s&d: True Crime! books

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!

Thanks for linking your blog piece again!!

I get a lot more out of a true crime author grappling with subject, because it feels more honest somehow. But it's not that common, which is kind of weird! The assumption is true crime readers want answers & closure but imo it's better not to be satisfied. This is the lower reaches of human behaviour, after all!

I'll def check out Bitter Blood now

There was a TV movie/miniseries adaptation of the book back in the early 1990s -- never saw it, assumed it couldn't do it justice. These days, reading it, it would make for an absolutely astonishing limited series on Netflix or wherever. If they can aim for an 80s retro vibe in Stranger Things and The Americans and etc. and (mostly) get it, they can do it with this. I've framed and thought over so many shots in the story in my head, and structurally the book isn't an easy ride either, it goes backwards in time as it needs to. But a series could do the job a movie couldn't. Hell, a good podcast going into it could. I think it's a deeply underrated book in the field.

(Should also note Joan Crawford Loves Chachi may find the book of interest due to it being mostly a North Carolina story.)

Was there discussion on another thread of the drama surrounding new "true crime" book Pill City, excerpts of which read like a 16-year-old who watched the first season of The Wire? https://medium.com/@willsommer/does-this-true-crime-book-sound-true-to-you-3051e8caadcf

Wow

Srsly why not just publish it as a novel tho

Bitter Harvest it probably my favorite Rule book but everything you said Veg is still spot on. But, yeah, it didn't sound like she had much access to Green.

Another thing that pissed me off was the complaints about her coming home and reading a stack of books. That's what I do and I don't feel any desire to set my house on fire with my children in it.

This was really, really good

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34006812-killers-of-the-flower-moon

joined a local true crime bookclub

our first book was Graysmith's Zodiac. Knew I was among friends when we all agreed that the book is basically crap but the movie rules ❤️

next month: Ann Rule, Stranger Beside Me. Weeee

When do you find out which member of the club is the serial killer?

week 3

i mean month 3

rereading Stranger Beside Me for my bookclub

Funny, I've read this a couple of times since I was a teenager, I think the last time was probably 10 or 15 years ago. But this is the first time where I'm finding myself casting a more critical eye on her involvement in the story. Her whole narrative that she's not sure if he really did it while she's writing these letters back and forth just beggars belief; especially knowing that she had a book contract since 74... like she's never completely honest about her own position vis a vis Ted, she plays it so passive for so long that it feels a little false to me, or convenient for the book, at least.
Not that it should go any other way, I mean, it's smart and it's totally why this book still sells a bajillion copies.
But the way she hedges about Bundy for *so* long...I mean, based on the book she doesn't really come to jesus over Ted's guilt until she sees the florida crime scene photos at the first trial!

I still love her, and I still really like this book. But it's definitley interesting to read it with a more jaundiced eye this time.

also can i just

I am not really interested in bundy's fame or notoriety or anything but for me personally he is still the most upsetting of pretty much all the cases i've read

I mean, they're always telling women 'don't walk alone', don't go out at night, don't this don't that, right?
ted blows that out of the water. based on ted it's like
don't sleep
don't stay home
don't go to school
don't go to a hotel with your family
don't go to a mall
don't walk
don't drive
don't exist with brown hair anywhere basically

like, dear women: we're sending you to outerspace because NOWHERE is safe

and he's such a blowhard douchebag. he's the worst.

I read American Heiress in like two days last week. Very good book, and had a LOT I did not know about the whole Patty Hearst/SLA saga. (LOL at Bill Walton getting briefly sucked into things.) Devastating final paragraph.

Has anybody read "The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father…and Finding the Zodiac Killer"?

Publisher's summary:
"Soon after his birthmother contacted him for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, adoptee Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father. His quest would lead him to a horrifying truth and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his world.
Written with award-winning author and journalist Susan Mustafa, The Most Dangerous Animal of All tells the story of Stewart’s decade-long hunt. While combing through government records and news reports and tracking down relatives and friends, Stewart turns up a host of clues—including forensic evidence—that conclusively identify his father as the Zodiac Killer, one of the most notorious and elusive serial murderers in history.
For decades, the Zodiac Killer has captivated America’s imagination. His ability to evade capture while taunting authorities made him infamous. The vicious specificity of his crimes terrified Californians before the Manson murders and after, and shocked a culture enamored with the ideals of the dawning Age of Aquarius. To this day, his ciphers have baffled detectives and amateur sleuths, and his identity remains one of the twentieth century’s great unsolved mysteries.
The Most Dangerous Animal of All reveals the name of the Zodiac for the very first time. Mustafa and Stewart construct a chilling psychological profile of Stewart’s father: as a boy with disturbing fixations, a frustrated intellectual with pretensions to high culture, and an inappropriate suitor and then jilted lover unable to process his rage. At last, all the questions that have surrounded the case for almost fifty years are answered in this riveting narrative. The result is a singular work of true crime at its finest—a compelling, unbelievable true story told with the pacing of a page-turning novel—as well as a sensational and powerful memoir."

Also curious if anybody has heard that Convicted podcast. It's super high on the podcast charts, but I dunno if I have time for yet another one of these, unless it's really well done

xp at this point in history the only thing that would convince me someone has actually discovered who the Zodiac was, is finding the rest of the scraps of Paul Stine's shirt among their belongings.