s&d: True Crime! books

i like that podcast, her monty clift ep is pretty good

Thought this revive might have been for RIP Ann Rule.

almost done w/ http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61EaSiSMyvL._SL500_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-big,TopRight,35,-73_OU01_AA130_.jpg

is nicely structured & detailed esp considering dudes guilt is such a foregone conclusion

I flagged those multi-posts, god damn.

xp fyi this guy was writing to himself in an alien star wars language during his murder trial

yeah i was v bummed about her passing

she was my first entry into true crime: a paperback copy of small sacrifices when I was 12 or 13

i said on fb her best quality was her ability to tell the victim's story, make them the focus & bring them to life. especially the Green Rivers Running Red book - she changed the tone of the story & gave the girls a voice

her book about knowing ted bundy, ''the stranger beside me', is really excellent

yeah, really good

Yeah, I read her Bundy book too, a true crime classic.

I really liked the "You Must Remember This" podcast too! A friend recommended it to me because we had read Helter Skelter concurrently in middle school. I had to have a parent/teacher conference because I brought some other Manson-related book to class and left it in the cubby by accident.

Anyway, being that I read it in middle school, it completely washed over me that a couple of the victims were high on MDA on the night of the Tate murders. I thought about bringing that factoid up when ecstasy was revived last week, but thought better of it.

manson in the cubby

I have never read any Ann Rule

In honor of her passing I just started the green river one this morning. Digging it so far. I spent 6 yrs living in the region before the tech explosion and she is really evoking that hopeless sasquatch deathtrash feeling I got from driving around some of those towns

Yeah I found her writing in that so affecting. I think it's of a piece with the recent "Lost Girls" by Kolb

Green river book is straight up amazing btw

Rule is so much better than I thought she would be all these years

I'm about 75%

And holy fuck they really aren't going to catch him before I move to Seattle in May 90 are they?

nope

Ann RULE(S)

:D

they aren't going to catch him before I move to Seattle in May 90 are they this reminds me (hadn't thought of it in decades) a girl I knew finally made up her mind to transfer to FSU in fall '77, and in January, she finished a letter about wild rumours from Sorority Row, ones she'd just overheard while writing. She put it in the mailbox that evening, and by the time I got it, a couple days later, the news was all over TV, about a month before Ted Bundy was caught.

Finished a letter by mentioning wild rumours, that is; it wasn't all about them. We were used to wild rumours; before she transferred from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, our campus officials and local cops had tried to put a lid on an outbreak of stories of rape, which had the opposite of the desired effect.

(Turned out the stories were basically true, duh.)

Come to think of it, I also knew a family who left San Francisco for sweet Columbine, right before the high school shootings.

Personal connections dept, while in Seattle I knew the son of Bob Keppel (instrumental on the bundy and green river investigative teams). And another guy I knew was whispered to be the son of a GRK suspect who had been ruined by the accusation (based on Rule's account and the guys last name, I'm doubting that rumor)

finally got into the Manson episodes on 'You Must Remember This' podcast -- recommendations itt are otm, it's really good!
it was also a good reminder that I need to get onto that Jeff Guinn Manson bio. So I ordered it from amazon :)

Because what I need in my life is more Manson rabbitholing. ffs.

Not wanting to break my mood, I have segued from green river running red to Fred and Rose, Howard Sounes book about Fred and Rose West. Jesus this awful awful couple, the details beggar the imagination, just stick an ice pick right in the imagination's eye socket.

i believe i need to read that right now

haven't read it but Happy Like Murderers is meant to be the definitive West book

I believe they may be the worst people I have ever read about in my life

That should be very thorough; Sounes' Dylan book uncovered several noteworthy items apparently not in any of the many, many previous Dylan books. Speaking of tenacity, would like to check xpost intrepid police investigator Bob Kepner's books (hoping co-authorship didn't get awkward).

xxpost Sounes was the journalist who broke the story of the Wests. i havent read either book but I would have thought his book to be the go-to

anyone read happy like murderers? sounds interesting:

An account of two people - Fred and Rose West - who lived together, raised (and killed) children, provided sexual services for anyone interested, and pretended to provide social services for single women. Investigated and told by one of the greatest journalists and writers of the last twenty years, this is the most powerful and upsetting true crime book you will ever read.

we talk about it upthread a bit - it's an amazing & profoundly grim book. Burn was a really serious, first-rate writer & you can see a couple of us have some nagging reservations that come from that, but tbh it's a great book, strongly recommend.

Gordon Burn was an incredible writer, and both that one and Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper are unmissable

The Brian Masters book on Rose West's trial - She Must Have Known - is also worth reading, if only because, by complicating the matter of Rose's guilt or innocence, it moves a tiny bit beyond the standard tabloid conception of 'evil' that sometimes blights more give-me-the-facts true crime books. Masters' books on Nielsen and Dahmer are also highly recommended.

Burns' book on the Yorkshire Ripper is best read in conjunction with Wicked Beyond Belief by Michael Bilton, a more straightforward narrative that offers a very full picture of the 'hunt' for Sutcliffe, and the many false turns that investigation took.

One of Robert Keppel's criminology textbooks has a very in depth analysis of the Yorkshire investigation and where things went wrong.

There is a Manson special on CNN at 9 PM EST tonight.

just finished Happy Like Murderers. I see what you guys were saying up thread about the dissonance between Burn's brilliant writing* and the sheer sordid evil of the subject matter. The cruelty of the Wests is genuinely unimaginable at times. Still, an incredibly powerful book.

*pretty obvious David Peace is a big fan

Started reading Krakauer's Missoula yesterday and every page makes me want to turn into The Hulk.

i do not need to read that book, esp after i heard him on the radio when he said that he didn't think really understand rape before he wrote it.
i understand it just fine! glad other people are getting it too, but it's definitely not a book for me.

he didn't think really understand rape
*he didn't think he understood rape -- i think he actually said he didn't understand what a big deal it is to victims. he thought it was more like a scary event but not a total violation of one's person. it was pretty shocking to hear that from an otherwise reliably ok person.

Jeez
How old is he?

idk, 40 something, 50 something? not boomer old.

young enough that i expected him to know better (although i gotta give him some credit for being honest)

I haven't read that many reviews of it yet, but a couple present it as not up to his usual standard of investigative journalism---not that it's likely(?) to blow up a la the Rolling Stone article, but his previous books have set the bar pretty high.

i've read a couple of his others, under the banner of heaven is all-time, but i have been wary of this one

This is a review of The Man In The Monster, about convicted serial rapist-killer Michael Ross. The author, Martha Elliot, is a legal journalist who got too involved with him, according to the reviewer, Nancy Rommelmann, who wrote a book about Gacy. Rommelmann really does review Elliot's book, rather than use it as a point of departure for her own show of expertise and righteous indignation, unlike so many others with such an opportunity. Don't know if she's right, but, as a journalist of some evident integrity, at least here, she includes information that doesn't necessarily sell her opinion (ditto Elliot, looks like). Anyway, the story is too brutal to paste; here's a link:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-1439586517

If any of these are new recs, feel free to update the spreadsheet of book recommendations from this thread - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDauY2Ll7tceSnoE60V-OQdocFgI2wNJqWfuscqig_c/edit?usp=docslist_api

Or don't! This isn't work, after all.

xxp It definitely borders closer to polemic than investigative journalism at times so far, but one gets the sense that Krakauer became genuinely outraged once he got an up close look at how victims suffer, how perpetrators get away with it, and how unfair and insensitive police and other authorities can be.

If you're likely to be triggered, I'd definitely avoid it. He does not shy away from very graphic description.

Have we ever discussed Ann Rue's Bitter Harvest on this thread? Amazing book. Probably my favorite True Crime book.

Rule even

ooh havent read that one! what's it about?

omg. this crazy as fuck woman who burns down her house so her husband wont leave her and then we he finally does leave her she burns down a bigger house with her kids inside to get back at him. I mean, obviously so much more goes on but that's the very general idea. She makes Diane Downs look like mother of the year in comparison.

holy shit

adding it to my "want to read" list