”People always ask how I am able to detach from the horrors of my work. Part of it is an innate capacity to compartmentalize, to put my thoughts in me”People always ask how I am able to detach from the horrors of my work. Part of it is an innate capacity to compartmentalize, to put my thoughts in mental boxes and only access what I need, when I need it. The rest is experience and exposure, and I’ve had plenty of both. The macabre becomes familiar enough that I can dissociate from even the grisliest details of the job. I file the gore in my brain under science. I suppose anyone can become desensitized to anything if they see enough of it, even dead bodies, and I’ve been looking at them since college when I spent hours studying death scenes in pathology books.”
Paul Holes, a California forensic investigator, has spent almost his entire adult life investigating cold cases. He devoted twenty plus years chasing after the Golden State Killer, starting when the killer was still known as the Original Night Stalker and East Area Rapist. The grand finale of his career was the apprehension of this evil monster. Hunting these killers cost him everything. Marriages, his relationship with his kids, friendships, and the ability to embrace a normal life.
Was it worth it? I guess the bigger question is, would Paul Holes have ever been fulfilled doing anything else?
As I read this book, I kept thinking, why do we give serial killers such lurid, dramatic names, starting with Jack the Ripper? In more modern times, we have The Night Stalker, The Butcher Baker, The Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam, The Green River Killer, The Killer Clown, Hannibal the Cannibal, Golden State Killer, and my own backyard psychopath BTK Killer. If it bleeds, it leads, and giving a serial killer a flashy name adds color to the terror of those who read about his crimes. I mean, we have to call the killer something because we don’t know who he is. One notorious killer was called The Lady Killer until he was caught, and now we all know him as Ted Bundy.
My thought is, why don’t we call them something less glorifying or horrifying? Would Hannibal the Cannibal be as thrilled about his news coverage if he were called the Chicken Shit Killer? Would Dennis Radar feel as proud of the terror he inspired if he had been called the Limp Dick Killer? Law enforcement, and I’m sure Paul Holes felt the same way, often roll their eyes at the names the Press dub the killers they are hunting.
Holes experienced a lot of resistance from his bosses about working cold cases. He’d often have to surreptitiously work on them on his own time or steal time from overseeing the forensic lab, his real job, to search for new leads. Police departments want clearance rates on hot cases. They don’t want limited forensic time spent analyzing data from a case that went cold a decade ago. If I had any doubts he was doing the right thing, there was a convincing conversation he had with one of the victims of the Golden State Killer who had been fortunate enough to survive. She lived in abject fear that at some point the killer was going to come for her again, even more than a decade later.
Victimization never goes cold.
The thought of a killer calmly going about his life, sitting down to dinner, watching football on TV, and mowing the lawn is just about enough to tilt even a hardened investigator like Paul Holes over the edge. Serial killers don't deserve a normal life or any peace of mind.
Paul was good friends with Michelle McNamara, and they shared information back and forth about the Golden State Killer. This was truly the situation of one obsessive finding another obsessive, and what a relief it was for Holes to finally find a kindred spirit as determined as himself to find the killer. Unfortunately, McNamara passed away shortly before her explosive book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, was released. It’s one of those tragic ironies of life that she didn’t live long enough to see the Golden State Killer apprehended.
If you enjoyed John Douglas’s book Mindhunter,* you will certainly relish this even more intimate look at the mental and physical toll experienced by investigators who choose to chase killers. You can’t catch them unless you enter into their dark and twisted existence, and there is no way to do that without carrying some of their evil away with you. Holes watered down his thoughts with bourbon, but even that grand elixir can only do so much.
*I’m still holding onto a slender thread of hope that the Netflix series Mindhunter, based on the Douglas book, will eventually bring us season three. The actors were released from their contracts because of the busy workload of David Fincher, so officially it is not canceled, just on indefinite hold. Meanwhile, you can read Paul Holes book and hope that a series will eventually materialize based on his life.
I want to thank Celadon Books for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”Ten minutes short of three o’clock on a moderately warm Sunday afternoon, a turnpike maintenance worker was emptying the green barrels at a rest area”Ten minutes short of three o’clock on a moderately warm Sunday afternoon, a turnpike maintenance worker was emptying the green barrels at a rest area in Lancaster County on the westbound side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was looking for aluminum cans to sort, when he pulled hard on a plastic trash bag that he simply couldn’t lift. A strong five foot six, he’d never had a problem emptying the barrels in the six years on the job. What’s in this bag that I can’t lift?
Annoyed, he rooted around for a stick, and opened the bag. ‘But every time I opened one bag there was another bag,’ he recalled years later.
Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag.
He assumed it was a deer carcass. Now he realized it was, in all likelihood, something more sinister.
When he finally got the last bag opened--eight in total--he couldn’t make out what it was.
‘It looked like a loaf of bread,’ he says. ‘But then I saw freckles.’”
It all begins with a John Doe.
But the story doesn’t begin with a dead body. This John Doe had a life before he was found brutally murdered. He had family and friends who cared about him. He had a successful career. We can hope that the discovery of his dismembered body in a turnpike trash can isn’t the end of his story. There are questions that need answers. His narrative must continue, and the only people who can insure that it continues are the detectives investigating his murder. They must write the end of his story.
They must find his killer.
This murder is just a random act of brutal violence until they find another dismembered body and then another. The killer doesn’t disarticulate the bodies, but saws them apart through the bones. He double bags and double knots to make sure the bags don’t leak fluid. The bodies are of small men, middle aged men, and as they begin to ID these men, they start to realize a pattern.
They are all gay men. They are in the closet. They are all successful men, except one.
It is the 1990s, and violence against gay men is at an all time high. The AIDS epidemic has made a bad situation worse. Roving bands of “heterosexual” men feel justified in beating the crap out of random men in New York they perceive to be gay. They are, in their small minds, cleansing the earth of a pestilence, and at the same time, they get to take out their failures and frustrations on a demographic that society has deemed contemptible.
I moved to San Francisco in the late nineties to pursue an opportunity to work for a prestigious bookstore. I can still remember when a staff member showed up to work with cuts, contusions, and a limp. He and a friend had been jumped and beaten coming home from a bar late at night. These attackers weren’t interested in robbing them. They were only interested in hurting them. It was hard for my friend to fathom the source of the rage that inspired these men to beat them so viciously. The older gay staff members all felt lucky to be alive as they had buried so many of their friends who had died horrible, lingering deaths from AIDS. After growing up in Kansas and going to college in Arizona, I was now getting a full education on what it meant to be gay in America.
They feel cursed because they are vilified, and God, if there is one, has turned his face away from them. They are seen as a weakness, a perversion in society by those who don’t understand how intelligent they are, how creative they are, and how caring they are. Still, I believed we were steadily moving forward to a more tolerant civilisation until 2016.
The problem back in the 1990s was to get the police to see that these crimes are not the murders of deviants and criminals, but the murders of people not that dissimilar from themselves. One police chief rails at his staff to leave their prejudices at home. Now, if these murdered men had been pretty women instead, then every effort would have been made to apprehend and stop the killer. The press would have demanded nothing less.
The author, Elon Green, is careful not to paint all the police with the same brush, but the police are a reflection of our society, and when we are racist, homophobic, and sexist, they feel very comfortable being so as well.
This killer picks his victims from patrons of gay bars and deems himself, appropriately, The Last Call Killer. Unlike other serial killers who have a wikipedia page with an in-depth listing of their notorious deeds, no such page exists for The Last Call Killer. It is as if there is a collective decision by those in the know to make sure these murders remain hidden from the public eye. Elon Green has rescued this disconcerting history from the dusty archives. It is a tale some believe best forgotten. This book is the story of the victims, the role of society in their deaths, and of the perpetrator who preyed on these vulnerable men. The victims were men who had the audacity to seek, at least for a few hours, the safe haven of a gay bar with heavy pours, a show tunes piano player, and the atmosphere of normalcy towards the aspect of their character that the rest of society deemed perverse.
Green will weave you through the events of a decades long hunt for the killer. You will feel anger, bafflement, frustration, but in the end you will see the killer caught. It will feel like a muted justice though because, like me, most of you will think to yourself, why don’t I know about this? Why were these events kept out of the glare of the public eye for so long? Why was this narrative left for Elon Green to tell in 2021?
This story is much bigger than just a series of murders. It is about queer New York in the 1990s and the resilency of a community under the threat of AIDS, under the threat of being beaten or murdered, and their ability to adapt to societies demands that they remain closeted. Don’t forget this was the era when Don’t ask Don’t tell began. Ignoring this story for so long was keeping the spotlight off of our collective prejudices. Thanks to Elon Green this dark time has been recast against the backdrop of the current issues with sexual orientation that continue to plague our society. The past and the present collide, but it doesn’t mean that we have to let the same issues cloud our future. Maybe we can achieve collective acceptance.
I would like to thank Lauren Dooley of Celadon Books for offering me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
”She loved Kurt Vonnegut and often quoted him. ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God,’ she would say, perhaps dreaming of dig”She loved Kurt Vonnegut and often quoted him. ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God,’ she would say, perhaps dreaming of digs in distant countries, though her favorite was from The Sirens of Titans: ‘I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.’”
Jane Britton was murdered in her Harvard apartment in January 1969. The circumstances were odd: her next door neighbors heard nothing; she was found on the bed with her head bashed, rugs thrown over her, a stone grave object at her head, and red ochre thrown upon her body in a circle. There were many rumors surrounding Jane. She was a liberated and spirited woman, who was thought to be promiscuous. There was talk of an affair with a professor. She had friends among the grad students who were odd ducks. One was connected to the disappearance of another woman. There were a plethora of candidates who might have killed her. The motive was murky. Becky Cooper first heard about her when she was told the story of her death. A story wrapped in half-truths, but one of those stories that becomes a cautionary tale to women.
Who killed Jane Britton?
It would go unsolved for fifty years.
The rumors placed one professor in the frame. Archaeology Professor Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky found an important archaeological site in Iran, but it wasn’t just the find that made him a minor celebrity at Harvard, but also his ability to spin a story. He didn’t just tell you what happened; he brought all the possibilities vividly to life. He was tall and dashing and was Indiana Jones long before Indiana Jones existed in the mind of Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Spielberg. ”Karl emerged as a complicated, mercurial man: brilliant, imposing, hot-tempered, ambitious, inspiring, flamboyant, charismatic, exploitative, even paranoid. Some knew to stay away from him, some admired his charisma. But one way or another, he inspired intense reactions.”
Karl was the type of person that people want to be guilty. ”The students detested Professor Karkov with a vividness and clarity of feeling that, in the young, is rarely reasonable, and yet not always wrong. Their arrogant tribunal of the spirit pronounced him unattractive, cowardly, dishonorable, disloyal, callous, self-elevating, hypocritical, calculating--guilty in general of conduct unbecoming a young professor.”
What was interesting for me was the slight differences in the description of Karl by the author and then the descriptive terms used by the students. One painted a picture of a man who had some redeeming qualities, but the other painted a picture of a man who should be drummed out of academia.
Jane butted heads with him. She had a strong personality. I could see him being a puzzle piece that she might be thinking about how he would fit into the chaotic puzzle of her life. He could help her. He could destroy her. She might fuck him, but she certainly wouldn’t like it if he fucked her over. She was certainly the type of woman who would have no qualms about ruining a man’s career.
Becky Cooper was soon consumed with the story of Jane. There were certainly more questions than answers, and over the distance of time, facts had been modified to tell a better story. ”I laughed out loud at her fifty-year-old jokes. I started writing my own emails like her. It felt a lot like love--a confusing mix of admiring her, devouring her, inhabiting her, emulating her, channelling her, and thinking I was her.”
Whose face was in the mirror, Becky? Yours or Jane’s?
Jane was the type of friend you rarely found in real life, but of course, the dead could be shaped into who we wanted them to be.
Cooper didn’t shy away from self-reflection. ”I attributed the depth of my feelings to the natural process for a biographer. Breathing life into someone on the page was an act of both resurrection and transubstantiation: I wrote them by learning about them, then by holding them inside me, then by feeling for them. By the end, I’d become their host, so of course I would forget where they ended, and I started.”
It was a dangerous thing to become obsessed. It could crater every other relationship you try to have, but at the same time, I kept thinking to myself, Everyone needs something to obsess about. Hopefully, not something all-consuming, but something that adds a layer of mystery or something that enlarges your life.
Cooper weaved in some of the sexist history of the Harvard archaeology department. She shared some staggering numbers, like that 87% of the grads who washed out of the program were women. 70% of the women were sexually harassed or assaulted on digs, and 40% of the men. How many red flags did a university need to know there was something wrong? I pondered whether sharing these stories of some of these women went beyond the bounds of the intention of the book. After all, this was a true crime murder mystery, not a sexism expose, but I found myself frequently raising my wife’s blood pressure when I shared some of the stories and statistics with her. Cooper also expanded the parameters of sexist behavior for me, revealing things that were so self-evident in retrospect, but would have been difficult for me to fully grasp when I was managing companies. All of this did relate to Jane because it showed us the environment she was trying to navigate as a female archaeological grad student. Even if she’d lived, would she have been doomed to fail?
So we had several suspects beyond just the villain Karl, and Cooper chased each of them to ground, building cases for motive and exploring the stranger aspects of their personalities. ”I looked back at where I started. How quickly everything became a giant puzzle, a world of secrets, where every fact had a double meaning and everyone seemed to have a secret life. The speculative quicksand on which my story was based seemed so limitless that sometimes I had to remind myself that Jane did die and someone did kill her.” I could see that Jane, through her sparse correspondence, came back to life in Cooper’s mind. Someone might have needed to gently shake Cooper at some point and remind her that Jane was fifty years dead. I could see her blinking for a moment, uncomprehending, and then mourning her death as if it had just happened.
The historian H. W. Brands confessed that, as he wrote about Abraham Lincoln dying, he had tears streaming down his face. The moment was as real for him as it would have been for a weeping Lincoln supporter in 1865.
This book drives the reader forward relentlessly. It flips between chapters focusing on Jane Britton and the people surrounding her and Cooper’s investigation and her relationships with the remaining people who were connected to the murder. The resolution is a gut punch. My mind still touches on the reveal and steps back. The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it bogs you down in disbelief. I do wonder, now that Jane has been laid to rest, how will Becky Cooper fulfill herself going forward?
***If this review disappears. I’ve been compromised. Send in the...well, hell, there really isn’t anyone to send to save me.***
”There is no doubt in m***If this review disappears. I’ve been compromised. Send in the...well, hell, there really isn’t anyone to send to save me.***
”There is no doubt in my mind that this book will not be warmly received by all readers. In our celebrity-driven culture, calling into question the character and motivations of so many widely admired and respected figures from the entertainment community is never a good way to win popularity contests. And when those revered figures are overwhelmingly viewed as icons of various leftist causes, it is definitely not the way to win fans among those who consider themselves to be liberals, progressive or leftists. But while my sympathies lie solidly in the leftward flanks of the political spectrum, there are no sacred cows in either this book or in any of my past work.”
Prepare to have you mind blown.
I started reading this book very late at night, and after reading the preface and about half of the first chapter, my hair was standing up on the back of my neck. “Danger, Will Robinson!” was running through my brain on a continuous loop. It was so quiet that late at night I could hear the synapses crackling in my brain. Paranoia started rampaging through my mind like Godzilla ravaging Tokyo. (Seriously, no drugs involved here folks.) I thought to myself, I bought this from Amazon...there is a paper trail a mile wide saying...yes, Jeffrey D. Keeten bought this book.
Shit!
I don’t want to die. I’ve got too many fucking books to read. Who is going to read these piles of books sitting around my house if I have what is referred to as a...premature death? So maybe I shouldn’t write a review. Maybe I should not involve all of those innocent bystanders on Goodreads. Those hearty, few friends and followers who still read my reviews...all...what two of you? Okay, okay, so the body count won’t be that high if the Christians In Action (CIA) actually decide that a nobody like me shouldn’t be posting my thoughts on a book that reveals some very insidious and incendiary behavior by the very people who are supposed to be protecting us from foreign enemies.
But the CIA isn’t supposed to be working in the US?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, let me wipe the tears away from my eyes so I can form some more pixels into words.
The 1960s counterculture movement was an intelligence operation managed by the CIA.
What? No way, man!
LSD was a product of a CIA program studying how to control people. Timothy Leary was a painfully obvious CIA asset. These drugs were being manufactured for distribution on the street to turn the anti-war movement into navel-gazing morons. The CIA wanted the face of the anti-war movement to be dirty, drugged out hippies, not professors and clean cut kids whom the American public might actually take seriously. Charles Manson was part of this program. Well...probably...truth is a difficult commodity to come by whenever someone is looking into a CIA program. Finding proof is never good for your health.
You’re out of your fucking mind, Keeten.
Am I? Imagine my raised eyebrow. I’ve read enough about this to begin to believe that, as crazy as any of this sounds,...it starts to make sense. The first step is to understand the agenda of the CIA.
David McGowan’s research revolved around all the strange activities that have happened in Laurel Canyon for the last several decades. The shadow looming over the sunshine and surf is coming from Lookout Mountain Observatory. The California music scene originated here, and it was primarily driven by kids of career military men. They migrated from Washington DC, and somehow all ended up in Laurel Canyon and started “producing” music that would become the driving force behind the counterculture movement. Okay, I’m going to say something shocking that will be very upsetting to many of you, especially those people who have defined their lives by the music of the 1960s. Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Love, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield, and many more were all musicians/bands created by the CIA.
This is going to be the part that feels like a gut punch.
They couldn’t play their instruments for crap. Studio bands produced the records.
Oh come on, not the Lizard King...not Jim Morrison! ”So here was a guy who had never sang, who had ‘never even conceived’ of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn’t play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even to just watch one perform, and yet he somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. Even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill the first few Doors’ albums.”
What was really irritating to me was I couldn’t resist putting the Laurel Canyon produced music on while I was reading this book. I have to hand it to the CIA; those SOBs could really write some great, fucking music. That alone kind of blows the mind. Okay, so Brian Wilson was the real deal. The guy can write music, but for most of his life, he has been a mental basket case, as if he has received too many signals on his antenna from the mothership (LOM).
So where did the hippies come from? ”Vito and his Freakers were an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Vito Paulekas and his wife had a similar situation as the Manson family. They engaged in sex orgies, free-form dancing, and drugs. They started dressing oddly, growing their hair out, and became the blueprint for the flower children. They were cool, and middle class kids started emulating them. These freaks would go to concerts and be the main attraction. Someone had to take attention away from David Crosby/other made up bands and the badly performed music they were making on stage. I do think, over time, these guys did learn how to make music, but in the early days they needed a distraction, and lovely people who looked like they had dropped in from outer space, dancing like fiends, was a pretty good diversion.
Come on, man. The hippie movement was real. I smoked dope, got laid, and didn’t take a shower for six months at a time. It was very real, especially everytime I raised my arm and a noxious cloud emerged. Welcome to being a manipulated low level asset of the CIA...Mr. Moonbeam.
Chapter three: The Laurel Canyon Death List is pretty sobering. I mean, this place is by far the most dangerous place on earth. The number of premature deaths, suicides, and bizarre murders that have happened to residents of this area borders on the ludicrous. Some of the suicides were simply ridiculous, but then if you’re a cop getting a late night phone call from a breathy, deep voice explaining the whys and wherefores of a short life or long future, you might just decide that suicide is the best way to wrap up a sticky case.
So why kill the very musicians and peripheral people who were perpetrating your agenda? I don’t know. David McGowan was not especially clear on this, except to say that they knew too much. Some lived long, normal lives, while many others were cut down in their twenties. I do understand that the CIA would see all of these people as expendable, but at same time, these were sons and daughters of the very people who protected and served us in the military.
David McGowan shared all the information he had gathered. Some of it was loosely threaded together, but he lets you draw your own conclusions. I’m still not sure I really grasp exactly all the nefarious things that were going on inside the Canyon, but I do believe that the CIA was involved in creating a counterculture movement that they could control. I think the moral of this story is to do our best not to be manipulated by the right or the left into being their stooges by being a distraction from the people who are really trying to make social change. Riots...are a distraction. Hippies...are a distraction. Trump...is a distraction. They all make the CIA smile.
One last freaky thing to reveal.
RIP David McGowan, who died a premature death shortly after the publication of this book. He had an aggressive form of lung cancer that took him quickly.
”On the floor was the bearskin rug where he had raped her. In the corner were piles and piles of wolf hides. Huge caribou and goat heads graced the pa”On the floor was the bearskin rug where he had raped her. In the corner were piles and piles of wolf hides. Huge caribou and goat heads graced the paneled walls. Stuffed ducks and other game birds appeared to fly from their mountings. A stuffed fish rested on a coffee table. She got the message: This guy liked to kill things.
‘I gotta get out of here,’ she told herself.”
Kitty Larson did get away. She fought for her life, and with some luck mixed with steely determination, she lived to tell her tale.
Except the cops didn’t believe her. This was despite the guy who saved her life by stopping to pick her up, handcuffed and nearly naked, assuring the cops that he did see a man with a gun chasing her.
She was a prostitute...what did things just get a little too rough, missy? As Robert Hansen would later say, with a shit-eating grin on his face, “You can’t rape a prostitute.”
Kitty was promised a big money date. $200 for a blow job; this was well above the market average, and so even though going to his house was a big red flag, she consoled herself with what that $200 would do for her. She didn’t know she fit the description of every other girl that was about to go missing in the Alaskan wilderness. She was between 5’4”-5’7”, slender, and had a big bust. Just the type of figure that men like to gaze at in topless bars. For the women, the bars were chicken feed. The real money was in tricks.
Alaska has a transient population of oil field workers and women from the lower 48 who drift in and out of the state to make some cash servicing those men. Some of these women are runaways; some are pros who work the circuit from California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska and back again, and some of these women are teachers or nurses who are there to earn some big cash before returning to their jobs down south. As Detective Glenn Flothe started to investigate the disappearances of what turned out to be a slew of at-risk women, one of the things hindering his investigation was the very transient nature of the women he was trying to find. Were they really missing, or did they head back down to the lower 48?
Alaska has by far the worst statistics for rape—161.6 occurences among 100,000 people. The next closest is Michigan with 76.9. Is this because there are way more men in Alaska than women? Is there just more pent up lust, due to a lack of women that spills over into violence? Alaska does have the largest split of men to women ratio than any other state, but it isn’t as much a difference as you would think. Men are 52% of the population. Now if I were sitting in a bar with some friends and someone had asked me for my best guess I would have said somewhere in the 60% range and I would have been very wrong. I believe the transient nature of the state certainly contributes to more crimes against women. I also think that a certain type of man is attracted to the wilds of Alaska. It is perceived as one of the last places where men can live like it is still the wild, wild west. Where men can just take what they want. Where men are men and if there are sheep...they are very, very nervous.
As it turns out young women should be nervous as well.
Of course what Detective Flothe is dealing with is much more than rape. He is looking for a man who looks on these young women with more than just lust, but with murder in his heart. He is looking for one sick son-of-a-bitch.
And he has to catch him.
Robert Hansen slipped through the fingers of the justice system many years before he was actually caught. He was arrested for kidnapping, threatening a woman with a gun, and attempting to rape her. The DA cut a deal, dropped the kidnapping and Hansen barely served any time. The kidnapping charge should have been enough to put him away for several years. It would have saved the lives of several women. Maybe after a chunk of served time the Hansen we know as the Butcher Baker would have harbored dark desires that were never realized. He’d been in trouble before, arson back in Iowa, and a few other incidents where he ran into trouble with the law, but this moment in time was when the justice system had the best opportunity to stop a serial killer before he became deadly.
Hansen has come up in my reading before. I had some interest in him after reading the Maureen Callahan book called American Predator about another demented Alaskan serial killer Israel Keyes, but it was watching the Nicholas Cage and John Cusack movie The Frozen Ground (2013) that convinced me that I should learn more about the “gentle” baker who killed for sport. I was pleasantly surprised to learn as I read this book, how accurate the depiction of the real events were portrayed by the movie. They didn’t have to... Hollywood the script... because the story itself is so compelling that all they had to do is stick with the facts.
Detective Flothe is an atypical police officer. He was nearly a school teacher, but there are a lot of young women who are still alive today who would have been dead if he had decided on a career in the classroom instead of the police station. If not for his tenacity to find survivors and convince them to testify, and his dogged determination to keep looking for the evidence that would allow him to spring those search warrants on Hansen...the Butcher Baker might have slipped through his fingers. The profile of the killer given to Flothe by the famed FBI profiler John Douglas was chillingly, reassuringly dead on, right down to the hunting obsession, the stutter, the low self-esteem, and the ultra religious wife. Flothe knew he had the right man he just needed to make sure he didn’t screw up any part of the chain of evidence or he’d give Hansen a loop hole to crawl back out of the justice system and back into the hunting grounds of Topless bars and street walkers.
The pacing of the book is relentless and fascinating. I read a big chunk of the book in one afternoon. Sometimes the writing style used in true crime books is not the best, but the style of Walter Gilmour and Leland E. Hale was well above average. We need to continue to improve our ability to recognize behavior that indicates the dark hearts of some of these individuals who vent their frustrations with their social ineptitudes and subsequent rejections with deadly consequences.
”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how long they’d been lost. One of them wandered back up a peak. One of them was barefoot. They were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked. Their eyes were cloudy with dust, almost too dry to blink up a tear. Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, standing in crowns from their scalps, old because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and Devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine, the poisons clogging their systems.”
In May 2001, twenty-six men crossed the border illegally and entered the corridor of unforgiving desert called The Devil’s Highway. Like with most catastrophic events, it required a series of things to go wrong for something as horrific as this to occur.
Twenty-six men entered. Twelve men emerged.
Luis Alberto Urrea is going to tell you how it all happened, but he is also going to educate you beyond just the facts of this story because the story is larger than just one tragic event. The story is about desperation, heroic efforts, and a lack of understanding by most people who live beyond five miles of the border.
“Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, a tireless crusader for border reforms and more humane treatment of the undocumented: ‘There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.’”
It begins with why a person from Mexico or Central America or any number of economically depressed countries wants to come to the United States. Usually we can begin with failed economic policies by the country of origin. If there are opportunities where they live, even the shining beacon of America would not tempt most of these people to leave the ones they love to seek a better life elsewhere. They are desperate enough to risk their lives in the hands of coyotes, many of whom are inexperienced boys controlled by criminals.
We, too, have had our share of economic downturns in America. I think about the jobs in Detroit and Cleveland that were shipped overseas, leaving devastated families and communities in their wake. We allow those companies to do that. Those companies find cheaper labor, make more profits, park money offshore to avoid taxes, and still are allowed to sell their products to the very American communities they abandoned. It’s called capitalism and a free market economy, but unfortunately, those heady words associated with freedom only benefit a very small percentage of people. Regrettably, American corporations forget or never knew something that Henry Ford discovered over a hundred years ago: If you give workers security and a living wage, they have more money to buy your product. It becomes a beautiful cycle, involving less profit for the corporation but keeping America’s economy strong from the ground up. So I could lecture Mexico and others of our southern neighbors about many failed policies involving greed, mismanagement, and corruption that have contributed to the immigration issues, but we have plenty of that right here in the good old U. S. of A.
What was most impressive to me about this book is the evenhanded way in which Urrea tells this story. He isn’t here to paint a story of abuse and disrespect perpetrated upon immigrants by border security. He does discuss those incidents, but he also talks about the many people who do their best to save lives and treat people with compassion. One story that really resonated with me was that railroad crews have learned to carry cases of bottled water with them so they can drop water at the feet of those human beings who stagger from the wasteland closer to death than life. The quick responses by the Border Patrol are also very impressive. They aren’t there just to enforce the law, but to save lives. There are abuses. Unfortunately, not all the people attracted to law enforcement jobs are there for the right reasons. Those types of officers call illegal aliens tonks.
Tonk...tonk...tonk. It's the sound that a flashlight makes on the back of a person’s skull.
Urrea also shares some math that might be of interest to most people. My conservative friends and family are always railing about all the social services that illegal aliens are using while they are in the United States. They are, according to these FOX informed people, taking advantage of our system and costing taxpayers millions or, depending on the hyperbolic capabilities of the person,...billions. Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management, conducted a study. ”Mexican immigrants paid nearly $600 million in federal taxes and sales taxes in 2002...Mexican immigrants used about $250 million in social services such as Medicaid and food stamps...Another $31 million in uncompensated health care… That leaves a profit of $319 million.”
Holy shit! Open the frilling border! Obscene profits are the life blood of capitalism, and that is a profit margin that would make even a one percenter’s eyes widen. Talk about a bonanza to be made off of our southern brethren. Not to mention all the goods and services they purchase that contribute to our economy as well. These figures would tell me that stifling illegal aliens is actually stifling our economy.
Of course, nothing is as simple as all that, but still the story is larger and more complicated than what most Americans are being brainwashed into believing.
My father, who is now 80 years old, watches nothing, but FOX NEWS, and he asked me one day...so whatever happened to that caravan? *sigh*
This is the beginning of my reading quest that is in response to the controversy surrounding the seven figure advance given to a white woman for her immigration novel. For the real scoop on that book please read David Bowles’s review. Click to go to the American Dirt Review At the end of David’s review, he provides a list of alternative reading choices that will give you a much more realistic view of the border situation than what was presented in American Dirt.
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