s&d: True Crime! books

Finally finished McGuinn's Manson bio

Really good -- much more clear-eyed about who Manson really was, even before he started the Family, and does a good job throughout the LA years to underline his opportunism and obsession with his own music career while moonlights as a dirtbag hippy pimp. Through McGuinn Manson becomes more pathetic without becoming sympathetic, but at the same time it makes everything that unfolds even more awful because it was so haphazard and needless and can't just be neatly filed under 'evil'

VG -- have you/did watch the show Aquarius?

no, i tried & I couldn't get past the cheesiness

Is it getting a second season or not?

A second vote here for Emmanuel Carrere's The Adversary

VG: You mean Jeff Guinn's, right? Unless Roger McGuinn wrote one...

lol yes Guinn not McGuinn bwaha oops

re schechter: the h.h.holmes is good -- if this means fascinating creepy and dreary -- but his best imo is his albert fish book

first of this type i ever read was emlyn williams's beyond belief abt the moors murderers -- i think many more facts are now known abt this, but the book is so good on a sense of manchester itself as the story unfolded: place and psychology and how the city was on the move between past and present (the war generation, the 60s youngsters) and how this affected that transition (hindley and brady "hipster" enough that the pettibon cover for sonic youth's goo -- based on a photo of them -- seems perfectly current and in keeping)

williams was a working-class welsh playwright and screenwriter rather than a journalist: i faintly wonder if his approach to the material isn't an argument with (and implied reproach concerning) truman capote's in cold blood, which was published a couple of years earlier (and a huge literary talking point)*

i think gordon burn's happy like murderers attempts the same approach as williams (as in, is consciously inspired by it), but it's honestly -- to me -- not quite as good: he does a lot of writerly work describing the social milieu the wests existed in but in the end has no felt connection with it? anyway that's how i felt about it

by contrast andrew o'hagan's "the missing" is very good on the nearly invisible social layer of the transients the wests mainly preyed on -- runaways hitchhiking to big cities to escape all kinds of things, no love (or worse) behind them, a gamble against peril before them, and then just vanishment and no one knowing for years and even decades

*the "true but as a novel" technique was newer than the topic, in new yorker terms: editor harold ross always had a small-town tabloid streak to his tastes, and many of his best writers had learnt their trade on city papers -- james thurber for example wrote a sort of genius about willie stevens, a curious character caught up in the hall-mills case: during the media frenzy, stevens had caught the public imagination for his mixture of dignity and oddball perspective on the witness stand

Pettibon drawing is based on a picture of Ian's sister and her fella, but yer point stands.

d'oh, that'll teach me to factcheck via skimreading the very first website i find -- thank you

i read that fire book -- sad story

yeah

anyone averse to me starting a true crime tv/podcast thread? i hate shitting up the book thread with other stuff.

ok i did it bc i’m bored

link it, bae

Use of a logarithm that measures possible traces of serial killers and others:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-serial-killer-detector

"Where's my sh*t? I have a five-year-old in the car." This latest story is something, incl. charges of felony burglary and misdemeanor assault, which seems assbackwards, but I'm not a Republican----for more (though no doubt not nearly all) of the family chronicle, scroll down through the rest of these links, incl. the house party brawl starring a couple of Palin sisters, source of opening quote. Don't ask, "Where are the parents?" They're here too, Snoflake.
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/mat-su/2017/12/18/track-palin-arrested-for-assaulting-his-father-todd-palin/

The Staircase is coming to Netflix in the summer:

The Staircase: the compelling story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16 year judicial battle that followed.

Netflix will air three brand new episodes alongside the original 2004 series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAEZYPCtp-w

It was the owl!

YAY

i happen to just watch the investigation discovery 3 part thing on this (which wasnt good btw), will be interesting what the new eps are, maybe theyve done significant new investigation but the case is clearly capital O over & i cant imagine peterson is cooperating/talking to ppl abt this really

ok yea i guess the new eps will just be the new trial ordered cuz of the lying blood expert guy & mikes alford plea, not too compelling but prob is geared more to ppl whove never seen any of it & bolstering their tru crime library

just started Darcy O'Brien's The Hillside Stranglers

not sure about it so far - it's extremely novelistic

https://www.thedailybeast.com/joseph-james-deangelo-is-suspect-in-golden-state-killer-case-according-to-co-author-of-ill-be-gone-in-the-dark

they arrested someone for the east area rapist/original night stalker/golden state killer crimes described in "i'll be gone in the dark"!

so crazy

like i’m seriously stunned that it happened
and excited
and amazed

that fucking motherfucker

check out this sketch vs a photo of him posted on reddit

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/unknown-suspect-21/@@images/image/preview https://i.redditmedia.com/JIzw-gVBlaJkEBoanzYbBQaoIPGtUmqvxDQ4tkPL0bA.jpg?w=350&s=1c168232a7a6bec5a968b01b30543970

Couldn't find any mention on this thread of The Keepers (true crime docu series on Netflix)? Have only watched the first episode so far, but it's pretty gripping in a low-key way, and has a fairly unusual 'hook' - a couple of women in their sixties doggedly investigating (via a Facebook group) the long-ago murder of a young nun that they were taught by. I get the feeling that the series is eliding certain key facts in order to build a suspenseful narrative, but the imagery, pacing, music all have a nice melancholic feel, and the first ep deals well the w/ the way ppl feel frozen by circumstance when someone they know and love goes missing. Am avoiding all online spoilers, so far successfully, so I don't yet know the significance of the title.

i think there's a separate thread for true crime shows/movies, maybe?

re: golden state killer, it's crazy if they caught him but my impression from reading the book was that he seemed catchable if agencies would actually collaborate and put effort into it - there was dna, there were eyewitnesses, etc etc, so maybe they just needed the publicity of the book to go back and get it done

plus during the period when he was most active, agency collaboration barely if ever happened so perhaps it just needed all the info to be reeexamined now in a time where information sharing is possible & technology is more advanced wrt dna etc

i keep thinking about all the survivors, all those women & their husbands & families & what they must be feeling now. i imagine they’re holding their breath waiting for the other shoe to drop after so much disapointment.

but if it’s true. my god.

my punitive imagination is running wild with all the things i’d love to see done to him

was this guy mentioned in the book at all? i can't remember

Holy shit this is crazy

It’s so fucked up michelle isn’t alive to see this

The Hillside Stranglers book picked up. Much more interesting/less dubious when O'Brien digs into the details of the arrest/trial - especially the stuff about Kenneth Bianchi trying (and succeeding) to fool the psychologists into thinking he had multiple personality disorder based watching Sybil in jail. Also I had never heard about the Veronica Lynn Compton stuff, which is absolutely insane

Shpuld we start a Golden State Killer thread? this is pretty huge

Do it!! I’m at work with spotty reception so it’s hard trying to track updates across different sites.

new thread started

i can’t link on my phone but it’s “Golden State Killer (East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker)”

Couldn't find any mention on this thread of The Keepers (true crime docu series on Netflix)?

Minor discussion here: Netflix show Making a Murderer - Steven Avery case, etc and woven throughout the general Netflix thread starting here: Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Thanks for directing me to the right threads, HL - will read those posts once I've finished the series.

Whodunnit: the husband or the owl? How The Staircase invented true crime TV

VegemiteGrrl, you should read THE ARSONIST: A MIND ON FIRE, by Chloe Hooper, about the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009. Very, very good. And her The Tall Man is wonderful and depressing, too.

oooh will do


timely thread revive: i just finished To The Bridge by Nancy Rommelmann, about Amanda Stott-Smith who dropped her 2 kids, aged 4 and 6, off a bridge in 2008. Awful topic but it’s a great book...very clear eyed but compassionate to pretty much everyone in the town. Affected me a lot, there is a lot to unpack in the story of this woman & her husband. Neither come away clean, which feels ok with me.

I have always had an interest in the way women who kill their children are portrayed, and an interest in the topic itself because it’s so dense & sad & thorny.

Worthwhile if you are inclined, imo

this Jayme Closs case in Wisconsin is giving me some flashbacks to a similar case in my hometown back in the late '80s.

what were the details of the similar case? out of curiosity..

but yeah, the Closs case is pretty scary. i hope they find her by some miracle

it was really not similar, i just get a feeling from it that reminds me of the previous case. it was an estraged bf situation; he broke into his ex-gf's house and killed her parents and tried to kill her brother, she escaped. it just seems like a similar situation where she was the reason for the murders, which in this event gives cause for hope that she'd still be alive and being held.

it also gives me a slight vibe of that terrible case in Texas a few years ago where a 15 yr old girl recruited her bf and his friend to kill her family after her folks told her she had to stop seeing him. BUT it seems to be nothing like that, she's been ruled out as a suspect iirc. but this case does not seem random.

there's one a few people elsewhere online have referenced -- Jennifer Short in Virginia in 2002 https://www.virginiafirst.com/news/local-news/investigators-release-new-plea-for-help-in-short-family-murders/1489863006
Parents were shot, 9 year old Jennifer was kidnapped, and sadly her body was found a month later in North Carolina. They never caught the guy but the motive for the murders seemed purely as a means to kidnap the girl.

Podcast, not a book, but the BBC has a big new 8-part podcast about Waco/Koresh: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06qc33m/episodes/player

ooh thx!

here's a surprise larceny crime ending to a viral crowdfunding story

https://gizmodo.com/couple-and-homeless-man-said-to-have-made-up-story-behi-1830460690

I was thinking the other day that there ought to be more True Fraud content. Fraud gets a lot of play in drama/adaptations like Can You Ever Forgive Me? or The Informant! but there's nobody starting a podcast empire based on random fraud casefiles

That would be cool. I'm interesting in learning more about, like, the proliferation of MLM schemes in 90s Russia.