Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History
By Mike Browne

The crimes:

“Girl Gone”: a man kills the parents of a 13-year-old girl and kidnaps her, but he is later apprehended and she is rescued.

“Spell Murder for Me”: a pair of lesbian lovers working at a nursing home decide to kill some of their patients.

“The Boozing Barber”: an alcoholic barber poisons a series of women with overdoses of ethanol.

“The Elementary School Murderer”: the Mary Bell case. Bell strangled a couple of pre-schoolers when she was only 10 years old herself.

“Bad Apples”: the murder of Sylvia Likens.

“Sing a Song of Murder”: an American serviceman stationed in Australia in the Second World War strangles three women.

“Antifreeze and a Cold Heart”: a woman poisons her husband with antifreeze and it’s discovered that she killed her previous husband the same way.

“The Oak Island Mystery”: people keep digging for gold or other buried pirate treasure they think is hidden on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island.

“Who Was the Persian Princess?”: a mummy turns out to be a deceased woman of more recent vintage.

“The Love Me Tender Murders”: a pair of young Elvis fans are killed in Chicago.

“Dark Water”: the body of Elisa Lam is found in the rooftop water tank of a hotel in L.A.

“The Unknown Man”: an unidentified man is found dead on a beach and nobody can figure out who he is.

“The Dyatlov Pass Incident”: a group of explorers are killed while hiking in the Ural Mountains.

“Northern Rampage”: a pair of teens kill some people they met on the road and then drive part way across Canada before killing themselves in the bush.

“The UFO Cult”: the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide story.

“Colonia Dignidad”: a bunch of Nazis set up their own little torture village in Chile after the Second World War and the government finds them useful.

“The Ripper Crew”: a foursome of Satanists butcher women.

“Lost Narcosatánicos”: a Mexican drug gang gets into voodoo and human sacrifice.

“Children of Thunder”: a man styling himself a prophet attempts to set up his own church, using murder to get a bit of seed money.

“The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918”: millions die worldwide from the flu.

“The Eruption of Mount St. Helens”: a volcano in Washington State goes off, killing more than fifty people.

“The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion”: a space shuttle blows up soon after launch.

“The Grenfell Tower Fire”: a high-rise apartment building in London burns up because of cheap siding.

“The Boxing Day Tsunami”: a massive earthquake (the third largest ever recorded) beneath the Indian Ocean spawns giant waves that destroy many coastal areas, especially in Indonesia.

“The Chilean Mining Accident”: a group of miners are rescued after spending more than two months underground.

The book:

Not what I was expecting.

Mike Browne, a native of Nova Scotia, is host of a podcast called Dark Poutine, which is primarily about Canadian true crime stories and “dark history” (a rather vague term I hadn’t encountered before). Given this, and the picture on the cover of a loon floating in a northern lake and the bibliographic information categorizing the book as “Canadiana,” I figured the line-up was going to consist mainly if not exclusively of Canadian crime stories.

That’s not what this is. Instead, many of the stories fall outside the category of what I’d call true crime, and only a few have a Canadian setting.

The twenty-five tales are divided into four categories: murders, unsolved mysteries, partners in crime, and “notable disasters.” Unfortunately, the labels aren’t very helpful. Category one is called “murder with a twist,” but the murders didn’t strike me as exceptional or linked to each other in any way. Category three is called “the madness of crowds,” but some of the cases are just a couple of people killing together while others deal with cults, criminal gangs, and even political movements. “Notable disasters” range from natural to man-made catastrophes, and I couldn’t figure out what the 1918 influenza pandemic, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, and the rescue of 33 Chilean miners in 2010 had in common.

Even some of the titles left me scratching my head. Why was the horrific Sylvia Likens case called “Bad Apples”? I feel like I was missing something. I assume “Dark Water” was a reference to the movie of the same name, but that’s a link that’s never explained so there could be something I wasn’t getting there too.

The overall effect was a bit like flipping through a Reader’s Digest in a doctor’s office. Browne is a fluid writer, but the sections are all pretty brief, around ten pages each, and there’s little if anything that’s new in terms of information or interpretation. And in the final section especially some of the disasters are just too broad and technical, not to mention already well known, to deal with in so short a space. Throw in the fact that there aren’t any pictures or maps and I came away a bit disappointed. The only case that was new to me was that of the Brownout Strangler, a figure who I then looked up on Wikipedia to find out more about. Isn’t that moving in the wrong direction?

Noted in passing:

At the Grenfell Tower fire: “Firefighters told bystanders to back away for their safety, but many stood their ground, shooting photos and videos on their cellphones to share on social media.”

During the Boxing Day tsunami: “Thai tour guides and resort employees began yelling for people to leave the beach and get to higher ground. As locals ran past them, some tourists, not realizing the danger they faced, walked toward the incoming wave, taking photos and shooting video.”

It’s easy to see behaviour like this as being a sign of the times, but if they’d had phones that took pictures and shot video in the nineteenth century people would have probably done the same thing.

Takeaways:

There is no gold, or treasure of any kind, on Oak Island.

True Crime Files

Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder that Hooked America on True Crime
By Joe Pompeo

The crime:

Edward Wheeler Hall, a priest, and Eleanor Mills, a choir singer, were found dead on the morning of September 16, 1922, their bodies arranged together under a crabapple tree. Both Hall and Mills were married, but not to each other. The prime suspects were Hall’s wife Frances and her siblings, but after  years of investigation and the circus of a huge trial they were found not guilty and the case remains unsolved.

The book:

The title tips you off that Joe Pompeo is going to come at the story from the angle of its media coverage, which I think is justified given how big a deal the Hall-Mills case was at the time. I don’t think it’s as well known today, though among true-crime connoisseurs it remains a favourite: a fun case to dig into, both for being unsolved and for the colorful cast of characters.

It’s a bit misleading though to say the case hooked America on true crime, and in his conclusion Pompeo admits that the press coverage only “arguably laid the groundwork for the genre as we know it.” I don’t think he’s as interested in the genre of true crime anyway as he is in the rise of tabloid journalism. The two were connected, though not the same thing. Joe Patterson, one of the first tabloid impresarios, had it down to a formula: the subjects that most interested readers were “(1) Love or Sex, (2) Money, (3) Murder.” He also believed that readers were “especially interested in any situation which involved all three.” The Hall-Mills case hit the trifecta. As one reporter covering the trial put it, “It has a combination of every element that makes a murder case great.”

So the story of the case and how it was covered go together, especially when the tabloids themselves, mainly in the person of New York Daily Mirror editor Phil Payne, became the driving force in the investigation. And like the best cultural history it reflects a critical light back on our own media ecosystem. When the Daily Mirror launched it promised readers “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information.” Clearly the days of infotainment were upon us. As William Randolph Hearst (publisher of the Mirror) understood, “People will buy any paper which seems to express their feelings in addition to printing the facts.” So the foundations for today’s media silos were being poured as well.

Other points of reference are even more intriguing. The Evening Graphic made use of an innovation called the “composograph” that apparently worked by superimposing the faces of story subjects on body doubles, thus creating deep fakes a century ahead of schedule. And the publisher of the Evening Graphic was also a health and fitness nut who wanted to use the paper to “crusade for health! For physical fitness! And against medical ignorance!” What this meant, among other things, was a competition to find ideal human specimens (“Apollos and Dianas”) who would be “perfect mates for a new human race, free of inhibitions, and free of the contamination of the smallpox vaccine!” A eugenicist and anti-vaxxer then.

This is all interesting stuff, but in the drive to get to the totemic 280 pages there’s still a fair bit of filler. I was uninterested in the details of Payne’s life and death, or the story of cub woman reporter Julia Harpman, as inspiring a figure as she may have been. Payne in particular seems to have been more than a bit of a jerk, and it’s hard to tell if he really believed any of the trash news he was trying so hard to manufacture out of nothing, or if he cared about any of the people he might have been hurting along the way.

As for the crime itself, it’s continued to cast its spell over armchair sleuths for generations. There’s the sex not only at the heart of the story but also creeping around the edges. The bodies were discovered just off the local lover’s lane by Ray Schneider and Pearl Bahmer, a pair who authorities discovered were up to no good. This grand jury confrontation between the lead detective on the case and the young man involved must have been shocking stuff:

“Did you go up there,” Mott demanded, “knowing that [Pearl] was having her period, for the express purpose of lying down on your back, as you did, and [having] her do the vile thing she did to you? Wasn’t that why you were there?”

“No, sir,” Ray lied. “It was not.”

In addition to the sex (I’m still going off Patterson’s trinity here) there was the money. Or class. Hall represented money, even if only by marrying into it. Mills came from a less privileged background. But the split was also there in the arrest of a young man named Clifford Hayes, who was soon cleared of any involvement. Harpman drew the storyline in clear terms:

The law says certain things about equality of rich and poor. But the law speaks with its tongue in its cheek. The law says the rich Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall . . . deserves no more consideration than Clifford Hayes, the young man who was thrown into prison on the unsupported accusation of an irresponsible character. But the eyes of reality see an impassable gulf – a chasm cleft by the sinews of wealth – between the preacher’s widow and the swarthy young sandwich cook, who worked, when he did work, in a side-street lunch cart.

Later, when Frances herself was arrested, the conflict was drawn between “the masses and the classes.” Which was a divide that everyone in 1920s American could relate to. It’s interesting that in our own time, where the level of inequality has managed to regress to the level of those years, the language of class has mostly been retired. As cited by Paul Fussell in his excellent book on the subject, class is America’s “forbidden subject.” We’re still drawn to stories of rich people behaving badly, but there’s no sense of an “us against them” anymore.

Finally there’s the murder, and “the million dollar question” that remains of Whodunnit?

My own take is close to that of Bill James, as laid out in his book Popular Crime (in which there was also a lot I did not agree with). Given the nature of the crime – basically the execution of an adulterous pair who were not robbed – I think it very likely that the killer(s) knew the victims very well. Indeed, that they knew where and when they were meeting the night they were killed. That basically leaves two groups of suspects: Frances and her brothers, or James Mills (Eleanor’s husband). Pompeo sees Frances as “the most obvious” solution to the mystery, reasoning that “there was too much smoke around Frances and her brothers for there not to have been any fire.” Unfortunately, a lot of the smoke was proven to be just that. Meanwhile, I agree with James in seeing the disproportionate violence directed at Eleanor as significant. Edward Hall was shot once while Eleanor was shot three times in the head and had her throat slit. This suggest a special order of anger. It’s possible that Frances or one of her brothers might have felt this same level of rage, but it seems to me that James Mills was more likely to have gone over the edge.

Noted in passing:

There’s a wonderful moment in the trial for all lovers of language and anyone interested in how the meaning and usage of words changes. The prosecutor Simpson is questioning Frances:

“When you got up,” Simpson said, referring to the morning after Edward’s disappearance, “you telephoned police headquarters?”

“I did.”

“You were looking for information about your husband?”

“Yes.”

“You thought you would get it from the police?”

“I thought I would hear of any accidents.”

“Accident was in your mind?”

“Yes.”

“But you said to the police, ‘Have there been any casualties?’”

“Doesn’t that mean accident?”

“Weren’t you looking to see if the dead bodies had been found?” Simpson pressed. “If you used the word ‘casualties,’ and you had accidents in your mind, why did you use the word ‘casualties’?”

“It means accidents,” Frances replied. “It is the same thing.”

“It also means death, doesn’t it?”

“I do not know that it does.”

“So, with your understanding of the meaning of the word, you telephoned police headquarters, you did not give your name, and you asked for casualties? You thought, you say, maybe there had been an accident, maybe your husband had been hurt in an automobile accident?”

“Yes.”

Today I think most of us take “casualties” as referring to lives lost either in battle or in natural disasters (though non-fatal injuries in both cases are still considered casualties). But Frances is correct, in an upper-class sort of way, that it could refer to any loss through accident or misfortune, to life or property and possessions. In the insurance industry it still has this broader meaning, though it too has evolved and mainly refers today to liability insurance. I love how Frances and the prosecutor can’t understand the words they’re using, even when they are the same words.

Takeaways:

Pompeo uses the term “trial of the century” as a chapter heading, and it may be that in 1926 Hall-Mills deserved that appellation. However, I don’t recall any of the journalists covering it using those words. In any event, in 1935 the Lindbergh kidnapping trial effectively supplanted it and would go on to hold that title at least for another seventy years. The only challenger I can think of would be the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995. But as F. Lee Bailey said in the aftermath of the Simpson circus, “trial of the century” is just “a kind of hype. . . . It’s a way of saying, ‘This is really fabulous. It’s really sensational.’ But it doesn’t really mean anything.”

True Crime Files

Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
By Susan Jonusas

The crime:

The Bender family – consisting of Ma and Pa Bender, daughter Kate and son (or son-in-law) John – ran a trailside inn during the early 1870s in Kansas. Some who checked in never left. After being brained with a hammer and having their throats cut they were robbed of whatever cash and valuables they had and their bodies buried in a nearby orchard. As suspicions mounted over the number of disappearing travelers in the area the Benders fled to parts unknown. They were never apprehended and their ultimate fate remains a mystery.

The book:

The Bloody Benders, as they were later designated, are famous frontier figures, but what Hell’s Half-Acre brought home to me was how little about them is actually known. In large part this is because they were never captured and made to stand trial, with a full public hearing of the evidence against them. As it is, we don’t know where they came from or where they went, if John and Kate were siblings or married, or if John was a half-wit or just someone who behaved in an odd manner and giggled a lot. Susan Jonusas doesn’t definitively answer any of these questions in this full account, but I think that’s because they’re probably unanswerable now.

This is not for a lack of contemporary reporting. The Benders were big news back in their day. But newspapers had more flexible standards then, as Jonusas notes in her Introduction:

. . . nineteenth-century newspapers can be unreliable, as proven by the wild variations in the number of victims attributed to the Benders, with some claiming the number as high as 150. Along with embellished figures come misspelled names, seemingly random locations, and widely varied physical descriptions of the Benders themselves.

So we are left with these same basic questions. How many people did the Benders kill? Can we just go off the number of bodies dug up in the orchard? No, because they disposed of at least one other victim in a nearby river. What did they look like? Even among those who knew them descriptions varied quite a bit and there was no “paper of record.”

Like the frontier rumor mill, regional newspapers were a mixture of fact, hearsay, and complete fiction. Out-of-state newspapers that could not afford or be bothered to send reporters to Labette County pooled information from local articles, selected the narrative they liked best, and reprinted it as fact.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what to think of when Jonusas says that the Benders regularly appear in top 10 lists “where they routinely secure the top spot above other murderous families.” What other murderous families have there been? I couldn’t think of any. I did a quick search for some of the lists Jonusas might have had in mind (none are mentioned in the notes) and found several, but they mainly consisted of couples or other pairings, which I categorize as folie à deux and not families. The only other “family” I saw mentioned was the Sawney Bean clan, who were figures out of Scottish folklore (that is, not real). Would you include the Manson “family” in such a list? Or mafia crime families as serial killers?

This may seem like a minor point, but it gets at the historical uniqueness of the Benders. There’s nothing else quite like them in the annals of true crime, at least that I’m aware of. The serial killer family is more likely to be encountered in crime and horror films like Bloody Mama, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes, along with all of their descendants (House of 1000 Corpses, et al.).

And Jonusas does give Hell’s Half-Acre a good squirt of horror-movie juice. The Bender cabin is evoked as the kind of place that did in fact creep a lot of guests out (including a few who only narrowly escaped). I did think, however, that in several places she crosses over a line in trying to make the proceedings more novelistic. There are scenes she describes where the only people present are members of the Bender family and I don’t see how she has any idea what they were doing, saying to each other, or thinking. I appreciate this being a good read, but there are still rules when it comes to writing non-fiction.

Otherwise, I’d fully recommend this as being a decent look at the case. Some of the historical material, like the fad for spiritualism, are worked into the mix well, though I felt the final chapters wandered off a bit into the trial of a pair of women who were falsely accused of being Ma and Kate Bender.

Noted in passing:

The question of how smart criminals are is one that gets a lot of attention from true crime writers. I think a lot of this is driven by media representations. Here’s something from my review of The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter and David Everitt that I think is on point:

What undercuts the expertise of the profilers even more is the fact, amply demonstrated (it seems to me) by the case histories in these volumes, that most serial killers aren’t very bright. Contra the FBI’s profiling program, that found the mean IQ for serial killers to be “bright normal,” and Schechter and Everitt’s conclusion that “serial killers tend to be smart,” the best that can be said for the best of them is that they were able to live functional double lives. Smart people don’t think they can get rid of bodies by cutting them up and flushing the pieces down the toilet. And yet this is how both Dennis Nilsen and Joachim Kroll were caught. Again we can blame Hollywood for the entirely fictional figure of the serial killer as cunning genius and criminal mastermind – someone like Hannibal Lecter who can lecture on Dante and play the Goldberg Variations from memory. In the real world some of the most successful serial killers, like the cretin Ottis Toole or the degenerate Wests, were borderline retarded.

But underestimating the intelligence of criminals can also be a trap. Think of Eliot Spitzer’s remark about how most crooks are stupid, just before his own fall. Or how, as described in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Constance Kent, who everyone seemed to think was just a stupid girl, initially got away with murdering her step-brother, even fooling the great detective Mr. Whicher himself.

A similar dynamic was at work with the Benders. When Alexander York, who hadn’t followed up on suspicions of the Benders earlier, digs up his brother’s grave he sees “only his own obstinate refusal to believe that the Bender family was clever enough to commit such an atrocious crime.” And years later, when newspapers speculated on the fate of the family, it was thought by some that they must be dead because “They were simply too stupid to have evaded the authorities for so long.”

Attitudes like this confuse me. I’m never sure what people mean when they describe someone as being either smart or stupid. Intelligence takes many different forms – from book learning to social skills and mechanical proficiency. And it can be put to infinite uses. Were the Benders stupid or cunning in their criminal careers? Were they clever and resourceful or mostly just lucky in evading the law? Surely it’s a mix of all of the above. My sense is that Kate was not only the scheme’s honey trap but its directing intelligence. How clever she was is impossible to say now, but I wouldn’t underestimate her.

Takeaways:

In strange settings, always sit with your back to a wall. That way no one can sneak up behind you.

True Crime Files

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