s&d: True Crime! books

great article on Texarkana's "Phantom Killer":
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/the-story-of-the-phantom-killer-a-texarkana-murder-mystery

Totally fascinated by the story of Ann and John Bender. It's a real-life version of The Mosquito Coast
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/Love-and-Madness-in-the-Jungle.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-death-of-john-bender-suicide-accident-or-murder/

I finally got around to reading "Lost Girls" and it made me depressed and angry. I posted on FB after reading it that for all the mystery-fan conjecture over the years about "How to commit the perfect murder," it's depressingly easy in this country: Kill transients and sex workers.

It seems like the Long Island police department is hopelessly corrupt and the locals are keeping their mouth shut, too, which isn't helping

haven't read any of these but you guys might like them http://longform.org/lists/best-of-2014#crime

The bank-robbing family article is the best one. Texas Monthly's crime writing is always A+

I guess it's kind of an obvious recommendation but carrere's The Adversary will knock your socks off.

not heard of this but buying now - don't be afraid to be obvious on this thread!

damn no ebook to buy, only thing out there is an unreadably blurred pdf scan

I watched the doc on this thing -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cruces_Bowling_Alley_massacre

it was ok, didn't really truly quench my true crime thirst cuz theres really minimal info w/r/t suspects and it is mostly just very sad

i hadn't heard of it either. looks great. i'm buying a one cent copy on amazon. just watched "murder on a sunday morning" which was amazing, there's a high-enough resolution one on youtube from channel four. i'll get it for u all later.

(that pdf scan above is only unreadable on calibre, weirdly. works fine on olde style kindle, if a little small)

ashamed to admit that i never read in cold blood. started it after seeing discussion re: it's ethicalness on serial thread. also started manson book but stopped. it's good though. i just constantly start and don't finish books. i think i'll finish it. it's 2015 though and 2014 was my year of true crime. i need to read other types of books too.

i was obsessed with in cold blood in high school

Only TV, but Dateline tonight: re victim of his beating:"She was suffering like an animal. I had to put her out of her misery." New one on me

Not making light, I just never heard that before. Think he's about to claim he's victim of abuse (pleaded Not Guilty after confessing).
Yes, that's what he just did.

Charge is Second Degree Murder, don't know why not First, ffs

Been meaning to pick up The Good Nurse for a few months now, but reading that it was going to be the subject for Aronofsky's next film made me bump it up a little in the queue. Haven't cracked it yet, but I feel like I'll be digging into true crime in 2015 and this thread seems like it'll give me some good recs.

Think I already mentioned this, but been seeing more about it recently, reminding me I still need to read
Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. From NY Times review by Jennifer Gonnerman:
[
i]Leovy...started a blog at her newspaper {LA Times] in late 2006 called The Homicide Report, in which she attempted to cover every murder in Los Angeles County in a single year. It was a radical idea — at the time, her paper reported on only about 10 percent of homicides — and also a near-impossible task: In a 2008 article, Leovy acknowledged that the report “has merely skimmed a problem whose true depths couldn’t be conveyed.” So, she took the opposite tack, to convey more via narrowing the focus:
In “Ghettoside,” she tackles this “plague of murders,” as she calls it, with a book-length narrative that enables her to write about it with all the context and complexity it deserves. Her protagonist is John Skaggs, a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, whom she portrays as both compassionate and relentless...The narrative arc of “Ghettoside” traces one of Skaggs’s homicide cases: the murder of Bryant Tennelle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/books/review/jill-leovys-ghettoside.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20150123&_r=0

Messed up the formatting: from "Leovy...started" to "conveyed," the post quotes the reviewer.

ooh i heard her on frrrrrresh air this morning and preordered the ebook mid-interview
it sounds really interesting

Yeah, just now saw the download/stream on their site, didn't know!
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/26/381589023/ghettoside-explores-why-murders-are-invisible-in-los-angeles

i can't stop this true crime thing, i am just so voyeuristic about these ppl in these books it's bordering on gross. life is too short to worry about that though. i finished in cold blood. i started the good nurse. that one is already so insane and great. i am 10% done. like some commenter on amazon said don't read it on kindle because there are so many footnotes but i'm doing ok, just have to remember the location you left to go back.

did u like in cold blood?

i did but i didn't believe it was true? like is it a novel?

It's a true story that Truman Capote took a lot of artistic license with iirc.

otm

ok, i get it. the good nurse is so terrifying and amazing and fucked up, love it.

ok sold i am going to put it on my kindle for my trip next week :D

Ghettoside is really good. Story unfolds slowly and naturally, respectful of everyone involved imo. I'm only about 45% done but it's a solid book afaict.

I devoured "Cries in the Desert" by John Glatt about the "toy box" torturer / murderer in New Mexico. It was just fascinating, this scene in Truth or Consequences, NM with bikers and drinkers and meth abusers - a lot of people who just live cheaply in the desert and do drugs all of the time. It even has Satanism in it.

This book covers decades of tangled lives--families, lovers, friends, frenemies etc.--in and out of the projects, streets and prisons. Case in point: dealin' prodigy Boy George, a hero to some and sentenced to Life Without Parole by the time he turned 21 (the Rockefeller Laws, solution to drug epidemic uh-huh). So how does he deal with that? Better than I expected, but it's a long & winding road--ditto life in women's prison, which now seems like a prequel to Orange Is The New Black, the series more than the book. The author got to know these people as well as she could, seems like:
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

holy shit Good Nurse (harbl's rec upthread) is kerrrrrrrrazy

i cant put it down!!

yeah and

just have to remember the location you left to go back.

took me half the book to realize you just hit the left arrow :D

yeah u were right abt the footnotes jeez louise

really like the sound of Cries in the Desert but it's not available on kindle in the uk, only america. really don't like reading physical books anymore and even then i'd have to order that from america, mustn't have been published over here. has anyone had this before where a book is only available on kindle in another country? is there any way around this?

Cries in the Desert was interesting because the crimes were part of a sad criminal subculture in some awful desert town.

Anyway, got a fresh stack of crime books this week - currently reading "Harvard and the Unabomber: the education of an American terrorist." It talks a lot about the academic work Ted Kaczynski was exposed to. I worked in academic libraries when the Unabomber was doing his deeds, so I was getting exposed to similar literature. I read a lot of Anarchist and environmental literature back then. I even wanted to quit my urban job to become a park ranger. It includes excerpts from Kaczynski's journal and letters.

I also got True Crime: An American Anthology which is an anthology and history of American writing about crime. Haven't started it yet but it looks fantastic.

Harvard &The Unabomber is really good...def recommended!!!

and the academic work he was exposed to is waaay beyond reading material, lemme tell ya.

I read The Good Nurse last weekend. Good god, just . . . so much to cope with in that book. The idea that someone who is supposed to be caring for you could just blithely kill you, the complete lack of attention at every hospital he worked at. I wish more of the story of the institutional failures had been covered in the book proper rather than the footnotes. After reading I went to YouTube and watched the 60 Minutes story on this, and it included recordings of the phone calls between Somerset and the NJ Poison Control Center. The audible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ from the hospital authorities is staggering.

The hospital's desire to save face in every instance is just so unbelievable

it's interesting how different he is from the mercy killer or angel of grace or whatever. it's all him, it has nothing really to do with them except as means to an end. from what i could figure out, killing all these people was like a stress release instead of going to the gym. the level of dissasociation from his victims was really terrifying

and the numbers are !!!!! O_O

Wow, this Unabomber book is really good. The author, Alston Chase, does a great job of portraying Kaczynski as not at all insane and possibly someone to be envied - he lived in one of the most beautiful places in the United States, didn't have to work for a living, read all of the time....then you get to the pictures and there is bombing material alongside all of that literature...the idea of retreating so you can kill people is horrifying. Other true crime books don't make this point well. It's also stunning to find how much of the same literature you may have read.

I wish someone would do for Timothy McVeigh what Chase does for Kaczynski.

i never felt like chase portrayed kaczynski as someone to be envied, am a liiiiittle concerned that you would come away with that reading imo

I feel moderately guilty that I stopped reading The Road Out of Hell after the demise of Uncle Stewart ... good lord and good recommendation ppl!

Hey, would this be the thread to talk about The Jinx on?

xpost - dont feel bad! even reading up to that point, you feel like you've been *through* some shit

xpost yeah i was wondering, seemed like this would be as good a place as any!

who else watched?

it was pretty satisfying to finish The Jinx and later that day see ROBERT DURST ARRESTED on the scrolling led news thing downtown.

right!?

he's such a strange guy overall...jarecki said in an interview that he thinks durst has a compulsion to putting himself at risk/at odds with those around him, as an explanation for why durst first reached out to do the initial interview

like, if he had kept to himself most of this stuff would just stay buried
then again what's a true crime story without ~ego~