they meet as having “a charming Canadian accent” or “a distinctly Canadian accent.”

According to Wikipedia, most North Americans “cannot distinguish the typical accents of the two countries [that would be Canada and the U.S., though Mexico is also in North America] by sound alone.” Of course there are regional differences. People from Texas, Boston, or Newfoundland have easily recognizable accents. But I don’t think there’s any difference between the speech of someone from Toronto and a native of Cincinnati. The old joke from South Park where Canadians are heard pronouncing “out and about” as “oot and aboot” always baffled me. We don’t sound like Scots.

When I went and watched some videos about Canadian accents I was just as confused. The way words were being pronounced in a “Canadian accent” didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “sorry” pronounced as “sore-ee.” There are some Canadianisms, like the particle “eh?” that I guess are a tag, but to be honest I don’t even hear “eh?” very much anymore. Certainly not as much as it was used thirty or so years ago, when you did hear it all the time. Place names are a specialty in any language, so I don’t know how many people from elsewhere pronounce Toronto as Trahn-toe (which is how we do it). Probably as many as pronounce New Orleans as New Orleens or New Orlee-ans, when I think it’s supposed to be New Orlins or New Awlins (but not Nawlins, which I’ve heard is a myth).

In any event, Ellis and Hicken don’t give any examples of what makes the Canadians they talk to sound so charmingly or distinctly Canadian, so I don’t know what it was they were responding to.

Takeaways:

It’s lucky the Duval mail fraud was shut down, though I doubt it has been shut down so much as it’s just been diverted into other channels. These operations know how to stay two or three steps ahead of the law. It’s exasperating reading about scams like this because they’re like junk mail, telemarketers, and spam: at any point the government could step in and put an end to all this but they won’t because there’s too much money involved.

What’s worse, in accepting, as I think we do, that so much of normal capitalist activity is a fraud or a scam, or something very like it, we tend to valorize the scammers as heroes and see their victims as clueless suckers who are, in the words of one of the people involved in the fraud here, “too dumb to live.” Taking the life savings of these people is a sort of cull. And this is old school mail fraud we’re still talking about. The Internet takes this heartlessness to a new level.

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