Book ‘Em Archives
Crime Magazine’s Review of
True-Crime Books
2003
by Anneli Rufus
(Vol. 15, 11/05/2003)
In late October I was
fortunate to interview true-crime queen Ann Rule. She was in the Bay Area to
promote her latest book, Heart Full of Lies. Rule told me that she “can’t
stand” mystery fiction: As we true-crime fans know, what’s the point of reading
about made-up murders when the real ones are more gripping? “When I read mystery
novels, I’m always finding things wrong with the police procedures,” sighed
Rule, whose inability to pass the eyesight portion of the test that would have
allowed her to become a cop still stands as “the greatest disappointment of my
life.” Her college major was creative writing, “but only because it was an easy
A,” she admits. “I never wanted to be a writer.” But “as a young mother about to
be divorced with four little kids,” she started writing for since defunct
True Detective magazine. Some 1,400 articles and many bestsellers later,
Rule is working on a book about Washington State’s Green River Killer case,
about which she has filled an entire closet in her home with files and newspaper
clippings. After 20 years and some 49 unsolved murders, a suspect has finally
been arrested and tagged as the killer. When Gary Ridgway was first nabbed, “my
daughter saw his picture on the news and said, ‘Mom, that’s the guy who used to
come to all your book signings,’” Rule recalled with a shudder. “She said, ‘He’d
stand there leaning against the wall.’”
Heart Full of Lies, by Ann
Rule (Free Press, 2003): Ex-cheerleader, screenwriter and mother of two Liysa
Northon was a classic sociopath: roping friends, lovers and family members into
a complex labyrinth of falsehood and deceit that made Liysa seem like a victim,
a survivor, and a hero. After years spent convincing them all that her third
husband was an abusive alcoholic, she quietly killed him at an Oregon campsite.
Having already bought her stories of his abuse, many were also willing to
believe her claim that the killing was in self-defense. Determined to clear
Chris Northon’s name, Rule investigates this domestic drama with her usual
compassion and careful attention to character development.
An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey: A Play and Two Essays
by Walter A. Davis (Xlibris, 2003): Davis, Professor Emeritus in the English
Department at Ohio State University, does not mince words in his essays on the
case. Before JonBenet was a murder victim, she was a victim of chronic sexual
abuse, both physical and psychological. Davis, with erudite writing, debunks
both prevailing theories about how the 6-tear-old beauty princess came to die:
death was no accident and no intruder was involved. To Davis, the preponderance
of the evidence points to Patsy Ramsey as the murderer in retaliation for the
intimacies her husband John Ramsey took with JonBenet. "A sexualized child is at
the center of this tale," Davis writes. "Sex is here the key to everything." In
the play, Cowboy’s Sweetheart, Davis imagines the life of a child who was
murdered by her mother as it might have evolved if she had lived.
Mortal Evidence, by Cyril
Wecht and Greg Saitz, with Mark Curriden (Prometheus Books, 2003): World-famous
pathologist Wecht spotlights some of the high-profile cases with which he’s been
involved. From Sam Sheppard to JonBenet Ramsey to O.J. Simpson to Tammy Wynette,
we meet once again the celebrity perps and victims of whom the press never seems
to tire. Lest you suspect that you’ve already heard everything about these
cases, Wecht proposes his own bracingly controversial theories about them, which
keeps those pages turning. Making no bones about his belief that JonBenet died
during sex play with someone she knew, he’s also pretty sure O.J. had an
accomplice.
Memoirs of Vidocq, by
François Eugène Vidocq (AK Press, 2003): An international bestseller when first
published almost 200 years ago, this autobiography of Paris’s celebrated
post-Revolutionary police chief introduces an irrepressible raconteur. Also a
private detective, Vidocq was an unrepentant ex-criminal himself. French writers
Alexandre Dumas, Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo were his personal friends, so
it comes as no surprise that Vidocq’s firsthand accounts of clever crimes, perps,
and convictions influenced their works, as well as those of Arthur Conan Doyle
and Edgar Allan Poe, whose literary debt to this bon vivant is made ever
so clear by these lively memoirs.
Drake’s Fortune, by Richard
Rayner (Anchor, 2003): In the 1920s, farm-boy-turned-con-man Oscar Hartzell
bilked tens of thousands of hapless Midwesterners out of their life savings. As
Rayner recounts with breezy journalistic eloquence, Hartzell accomplished this
by convincing his victims that they were the legitimate heirs of Sir Francis
Drake, and thus entitled to a share of the 16th-century admiral’s huge fortune,
which was tied up in extensive legal red tape that Hartzell offered to untangle
— at a cost. Of course the fortune was a myth, Drake’s estate having been
settled centuries before Hartzell and his victims were even born. The con man
lived in luxury but died mad, as this swiftly paced biography of a determined
criminal reveals while bringing a bygone era satisfyingly alive.
(Vol. 14, 09/29/2003)
Books about true crime are moving from the back to the front of bookstores
and public libraries. All of a sudden, true crime is in. Major publishers are
bringing out new crime books at an unprecedented rate, and promoting them
feverishly. True-crime authors are snagging six-figure advances. It was bound to
happen sometime. But why now? Because "CSI" and other forensics-based TV dramas
are attracting more viewers than other shows? Or because we’re all just feeling
more fearful, in general, all the time?
The Master Con Man, by Robert Kyriakides (Headpress,
2003): Irish-born Syd Gottfried, a fearless crook, ran ever-more-complex con
games in Europe and America for some 50 years, bilking every kind of mark from
casino owners to diamond dealers to penis-enlargement-surgery patients. Told in
the first person in a conversational style yet published under the byline of
Gottfried’s former lawyer, this (auto)biography gives the inside dope on how
cons work — and begins, chillingly, with an account of the night Gottfried
arrived home to find his young daughter murdered.
The Best American Crime Writing 2003,
edited by John Berendt, Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook (Vintage, 2003): These
nearly two dozen examples of the past year’s finest crime reportage include
pieces on pedophiles, pimps, terrorists, and other evaders of justice — even
Enron executives. They span the globe; a story on the savage murder, in
Pakistan, of journalist Daniel Pearl is sobering as is The Perfect Storm
author Sebastian Junger’s article on an Eastern European prostitution racket
into which trusting young women disappear without a trace.
A Deadly Secret, by Matt Birkbeck
(Berkley, 2003): A seeming drifter arrested for shoplifting in Pennsylvania in
2001 was soon discovered to be New York billionaire Robert Durst, heir to a
real-estate fortune and key suspect in the still-unsolved 1982 slaying of his
wife. Shortly after his arrest, Durst was indicted for the grisly murder of a
Texas man. As revealed in the new afterword of this nuts-and-bolts account by a
People magazine reporter, Durst is now being eyed for investigation in
unsolved vanishings elsewhere.
Journal of the Dead, by Jason Kersten
(Harper Collins, 2003): Young city-boy college pals Raffi Kodikian and Dave
Coughlin were driving cross-country, On the Road-style, when a campout
near New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns took a deadly turn: As Kodikian later
reported, the pair had run out of water and a dehydrated Coughlin had begged to
be killed rather than endure another hour of thirst. Not as passionate as it
could be, this effort by a Maxim writer recounts the incident and
Kodikian’s subsequent trial for murder; most gripping is the blow-by-blow of
exactly what dehydration does to a human body.
Murder in Paradise, by Chris Loos and Rick
Castberg (Avon, $7.50): Two Hilo-based writers cover the Christmas 1991 killing
of 23-year-old Dana Ireland, who was knocked off her bicycle, raped and battered
while visiting the Big Island of Hawaii from Virginia. A trio of neighborhood
toughs was arrested for the crime; what elevates this book from standard fare is
the detailed picture it paints of a Hawaii that few tourists see: lowdown
housing projects and the hopeless Pidgin-speaking drug dealers and addicts who
dwell there, preying on locals and outsiders alike.
Dead Center, by Frank J. Daniels (New
Horizon, 2003): Hopelessly romantic and newly married for the first time at age
46, Bruce Dodson was shot to death near Snipe Mountain in western Colorado in
1995 on his first-ever hunting trip. His bride of 90 days, Janice, appeared to
go into shock after discovering his body. The autopsy, though, showed that
Dodson had been murdered: he had been shot three times not once. Suspicion soon
fell on Janice, a crack shot who had recently taken out a large insurance policy
on Bruce. Local prosecuting attorney Frank Daniels offers a belabored, cliched
account of the crime and its subsequent four-and-a-half year investigation that
led to Janice being convicted of first-degree murder.
(Vol. 13, 07/07/2003)
For true-crime readers,
summer vacation means catching up on old but as-yet-unread favorites as well as
scooping up the latest the genre has to offer. This season features some
high-profile new releases based on high-profile cases — Aphrodite Jones’s Red
Zone is sure to score a lot of buzz. You might remember Jones as the author
who sued the distributors of the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry,
claiming that her own account of the Brandon Teena murder case — a book called
All She Wanted — afforded her special rights to the story and its
principals. She settled for an undisclosed amount. The San Francisco dog-mauling
case on which Red Zone is based made celebrities out of its perpetrators,
their victims, and a passel of lawyers. Maria Flook’s Invisible Eden
banks on celebrity spin as well. The victim of the murder Flook recounts was a
high-fashion reporter who hobnobbed with royalty. Buckets of blood, flashes of
glitz — that’s summer reading.
Red Zone, by Aphrodite Jones (Morrow, 2003): Few crimes are as
all-around sordid as San Francisco’s dog-mauling case, in which two huge dogs
killed a young lacrosse coach in 2001. A pair of down-and-out lawyers was
raising the hounds for an incarcerated armed robber who was scheming to sell
guard dogs to meth-lab operators. Days after the killing, the lawyers legally
adopted the prisoner, who was the object of their fervent sexual fantasies.
Rumors of bestiality spice the bloody story even further. Jones luxuriates in
the gory details, effectively exposing the pair whom a trial judge dubbed "the
most hated couple in San Francisco." But victim Diane Whipple gets jarringly
little coverage: a glaring omission that leaves us wondering. Also, even some
diehard true-crime fans will find the close-up photographs of Whipple’s lethal
wounds in bad taste.
Invisible Eden, by Maria Flook (Broadway, 2003): A less forgettable
title would attract more readers to this intriguing account of a still-unsolved
year-old crime in which a celebrated fashion journalist was killed in her serene
Cape Cod bungalow. When Christa Worthington’s corpse was discovered 36 hours
later, her toddler daughter was suckling at its breast. Flook, a Cape Cod
denizen herself, is a powerful, evocative writer who thrives in this "literary
investigation." Although some readers may have little patience for first-person
passages in which Flook recounts her own history (strikingly parallel to
Worthington's in various aspects), the dogged attentiveness with which she
investigates Worthington’s character outweighs that nuisance. Worthington is a
complex victim: always unlucky in love, aristocratic yet unsatisfied, an
inveterate pursuer of married men, she defies categorization — as even her
closest friends told the author.
Held Captive, by Maggie Haberman and Jeane MacIntosh (Avon, 2003): After
vanishing one night from her well-appointed Salt Lake City home in 2002,
14-year-old Elizabeth Smart became the subject of a massive search. That she was
recovered nine months later, alive, marked a rare moment in child-abduction
cases. This mass-market paperback adopts a predictable breathless tone while
recounting the tale of the teen’s abduction and the back stories of the
husband-and-wife Christian zealots with whom she was eventually found.
Conspiracy theorists and scandalmongers — and this case spurred more than a few
— will find little to go on in this by-the-book book about a very strange crime.
Lethal Intent, by Sue Russell (Kensington, 2003): Yes, women can be
serial killers, and Russell shows how Aileen Wuornos emerged from childhood
traumas to become one of the nation’s most notorious. Executed this year in
Florida, Wuornos murdered seven men in that state (wives, warn your husbands not
to pick up hitchhiking prostitutes) and declared after her capture that she
would gladly kill again. Lambasted in the world press as a "man-hating lesbian,"
she gave gays a bad name. Interviewing many participants in the saga, including
men who, as teenage boys, were initiated sexually by Wuornos, Russell writes
with empathy for killer and victims alike. That Wuornos was the daughter of a
convicted kidnapper and child molester whom she never met gives the
nature-not-nurture folks grist for the mill.
Gangs, edited by Sean Donahue (Adrenaline, 2003): Famous fictional
excerpts such as part of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange supplement
thoughtful, true, journalistic accounts of gang life and its violent
consequences. Particularly gripping is an inside look at New York’s Chinese
gangs, in which senseless murders wreck the dreams that brought immigrants
halfway around the world. A startling commonality in many of these essays and
articles is how young the gang members are. Parents of teens will read this book
with especial horror.
(Vol. 12, 05/28/2003)
After a long legal struggle, British courts have granted notorious
child-murderer Mary Bell the right to lifelong anonymity. Retold in the
fascinating book Children Who Kill, which was covered in the last
installment of this column, Bell’s is a harrowing tale in which an 11-year-old
girl murdered a 4-year-old boy and a 3-year-old boy in 1968. Now a mother
herself, living under a different name, the former Mary Bell was incarcerated
until 1980. The parents of her young victims are among many now protesting the
court’s decision, arguing that the killer forfeited any right to public mercy
when she was paid some $100,000 recently for contributing to a book based on her
life. This situation brings up a ticklish topic for true-crime buffs. Sure, most
books include a short-term epilogue. But after a book goes to press and hits the
stores, the story it started to tell goes on and on and on. Just as we wonder
"Where are they now?" about vanished celebrities, we might also ponder the
long-term fates of victims’ families and perps of every stripe. Those stories
would make for good books too.
Dangerous Attractions, by Robert Scott (Pinnacle,
2003). Ever-so-prolific Scott takes on an 11-year-old case in which a
white-supremacist ex-con gangbanger murdered his on-again, off-again girlfriend
in idyllic coastal Southern California. Prosewise, it’s not top-notch, but this
nuts-and-bolts rendering of an utterly pointless killing enters the violent,
drug-addled minds of neo-Nazi skinheads. What it finds there is scarier than any
isolated crime.
The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and
Lisa Pease (Feral House, 2003). If it’s not JFK’s brain in the official autopsy
X-rays, then whose is it? If Sirhan Sirhan continues to allege his innocence,
should we believe him? If James Earl Ray didn’t kill MLK, then who did? This
collection of dozens of essays previously published in Probe magazine
pours new fuel into the ongoing furor vis-a-vis snafus, cover-ups, conspiracies,
and alternative endings to the most famous American assassination cases of the
last 50 years.
The True Intrepid, by Bill Macdonald (Raincoast,
2001). Said to be the flesh-and-blood model for James Bond, Manitoba-born master
spy William Stephenson attracted a bit of attention 30 years back as the
putative subject of another book, A Man Called Intrepid. But spy that he
was, Stephenson moved amid a constantly changing and continually remade series
of state secrets, false fronts, and duck blinds. CIA historian Macdonald tracked
down the genuine article, a crime fighter of the old school and a nonpareil WWII
character.
The Rabbi and the Hit Man, by Arthur J. Magida
(Harper Collins, 2003). Southern New Jersey’s Jewish community had its faith
shaken to the core when, in 1994, beloved Reform Rabbi Fred Neulander hired a
ne’er-do-well to murder his mild-mannered, cake-baking wife. A shanda to
end all shandas, entailing multiple affairs and a complex web of lies,
the crime landed both clergyman and killer behind bars for the long haul. This
book could have used an editor with a firm hand, and Magida’s characterization
of certain key players, including the victim, falls far short of what they — and
this story — deserve.
Crimes of New York, edited by Clint Willis
(Adrenaline, 2003). This collection — part of a series whose many other titles
include Mob and NYPD — includes the work of many illustrious
writers, who riff on gangsters, hoods, and wrong-place/wrong-time situations in
the city that never sleeps. Lillian Ross writes about 10th-grade girls in
trouble; Calvin Trillin unveils wrongdoing on Wall Street. Drugs and guns
punctuate a high-caliber reading experience, but the inclusion of fictional
works in what is mostly a true-crime anthology is unsettling; we might like P.G.
Wodehouse but we don’t want him here.
Guillotine: The Timbers of Justice, by Robert
Frederick Opie (Sutton, 2003). From a British publisher comes this unique
200-year history of a device whose ingenious and grisly efficiency has, as Opie
tells us, captivated the public unlike no other method of execution. Examining
its use during the French Revolution, by the Nazis during WWII, and beyond —
including its last official deployment in the 1970s — this serious work affords
insights into politics, crime, and human nature. Illustrations bring us almost
to the present day by including a photograph of France’s last public execution:
the 1939 guillotining of murderer Eugène Weidmann.
Born to Steal, by Gary Weiss (Warner Books, 2003).
Crooked, Mob-connected brokerage houses known as "chop houses" use cold-calling
to loot millions from the gullible and greedy all over the United States. Weiss,
an investigative reporter for Business Week, melodramatically traces the
improbable rise and inevitable fall of one young broker. The stupidity of
investors is as astounding as the lack of government enforcement.
(Vol. 11, 04/07/2003)
For the last 30-plus years, women have been
struggling to escape, change, or adapt the traditional roles set in place by
society and history. But in the world of crime — and true-crime writing — women
and girls have traditional roles as well. By an astounding majority, we are the
victims. It is we who are abducted, tortured, raped, easily overpowered by men
with or without weapons. It is we who fall in love with the wrong men, we who
pay dearly when we try to break up with them. It is we who become the subject of
sexual fantasies — either in the minds of strangers who stalk us, or in the
minds of acquaintances who mistake our friendliness or politeness for flirting.
Yet, as two new books reveal unflinchingly, it is an emerging fact of life in
the modern world that females can be vicious, heartless perps too.
Murderous Women, by Frank Jones (Firefly, 2003): Updating a work originally published in 1991, journalist and true-crime
veteran Jones has added several chapters about more recent cases, as well as
epilogues to some of the earlier ones. Much-loathed Canadian sex-killer Karla
Homolka and South African Mariette Bosch, hanged for shooting her best friend
because she wanted his husband, are among the new additions. The Myra Hindley/Ian
Brady case might seem like such old hat that you’re tempted to skip Jones’s
chapter on it, but don’t. Interviews with investigators cast a fresh light, as
do the personal insights, visual details and analysis that make this and the
rest of the book a thoughtful, absorbing read.
Children Who Kill, by Carol Anne Davis (Allison & Busby, 2003): The Scots author of Women Who Kill comes back with a bracing new
follow-up. School shooters, teenage sex killers, kidnappers who were kids
themselves: They did the unthinkable, yet rather than take the easy route and
demonize them, Davis delves deeply into their lives before and after their
crimes. It’s rare for authors of any kind to pay such intense, authentic
attention to kids’ feelings and characters; Davis’s doing so makes these crimes
and criminals all the more interesting. Complex yet so simple, these two dozen
or so stories implicate abusive parents and other irresponsible adults who might
have saved these kids — and thus their victims — but didn’t.
The Montesi Scandal, by Karen Pinkus (University of Chicago, 2003): Mild-mannered Roman ingénue Wilma Montesi was found dead on a beach outside
the city one day in 1953. At first called an accidental drowning, as there were
no signs of assault, the mysterious death spawned a huge scandal in which all of
Italy buzzed with talk of orgies, drugs, movie stars — and murder. Comparative
literature professor Pinkus reexamines the case and its aftermath in what many
if not most readers will find a daunting format: as the production notes for a
never-made film. Characters are introduced, scenes are described, and the story
gets told — but the film-notes conceit makes for a long and not-so-rewarding
effort.
Con Men,
edited by Ian Jackman (Simon & Schuster, 2003): Mike Wallace wrote the introduction to this collection of profiles, from the
"60 Minutes" archive, of swindlers and flim-flam men, forgers and fakers,
mail-order ministers and pyramid-scheme pirates. Dating back several decades,
these range from a phony doctor running a phony health spa in Southern
California to the case of Santé and Kenny Kimes, mother-and-son
scammers-cum-killers, whose plan to steal a wealthy woman’s Manhattan apartment
house ended with their convictions for her murder. Each case includes background
details on how "60 Minutes" investigators pulled off their “sting” operations
and exposés. Not a deep read, but a quick, fun one.
(Vol. 10, 01/25/2003)
As the
old year slid into a new year, the headlines were as much about corporate crime
as about the other, more familiar and more personal kind. Corporate crime –
its dynamics, terminology, and mechanisms – presents a much more complex
picture than that other kind, an almost abstract image onto which it is
difficult to put a real human face.
Best
Business Crime Writing of the Year,
edited by James Surowiecki. (Vintage, 2002):
In an earlier era, the very idea of such a book
would be implausible and far from exciting. But the fact that this collection
even exists, that its contributing writers include some of America's top
reporters, and that it makes for a whole new kind of thrilling true-crime book
says a lot about our times. Previously published in the likes of Vanity Fair
and Newsweek, these stories include the stock scandal involving Martha
Stewart, the Enron debacle, and more.
Finders
Keepers, by Mark Bowden.
(Atlantic
Monthly, 2002): By the author of Black Hawk Down, this
true tale of a South Philly down-and-outer who had a lucky break explores the
age-old question: What would you do if you found a million dollars? After coming
across a full bag that had fallen out of an armored vehicle, this guy made
choices that led straight to misery, as the author reveals in a scintillating
blow-by-blow.
Mr.
Nice, by Howard Marks. (Canongate, 2002):
Some 20 years back, the author had dozens of
aliases, dozens of phone lines, and dozens of businesses that were used to
launder the earnings from his true avocation: drug-dealing. In this engaging
memoir, Marks – who really does seem to live up to the book’s title –
starts with his childhood in Wales, then tells the whole story, through his
capture and incarceration, and then beyond.
Dangerous
Waters, by John S. Burnett. (Dutton, 2002):
If you think pirates went extinct with Captain
Hook, think again. Terrifying anecdotes fill this journalist's in-depth account
of modern-day piracy on today's high seas. From fishing boats to oil tankers,
vessels of all kinds around the world are fair game for professional thieves who
board them by stealth and will stop at nothing in their quest for cargo and
cash.
Like
Father, Like Son, by Robert Scott. (Pinnacle,
2002): Depravity takes on a whole new meaning in this
tale of a killer who turned his own son into a sex slave, then as the boy grew
the father turned him first into a pimp, then into a partner in crime. Together,
father and son abducted, abused, and slew a 9-year-old girl, making their crime
Nevada's first father-and-son death-penalty case.
Portrait
of a Killer, by Patricia Cornwell. (Putnam, 2002):
The best-selling author of mystery novels spent
many years and lots of money pursuing her personal theory about Jack the
Ripper's true identity. In this nonfiction account of that pursuit, Cornwell
makes the case that Jack was actually the famous British artist Walter Sickert.
Cornwell's purchase and subsequent slashing of a Sickert painting raised
eyebrows and rampant criticism last year; she tells her side of the story in
this big and somewhat self-indulgent book.
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