You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You are Raoul Moat]
By Andrew Hankinson

The crime:

A couple of days after being released from prison (on July 1, 2010) Raoul Moat shot his estranged girlfriend and shot and killed her new boyfriend. The next day he shot a police constable in the face, blinding him (the constable would later take his own life). A massive manhunt for Moat ensued, ending with his killing himself.

The book:

You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You are Raoul Moat] announces itself as literary non-fiction by being written in the highly unconventional second person. Despite all the rave reviews, I was on edge, thinking this a bit of a stunt.

It isn’t, and it works.

There’s a boldness to proceeding in this way. The stated “aim was to stay in Raoul Moat’s mind,” which presupposes an ability to inhabit that mind, to directly state what Moat was thinking at any given time. What allows Hankinson to go this route is the documentary evidence available. Moat left a record that speaks to us directly in his own voice:

The main source for this book was Raoul Moat, who left behind spoken and written material including audio recordings he made on the run, a 49-page confession he wrote on the run, recordings of this 999 calls before and after shooting PC David Rathband, recordings of phone calls he made while in prison, audio recordings he made during the final years of his life, training diaries, a psychological questionnaire, his correspondence, and six suicide notes he left in his house.

For all its literary qualities then, it’s also a very simple book, being a sort of Raoul Moat Reader or even oral history, with slight editorial asides inserted in square brackets instead of footnotes. But it makes for a great read and effectively delivers on the promise of taking us into Moat’s head by serving him up in his own words, even down to his employment of obscure local slang (“micey” being a word the exact meaning of which I’m still not sure of). The comparison most often made by reviewers was to the work of Gordon Burn, who did something similar in his immersive account of the Yorkshire Ripper, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. That both authors are natives of Newcastle upon Tyne is only a coincidence, but one that probably carries some meaning. On some level our language, even if it’s just a dialect or regional voice, reflects a type of consciousness, and for an author wanting to get inside his subject’s head in particular, I think being steeped in that language and being a native of that place makes a difference. (As an aside, I’d mention Michael Winter’s attempt to do something similar in his “non-fiction novel” The Death of Donna Whalen, though the results there weren’t as successful.)

We shouldn’t be surprised, however, that nothing remarkable is revealed. Moat wasn’t so much a monster as just a dull brute. He was a big guy – 6’3” and around 240 pounds – and took various supplements as a bodybuilder to turn himself into a hulk. This came in handy when he worked for a while as a doorman or bouncer at local clubs, but the thing about big guys like this – or any athlete, or young beauty – is that you have to be able to manage the decline. Your physique is a diminishing asset. Moat was deeply depressed at no longer being as big or strong or tough as he was as a younger man – “I’m well aware that I’m past my prime” – and saw the best years of his life as over. At 37 he was “too old to start again.” “I’m not 21 and I can’t rebuild my life,” he remarked after coming out of jail. “I’ve got no life left,” he told the police operator after shooting PC Rathband. The suicide note or recording was his obsessive genre. He was paranoid too, to the point of delusion, and could be downright whiny when it came to how he was being “bullied” and “stitched up” (framed) by the police, but taking his own life was always where this was heading.

Hats off then to Hankinson’s largely editorial skill in making such a depressing and limited figure so interesting. I guess I could call it “revealing” too, but it’s a case where little is revealed that you probably wouldn’t have figured out after reading a quick news report on the case. Instead it’s exactly what it sets out to be, which is a trip into Raoul Moat’s mind. Not a place you may want to go, but one that it’s worth knowing about.

Noted in passing:

The level of self-pity even among the worst members of society has few limits. This was brought home to me years ago when reviewing Stevie Cameron’s On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women. Pickton was the B.C. pig farmer who confessed to killing 49 women. After being arrested he referred to himself as being “crucified” by the police (apparently he also found God behind bars). I can’t recall now if Moat ever referred to himself as being crucified, though I think he does at some point. He uses a more unconventional image in saying “I feel like King Kong when he’s at the top of that flaming building, you know.” Jesus, King Kong: both persecuted martyrs hounded to death by the authorities. It’s a weird way killers have of justifying themselves, while also plugging into the contemporary cultural imperative (that’s not too strong of word) of always casting yourself as a victim.

Takeaways:

Suicide can be a wrecking ball – just think of the prevalence of “murder-suicides” – and once someone’s course is set on self-destruction you should leave them to the professionals to deal with. Especially if guns and a history of violence are in the mix.

True Crime Files

Obsessed
By M. William Phelps

The crime:

Sheila Davalloo had a crush on her co-worker Nelson Sessler so she killed Sessler’s girlfriend Anna Lisa Raymundo. This meant she now had Nelson all to herself, but she hadn’t told him that she was already married. So Davalloo then tried to kill her husband, Paul Christos, but he managed to survive her attack, which led to Davalloo finally being connected to the Raymundo murder, for which she was convicted a decade later.

The book:

A great read, and very well paced given how long it is and the fact that not much actually happens. But Phelps’s description of Davalloo’s attempt at killing Christos offers up a master class on how to use point of view to slow down the subjective experience of time. It’s a scene that goes on for nearly fifty pages, and feels like it could have been written by Stephen King.

Another pacing problem that a lot of true crime books fall into and that Phelps avoids is expanding the trial to the point where it become tedious. I think this is just because trials throw up so much material it’s too easy to just transcribe the transcripts. But here the fact that Davalloo represented herself (rarely a good idea) made it more entertaining, and let Phelps give free play to a lot of judgmental asides. Phelps walks a fine line with getting too chatty on occasion (“Oh, how the guy should have listened to his inner voice!” “That, my friends, is the description of a desperate woman . . .”), and during the trial this is something he really indulges, sometimes overdoing the sarcastic play-by-play. But overall I think the tone he adopts works.

The pitfall that Phelps doesn’t avoid is that of larding praise on the police. Again, the reason this happens so often is pretty obvious: the police are the good guys and in most cases have been generous in providing access and interviews to the author. But this sort of guff too often turns into hero-cop boilerplate. For example:

Richard Conklin . . . is a top-notch cop. There’s nothing Hollywood about Conklin. He’s sharp and does things by the book. If Anna Lisa could have chosen the cop she wanted to manage the investigation of her murder, she could have never chosen a better investigator than Conklin to lead the task . . .

…

. . . there was no mistaking the tenacity and drive or compassion that motivated [Greg Holt] to solve crimes perpetrated against the people of the town he worked in. Hold was a doer. He believed in working cases the old-fashioned way: Hit the bricks. Track down sources. Bang on doors. Ask questions repeatedly. Allow his gut to guide him. And when he thought he’d exhausted every possible lead, every palpable clue a case had to give up, he would dig even deeper, go over it all again, and find that missing link –that one needle sending him running toward an entirely new haystack. For Holt, a cop didn’t stop because the answers were hidden. He persevered and made them emerge.

…

Alison Carpentier is one of those no-nonsense cops. She hardly took any crap from anyone. . . . Carpentier is one of those officers never satisfied with a case until it is looked at closely and all the questions answered. She doesn’t accept what is generally the norm: Most cases are what they seem, and are nothing else. Carpentier is one of those hungry cops, motivated by her instincts. During her ten years on patrol, Carpentier had done two years of undercover drug work, where she learned how to rely on her gut.

How could any perp hope to beat this team of all-stars? Holt is even presented as a human lie-detector: “Hold had interviewed countless suspects and witnesses. When a professional does that for years and years, he develops a sixth sense about people in general. He’s able to read human beings fairly accurately.” You’d think this would be true, but apparently it’s only a common misconception. Even experienced police interrogators apparently do no better than anyone else in being able to tell when someone is being truthful or not.

Well, I can certainly tell you who wasn’t going to beat these supercops, and that’s the blockheads in this case. I’ve read true crime books with stupider villains, but rarely one with so many outright dummies. You have to just shake your head at how dense Paul was in not picking up all the red flags and air-raid warning sirens that Sheila was sending out. What Nelson thought he was doing in playing games with the police is anybody’s guess. And Sheila herself was just a trainwreck, though she did almost get away with Anna’s murder. It was her attempted murder of Paul that undid her, leading the detectives to conclude that “as much education as she’d had, she was not at all intelligent.”

I don’t think this final point is fair though. I think it just goes to show that nobody is smart, or dumb, all of the time. We all have our areas of expertise, and other areas where we can’t function at all.

Noted in passing:

At one point Phelps refers to Davalloo as Sessler’s “mistress.” This is not how I use that word. I would have said “girlfriend” or “lover.” Isn’t mistress reserved for a lover outside of marriage? Yes, Davalloo was married, but Sessler’s relationship with Raymundo at the time was on the backburner so I don’t think his girlfriend would count as a mistress.

Something that never ceases to surprise me, no matter how many fresh instances of it I’m exposed to, is the inability of people younger than me to write (or even read) cursive. I realize it hasn’t been taught in school for a while, but I guess I’ve always figured that kids were still picking it up somewhere, somehow.

They aren’t.

Sheila Davalloo was a highly-educated woman – private school, university, post-graduate work at a medical centre – and was “a manager of medical coding and thesaurus administration, a select group within Biostatics and Clinical Data Management” at Purdue Pharmaceuticals. (I should say here that “thesaurus” in this case doesn’t refer to the helpful reference book I have on my desk, but rather “a form of controlled vocabulary that seeks to dictate semantic manifestations of metadata in the indexing of content objects.” I looked it up.) So when Phelps describes her handwriting as he does I was expecting something pretty special:

Sheila’s handwriting is something to take note of. It is nothing short of perfect. Not good, but flawless. It’s like staring at a specific font a computer has generated. She could write letters after letters, without any margins or lines on the page, straight and methodical, in this highly stylized penmanship of hers, which is so clear and precise that any recipient is inclined to think she had used a computer. Beyond the perfection of the letters, what emerges is how calm the hand is writing out the words. One would have to have a perfectly steady hand, along with an abundance of composure within, to achieve the precision Sheila does in these letters.

Whew! I was thinking to myself this must be some pretty fancy handwriting! Like expert-level calligraphy with its “highly stylized penmanship.” At the end of the book Phelps will get a letter directly from Davalloo and remind us of how he’s “incredibly fascinated by her penmanship. I have never seen anything like it.” Wanting us to feel as impressed as he was, Phelps even includes a sample of it in the photos section.

It is very neat and meticulous.

It is also all block caps. Back in the day (my day) that wasn’t even considered to be “writing.” We called it “printing.”

On top of that, of the nine words shown in the sample, one of them has a howler of a spelling error, with Davalloo writing “solider” for “soldier.” Which is the sort of mistake you make all the time when typing but rarely when you’re holding a pen.

Takeaways:

Sessler was one very lucky young man. Even given strong exculpatory evidence, like the fact that he was known to be at work at the time of the murder, being Raymundo’s boyfriend made him a prime suspect (or “person of interest”). The availability heuristic is powerful in criminal investigations, and he was all the police initially had. And if you only have one suspect then you get tunnel vision.

Then you can add to this the fact that he rubbed everybody the wrong way. And if you don’t trust someone you start looking for evidence that implicates them. The lead detective thought he was hiding something right from the start and took an instant dislike to him. And one of the jurors at Davalloo’s trial said that all of the jury members “hated him” and “thought he was a scumbag and a dirty liar.”

If the police only have one suspect then they get tunnel vision. If they don’t like him, and don’t trust him, they start looking for evidence that implicates him. Yes, things could have gone south for Mr. Sessler very quickly.

True Crime Files

The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed
By Sara Gay Forden

The crime:

Maurizio Gucci, former head of the luxury fashion and accessories company that his grandfather founded, was killed on the morning of March 27, 1995. His ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, had put the hit out on him, a crime for which she spent 18 years in prison.

The book:

This was a widely celebrated book even before Ridley Scott’s (overrated) 2021 movie, which had Lady Gaga playing Patrizia and Adam Driver as Maurizio. But while I thought it was readable, mainly due to its inherently interesting subject matter, I didn’t much care for it.

More than a true crime book, it’s mainly a history of the Gucci company, though that’s a history that involved a fair bit of shady dealings, mostly involving tax evasion schemes. (In a charming aside, Forden talks about how some of the financial maneuverings that were illegal at the time would be permissible today because of the “liberalization” of Italy’s laws. I’m not sure, but I think she registers this as some kind of progress.) I admit I have little interest in the world of fashion, but as a business story it works. Plus the family in-fighting is fabulously Italian, in a tradition running from the Borgias to the Corleones.

I had a couple of difficulties with Forden’s writing though.

In the first place, she has an annoying habit of skipping around instead of sticking to a strict through chronology. I got confused at figures like Paolo Gucci dying and then coming back to life, or Silvio Berlusconi being described as a “former Italian prime minister” in what I think is 1993 (Berlusconi first came to power in 1994, and would serve as prime minister off-and-on up until 2011). I assume this was a typo, of the same sort that has Paolo referred to as Aldo Gucci’s “youngest son,” but that were a lot of moments like this that had me mentally scrambling trying to get dates in order. Yes there are different threads being followed, but anyone who writes narrative history has to try to keep them straight. For example, it’s painful to read an account of the landmark YSL fashion show in March 2001 and then be jerked back with what had been happening a week earlier on the legal front. As a reader you start to get whiplash.

The other problem I had was with Forden’s attempt to make the events seem more dramatic by presenting them novelistically. Again, this is something every historian has to deal with in some way: how do you describe a particular historical actor’s thoughts and feelings at a certain time? In her section of Bibliographical Notes Forden explains her approach:

References to what a person was thinking are based on extensive research into the situation and the person’s frame of mind at the time according to people close to him or her or other reliable accounts. In dramatizing contemporary conversations, I have based dialogue on conversations with one or more of the participants.

That sounds fair, but vague, with a lot of wiggle room. What it results in though is passages like this, describing Maurizio at his uncle Aldo’s funeral service:

As Maurizio stood by himself in the chilly church, he looked down at his clasped hands in front of him and let the rise and fall of the priest’s voice float through his mind. He pictured Aldo scaling the stairs of his Via Condotti office two at a time, barking orders to his salesclerks right and left, or holding court in the New York store, signing Christmas packages. His mind’s ear heard Aldo’s voice repeating his old adage about the dynamics of the family – “My family is the train, I am the engine. Without the train, the engine is nothing. Without the engine, well, the train doesn’t move.” Maurizio smiled. As the mourners around him shifted their feet and dabbed their eyes with soggy tissues, Maurizio unclasped his hands, then clenched and unclenched his fists as though for warmth.

Reading stuff like this in a work of non-fiction gets my back up. How do we know what was floating through Maurizio’s mind at this exact moment, or what he was hearing in his “mind’s ear”? Perhaps there’s a source, but I doubt it’s this specific. And there’s quite a bit of this sort of thing here. At one point we even follow Maurizio into the confessional. I remember commenting on an even more egregious moment like this in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City years ago. If you don’t know how something happened, or even if it happened, then you shouldn’t pretend as though you do.

Noted in passing:

In explaining his reasons for giving Patrizia a twenty-nine year sentence instead of life (which is what the trigger man got), the judge at her trial gave her diagnosis of having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as a mitigating factor. This really turned my head around. While not a legal defence, the fact that one is a pathologically entitled asshole can actually reduce one’s sentence? This would mean that narcissists are actually victims of their “condition.” What sense does that make?

The edition I read was published as a tie-in to the movie, with the familiar banner on the cover about how it was “soon to be a major motion picture.” This made me wonder when a “motion picture” has ever not been “major.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book with a blurb like this on a cover say it’s soon to be or now is just “a movie.” It’s always a motion picture. And a major motion picture at that. It’s almost like those exact words are some kind of legal requirement.

Takeaways:

Family businesses rarely work out in the long run because money is more important than blood. That may seem unnatural, but we live in an unnatural world. Meanwhile, not being a publicly-traded company means that a family business is, at least to some extent, free to operate above or beyond the law. Hence the timelessness of these bloody dynastic struggles.

True Crime Files