s&d: True Crime! books

does it talk about the D.B. Cooper case?

Yes it does. The author thinks Cooper must have died in the jump. (It was me who mentioned this book about 12 posts upthread).

Can anyone recommend a good book on either Charles Whitman or Richard Speck? I've seen a few online, most appear to be out of print, and there's even one about the two of them together. As I posted above, I'm pretty new to this genre. Whenever reading non-fiction about something I'm really interested in, I prefer an author who just tells the story and stays out of the way.

sorry, josefa, i must have read your post at the time and then forgotten anyone else had talked about that book before me. anyways it's a really fun book.

clemenza, this book seems to be highly regarded and a good read (haven't read it myself):

http://www.amazon.com/Sniper-Tower-Charles-Whitman-Murders/dp/1574410296

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Personally I would like to find a good resource on Richard Ramirez. "Satanic" murders are pretty interesting to me. As an aside to that, does anyone know if David Berkowitz' claim of being in a satanic coven has been proven to be bullshit or not?

Thanks, missed that one--will order it tomorrow. I find Whitman fascinating too. He--and Speck--somehow seemed to belong more to Manson and what came after them than anything that came before. The Bogdanovich film gets some of that.

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Wait, what?

Now I'm reading the medical commission's report on Whitman's autopsy: http://alt.cimedia.com/statesman/specialreports/whitman/findings.pdf (pdf)

Huh, a GBM.

The GBM was associated with a congenital AVM, which is also unusual. The description of the pathology is otherwise very typical, I'm sure a panel at MD Anderson is going to be correct in making that diagnosis.

Wikipedia says it might have been pushing on his amygdala, but that's not exactly close to the "right temporo-occipital white matter", where the tumor was found.

Is that the theory in the Lavergne book?

Most GBMs of smaller size ("size of a pecan") are minimally symptomatic unless they're near eloquent cortex (which Rt T-O is not) or unless they cause seizures. Behavioral changes can be caused by persisting epileptic activity in the brain, despite showing no obvious outward manifestations of seizures ("non-convulsive status epilepticus"), but this is rare and not usually associated with violence AFAIK.

thanks for the details!

just finished reading the excellent monster of florence book, thanks to whoever mentioned it above. any similar recommendations? something well-written, twisty, turny, etc

a friend put me onto a 2011 Australian mini series 'Killing Time' starring David Wenham

Veg, did you ever see 'Blue Murder', about Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson (for those outside Aus, a very corrupt cop and his hitman/rapist offsider) -- very well done, very bleak series

I think I was the monster of Florence guy. It's sooooo good. Unfortunately I haven't found much that is similar, but I've got a bunch of stuff on the to read list so I will let you know.

THE SKIES BELONG TO US looks fascinating--have ordered it

I just saw the Charlton Heston film Skyjacked from 1972 because it was mentioned in The Skies Belong to Us as having inspired one of the hijackers in the main hijacking incident in that book. Indeed, the plot of the movie was freakily similar to the real-life hijacking that happened less than two weeks after the film came out. One of the clearest cases of life imitating art I've ever seen.

OK, found and read The Skies Belong to Us over the weekend--fascinating! I had no idea about the huge number of US skyjackings in the late 60s/early 70s, and how chill the airlines were with it: 'As long as we get the plane back OK, everything's cool!'. All these nutters wanting to go to Havana.

Plus it has an Algerian thug called No Nuts.

Thanks to Josepfa and n/a for the recommendation!

started rereading Helter Skelter this week. Haven't read it since high school. I have some v embarrassing memories of reading it then thinking, 'he's biased because he prosecuted Manson, this isn't the TRUE story' and going out and reading Manson In His Own Words and realizing afterwards 'ohhhh right Charlie's nuts'
but I was fifteen, whattyagonnado :/

Anyway am enjoying it much more on the reread. Forgot how crazily detailed it is, and how horrifying the murders still are when you read the stats on stab wounds etc.

The thing I'm most struck by is it took the police so long to link the Hinman, Tate & LaBianca murders. Hindsight being 20/20 and all

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Li9H-ADoL.jpg

i picked this up v. cheaply today and it is AMAZING - format is modelled on bruce bernard's Century, ie page after page of well chosen/reproduced photographs, accompanied by a few judicious paragraphs on the pictured atrocity/murderer/victim/assasination/lynching/mob hit etc - everything from a terrifying pic of Lucky Luciano to the trial of the truly repugnant Dr Petiot(and yes, parts of it, esp the war crimey stuff, are p lurid/hard-hitting) - alongside obv candidates like Crippen and Hindley, there are lots of other terrifying/fascinating killers from the around the world that i knew nothing abt - its just a great fuckin' selection/primer on all sorts of ghastly human behavior - highest possible recommendation!

btw i think it has been issued w. a number of diff titles/covers in the uk and us - the above has a new price of £7.99 and is a bargain at that, nevermind cheaper prices on the net - actually the cover design looks a bit generic (weegee pic, standard typography) and doesn't really reflect the richness/range of the material inside

RIP colin wilson

Half tempted by Weegee: Murder Is My Business which was published by Prestel last year.

read somewhere about "the yoga store murder," a book about the lululemon store murder in 2011 in bethesda so i downloaded it for kindle. lo and behold there was already a book called "murder in the yoga store" about the same topic. this is hilarious to me for some reason. the yoga store murder has a higher amazon review rating and more pages though.

aaaand i already finished it! it was decent

i feel like this is the only kind of book i can read right now with my tired anxious brain. i was reading gomorrah and i like it but even that is too dense at the moment. quick recommend me something on kindle i can start tonight to get myself to bed on time and to work tomorrow even though it's a holiday.

have you read debbie nathan's book about satanic ritual abuse? i recommend that! it's totally bazonkers and i am 100% sure you will enjoy it. also, it's well written and full of insane details.

whoa is this the same case as in bakersfield (i think?) where the whole neighborhood of kids said they were abused and they weren't? the blurb on amazon uses the phrase "victimology feminism" which is one of my favorite topics though i have never used that phrase. relevant to my lawyerly interests. i also got the skies belong to us. i got part of my tax refund from turbotax in an amazon gift card because they give you a 10% bonus so i'm going crazy with the kindles.

totally understand that, esp when it comes to sensationally weird true crime books
also you should obvs read sybil exposed if you haven't read that!

ok i will!

i was thinking today about how that girl who killed the guy in pennsylvania after soliciting him for sex on craigslist and now admits to killing 22 others will make a great true crime subject someday

with a satanic cult tie-in

yeah that case could be really crazy(ier)

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/justice/craigslist-thrill-killing-confession/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

A law enforcement source close to the investigation said Miranda Barbour's new claims could be "the real deal." "It's conceivable," the source said, who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing investigation.

Forget the exact title, but if you search ILE for Sybil, you will find a thread of freaked-out suburban legends and their media funhouse mirrors: classically 70s, but before and after (especially 80s) too.
Speaking of hijackers, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, 2004 movie with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, is based on a true crime played down in the 70s. I was an all-media junkie back then, but don't remember it at all. Penn's character is so sad, then ridiculous, then truly dangerous, remaining all that as he wrings involuntary sympathy, another sense in which the character and plot are so deftly, damnably twisted---it ain't no masterpiece, but it works.
Never read Helter Skelter, but engrossed/grossed by Ed Sanders' The Family. He did his footwork too: for inst., entering Hollywierd's scum side as a bootlegger of porn loops, incl. supposedly purloined Warhol outtakes, and eventually inquiring about spare footage involving blood. Also literal footwork, like when he and Phil Ochs went down the hill andover the wall to the house where the Tate (or was it the LaBianca?) murders occurred.
This one came out in '13: I guess it's good; anyway, stuff I didn't know, and read it in one sitting
http://www.laweekly.com/imager/jeff-guinns-new-book-posits-charles-manson-as-a-con-man-who-preyed-on-youn/b/original/4175176/92e6/manson_book.jpg

Teresa Carpenter's Missing Beauty is about an over-the-hill prodigy, from an area with very many doctorates per square inch, who meets a former high school princess, in a sketchy urban zone of their own. It works out for a while. This won a Pulitzer, but it's not overdone in any way: the material's dense, the presentation's clear, and the author knows the characters don't need any tarting up, or tarting down, for that matter. Rec'd to Dreiser fans too, but don't worry, she doesn't write like him.

xp The Family, the author also talked to musicians, some of whom he already knew, others with mutual muso connections, also and involved in the case---one of the latter put a snapshot on the diner table, like it was a card. It was a close-up of Sharon Tate, dead. The expression on her face...

also *cops* involved in the case, I meant.

Speaking of cons, frauds, here's something from WSJ's Five Best series, orig. pasted into ILB's current What Are You Reading thread: non-fiction and fact-based novels:

Ferdinand Mount
on stories of fraud
Mr. Mount's books include 'Cold Cream' and 'The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy.'

Little Dorrit

By Charles Dickens (1857)

Debt haunts these pages. William Dorrit has been imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison for so long that he has become known as "the Father of the Marshalsea." His daughter, Little Dorrit, was born in the jail, and she skitters out through the gates into the world of supposed solvency, which is in fact a shakier and more frantic place. It is not until a third of the way through the book that we meet Mr. Merdle, the miracle-working financier. "Nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money." He is reluctant to let outsiders in on "one of my good things," but special friends are allowed a slice of the action. He is, in short, the Bernie Madoff of his day, the Ponzi before Ponzi. At the time, "Little Dorrit" was taken as a straightforward polemic against debtors' prisons. But really it is a greater fable about universal illusions and one of Dickens's greatest, if least regarded, novels.

The Way We Live Now

By Anthony Trollope (1875)

Augustus Melmotte is a big, flamboyant man of mysterious foreign origin, "with an expression of mental power in a harsh vulgar face." The amazing thing about him is that, right from the start of Trollope's irresistible novel, he has the reputation of a gigantic swindler who has already ruined those who trusted him. Yet respectable types still come running to the door of his office in Abchurch Lane. His prize speculation in Central American railroads is revealed as a cynical scam, and, like Mr. Merdle, he does himself in. "The Way We Live Now" offers another marvelous panorama of mid-Victorian London, but the difference is that most of Melmotte's victims aren't innocent dupes but greedy chancers well aware of the sort of man they are dealing with. Melmotte is based on George Hudson, "the Railway King," whose swindles bankrupted Trollope's father-in-law, but his whole career is a dead ringer for that of the newspaper baron Capt. Robert Maxwell, MC, MP, who was discredited time and again but always bobbed up until, in 1991, he went down for the third time off his yacht.

The Tichborne Claimant

By Rohan McWilliam (2007)

In the spring of 1854, Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy and a large estate in Hampshire, took ship out of Rio de Janeiro. Neither the ship nor Roger was ever seen again. It was 12 years later that his French mother placed ads in Australian newspapers, in the belief that he might have fetched up there, and a bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga called Arthur Orton slyly confessed to being the long-lost Roger. Roger had been as thin as a rake, Rohan McWilliam notes in his compelling history of the affair, but Orton weighed nearly 400 pounds. Roger had gone to a first-rate school and was half-French; the claimant was barely literate and couldn't speak a word of the language. The best that could be said was that the way the claimant waggled his eyebrows was reminiscent of Roger. Yet his cause attracted a national following. It took George Bernard Shaw to point out the irony of laborers clamoring for a working man's right to pass himself off as a baronet. Orton's two trials were the longest in British history, and when he was finally sentenced to 14 years for perjury, the Lord Chief Justice declared that not since Charles I had a trial "excited more the attention of Englishmen and the world than this." Certainly never was there a more delicious demonstration of willful public gullibility.

A Romanov Fantasy

By Frances Welch (2007)

The Bolsheviks had taken great care to shoot every member of the imperial Russian family in the early hours of July 17, 1918. But in no time Siberia was swarming with Romanov impostors who claimed to have survived, including no fewer than 14 Grand Duchess Anastasias. The most famous of them was a Polish peasant born Franziska Schanzkowska, who was fished out of a canal in Berlin in February 1920. Now calling herself Anna Anderson, she first claimed to be the Grand Duchess Tatiana, but when told she was too short to be Tatiana, she switched without blinking to Anastasia. Anna was squat and square-jawed, whereas the real Anastasia had been tall and long in the face. Nor could Anna speak Russian. Yet it wasn't until 1994, 10 years after her death, when a piece of her intestine was compared with the DNA of Prince Philip and some of his genuine Romanov cousins, that it was definitively proved that she wasn't related to the Romanovs. Frances Welch takes as the epigraph to her entrancing account the maxim from "The Ship of Fools": "The world wants to be deceived." You can say that again.

Falling

By Elizabeth Jane Howard (1999)

After she had left her third husband, Kingsley Amis, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard fell for a con artist who wheedled his way into her lonely life after hearing her on the radio. This is the novel she made out of her scary experience, which might have ended in marriage or murder, or both. She is rescued in the book, as in real life, by the inquisitiveness of her daughter, from whom she had been estranged for years—one good thing to come out of her humiliation. "Falling" is another. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about it is Howard's ability to think herself into the mind of the con man Henry, who tells the first half of the story. She makes him plausible in every sense of the word, so that we begin to see how he got into the habits of deception, without our beginning to like him. He gets creepier as the book goes on. Elizabeth Jane Howard died on Jan. 2 this year at the age of 90, and if you read one thing of hers, I recommend this.
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― dow, Tuesday, February 11, 2014 10:04 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, I really want to read Falling, after having such an emotional reaction to the selfish, self-obsessed not-hero of Love All. She does have the ability to make you emotionally connect with very unlikeable people.

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), Tuesday, February 11, 2014 10:15 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

satanic ritual abuse book is v good. i'm about 40% done. it mentions a 20/20 about devil worship, which i found on youtube and started to watch but i felt too enraged that this was an irl witch hunt so recently so i stopped.

Yeah there's a point where it becomes genuinely terrifying. Also it made me worry that people would think that I am a witch and try to discredit me.

Read several reviews of this new book sorting out the --can't call it urban legend, because it's based around the actual murder of Kitty Genovese---but made into the ur-fable of urban anomie, in the 60s. WSJ reviewer thought the book was padded, but even so, basically valuable, and others agree. Good interview with the author here: http://www.npr.org/2014/03/03/284002294/what-really-happened-the-night-kitty-genovese-was-murdered

yeah I heard that on the radio last night, seems interesting

i finished satan's silence. p good. not perfect. worst was the cheap transfer to kindle that got some words wrong! but i liked it. devil's knot: the true story of the west memphis three came in the mail too.

Kevin Cook's xpost Kitty Genovese is, judging by excerpts and reviews apparently a true crime book in the traditonal genre sense as well, with, you know, scenes, thoughts of participants, dialogue all helpfully enhanced by the author...but basically, this one's really done his homework as well.
(For the unpadded, unfiltered, but still plenty readable approach, try "The Reckoning," Andrew Solomon's New Yorker account of conversations with Peter Lanza, interspersed with some astute, unpretentious comments by the author. Solomon also talked to the Klebold family in Far From The Tree, which is always checked out of my library, but real good reviews.)
Back to true crime old school, here's a thing about a couple of homegrown books meant to prove the innocence (or lesser culpability) of Caril Fugate. The 12th Victim and Pro Bono are on Amazon now, with others along the same line, I think (plus those of the opposite persuasion, of course)
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120903/NEWS/709039923

i'm reading "far from the tree" now and it's extremely sad. solomon is a great writer, though. i really love his simple, precise, direct style.

Solomon on Lanza blew my ass away.

i was listening to an interview on local radio with a guy who wrote a book called blood will out about clark rockefeller/christian karl gerhartschreiter and i wanted to read that but some amazon reviews said it wasn't so great so i found another book someone else had already written called THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT. seems pretty good so far.

that's a pretty great title imo

I'm reading the skyjacking book! It's really good so far.

Seconding The Man In The Rockefeller Suit - the other book (Blood Will Out) is more of an annoying "hey, I'm a famous writer who was friends with a sociopath" memoir.

yeah this is a must read. so unbelievable!

So this guy went looking for his real father and determined that his real father is the Zodiac Killer - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062313169/ref=nosim/0sil8

It has to be bullshit but I am intrigued anyway.

this is a little different, but that reminds me of some of those killers who are arrested who have regular family lives but they're actually these horrible killers on the side. like the BTK. i don't know how rare that is but most serial killers are loners.

most useful thread on ilx. loved the rockefeller and skyjacking books - anyone reading anything written as well as those two? is the zodiac book worth a look?

zodiac book def worth it imo

Graysmith is a nutbar, let him show you how

read the sequel only for lols