1965 to 1975 were wild times in the USA and elsewhere*. The hippies, the yippies, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the assassina1965 to 1975 were wild times in the USA and elsewhere*. The hippies, the yippies, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the assassinations, blah blah, you know it all. This particular story of the Zebra murders is strangely not so famous. It’s very easy to see why : it’s a horrible tale about racists.
The location was San Francisco. The time span : October 1973 to May 1974. The number of victims : 15 dead, eight more who survived.
All the victims were white. All the perpetrators were black. This wasn’t coincidental. I had thought that that was why these crimes were called Zebra murders but that would have been gross. No, it was because the Z channel on police radios was cleared for use only by the cops working on this case. Z is always for zebra, you know.
This is a story of American terrorism, not serial murder. Beginning in October 1973 the homicide cops in SF were confronted with a seemingly unstoppable series of random shootings. It was a worst nightmare situation. Usually with murders the cops have something to go on – witnesses, evidence, motive that can be deduced, money, drugs, sex, connections between the corpse and the killer that spin a thread the cops can follow. But in these cases, one after another after another, there was nothing. All the witnesses, when there were any, said the same thing – a guy walked up the street, pulled out a gun, shot this poor person twice, three times, then walked away. Description? Kind of tall, nondescript clothes. A black man. And it didn’t take the cops long to connect the shootings, they were all done with the same gun. And the cops also noticed the thing about the victims – young, old, men, women, quite random, except they were all white. The bodies kept falling : five in December, five in one single evening in January. The story is told by Earl Saunders, the black homicide cop who worked the case from the very beginning. After the five in one evening, he said
“It felt like the gates of hell had opened up and something evil swarmed out. It was a feeling that grabbed your stomach and wouldn’t let go. Because as bad as that night was, what made it worse was we didn’t have a clue when it would end.”
Earl and his black partner shook down all their informants in the black community and got stony silence. Usually they could pick up a whisper here, a word there, not this time. That made them think – it’s not ordinary criminals doing this. Who then?
Eight months and they had nothing, not a single clue.
Eventually the case was cracked when the cops finally released some police sketches of suspects (they were reluctant to do this for some complicated reasons). And plus, the city put up a $30,000 reward. One of the group recognised himself and thought he could convince the cops he hadn’t killed anyone but he’d been along on the ride for a lot of the time, so he could turn state’s witness and get the thirty grand. And that’s what happened.
So who were the killers and why did they do it? If they weren’t called the Zebra murders they would have been called the Black Self-Help Moving and Storage murders, because the five guys who had been doing all the shooting met when they worked for this small company. It specialised in employing black guys recently released from prison, and it was associated with the Nation of Islam. The book states many times that the Nation of Islam that existed in the early 70s was a totally different organisation to that which exists today. It then goes on to show that the teachings of Elijah Muhammed, especially one inflammatory passage about killing white devils, was taken literally by these guys. Earl says :
From what I could see, the one thing that seemed to guide every other possible motive, whether it was to start up a race war or just avenge what they saw as injustice, was rage. A crazy, insane rage over what they thought whites had done to blacks. Once you got to that realisation, if you were black, you had to pause. Because the truth was there wasn’t a black I knew who didn’t feel at least an inkling of the same thing.
Earl later became the first black police chief of San Francisco.
Although this is a fascinating and horrifying crime story, I nearly had to rate the book only 3 stars because it tries to tell two stories at the same time, the main one being, of course, the story of the murders and the investigation, and the other one the struggle of Earl Saunders and the very few other black police officers in San Francisco against the awful racism of the San Francisco Police Department. It’s a very worthy subject, surely, but, no offence intended, it gives the first half of the book a draggy stop-start effect. You want to get on with the what-happened-next of true crime and you are continually being informed about the lawsuit black officers were bringing against the SFPD and how the white officers tried to sideline the black minority, etc. But I can see that from Earl’s perspective the two are intertwined.
Final note : the 4th victim, who survived two point-blank bullets in the chest on 13 December 1973, was a guy called Art Agnos. 15 years later he became Mayor of San Francisco.
FURTHER READING (all these stories are connected and these are all wonderful books)
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
Malcolm X : A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff
And i need to to read
The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad by Claude Andrew Clegg III
*
*Of course, in the future they will say those 2020s sure were wild times....more
I was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book isI was shocked by a series of 1 star reviews for this but I can see that for some, there will be a couple of problems. First might be that this book is about the homicide department of the Baltimore police in the 1980s, so what that means is almost all the detectives are white and almost all of the criminals and victims are Black. And the white detectives all look similar, with great heavy moustaches and unchanging mournful expressions. They never smile, they never look surprised. What was it in the 80s with moustaches? And there’s no action – the cops get to the murder scene after the crime has happened, so they stand and stare and write stuff down. And of course the victim is not moving much either. There are no car chases, there are no shootouts. (Okay, one brief shootout.) Practically the only action most of these detectives engage in is getting in and out of cars.
Then there’s the concept of the “red ball”, the cops’ name for a murder that “matters”. That concept will be very offensive to some modern readers. Most of the murders in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade. Those that weren’t, those where the victim is a child, or a city official, say, are the red balls, the “real” murders. This was the way of thinking. A dead 22 year old Black guy in an alley with no witnesses was not a red ball.
And also there’s a long discussion of a police shooting in this book and how attitudes were very slow to change. Were? Still are.
If it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident was not an intentional murder. It was a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman used his weapon…if that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from the scene because he had no faith in his department to protect him….
Probably not how someone writing about police shootings today would phrase it.
SOME HISTORY
This whole thing has a history; it began as a series of articles by David Simon who was “embedded” as they say with Baltimore homicide for about a year. Then that became a book which is still one of my all time favourite true crime books, it’s brilliant (but very long).
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Then the book became the basis for the tv show Homicide : Life on the Street which ran from 1993 to 1999
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which dramatized most of the stuff in the book and then added lots more fictional cases. It was a real masterpiece of tv drama with a fantastic cast (Melissa Leo! Andre Braugher! Yaphet Kotto! Richard Belzer!) . After that came the famous The Wire (2002-2008) which was a kinda-sorta spinoff from Homicide and at that point many people became fans.
So now, 32 years after the original book, we get the graphic novel version. But that’s a misnomer as the original book wasn’t a novel. This is a graphic nonfiction book. I thought it was a great addition to this particular universe.
Maybe Homicide: the Theme Park will be next....more
This excellent book asks the question ”did the building of the American interstate highway system inadvertently create the perfect conditions for a whThis excellent book asks the question ”did the building of the American interstate highway system inadvertently create the perfect conditions for a whole bunch of disgusting serial killers?” and the answer is yes, of course it did. All those victims dumped at the side of the I-5 ! So this book is where true crime meets urban geography.
The magnificent highway system is a tremendous feat of engineering, but its blank sameness and its anonymous encounters provide the necessary backdrop to hundreds of murders. Commonest victims : no prizes for guessing, hitchhikers and truck stop sex workers. Because of all the murdering done in the 70s and 80s nobody would think of hitching now. Sex working at truck stops has not died out, however, according to the author. Quite the reverse.
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(note – first it was the hitcher who was the killer but that quickly flipped round)
Ginger Strand (great name) kicks off with the well-known Charles Starkweather in 1958 who drove around with his 14 year old girlfriend shooting people.
Reporter : Do you regret throwing your life away? Charlie : I throwed away nothin’ cause I didn’t have nothin’.
Ginger is not one of these deskbound academics. She attends trials and like any true crime fan she wants to see the precise locations of the murders:
Charles gave such a complete account of their flight that when I visited Lincoln I was able to follow the pair’s exact route.
But it doesn’t always work out like that. When later Ginger drives to Atlanta to see the locations of the famous 1981 child murders there’s only disappointment :
The Hollywood Shopping Plaza, where Clifford Jones was found in a dumpster: razed. Hollywood Courts, where Terry Pue lived : a pile of cement chunks. Hillcrest Apartments where Latonya Wilson lived and died : boarded up and abandoned. Thomasville Heights, home to at least three of the victims: scheduled for demolition
But she finds the home of Wayne Williams still intact and well-maintained, and includes her own photo of it on p122.
There’s a chapter on Edmund Kemper III, who is now pretty famous from Mindhunter. I only mention this because Ed provides us with an example of psychiatry at its finest:
Two days later, with Aiko Koo’s head in his trunk, he drove to Fresno for a psychiatric examination. Based on the interview, the psychiatrists determined that Kemper was no longer a threat to society and that his juvenile murder record should be sealed.
Moving on to Bundy, Ginger takes the time to skewer some fake news:
Bundy fascination spawned a number of false myths about serial killers: that they are predominantly white, middleclass men who prey on beautiful young coeds; that they are intelligent, even brilliant, capable of eluding and tricking the police…[these myths] serve to make serial killers more likeable
And here ’s my favourite paragraph, where Ginger simply can’t hold back her feelings about the interstate highway system anymore:
A number of things had become apparent about the interstate highway program. It had mowed down mountains, plowed through communities, and divided up farms with little regard for the opinions of affected citizens. It had cost at least three times what it was expected to cost. It had accelerated white flight from cities, contributed to urban blight, and abetted the spread of environmentally destructive, aesthetically awful suburbia. It had spawned a monotonous national landscape of homogeneous franchise businesses, ticky-tacky homes, eyesore shopping malls and hideous commercial strips.
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Ginger is bang-on also about the curious pickiness of the American press and public about serial killers. They are fascinated by some (Dahmer, Bundy, you know them all) and they ignore a whole string whose awful murders were just as bad – who has heard of William Bonin, Patrick Kearney and Randy Kraft? Ginger thinks that they were ignored because they were dull : “Like the highways themselves, they were bland, unappealing and lacking in taste”.
The best chapter in this jargon-free, compelling, eccentric and borderline-essential book is the one most based on Ginger’s own research – called "Drive By Truckers", it’s all about long distance truckers murdering truckstop hookers – a very ghastly subject which may be why hardly anyone has written about it.
The US national average for all homicides in 2009 : 5 per 100,000. The homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000
**
I could go on extracting grisly little-known facts from this book but this review is long enough. For true crime fans this is totally recommended....more
After the crimes themselves, the most sickening aspect of the story of a lot of serial killers is the teasing dance of the seven veils that then unfolAfter the crimes themselves, the most sickening aspect of the story of a lot of serial killers is the teasing dance of the seven veils that then unfolds as the cops try to get a full confession. The killer finds that the cops themselves become a second type of victim presented for his sadistic pleasure. He dangles tiny scraps of information in front of their eager faces, maybe he snatches them away at the last moment, maybe he throws them a couple of victims they didn’t know about, maybe a dump site. There they sit, the cops, and they know he’s got them squirming. They have to be so kind to him and offer him exciting enticements – writing material, a radio, they’ll fly his brother up to see him, that kind of thing. Oh how they want him to confess believably (not like that old embarrassing fraud Henry Lee Lucas). Oh how he sees them hanging on his every word.
This book is an exercise in frustration. After a terrific page-turning first third, the account of Israel Keyes’ last crime and how he was caught, and how the cops began to realise the vast extent of the case, the rest of the book is all about Keyes telling them he wants to confess and then not confessing and then committing suicide whilst on suicide watch.
Before his very timely end he was coming into focus as an extremely chilling character, planning his crimes like a supersmart villain from a cheesy thriller, with gun stashes in various states, murder kits, police scanners, and his studies of FBI methods. And living almost entirely off the grid : the cops find
no property records. No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. He wasn’t on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. He had left nearly no digital footprint, no paper trail – and this was a guy with an unusual name.
His background was extraordinary – his parents were “cult tourists” (his description) – they moved their family of ten children from one loony Christian cult to another, from state to state. They didn’t believe in modern medicine or science. Mostly lived in tents. I would have liked more on these strange people but like the rest of the book I was frustrated. As was the author, I think. She just couldn’t find out anything more.
***
Additional note which has nothing to do with this book : true crime fans should not miss the recent series textmewhenyougethome - it's brilliantly made, it's a must watch. ...more
This painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetiThis painful but I think necessary memoir by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters was written 17 years after the event and so contains a lifetime of anguished reflection. The results are disheartening. The preface by Professor Andrew Solomon says:
The ultimate message of this book is terrifying : you may not know your own children, and, worse yet, your children may be unknowable.
Or as a three minute song from the 1960s put it :
Nobody knows what’s going on in my mind but me.
LIKEABLE YOUNG MAN FROM A GOOD HOME
When you find out about Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, you can see there were enormous red flags all over, he was practically announcing I will be the Next One. Dylan Klebold was the opposite. He was the sweet loveable gentle teenage giant (6 foot 4) who only in his 16th year started doing a few sketchy things – the big one was breaking into a parked van and stealing some electronic equipment, with his dodgy friend Eric. Dylan didn’t do drugs but he was a secret drinker. But then he shaped up and got his applications in order when the time came to apply for university, and he was accepted. He wasn’t a weirdo loner, he wasn’t a bully. She says :
He wasn’t the pinwheel-eyed portrait of evil we know from the cartoons. …(he was) an easygoing, shy, likeable young man who came from a “good home”…he was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who always made us proud.
The story his mother tells is a horror story : her journey from denial and disbelief to ghastly realisation of the facts. On the dreadful day she thought at first he had been a bystander, then she realised he was some kind of perpetrator, but she told herself he couldn’t have actually shot anybody, then she found out he had, then she told herself he was on drugs, but he wasn’t, then she told herself he had been hypnotised in some way by that monster Eric Harris, and perhaps dragged into it at the last minute, and that was the belief she clung to until six months after the massacre the cops released the evidence they had collected and she was able to see the Basement Tapes for the first time, which you can believe she watched through her fingers, in total dismay. These were videos that Dylan and Eric made in the months before the shooting, and it was clear from them that the massacre had been carefully planned for eight months before the event. And it was also clear that the event that happened was a watered-down version of the event that was supposed to happen, which was the destruction of the whole school by means of propane bombs they put in the school cafeteria that morning. The idea was that they would sit outside and shoot the survivors of the explosions and fire as they ran outside. But the bombs failed to detonate so they changed their plan and went inside.
What was on the tapes was the sheer hatred Eric and Dylan had for the school and their lives in general. For Sue Klebold this was a revelation. Where did this hatred come from? Kids can easily have fantasies about burning their school down, hahaha, but to actually plan such a thing, go to the trouble of assembling the equipment bit by bit and then do it is a whole other thing. For Sue Klebold’s especial misery, on these tapes the two 17 year olds viciously mock what their parents will say after the massacre :
Dylan: If only we could have reached them sooner, or found this tape.
Eric : If only we would have searched their room. If only we would have asked the right questions.
Dylan: They gave me my fucking life. It’s up to me what I do with it
Eric: My parents are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn’t have any remorse, but I do. This is going to tear them apart. They will never forget it. [He then addresses his parents directly, if briefly] There is nothing you guys could have done to prevent any of this. There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and Vodka [Klebold’s nickname]. Our actions are a two man war against everyone else
HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?
This sums up the general reaction to Columbine, and this book is the explanation.
I would never have told you that I had access to Dylan’s every thought and feeling, but I would have said, with confidence, that I knew exactly what he was capable of. And I would have been wrong… I had raised a murderer without knowing it a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. … I had been a “I want o meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of parent. What good had it done?
OKAY THEN, WHY DID THEY DO IT?
The explanation Sue finally comes up with sounds inadequate – it amounts to the toxic nasty culture of bullying and belittling that goes on in every school and has had countless movies and tv shows made about it. And the reader is inclined to feel this explanation is inadequate. I did. But then I thought – yes, in the same way that many people think that the idea that Oswald was the sole shooter of JFK is inadequate; hence the conspiracy theories. So maybe Sue Klebold is right. The other part of the explanation she has is that Eric was a psychopath who wanted to kill people and his suicide was a byproduct of that whereas Dylan was a depressive who wanted to commit suicide and killing other people was the byproduct of his suicide. It sounds a little neat to me. But really, who can explain these things? At one point Sue asks of her own son “Was he evil?” and says well, no, I don’t think so. She spends pages talking about mental illness, then says even if he was diagnosable that’s no excuse. She spins in these nets of words like we all do.
Everyone knows that true crime is my Achilles’ heel. I’ve said many times that these careful accounts of human misery are just too sleazy and voyeuris Everyone knows that true crime is my Achilles’ heel. I’ve said many times that these careful accounts of human misery are just too sleazy and voyeuristic and I quit. But just like that Godfather meme, I thought I was out and they pullllled me back in.
My excuse here is that I never read an account of a killer nurse before and I wondered how they get away with it. Turns out, with considerable ease. They can go on for years if they choose victims that are likely to die anyway. The tale told expertly by this book is quite shocking. The perp doesn’t shock us so very much, human revoltingness being a well-known component of our lives. But the hospitals involved did shock me. Their drug accounting was almost non-existent. This guy Cullen was using more of one particular dangerous drug in a week than all other night staff on the ICU ordered in six months – did anyone spot this? Nope. Finally when suspicions began to gather did the hospital call the cops? Nope. They sat on the whole case very nervously making “internal enquiries” whilst the lunatic nurse continued to work there. When pressure of evidence forced them to call the cops did they explain that there was a computer system where you could see exactly what a particular nurse did to a particular patient? Nope. The hospital’s whole attitude was we want this to go away, we are going to squash this if at all possible.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE THING
99% of killer nurses are women and they do it for two reasons. One is simply mercy killing. The other used to go under the flamboyant name Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. This is where you cause the patient to have a medical crisis and then you rescue the patient from certain death, thus becoming a hero. (Or they die anyway but you still heroically tried to save them.) This Cullen guy (he admitted around 40 murders, cops think it might have been more like 400 over 16 years) was different.
Here’s the strange theory this book mentions (almost in passing). Cullen was a life-long depressive who had attempted suicide many times. So, his murders were a way of killing himself successfully by proxy. Hmmm…. Sounds wacky to me. But otherwise the explanation for this guy’s dedicated 16-year long career of dealing out death randomly is blowing in the wind.
I’m hoping American hospitals have tightened up their drug dispensing procedures since 2003. ...more
You gotta read it. It’s a true crime classic! Total page-turner!
SECOND, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEYTWO REVIEWS
FIRST : FOR PEOPLE THINKING OF READING THIS
You gotta read it. It’s a true crime classic! Total page-turner!
SECOND, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY WON’T READ THIS BUT ARE WONDERING WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
The first thing is, true crime books almost never get translated into English, possibly because the English speaking world is arrogant and parochial, and possibly because it is so cram full of revolting crimes that it doesn’t need any more accounts of revolting crimes, thank you very much. So since this is a French book that was immediately translated in 2000 and then republished 17 years later, you got to figure this is quite something.
Second thing is this concerns a familicide which is as the name suggests where a guy slaughters his family. In this case it was his mother, father, wife and two children. There have been quite a number of such cases before, such as that of Ronald Gene Simmons who in 1987 murdered all 14 of his large family (including four grandchildren). That was in Arkansas. Compared to that guy, and trying not to be too crass, but five victims doesn’t sound like it warrants two books, three movies and a couple of tv episodes, which this Jean-Claude Romand case has inspired. So what’s the story here?
This Jean-Claude Romand was just an ordinary medical school student up until the point where he didn’t take his second year exams, he just stayed in bed. And lied to his parents. That was the beginning.
In year two and three he carried on being a student even though he wasn’t one. He attended classes, used the university library…had the same textbooks and photocopied lectures as the other students…he spent as much time and energy pretending to become a doctor as he would have to become one in reality.
(Numerous judges have said similar things to prisoners in the dock before passing sentence.)
He came back home pretending to have graduated. The family lived in France but only a couple of miles from Geneva, and he then set up the next big phase in this world of lies by pretending to get a job at the HQ of the World Health Organisation in Geneva. Over the years this job became a real globe-trotting bigwig-meeting hifalutin affair but nobody ever called him at his non-existent office, for 18 years. Not his parents, not his wife. He set up an answering service and they had to call that.
He lived a nice life for 18 years. You’re going to ask well, if he didn’t have a job at all, where did the money come from. And this was the magical part of the story. By innuendo and suggestion, he spun around himself the aura of a man who has some great contacts in a very top Swiss bank – like a top WHO research consultant might - & so if you’re looking for some safe investments that’ll get you a much better return than anything mere citizens could find (how does 18% sound?) he was the guy. So his wife, his wife’s parents, his own parents and his own best friend all regularly supplied him with large amounts of francs to “invest”, and all without any bank statements or interest agreements involved. They just handed over wads of dough to their fine upstanding friendly neighbourhood man of the world.
So you can see how this thing panned out. The thin ice he was standing on came to the point where it was about to melt, so he decided to murder his family before his life of shame was exposed. For some men, fortunately a very small number, it’s better that their family all die before they find out their son/husband/father was a heartless fraud.
When everyone was dead he made a very half-hearted attempt at suicide. The firemen rescued him out of the burning house and after a couple of years they had a big trial and put him inside for life. By that time he had found religion and was a born again Christian, and everyone was so happy for him, his troubles were over and he had finally found peace in the bosom of Jesus.
I’m glad to say that our author Emmanuel Carrere doesn’t buy that sickly bullshit.
Jean-Claude Romand is still alive in his French jail. His wife and little children and his parents are still dead....more
I keep thinking that you can draw a line from Sylvia Plath to Andrea Dworkin to Valerie Solanas to Aileen Wuornos.
Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise wI keep thinking that you can draw a line from Sylvia Plath to Andrea Dworkin to Valerie Solanas to Aileen Wuornos.
Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
- Sylvia Plath
We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent -- see, he's jealous, he cares -- a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure.
- Andrea Dworkin
They put one man on the moon. Why not all of them?
- Valerie Solanas
Sure, I killed these seven guys, but they deserved it…when I think about what I’ve done sometimes I get upset. I killed so many guys, like I feel guilty, you know? And at other times I’m happy, I feel good. Like a hero. Cause I’ve done some good. I’m a killer of rapists.
- Aileen Wuornos
FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER? YES
For sure there have been dozens of women in past centuries who have killed impressive numbers of human beings. To name but two :
Nannie Doss – poisoned four husbands, two children, her sister, her mother, two grandsons, and a mother-in-law in the 40s and 50s – so Nannie was what they call a Black Widow.
Jane Toppan - 12 confirmed, 31 confessed, more than 100 suspected – she was a nurse who poisoned patients, friends, acquaintances in the 1890s – so Jane was what they call an Angel of Death.
There are big obvious differences between this poisoning thing and what male serial killers do. When we say Aileen Wuornos is the first female serial killer we mean she didn’t use poison, she did not know her victims, she used a gun and she shot them full of holes, one at a time. (Since Aileen very few have followed in her footsteps, which for Valerie Solanas and any who believe in female equality might be a matter of regret.)
THOSE WHOM THE GODS WISH TO DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE MAD
Given that two of 1991’s blockbuster hit movies were The Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, as soon as the detectives in Florida figured out that one person had killed these seven guys and that person was a female, they knew that Hollywood would be on the phone the instant she was caught, and that’s what happened, as we know.
This caused a whole vale of tears for the detectives involved.
ONLY IN AMERICA
When the case had hit the press and Aileen was becoming famous, up popped a lady named Mrs Arlene Pralle, “a twinkly-eyed forty-four-year old born-again Christian". She wrote a letter : “You’re going to think I’m crazy but Jesus told me to write to you”. No, Aileen didn’t think she was crazy at all. They became instantly ascloseasthis and within weeks Arlene (44) had legally adopted Aileen (34) and was now her Mom.
A CROWD OF SOUR TEETH
At various times our author Michael Reynolds lapses into tough-guy detective thrillerese:
Her lips curled up to show a crowd of sour teeth.
Trailer parks crawling with oily-backed palmetto bugs the size of mice and old geezers running out their string on union pensions
There was nothing but fire. Fires burning way down inside and getting bigger. He needed to get up, was up. On his knees. Then up on his feet. But no. He couldn’t. He was choking. His throat was full.
A howling catastrophe of alcohol, drugs, fire, and craziness was coming down before this Wednesday night was over.
Dramatic stuff! And I love the way he introduces his characters:
A solid light heavyweight with a bulldog jaw somewhat softened by a set of aviator-style glasses
She was a roly-poly redhead with a burgundy Suzuki motorbike and no restraints
Detective Jimmy Pinner, a tall rail-thin country fellow with sad eyes
Mrs Vera Ivkolivich, a thin birdlike Yugoslavian with large liquid eyes
Judge Uriel “Bunky” Blount, a rotund, well-respected jurist with lavish jug ears, bloodhound jowls, and a florid rope of flesh bulging over his blue knit collar, topped by a rigorously maintained flattop
DATES
Aileen born in 1954 to a 15 year old mother and a father who later turned out to be a violent paedophile who died in prison in 1969 as a result of suicide or at the hands of fellow inmates, no one cared either way.
1955 – Aileen given up by her mother & raised by grandparents
1968 – aged 14 Aileen gets pregnant. Baby given up for adoption.
1969-1989 Trouble every day. Aileen is a full time grifter, part time highway hooker, busted numerous times for assault, destruction of property, nothing too major, until the two and a half stretch for armed robbery.
1989-90 The seven murders
1991 Arrested. Media circus.
1992 Guilty verdicts, death sentence
Documentary : Aileen Wuornos : The Selling of a Serial Killer
1992-2002 On death row
2002 Executed at age 46
2003 movie Monster. Charlize Theron gets an Oscar for playing Aileen Documentary Aileen : Life and Death of a Serial Killer (winner of the Amnesty International Award)
2021 Movie Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman – a prequel to Monster
Everything in the world is ours – the homes, the cars, the credit cards. People only think these things are theirs.
- Susan Atkins
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This is a very fasciEverything in the world is ours – the homes, the cars, the credit cards. People only think these things are theirs.
- Susan Atkins
*
This is a very fascinating but often dubious 1980 book about five of the six main Manson women. The concept here is that these women challenge the lazy idea that women are innately less violent than men. And it’s true, whenever women are involved with murder, the public (me included) want to believe that it was the man who made them do it. Women’s dark side has been denied, airbrushed out. Take the examples of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers, and Fred and Rose West, killers of at least 12 women, and Paul Barnardo and Karla Homolka, also serial killers. When they are arrested the defence is always that the woman was acting under orders, they were terrified of their partner, they were a horrified onlooker only, and so on. And let it be said, that may well be true.
Quite rightly the author mentions the female participants in such violent political gangs as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Baader-Meinhoff group. Clara Livsey says that women should not be denied their capacity to be detestable murderers. But she didn’t start off with this idea. “How difficult it was for me to accept that these women committed murder of their own free will” she says. Her ideas coalesced as she went along and eventually the book explains that in her view the Manson women were not in any sense victims, they chose to do these things. These things being the murder of eight people including one unborn child over two days in August 1969, plus another two less famous murders during that summer.
PALPABLE CONTEMPT
Dr Livsey interviewed Manson and most of these women for this book. And after a lot of talk and thought and research, it is quite clear she has nothing but contempt for these people. You don’t often find such harsh sentiments expressed by the academic author of a psychological investigation. Here she is describing the main message the women were promoting during her interviews, the cause that they claimed all their actions were in support of :
Their alleged concern for the environment, their tired verbosity on behalf of pure air and clean water never materialized into any constructive action; it was empty…
They were takers with an infantile sense of omnipotence and the belief that it was their right to avail themselves of anything they wished to have, a kind of magic thinking appropriate in the very young child…
Their empty language, their banal “truths” masquerading as wisdom, their ignorance wrapped up in their meaningless philosophizing…
Here’s a summary of the main characters in this gruesome drama.
SUSAN ATKINS
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She was convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California. She was later also found guilty of the murder of Gary Hinman in July 1969.
Consistently denied parole and died of cancer in prison 24 September 2009 aged 61
By the way she wrote a book
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LYNETTE FROMME
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not charged in relation to the Tate-La Bianca murders. On 5 September 1975 she tried to assassinate Gerald Ford
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I must say that I enjoyed Dr Livsey’s book greatly but she does have – inevitably – the psychiatrist’s tendency to fall into what is to me dreadful psychobabble. Here she is on Lynette Fromme’s famous failure:
Her attempt to assassinate President Ford symbolically represents her wish to do away with the “bad” and powerful father who she felt rendered her powerless, while keeping alive the illusion of the “good” father, Manson, who eventually, in her fantasies, will be powerful again and put her back in the position of child-queen that she had as a child.
Of course Dr Livsey does not think that is psychobabble! She thinks that is some solid analysis. You may too!
Lynette was sentenced to life 19 November 1975; released August 2009, aged 61 Still alive, aged 72.
By the way she wrote a book
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SANDRA GOOD
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Not charged in relation to the murders, but found guilty in March 1976 for “conspiracy to send threatening letters through the mail". Got a 15 year sentence; paroled in December 1985 aged 41 Still alive, aged 77.
PATRICIA KRENWINKEL
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She was convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California
Consistently denied parole, still in prison aged 73
LESLIE VAN HOUTEN
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convicted 25 January 1971, given the death penalty; reduced to life in Feb 1972 when the death penalty was abolished in California. That was declared a mistrial and she was re-tried TWICE. It’s a complicated story. Eventually she got life.
Consistently denied parole, still in prison aged 72
AND FINALLY
I was looking through some files the other week and found a letter from many years ago written (typed) to me by my old friend Nick Barks, who died four years ago. He included a long account of this book, which is what inspired me to get it and (finally) read it. Thanks Nick. I am so very sorry you aren’t around to see this review....more
**spoiler alert** This book presents eleven case histories* of psychologically disturbed violent offenders. Of course these are not real cases, becaus**spoiler alert** This book presents eleven case histories* of psychologically disturbed violent offenders. Of course these are not real cases, because there is such a thing as patient confidentiality. So what are they?
Drawing from many encounters and case studies over the years we have created composites; the eleven mosaic portraits presented here are clinically and psychologically accurate but won’t be found on Google.
For instance, we have the case of “Gabriel”. He is an immigrant from Eritrea who randomly stabbed a passer-by on a street. So “Gabriel” is a composite or mosaic drawn from different real offenders. We understand, then, that all of these details are true, such as his sad back story, but not all true about one particular individual. And the name must be true of one of them too, as Dr Adshead goes on about the significance of Gabriel’s name (“A name with meaning”).
But what about the very first of these composites, Tony the gay serial killer? There have been three such cases in the last 20 years in the UK, so if this chapter is really talking about a gay serial killer, it must be one of those guys. Or am I missing something? If I thought too much about this composite mosaic business, I got confused. So I tried to ignore that.
HARDCORE COMPASSION
The inmates in secure psychiatric hospitals have access to services the general public are denied, which means that the perpetrators of violence get therapy and their surviving victims don’t. Dr Adshead is aware of this, and thinks it very wrong, of course. But it is her job to treat these offenders. Back to Tony. According to this chapter he had strangled three men to death.
“Tony, I think you’re brave enough to look at something really difficult”…”I’m not brave”. I looked into his eyes. “You don’t think so? Well, I experience you as brave. It takes courage to think about past violence… you’ve shown real courage.”
And later
I gazed at him, this man who so wanted to talk and who felt things so deeply. I thought about how removed he was from the image I’d once had of the ruthless and unfeeling serial killer.
It’s possible that victim’s families will feel more than a little distressed should they happen to read this section. In another chapter she is dealing with Marcus who murdered his ex-girlfriend because she told him she was going to start dating other men.
I used the remainder of our session to explain our team’s set-up to Marcus. The goal was to work together to treat him for depression, aiming to reduce his suicide risk and get him back to prison
And later, also about Marcus
We had given him a chance to resolve his inner conflict by caring for him, allowing him to talk about his needs and his anger towards people who had failed him early in his life
This compassion for the perpetrators is probably entirely and absolutely correct but it really challenges the reader. You are perpetually thinking that there were never any teams of carers for the victims’ families.
SOME THINGS THAT GRATED
Dr A doesn’t indulge in too much therapy-speak (thank you for that Dr A!) but she is inclined to throw out general statements such as
In a psychiatric sense faiths are not delusions because they are based on reason and an awareness of doubt, as well as being culturally coherent, whereas delusions are rigid and culturally alien.
(“based on reason”?)
And she seems to approve of such borderline-useless statements as
Today’s statistics indicate that seven out of ten people in the UK are likely to experience PTSD in their lives
And
Intriguing research by American colleagues finds a correlation, particularly among men, between shame and higher rates of violence in times of increased social instability and wealth inequality.
(Oh you don’t say so? I wonder which times of relative social stability and wealth equality these researchers were using to make their comparisons.)
And also she has an off-putting tendency towards self-praise :
I was able to keep a neutral expression while still communicating interest and warmth with my body language, eye contact and careful listening and questions
NEVERTHELESS
Given all the above caveats and dubieties, there is no doubt these eleven “composite mosaic” account make compelling reading, even when, as happens, you are left with gaping questions that Dr A simply never addresses (why would a woman try to commit suicide by fire multiple times - why not try an overdose or another method?). Making an argument for the humanity of violent offenders is, I guess, a laudable enterprise. If you are thinking that while I was turning the pages I was feeling really very queasy the whole time you are quite right.
*THE ELEVEN CASE HISTORIES
Tony – murdered three men – wait, he thinks it might have been four Gabriel – random street assault with knife Kezia – murdered her care worker Marcus – murdered his ex-girlfriend Charlotte – part of a teenage group which killed a homeless man Zahra – attempted suicide multiple times by setting fire to her rooms Ian – sexually abused his two sons Lydia – female stalker Sharon – Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy Sam – murdered his father David – a GP with a nasty secret...more
Tony Parker turned the interview into an art form by finding extraordinary ordinary people and letting them talk. He edits out his questions. You neveTony Parker turned the interview into an art form by finding extraordinary ordinary people and letting them talk. He edits out his questions. You never heard people like these speak in their own voice at length before. Always they get filtered through the educated minds of the novelists or documentary makers, and they’re given to us in 15 second soundbites. Here they talk for ten pages at a time. Ordinary extraordinary lives.
This book is about twelve murderers, none of them in any way famous. I see there were hardly any manhunts involved, after their horrible act they either wandered around in a daze or gave themselves up. This was a reread. This time I made notes on all twelve but I’m only including five for this review. Three of the others were child killers and I don’t think you’d want to read those details.
NOTES ON FIVE OF THE TWELVE
DANNY
Aged 21 when interviewed. He had already spent 7 years in prison. He was 14, drunk, and went to see his grandfather. His parents wouldn’t give him any more pocket money. There was a big row when the old man also refused any money and he stabbed his grandfather in the neck with a pair of scissors that happened to be on the table between them.
I liked him, he was a nice man. What happened was mostly an accident.
EDGAR
aged 78. The story this guy tells is the fishiest in the book. He thinks the murder was actually a terrible accident. If so, police and judge and jury perpetrated a dreadful injustice. He wasn’t getting along with his wife. They went for a drive in his work van. It had a sliding door. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. He drove up a steep country road. At the side of the road was a deep ravine. The door flew open and the wife shot out and died. He said he didn’t push her. The more he describes his life since being released on license the more he sounds like a violent man. He says “there were one or two little scrapes or bits of bother”.
CAROL
aged 41. Ten years in prison so far.
No more men for me, I’ve had enough of men.
Adopted as a baby, then the adoptive mother died and the father remarried. She hated the new wife and the feeling was mutual. She was a wild child, always truanting and finally sent to live in a children’s home. Had sex first at age 11. Had a baby at 17, gave her up. Drifted from man to man, not quite a prostitute. But she ended up on a boat having been picked up by a drunk Dutch sailor. There was an argument. He went off to his cabin and fell asleep. She found a knife and stabbed him six times.
I don’t even know who he was.
Thinking about her lifestyle at the time she said
I suppose I could easily have ended up being the one who was killed.
That is so true.
ANDY
aged 45.
I was first put in an institution when I was 11. That’s 15 years I’ve had in the outside world, and 20 inside.
My father carried a knife, my brothers carried knives, everyone. You wore a shirt and trousers and shoes and a knife.
He was walking the streets late one night and a guy walked past him and muttered something Andy took to be a proposition.
I pulled out my knife and I turned around and I stabbed him…I was trying to hurt him, give him something to remember me by…I don’t know how many times I stabbed him but it was quite a few.
In prison some guys will become religious and some will become addicts if they weren’t before and some guys will get educated for the first time.
I studied English literature, psychology and sociology and maths. I read E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Jung, people like that. I’d stay up all night reading.
BETSY
aged 60. Longest serving female life prisoner up to that point (1990). She spent 30 years inside.
Tony Parker makes a rare personal comment :
Talking to her was as difficult as trying to interview a fully turned on bathtap.
She got TB as a child and was in sanatoriums for years She met a woman named Janet there who was 6 years older than her and fell in love. Janet loved her too but she was married.
I should describe what we had as a close lesbian relationship but without sex.
When they were both released from the sanatorium Janet moved in with Betsy’s family and everything was nice until Janet decide to visit her husband. Betsy got frantically jealous, stormed over to her house and after a big row stabbed her once with a knife she’d brought along for that purpose.
After that her TB returned, so that at her trial she was brought in on a stretcher. She was found guilty and given the death sentence (which was abolished in the early 60s). This was later commuted to life due to her poor health. I thought that was strange – they give her a death sentence but because it looks like she’s going to die anyway they think it's not appropriate. Ridiculous. Anyway, Betsy did nothing but what they call “hard time” for the next 30 years, she couldn’t stop rowing with people and threatening to kill them.
***
This is a classic true crime book, highly recommended....more
This plainly written heartfelt true crime book focuses on the four victims, which is refreshing, of course, and very laudable, yes, but uncomfortably This plainly written heartfelt true crime book focuses on the four victims, which is refreshing, of course, and very laudable, yes, but uncomfortably serves to remind us nasty readers that we’re much more interested in the criminal who commits the vile acts than the poor ordinary blighters that stumbled into his grisly purview. We probably really shouldn't be, but we are.
There were four distinctive murders of men, all of them dismembered post-mortem, drained of blood, bagged, double-bagged and dumped in rural trash bins. The cracking of the case had to wait some years for forensic science to develop a much better technique for lifting prints off the bags. Or to be more accurate, it had to wait for one of the cops working these cases to stumble over the information that a much better technique for lifting prints off plastic bags had been available for some years already.
Yes, this book exposes the often chaotic nature of policing in the USA. There was no national fingerprint database, for instance. So investigators had to laboriously send their prints, when they finally got them, to ALL FIFTY state crime laboratories, and wait for the results. Can you imagine!
Plus, the initial fingerprinting of individuals left quite a lot to be desired: “The patrolman or the sheriff often didn’t have the expertise and didn’t know how to take fingerprints” says Maine’s crime lab guy.
All too frequently, there was too much ink on the pad, and the print would be smeared, or there wasn’t enough ink, so the print lacked the necessary detail. As a consequence, many of the hundreds of thousands of ten-prints scanned …were functionally useless
Insert facepalm emoji here.
So anyway finally they find the murderer and there’s this casually dropped in on page 200 :
The investigators didn’t talk about it at the time, but they all believed he had killed dozens of men. In fact, they assumed he killed people whenever he went on vacation.
Well, the murderer is currently languishing in New Jersey State Pen, aged 70. The victims, however many there really were, are still dead.
This was a very solid account of a complicated case. Nothing spectacular, but a fine example of uncovering case that should not have been forgotten....more
I wasn't even going to read this yet. It was for later. But once I picked it up, that was that.
This is about a murder trial in which a father was accuI wasn't even going to read this yet. It was for later. But once I picked it up, that was that.
This is about a murder trial in which a father was accused of drowning his three children. It was in Australia in 2005. His car left the road and drove straight into a dam and plunged down 30 feet. The three kids in the car died, the father survived.
In a case like this the whole thing turns on the state of mind of the father at that precise moment, 7 pm, 4th September, 2005.
A whole sad parade of ordinary people become principal actors in the court drama. One of the most appalling public ordeals, I suppose, that anyone now has to go through is cross-examination. You are postman, a mechanic, a farmer, a window cleaner, and because of where you were and what you saw at this one particular time you become the focus of the high-beam intensity laser-intelligence of a barrister who will try to tear you in pieces. Here’s how Helen Garner describes cross-examination of a woman who had remembered something very damaging to the defense.
The whole point is to make the witness’s story look shaky, to pepper the jury with doubt. So you get a grip on her basic observations, and you chop away and chop away, and squeeze and shout and pull her here and push her there, you cast aspersions on her memory and her good faith and her intelligence till you make her hesitate or stumble. She starts to feel self-conscious, then she gets an urge to add things and buttress and emphasise and maybe embroider, because she knows what she saw and she wants to be believed, but she’s not allowed to tell it her way. You’re in charge. All she can do is answer your questions. And then you slide away from the central thing she’s come forward with, and you try to catching her out with the peripheral stuff – “Did you see his chin?” – then she starts to get rattled, and you provoke her with a smart crack – “Are you sure it wasn’t a football?”… she tries to get back to the place she started from, where she really does remember seeing something and knows what she saw – but that place of certainty no longer exists because you’ve destroyed it.
Powerful stuff. There’s probably more human misery in this book than I can really recommend to the non-true crime fan, but if you can stand looking one single horrific act in the face for 300 pages, Helen Garner is the most precise and compassionate guide....more
There’s only one thing wrong with this brilliant book, the title – yeah, oops. What? Was Jeffrey Toobin attempting to win the coveted “Most Exciting BThere’s only one thing wrong with this brilliant book, the title – yeah, oops. What? Was Jeffrey Toobin attempting to win the coveted “Most Exciting Book with the Dullest Title” award? If so, he did it! The award is his!
This book should have been called Absolute Batshit : The Patty Hearst Saga.
So just to be clear : Jeffrey Toobin gathers together an immense amount of detail but he moves this complicated story along like a bullet train.
I’d vaguely heard of this Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army stuff but it seemed almost too crazy to believe. I was right about that. This story is off the scale.
The story begins in Berkeley, the heart of radical California, in the early 1970s. There was a prison education program set up at Vacaville, the prison nearest to Berkeley, and some rad young women got interested in that. There they met a black guy named Donald DeFreeze. A couple of years earlier George Jackson had been killed in Soledad prison and DeFreeze was caught up in the aftermath of that, it was all revolution this, revolution that, and massive amounts of half-baked Marxism.
DeFreeze busted out of prison. That’s putting it too strongly. He wandered out of prison when the guards were looking elsewhere. He hooked up with this disparate group of white female prison visitors and within a week they had conjured up this thing, this imaginary thing called the Symbionese Liberation Army, the goal of which was – well, as ever, paradise on Earth.
Mr Toobin has some harsh words for Mr DeFreeze :
DeFreeze amounted to a junior varsity George Jackson. In almost every respect, DeFreeze was a lesser man – not as intelligent, not as good-looking, not as strong, not as charismatic, not as competent… if George Jackson was tragedy, then Donald DeFreeze was farce…He fancied himself as a leader of the African American people, even though the SLA never had a single black member except for himself.
The first “action” the SLA did was the worst and earned them their mad dog image immediately. They assassinated a black guy. This was Marcus Foster, school superintendent of Oakland. His crime was to introduce armed security guards into schools to combat gang culture. He was gunned down on 6 November 1973. Then they issued a communique :
On the afore stated date elements of The United Federated forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army did attack the fascist Board of Education, Oakland, California through the person of Dr Marcus A Foster, Superintendent of Schools…
DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
This “action” was supposed to galvanise “the people” to rise up against their oppressors. Instead it galvanised people to rise up against the SLA. The Black Panther Party denounced Foster’s murder and demanded that the police capture his killers.
The SLA sulked and plotted another action. By this time there were nine members. One of them saw an engagement announcement in the local paper featuring Patty Hearst. They saw where it said she was a student at the local university. They then remembered that the university had a directory of students’ home addresses available to the public at the university admin building. So – a Hearst heiress! Lightbulb moment! And they just strolled along and got her address and planned the kidnap.
What they were supposed to do with her after they violently snatched her up on 4 February 1974 and shoved her in the trunk of a car was never exactly clear. And what happened exactly in the weeks and months that followed is the heart of the mystery. But two things were matters of fact. On 12 February DeFreeze sent a tape to a local radio station, explaining that Patty Hearst was now a prisoner of war, denouncing the Hearst family as fascist insects and issuing the following demand :
Before any forms of negotiations for the release of the subject prisoner be initiated, an action of good faith must be shown on the part of the Hearst family. This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and the unemployed
This was followed by detailed instructions about how much, where and how this free food was to be distributed. Randolph Hearst, Patty’s father, took a deep breath and started to comply. It cost a couple of million, it lasted a few weeks, one of the giveaways ended in an unseemly riot with frozen turkeys being used as weapons, but the big free food giveaway was actually done.
After that, the SLA sort of wandered off the idea. Meanwhile, something had happened to Patty. There are two versions. There is Patty’s version, and there is everyone else’s version. Everyone else who survived, that is.
Either a) she gradually got to know her captors, to talk with them at great length (hey, they didn’t have anything else to do), she began to get caught up in their rhetoric, and to find, somehow, that she liked them a whole lot. They were keen to tell her they didn’t want her to come to any harm & that the only risk of her catching a bullet would be if the FBI bust down the door of their safe house. Meanwhile, she was convincing them that she was being converted to their far-out violent utopianism. Patty was merging into the SLA, as the weeks ticked by. And that included merging into the SLA’s sex life, which was fluid and frequent, they were all militantly opposed to bourgeois monogamy.
Or b) she was terrorised form the get-go, threatened with death, raped by two men, denied toilet facilities and eventually forced to comply with everything they wanted her to do. That’s Patty’s version.
This book, presenting as much of the facts as there are, and there are a lot, is respectfully incredulous of Patty’s own account. Well, this flies in the face of the modern mantra believe the victim. So, here we have a tough case.
The proponents of the majority view will say – what happened next? Lay out the facts.
Well, next came the famous bank robbery on 15 April 1974, so only two months after the kidnap. They planned the raid very well and deliberately stationed Patty inside the bank with a big fat gun underneath a security camera, so everyone could see that she was now a fully participating member of the SLA.
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In one of the many jaw-dropping turns of events in this saga, Patty’s face then turned up on the FBI’s WANTED poster. From victim to perp in 2 months.
I realise that I could carry on summarising the lurches from tragedy to comedy and back again that characterised the next few years for Patty and the gang – including what Mr Toobin describes as "the biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil" but hell, I should stop now, and simply say this is a true crime CLASSIC and for anyone interested in what happened to the American counterculture and the history of the 1970s this is a MUST READ....more
A transcendent high-octane memoir that burns all other memoirs to the ground. A five star must read.
LITTLE BIT LONGER REVIEW
Rereading nonSHORT REVIEW
A transcendent high-octane memoir that burns all other memoirs to the ground. A five star must read.
LITTLE BIT LONGER REVIEW
Rereading nonfiction is a rarity for me but for the second time this stunning book left me convinced that James Ellroy is one of the Greatest Living Authors. And yet
And yet
I do not read James Ellroy novels. I’ve only read two and abandoned a third. Why is this ?
It’s because Ellroy went TOO FAR. There are authors who go TOO FAR. James Joyce went mad and wrote Finnegans Wake, a book only 47 people have ever read all the way through. Henry James became gradually unreadable as his sentences exfoliated into the length of a paragraph and then a page with so many clauses and subclauses you have to investigate each one like it’s a murder case needing a solution. He went too far. And for me Ellroy, with his staccato ratatat nailgun style and his dense cop and underworld slang and his byzantine plots and his murky conspiratorial under-history of America and his everybody is a walking bag of pus attitude, he also became unreadable. I think I need to try again though, and try harder this time.
Part one of this book is 150 pages of Ellroy’s life story from age 10 to around 30, it’s all pure jawdropping brilliance. Kicks off with the sex murder of his mother in 1958, and how he and his father were pretty pleased, that’s right, that she was dead so they could carry on their degenerate lives together in peace. So there’s two jolts for the reader, and then comes the 100 pages of vileness that was the youthful Ellroy – he was a Nazi, a chronic shoplifter, broke into houses for the purpose of stealing women’s underwear, lived on amphetamine, became homeless, the list of his crimes and follies goes on, like Celine Dion’s heart. Maiden aunts were well advised to steer clear of the young Ellroy. Actually, the whole human race would have been best advised to avoid him.
Next part of the book is where he hires an investigator to see if between them they could crack the unsolved murder of his mother. This involves crawling all over the original case, all over his father’s life, all over his mother’s life, and coming to a wrenching emotional conclusion.
I could just possibly imagine this book would not be for everyone....more
The title is misleading, it should have been called The Man Who Really Liked Killing Teenage Boys. That said, this is a beautifully written account ofThe title is misleading, it should have been called The Man Who Really Liked Killing Teenage Boys. That said, this is a beautifully written account of one of the worst crimes in American crime history, which is saying, you know, a lot. And it’s a strangely unknown crime too, not famous at all like your Bundys and Mansons and Gacys. I’m not sure why.
The place was Houston, 4th largest city in the USA now, 6th at that time, the early 1970s. Specifically, the place was The Heights, a poor white suburb. From 1971 boys started disappearing, one here, one there. So the parents would ring the cops and the cops would say yes? And the parents would say our son has been missing for two days now and the cops would say well, what do you want us to do about that? And the parents would say why, look for him, of course, and the cops would say file a missing persons report and the parents would say what? Huh? And the cops would heave a sigh and explain and the explanation was :
WE DON’T SEARCH FOR RUNAWAYS
Jack Olsen follows the first set of parents and at one point he says
They came to the full realisation that their son was unmistakeably, undeniably gone, and that no one was going to help.
The cops were cynical and dismissive. This was happening, says Olsen,
at a time when teenagers were deserting their homes and flocking into communes and hitchhiking all over the continent without so much as a twinge of remorse about the generation they had left behind
Or so it was believed by almost everyone. Plus, Houston had a huge murder rate, twice that of London in the 1970s, and London was six times bigger. Some years Houston had a murder rate larger than all of Great Britain.
It turned out that even if a body of one of these kids had turned up, the cops probably wouldn’t have investigated very hard. They were swamped. One cop explained:
Our division works only murders, period, and not every murder either. We just say “Well, how much time are we gonna spend on this murder? If society hasn’t suffered a great loss, why, let’s go home and call it a day.”
Okay well, this is the story of a guy called Dean Corll who was in his early 30s and his two teenage sidekicks, Wayne Henley and David Brooks. They were both 17. How the whole thing got started is not clear but the idea was that David and Wayne would bring teenage boys to parties at Dean’s place and he would supply them with all the goodies their hearts could desire, dope, booze and plenty of acrylic paint to huff from paper bags. Most of the boys would go home eventually but there was usually one conked out at the end, not going anywhere, and Dean would have his fun with that one, which ended up with him strangling the kid.
Sometimes Wayne pitched in with the killing, sometimes not.
Wayne Henley on the difficulties of killing a boy :
It ain’t like on TV. Man, I choked one of ‘em boys, and he turned blue and gurgled, and I jes’ couldn’t kill him. He jes’ wouldn’t die! I went in and got Dean, and he come out and helped.
Then they’d shove the body into Dean’s van and drive it usually to a boat house he rented and bury it.
David Brooks :
That Dean, he was powerful strong! When we’d come down here to bury a body, I’d stay in the car, and ol’ Dean, he’d put two shovels under one arm and a body under the other and just walk on down to the beach like he was carrying a fishing rod.
Half way through all this homicidal madness David Brooks dropped out and got married. Henley and Corll carried on. But as we know, all good things must come to an end, and the day came when Dean and Wayne had an awful fight and Wayne ended up shooting Dean dead. Then Wayne called the cops and started singing like a canary. He took the cops to Dean’s boathouse, a large barn type place, and told them where to dig. The cops spoke to Dean’s landlady, Mrs Meynier, she lived nearby :
“Why, Dean was the nicest person you’ll ever meet! He had the most infectious smile you’ll ever see! Why, we were always talking to him. Just two days ago he offered to give me some plants. He’d go out of his way to visit with me.”
Jack Olsen has a chilling turn of phrase here, describing the ghastly work the cops now had to do in the boathouse.
they had all seen death, but none had encountered the wholesale transfiguration of rollicking boys into reeking sacks of carrion.
The boys (aged 13 to 17) were buried in three different places. Eventually the cops found 27 bodies. This raises a few questions.
1) Can at least 27 boys vanish from one suburb of a city and no one realises there’s something going on? No one had the least notion of Dean Corll’s activities until he was dead. Are people vanishing all the time now, in every city?
2) There are two gaps in the chronology of the killings, five months here, four months there. Most unlikely that the murderers put their feet up and relaxed, more likely that there are other victims somewhere. We’ll never know.
3) What was going on with Corll and his two willing helpers? Is this another example of the phenomenon described by Christopher Browning in his brilliant book Ordinary Men (about the first phase of the Holocaust) and revealed in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment? These observations seem to reveal that some, maybe many, people who are otherwise quite normal can turn into murderers or torturers quite easily, given the right circumstances. We think almost all people have a common decency, a basic morality, that would stop them either killing or torturing another human being, but perhaps that is a pleasant fantasy. Perhaps the truth is that many people, given the go ahead by someone like Dean Corll, will gladly have a go at strangling a young boy. And then another. And then another.
I had to read about this one sooner or later because he’s the only serial killer born in Nottingham, my town, and not only that, born in the suburb ofI had to read about this one sooner or later because he’s the only serial killer born in Nottingham, my town, and not only that, born in the suburb of Sherwood, Nottingham, where I live. And not only that but he’s the serial killer with the MOST number of proven victims in the whole world, according to Wikipedia. Yay, Nottingham, right? You thought we were all just Robin Hood and the Sheriff and Maid Marian but no, we have Shipman too.
But he wasn’t what you’d call a Merry Man. No.
If ever there was a guy with an obsession, it was Harold, known to his friends and family as Fred. He was a family doctor (called GPs in the UK), and what he would do is he would write prescriptions for diamorphine for his patients who had cancer, then he would give them half and keep the rest for himself, and in this way he would build up a stock of diamorphine. Then he would drop in on a little old lady, one of his patients, and tell Edith or June or Phyllis or Elsie or Dora or Ethel that he needed a blood sample. He would get them sat in their favourite chair, all comfortable (and they were always thrilled when their caring doctor turned up without them even asking him, they all thought he was wonderful), and he would shoot them full of diamorphine and they would die, it would only take a couple of minutes. And later that day either he would pretend to make a further call or a friend or relative would find them and call him (the victims were almost always found fully dressed in a chair looking very peaceful, with the television on) and Dr Shipman would come round again and write out a death certificate – heart attack, old age, whatever. And then he would go back to his surgery and log on to his computer and fake their medical history so that it appeared they had congestive heart disease for years when they hadn’t at all. And that would be that, no questions asked at all, although some professionals in Hyde, Manchester, where all this happened over 20 years, got rather suspicious that so many of Dr Shipman’s patients were dying suddenly. But they just kind of shrugged. I mean, who would think that a family doctor is actually knocking off his elderly patients? No one would think that and no one did.
He started with one or two in the late 70s then he was up to around 10-12 a year by the late 80s. In 1992 he set up his own sole practice and the murders really took off then, By 1995-7 it was 30 per year. Finally he did something stupid, so stupid that if it was part of the plot of a movie you would complain about the poor script – (“so unrealistic, nobody would do that” etc).
What he did was he knew one of his old ladies was loaded and so he faked a will, really badly. Then he diamorphined her. The fake will left her entire fortune to Dr H Shipman and disinherited her daughter who just happened to be…. a lawyer. So she was let us say a little distressed and more than somewhat suspicious. It took not that much digging and the cops were able to discover Shipman’s little plot. Worth pointing out that never had he ever stolen anything or tried to from any other patient. If he hadn’t done that he could have kept on diamorphining his patients till the cows came home. So let that be a lesson for all you murderous health professionals out there. Don’t be greedy!
The public enquiry into his crimes concluded that he murdered 215 patients for sure with another 45 as probables.
Of the 215 (only 41 were men) not surprisingly most were in their 70s and 80s, but he would kill the odd 50 year old on occasion, I suppose when the whim took him.
A FEW QUOTES
The author says :
Five years after his conviction, most people were at pains to tell me that, despite his horrendous crimes, Dr Shipman had also been a caring and dedicated GP. Even those who are relatives of his victims have stories to tell about what a good doctor he was.
A fellow doctor said:
I found him, as his patients did, very approachable, very friendly, very open with his opinions. I found him an extremely affable colleague and he certainly seemed to be a competent doctor. He fitted in very well with the other doctors in this group
A relative of victim said :
In our own little cul-de-sac he killed about six ladies… He killed three times within twenty yards of my front door.
LIMITLESS BANALITIES
This is a very repetitive account of a complicated case. It can hardly not be repetitive, Shipman was performing the identical murder over and over and over again, for 20 years. The author loves her criminal psychologists and “profilers” a little too much for me and quotes their limitless banalities endlessly. Man, these people get money for old rope. Just listen to their pearls of wisdom
What you can see clearly is the particular strength of the relationship Shipman had with his mother. The influence of a strong mother character in their early lives is something a great many serial killers have in common.
It is clear that the shaping of Shipman’s personality had begun in his childhood.
The psychologists told me that we are all capable of killing once, from rage, from fear, to protect ourselves and our loved ones; we can even kill twice, for the same reasons. But then we stop because we don’t enjoy the experience.
SO, WHY DID HE DO IT?
The author says:
I believe euthanasia or assisted suicide is practiced by many GPs. [One expert] calculates that at least 18,000 people a year are helped to die by doctors who are treating them for terminal illness.
I have no idea about how many, but I agree that doctors will do this regularly, it will be a tacit thing done when the person is in their last few days probably. But Shipman was not doing this. The great majority of his victims were old but reasonably healthy. They had years left in them.
These were murders of a completely different type than your usual sexually-related Bundy stuff. In all cases Shipman was sending these old people peacefully – indeed, blissfully – into the great beyond. There was not the tiniest hint of violence or aggression in his conduct. The subtitle of this book is Why Shipman Killed Again and Again but the author doesn’t get anywhere near to an answer. Once he was caught Shipman never admitted any guilt and never gave any explanations. After a couple of years in jail he hanged himself....more
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