s&d: True Crime! books

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

i didnt know where else to put this

I was poking around finding out about erotomania. had not heard about this woman (obv pretty famous at the time tho?)

makes me sad for her
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mary_Ray

some more interesting reading here, relating to its disappearance from dsm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-everyone-became-depressed/201507/erotomania-haunts-female-tennis-stars

NY Mag on the Slender Man stabbing: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/slender-man-stabbing.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/a-death-at-torrey-pines/403186/

I found a very good true crime podcast--"Sword and Scale"

It's mostly told through old interviews, news reports, 911 calls.
Episodes 5 & 6 are about the Larry King Bohemian Grove sex ring conspiracy. Pretty crazy.

wow, looks great. thanks, president.

i think vg posted about sword and scale, either here on fb, so i started listening to it this week - it's really good. i just finished up the two-part carnation murders episode, which was really weird.

that one bugged me because it was just an audio dump. i can kindacan see why he did it that way, it WAS weird but he didn't cover hardly anything else about the case & it just felt like "lol @ this guy"

the fetal homicide ep was interesting but v traumatic to listen to

the 911 calls in this podcast are hella stressful too, jfc

yeah it was less a story about the crime itself and more a study of this dude joseph. i felt like the podcast guy was... idk, like really really biased? i don't think that's the right word, but he just kept reading all this really negative stuff into everything joseph was saying and sounding kinda spiteful about it? i mean the guy murdered six people but clearly was a really fucked up dude and i felt pretty sorry for him.

but i did want to know more about the crime and more about michelle.

yeah he can be v immature & judgey with his comments, it's a bit offputting at times

he seems like a reddit dude, yknow, zero experise but likes acting like he knows ~stuff~

but i dont hate it so...shrug... lol

holy shit i just finished the two eps about toni ingram... what a clusterfuck!!! and that poor dude... i honestly can't believe he's managed to live 16 years dealing with this awful shit :(

I just finished the Robert Reed two-parter, gahhh racist small towns are the worst

Listening to the sword and scale psychopath episode. It's pretty amazing.

Listening to the sword and scale psychopath episode. It's pretty amazing.

the noreen gosch eps are pretty... unbelievable. especially when she says that her grown up son visited her in 2007 and is in hiding.

Skip the Luka Magnotta episode if you ever want to listen to True Faith again.

Listening to Ted Bundy's last interview again. This fucking guy.

i watched a horrible documentary about noreen gosch. a great documentary could have been made about her. she is unbelievable! i am fascinated by paranoid suburban mom narratives though.

oh that was mentioned in one of the podcasts, and i was really interested til the director said 'irregardless' during the interview.

i didn't look her up online til after i listened to all 3 episodes, and looks nothing like i expected! her narartive is way more crazy than toni ingram's, yet i'm more convinced by noreen bc she's so stern and articulate.

what did she do for a living before her son went missing?? what has she been doing for a living since he disappeared??

in the middle of that fred west 'happy like murderers' book and it's pretty good, if relentlessly bleak. gordon burn's writing style is frustrating though, constantly repeating things, writing in that studenty ultra-declarative way, rambling, confusing, childish and just outright bad at times.

Episode 54 of Sword and Scale has the singlemost horrifying series of 911 calls followed by the best discussion of Florida's stand-your-ground and Castle Doctrine laws. If say, you happen to listening to this late at night just be prepared to stay up a couple more hours to recover - both from the crime and the intense discussion. I love it when niche podcasters put in effort to make an actual show.

Has anybody read this?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/418OS6fIFxL.jpg

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell

In a searching examination of how children become violent criminals, and how the judicial system treats them, Sereny focuses on the case of Mary Bell. At age 11 in 1968, Bell committed the motiveless murder of two boys, ages three and four, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The British tabloids demonized Bell as a "born killer" and "vicious psychopath." But Sereny, who extensively interviewed Bell, her therapists and social workers, portrays Bell, at the time of the murders, as a cauldron of repressed rage and anguish who lived in a grotesque fantasy world dissociated from reality. A prostitute's daughter, Bell was forced to watch as her mother was whipped by clients; she was also sexually abused by her mother's customers. Sentenced to life in prison but released in 1980, Bell, according to Sereny (who covered the trial in a 1972 book, The Case of Mary Bell), today feels profound remorse, sees a parole officer regularly, has a stable relationship with a caring man and is raising a daughter. Sereny's account of Bell's 12-year incarceration is disjointed and overwritten, but it offers a scorching look at British women's prisons as cesspools of drugs, abuse and coerced sex. Sereny proposes that children under 14 should not be held criminally responsible and should be tried by a specially convened panel instead of by jury. Her harrowing inquiry, marked by a rigorous and by no means easy exercise of sympathetic imagination, will compel people to rethink how to deal with children who kill or commit other serious crimes.

I read this in 2002, just once (I was visiting someone who had a copy). Still think of it from time to time, no doubt in part because I haven't read that much about crime, but also because this was just an unbelievably wrenching read.

I just listened to the jonestown death tapes on sword and scale. holy shit! like my chest hurts.

I read Tim Reitermans 'Raven: The Untold Story of Jim Jones' just couple of months ago and it completely wrecked me. I already knew a lot and I still had to put it down and walk away several times, it's fucking horrible. Knowing the Sword & Scale dude's proclivity for audio-dumps, and knowing how much Jones loved recording himself and all the tapes that are out there, I knew there was no way IN HELL I was going to listen to that episode. I would never sleep again

Is this the right place for magazine articles too? This was a good'un

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-talented-mr-khater/

Finished this a couple months ago: http://www.amazon.com/Darker-than-Night-Homicide-18-Year/dp/0312936761

Any good? Looks interesting

VG, I hadn't read much at all about Jonestown and figured it would be a relatively safe ep to listen to...no 911 tapes etc. WRONG.

;_; (hug)

I recently watched The Sacrement, which is a horror movie in which three Vice reporters (LOL) get involved in a People's Temple-style cult, with a People's Temple style resolution and I thought it would be fiiiiinnnneee because I'm so familiar with the story and I was not particularly attached to the Vice reporters as characters but it was really tough to watch.

I can't remember which documentary about Jim Jones it was but there was one where they interviewed one of the survivors and it was basically impossible to get through without stopping to go get some fresh air. It's such a brutal, brutal story. Also: children.

Jesus Christ Sword and Scale is incredible and hard

Carl, yes, the children dying in those tapes is what got me. Note to self: never listen to audio of children dying ever again.

People's Temple is just bad bad bad ... In the book there's detail of the last hours of Jones' right hand Sharon Amos who upon hearing that shit was going down murdered two of her 3 kids. Then her oldest daughter helped Amos take her own life, & then the daughter killed herself ---all while the ex husband was waiting at the airport hoping to get the kids to safety

the levels of fuckedupness are endless

my husband's uncle & his family were good friends with Leo Ryan :/

ugh....so bad

Quite interesting to hear how fucked up Jones sounded at the end and how rational his internal critics were in comparison. Nothing like the persuasive charmer / passive followers story that usually gets told.

Yeah he was Elvis-levels of messed up at the end

I mean, more than normal. :/

The notion that the followers lined up & happily took the kool aid is the worst myth, aides were holding people down & syringing the kool aid into people's mouths (and children). It was much more murder than passive suicide, moreso than popular history assumes