s&d: True Crime! books

I read Who Killed These Girls? finally a couple of weeks ago. So depressing. So similar to the West Memphis Three case, too, and with (predictably) the same results.

i haven't heard of that one
well-written?

Yeah -- it's the recent one about the yogurt shop murders mentioned above by JCLC. It's exceedingly well-written. The author herself is from Texas and was the mother of a son killed by a drunk driver who was never apprehended. She also wrote a book about Karla Faye Tucker I haven't read, but based on this one I'll probably pick it up.

She doesn't stick to a strict chronology or a deep dive into forensic evidence like a lot of true crime writers. It's a more novelistic approach that really works well.

cool! i'll add it to my list

MFM episodes are getting me through my work day. i'm glad i heard about it through vegemitegirl bc i don't think i would have stuck it out past the first episode - which seemed kind of annoying and boring and had shitty sound quality.

Yeah mad props to veg for hooking us up with MFM. Those ladies make me feel like my brain isn't so broken after all.

i've been listening the jacob wetterling podcast, it's really good. has anyone tried the boston strangler podcast they advertise ad nauseum on there?

i just started it - i really like it, very professional & compassionate, and lots of first-person interviews

glad u guys like MFM! It took me a couple of goes to settle into the chattiness of it but it's v valuable to have a true crime show that doesn't make you hate yourself & shows a bit more compassion

my new favorite is Missing & Murdered, produced by CBC in Canada. Investigates the unsolved murder of an indigenous woman: reporter is indigenous herself and it's very compassionate & well reported.
Has made me cry a couple of times already
only 3 or 4 episodes released so far, but i'm def a fan

did i rep for Accused here? Cinncinnati Inquirer show, reporter on it is also a true crime writer. A+ show about the unsolved murder of a woman in Ohio in 1978. SO good. That one's done unless they have any developments -9 episodes

i liked accused but it was ultimately frustrating if you know what i mean
i tried one ep of mfm and i don't think it's for me. the actual discussion of crimes was ok but there was too much other stuff around it.

I haven't heard many of these post-Serial (post-Sword & Scale?) crime podcasts. I tried out "Pin Kings" the one about the wrestling partners who became a drug kingpin and a DEA agent, but it was like being shouted at by a cable TV station you can't see. Horrible.

yeah accused def won't make you feel good lol

If you can hang with MFM for a couple of eps it may grow on you. But it's not for everyone. ppl have told me Last House on the Left is great, like a male MFM, tried a few eps & i hate it. it's like Reddit: The Podcast

i'm really into professional reporters doing unsolved/cold case true crime podcasts. especially if they are from the area and/or seem to care about the case. I've run into a few amateur gumshoe ones lately that start out "serial was so popular we thought we'd try it too!" and idk that turns me off. These are people's lives you're digging into, many of them still have living family members. It should ~matter~ to you.

Up and Vanished was like that. The origin story for the show is the guy literally admitting "I was into Serial so I went online to find my own case to investigate."

that's one of the ones I tried! I noped out after a couple of episodes.

also a lot of xposts but thx to ShariVari for recommending the CaseFile podcast. I freaking love it. It's such a good straight-down-the-line show, well researched, concise. My dream crime podcast basically. The recent 3-parter on Yorkshire Ripper was a corker, I knew some of the story of this one + who dunnit, but still the story itself had me pretty much on the edge of my seat.

It's funny to listen to the older episodes where he talks a mile a minute (ie Australian).

Also I like it bcz he sounds like my little brother lol

Heard the name "Alice Crimmins" today, found this by Sarah Weinman (incl. her own inquiries and other sources cited, some linked): http://hazlitt.net/longreads/why-cant-you-behave-revisiting-case-alice-crimmins All this is just scratching the surface...

great article! Investigation Discovery's "A Crime To Remember" did a good episode on this iirc

All episodes of 'Death on the Staircase', about the 2001 trail of Michael Peterson, are up on BBC Iplayer at the moment (search for 'Storyville'). Easily as gripping as Making of a Murderer or The Jinx (it helped that I had never heard about the case before watching, and managed to resist googling the trial verdict).

blowpoke

I guess "The Staircase" wasn't a sexy enough title?

I love that series. I want to rewatch it

re: true crime podcasts, this looks interesting: https://gimletmedia.com/crimetown/
each "season" is about crime in a different city, made by one of The Jinx guys

ooh! I'm adding it to my list.

^ really enjoying that pod

Finished Ghettoside. It suffers from embedded reporter syndrome: she's too close to several of the detectives she's writing about, and at least one comes across as total caricature, reminiscent of some of the most gullible reporting from the 2003 Iraq war. I also had trouble keeping the several investigations straight, and following the general chronology outside of the Tennelle murder. The epilogue makes it clear she's writing about a specific time frame with its own particular dynamics of murder and murder investigation, post-90s yet pre-SSI. It's a period piece, not unlike The Wire, yet a somewhat misleading one.

That said, I still loved it, and was riveted throughout. It's a powerful argument for how restricting people's physical and financial mobility on the basis of race creates the circumstances for murder. And the scene with Detective Tennelle on the witness stand towards the end... no spoilers, but oof, just brutal.

cute little story http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-thief-who-steals-only-silver

Couple of new podcasts I've been liking...

Missing and Murdered - Who Killed Alberta Williams? http://www.cbc.ca/missingandmurdered/podcast
Eight part series on a 1989 murder along the Highway of Tears in British Columbia.

FBI Retired Case File Review http://jerriwilliams.com
Host Williams is an ex-agent turned crime author and interviews other retired agents on some of the biggest cases of their careers. The interviews can be dry at times, but the stories are terrific.

ooh that FBI one sounds good

cosign on Missing & Murdered - A+

Can any of you explain why youre so into ,this murder garbage? I feel like some point i could tolerate it but once i had i had a child it was just seeing people with educations and priveledge being helicopters over the crimes of the poor

I'm probably afraid of chaos I guess? I know it doesnt always work that way but I find the justice aspect appealing, the process of finding & catching the perpetrators

I dunno if my interests lie solely in the "crimes of the poor." By and large I see crimes against women, committed by sociopathic assholes who feel like they have some special claim over what women did or didnt give them. And as a woman who is generally afraid of stuff, i feel like helps me to try to understand what i'm afraid of. like staring under the bed at the boogey man. idk

You are right, vegemiteGrrrl, that these are not crimes of the poor, but Rather crimes by men against women. I think ive been influenced by my mostly white readership of the post Gone Girl thrillers to believe that there is an audience for degradation of women.

most of the true crime fans I know ARE women

some of the best crime fiction writers are women too

Thats always been the case with me-- can i borrow your Shoemaker book etc. -- just saying this murder shit is not is so appealing at some point, addicts proceed...

This is not so much about about gender--aside from the women i know sending fan letters to Manson, I'm reacting to shit like that.

A friend got of mine got Manson to design her tattoo. That's the kind of devototion i'm bothered by, not listening to podcasts etc.

but they are kinda outliers imo? i don't come across that kind of obsessiveness like YAY MURDERERS myself. and i sure don't roll that way myself

manson is 'interesting' as a product of the penal system but that's about as far as his appeal goes for me

i mean, these dudes are almost always just gross, boring narcissists. i don't read about murders because they themselves are fascinating or cool or whatever. i read to see how they fuck up and get caught. like i have no interest in hearing Ted Bundy talk about anything, or listening to Ed Kemper prattle on about how clever he is, etc. the only people who should want to listen to that are the profilers etc.

president, i think you've got us all wrong

Can any of you explain why youre so into ,this murder garbage? I feel like some point i could tolerate it but once i had i had a child it was just seeing people with educations and priveledge being helicopters over the crimes of the poor

when my first child was very young I felt exactly like this -- I couldn't play first-person shooter games any more, reading about violent crime made me feel physically ill. I think for me that was a natural adjustment to fatherhood. I have two kids now. I still can't bear to read about crimes committed against children any more -- which always outraged me but now really fuck up my head. But I do like reading about crime & crime-solving & suspect-hunting & police procedure now. When I was a goth kiddo, yeah, the killers seemed very INTENSE, MAN. I think most people grow out of that angle but there are genuine intellectual pleasures to be had in reading about horrible things that have happened. Some people like to read about war!

the kinda people who want proximity to mass murderers / tokens of their existence etc. are pretty different from people who just enjoy crime writing, I think.

otm

yeah. i stopped listening to sword and scale after just a few episodes (actually after the one episode about the woman who abused her children until they died and then kept their bodies in the freezer) because it seemed mostly focused on the gross voyeuristic side of things. i don't have any children and never will but i am far from what it seems keyes is thinking about. i am just endlessly curious about what happens to people or doesn't happen to them to make them do these things. i'm just as interested in non-murder crimes. like the jewelry thief guy above!

the "crimes of the poor" thing sounds closer to evening news, which i never watch, or COPS

idk, why are people into horror movies? i can't really watch horror movies bc i get way too freaked out, but am not easily disturbed by reading about the most horrific crimes. i have no interest in befriending sociopaths or collecting their memorabilia, but there is definitely some kind of voyeuristic 'thrill' i get out of true crime books/podcasts/documentaries (i'm not interested in fictionalized true crime movies or anything that involves reenactments), that i would probably liken to what horror fans get out of horror movies. it's a very creepy and fascinating subject, bc it's real, and bc those people exist. the weirder/more mysterious a crime is, the more i'm interested (like the woman who turned up dead in norway, and no one knew who she was, she had multiple identities and and strange behavior in regards to changing hotels/rooms every night).

pretty incredible thing from 2014 about Rhonda Williams, who survived the Houston Mass Murders

http://www.houstonpress.com/news/the-girl-on-the-torture-board-rhonda-williams-opens-up-about-being-attacked-by-dean-corll-6736780

Oof. There's how you tell an upsetting murder story about poor people without it seeming like exploitation. Devastating.

I've been reading Ann Rule's 'Bitter Harvest' about the Debora Green murders

Her portrayal of Green is really hard to take, and it really bothers me. Constantly hitting on how unattractive she is, how little pride she takes in her appearance, how she didn't take care of the house, hitting the Medea myth repeatedly...just really on-the-nose stuff that felt like it was coming from the husband's side of the story more than anything. Rule normally writes women pretty well, at least with a certain sense of empathy or insight, it's kinda disappointing tbh.

Even in the book, there's SO many small indicators that suggest Green had deeply troubling mental issues from waaaaay back in their early marriage, self injury that suggested munchausen's and serious prescription drug abuse that her husband, a medical professional himself, let slide.

It doesn't excuse what she did, by any means. And I'm not necessarily just looking for sympathy because Green is a woman. But being a fan of Rule you come to expect a certain approach from her that will cut through the usual bullshit from a trashy true crime book.

It just feels like Rule never really got her arms around Green enough to write about her well, and allows the SHE KILLED HER CHILDREN headline to take the air out of the narrative.

It's hard to believe this is the same person who wrote Small Sacrifices. They feel like such different writers.

Maybe it's just that she didn't really get any facetime with Green, their correpsondence was mainly through letters and I don't think she developed any kind of insight into Green except what was on paper and said by others. And Green seems perhaps more complicated and unknowable than other cases, so maybe it's just Green herself that's the reason for the book being so hard to swallow.

idk

I should be contributing more on this thread, really. Just started MFM finally and enjoy it though I'm settling into the rhythm. Agreed that SaS is a bit much at best -- also I was less impressed when I discovered that a lot of his stories were almost word for word from one or two key articles already written on his cases. I'll keep some of these new podcast recommendations in mind. (Perhaps oddly enough, I'm not really that interested in Serial/The Jinx/Making a Murderer etc -- perhaps due to overexposure in discussion. I think I tend to look more for things with less of a profile.)

I think the exchange above between VG/Pres Keyes and others about why one reads or listens is very important and deserves more attention. I linked this way up top of the thread, but my now ten-year-old blog piece on one of my favorite true crime books, Bitter Blood, delved into more of my own awareness of privilege, for lack of a better word, if initially from a more universalist "I'm alive and these people died for my entertainment via a casual read" perspective than anything more concrete.

I do also wish there was more of an open grappling with cases that were either unresolved or if resolved aren't treated with 'closure,' which I find as a concept is less about whatever those left behind have to deal with as it is what everyone else wants so they don't have to think about it much anymore. I said this at the end of my Bitter Blood piece and I stand by it:

The second point, though, is the one that Bledsoe himself notes in the book’s conclusion: “I set out to write this book with two major goals: to learn to my own satisfaction what had happened in this immense family tragedy, and, more important, to understand why. I failed at both.” It takes a certain kind of inner strength for any reporter or writer to go right ahead and say that rather than aiming for a neat, wrapped-up-with-a-bow ending — more than most writers on the subject, Bledsoe allows for the fact that questions not only remain but are all the more terrible for being unanswered. Rather than ending with the final crime, the book continues for some time to come, dwelling on various legal resolutions and conclusions but also exploring the actions of those having to live with the events well into the future — as one family member put it, simply but sadly, “It’s just a constant source of grief. There’s no way anybody could come to terms with it….There just won’t be an end to it. It’ll haunt us until we die.”

Bitter Blood, as a dramatic, creative piece, therefore has much less in common with, say, Murder on the Orient Express than it does with something like Rashomon or even L’Avventura — there is a gap that cannot be filled, a final conclusion that refuses to be drawn, much as it would be ‘satisfying’ to do so. No death-row confession, no extended psychiatric profile, merely evidence to sift through, memories to reflect on from an outside perspective. Whoever writes ‘the’ book, if there is one, on the Virginia Tech massacre will find themselves grappling with the same problem, and it will be illustrative to see how it is addressed. In Bledsoe’s case, the context that he introduces and sets more and more as the book progresses — the tensions between police departments, political undercurrents, assumptions about class and, in a more sublimated but no less pointed way, race [some of the principals in the law-enforcement side were simultaneously involved in the Darryl Hunt fiasco], parental rights and much more besides — ends up further decentering the idea of a neat narrative, a story where evil is punished and good triumphs. That, simply, does not happen here — leaving everyone involved, participants, Bledsoe, his readers, to grapple with everything at the end. There are some resolutions, but conditional, no more — hopes that may not have all played out.

Perhaps that is one reason why I like the book very much — it guarantees nothing, much as life does not guarantee anything. A reminder is always useful — but as I said earlier, it is one that should not have had to have been written, to have come at the cost of so many dead. Thus perhaps do the living hope to improve what they can, in the knowledge that they are still here.

Ned, on the podcast tip: definitely try Casefile. Nice bonus: host chooses to remain anonymous, so as not to get in the way of the stories.

Useful!