s&d: True Crime! books

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~

that double eye blink he did every time he told an obvious lie. great stuff. apparently he was carrying a full face latex mask when he was arrested.

!!

the guiltburp at the end was so weird, i was hoping he'd start speaking in tongues

I dunno -- I think Durst and the story are completely fascinating and the series started out very strong, but it totally lost me when the filmmakers started playing Hardy Boys late in the fourth episode. Playing ominous music when it became that Durst had HIRED AN ATTORNEY (GASP! HORROR!) when his wife went missing, that the attorney hired a detective who claimed attorney-client privilege (GASP! ETHICS! BEHAVING IN ACCORD WITH HIS PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES!), and that the detective had prepared a sheet pointing out discrepancies in the client's story (a client who smoked a lot of pot and was drunk). There were no critical questions posed to anyone -- especially cops and DAs -- who claimed Durst had done it. The last episode was too much amateur cop hour, the "confession" hardly that, and I ended up with the feeling that DAs co-opted the project somewhere along the line.

Mind you, I am fairly certain he killed two out of the three people he is said to have killed. I think he had professional help with Suzy and felt bad about it.

He burped when he went up to his brother's house as well.

Ugh I want to see this so bad and we don't have HBO life is so unfair

There are means...

I'm sure he has some Dursty alibi for the alleged confession, like "Gotcha!" And/or "I was just giving you what you wanted," thus launching a thousand more thinkpieces. Also, "I'm craazy, 'member, chopping up the guy and all? I can't hep it (burp]!"

i dont buy that he had help with susan's death.

I'm not selling it. My complaint is that this doc was selling the prosecutorial position.

i never felt that they were "selling" that. durst as a subject makes it kind of hard to *not* end up there just trying to find explanations for his behaviour.

it is pretty formulaic, but i guess i'm so used to this kind of stuff it didnt bother me

But see, I think the Durst Organization's behavior was also weird and disturbing and, frankly, suspicious -- but there was no attempt to "gotcha" them in any way, and I think that because there was no police/prosecutorial support for that project. I think I am the only non-lawyer left who gets mad when the cops frame guilty people, though.

reading The Good Nurse

halp

this shit is making me fucking dizzy

I just read the part where St. Luke's nails him for stealing and using (on someone!!!) tons of vec and when they offered to not press charges and give him 'neutral references' if he resigned, my FUCKING JAW DROPPED. Obv he gets put away eventually but dear god.

yeah that floored me

you guys can borrow this when i'm done with it!

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11083862_10153794778677137_2609858839527614647_n.jpg?oh=c6389f26c3b0bc1fe4e11835947a897e&oe=55B0FF2C&__gda__=1434471241_a85fbf41f10c477b3024463520964165

dame say hi to bear

Arghhhh this is nuuuuuuts

So glad I didn't know much about this case

three word username i thought you were a lawyer!
haven't done any jinx watching or looked at any articles about that stuff yet. too busy lawyering atm :(

i haven't seen the series but i loved the dunst durst movie so much. that movie freaked me out in a big way. i had to google that shit after watching because i couldn't believe that it was even near true. (one of the best movies i've seen in a long time and i had no hopes for it. just random netflixing and the fact that i will watch any and all dunst i have missed...)

Haven't practiced for a very long time, but yeah I guess it is a stretch to call myself a "non-lawyer".

i think i'm going to skip the good nurse
seems like it might make me flip out and i can't afford to flip out recreationally atm

it is making me flip out. But also blowing my mind. I feel like it is laying out the nuts and bolts of a specific type of irrational sociopath that I did not previously know about and which -- this is key -- has lessons to teach about the smaller-scale but similar maladaptions we (the merely neurotic) engage in. If that makes sense.

also it has shown me that hospital admin world is way way more fucked than i ever dreamed

Binged on the Jinx this week-end. I could relate to Jarecki (altho, damn that goatee makes it hard to take him seriously) starting out pretty open to hear the guy out and progressively get caught up in the anguish of having to bring down someone he obviously got pretty close to.
But yeah Durst what a character. I dunno if there's such a thing as mild schizo but the constant referring to himself in the 3rd person, the weird risk-taking and the final "confessional" dialogue all point towards a guy very much at odds with himself, to put it mildy.

finished The Good Nurse. The scene with Cullen and Amy in the restaurant was just astonishing and will probably stick with me forever.

this terrifyingly irrational guy, these terrifyingly rational hospital administrations

I also read The Good Nurse recently. Reading it, I felt pretty gross, bummed out and anxious. I think it was partly the setting- hospitals, end of life care and all that.Depressing. The sense of shared moral failure also made me feel bad- reading about stuff like this, or people who don't call the cops while they overhear their neighbor being murdered or whatever make me feel kind of guilty and anxious myself for some reason.
Also one of the images that sticks with me is the supposedly excessive amount of lotion Cullen would use on his patients.
I am reading some other kinds of books now but I think the next true crime might be Lost Girls, which also seems like it could be depressing and frustrating.

"When Buddhism goes bad": good tag, attention-grabbing-wise, but shouldn't blame it on the Buddha, just more moneyed and multivated young-ish Americans cuttin' up, in a (relatively) non-Dursty way, though plenty spacey and somewhat haplessly manipulative. Good presentation here of Scott Carney's A Death on Diamond Moutain by Laura Miller, who also provided an astute round-up of True Crime books in a piece I linked upthread:
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/15/when_buddhism_goes_bad_how_a_yoga_and_meditation_retreat_turned_cult_like_and_deadly/

i am halfway through the jinx. i love it. it reminds me a little of the clark rockefeller thing.

durst's guilt-burps immediately reminded me of anwar congo in 'the act of killing,' the only other place i think i've seen anything like that. gave me chills

not all the way through 4 but i did reach the "lawyering up" part and was pretty disturbed they made so much of it. "so why is he getting a CRIMINAL lawyer?" uh because you guys keep saying he killed her, which is a crime? even if he hadn't done anything wrong, come on. also didn't like how jarecki stalked doug durst and filmed himself doing it.

also the trying to ask the investigator privileged info and then somehow obtaining his report, which is privileged. not necessary imo.

Finally finished "True Crime: an American Anthology" and it is a must-read. I loved the Damon Runyon piece, I'll have to check out more. It has two Manson pieces - one by Gay Talese and an interview of Bobby Beausoliel by Truman Capote. It ends with Dominick Dunne's account of the Menendez murders, which are much more interesting than I'd realized. Jose Menendez is just not a sympathetic guy.

Anyway, it's 800 pages but worth it!

Watched The Cheshire Murders documentary last night. All recommendations OTM

we watched the first 40 mins of the cheshire murders doc earlier (don't know anything about the case other than ET's preceding post) but it didn't seem all that gripping, just an examination of an admittedly nasty case. is it worth watching the rest? no spoilers if there are any big twists and revelations please

WATCH

IT

GODDAMMIT

i mean if it doesnt grab you after that idk but cmon, at least watch it through

I loved it
Still trying to find a good book on the snowtown murders
Read some Robert keppel after the good nurse bc I guess I needed to hurt my brain some more

i bought masha geffen's book about the tsarnaev brothers, haven't started it yet though
i guess it's true crime?

The author was on Fresh Air a couple nights ago. Haven't heard all of the interview yet, but it's here (stream or download):
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/07/398061941/tracing-the-roots-of-the-brothers-and-the-boston-marathon-bombing

Also heard some of the discussion re Tsarnaevs during the first hour of WBUR's On Point this morning (not yet posted): incl. typological context; also somebody pointed out that there were almost no traces of the bombmaking, even though the flakey brothers seemed unlikely to have anything close to Unabomber skill sets. Possible that they were yer alienated loser textbook children *and* tools of conspiracy.

yup
i can't wait to learn the deets!

there's a masha geffen and a sasha geffen?