s&d: True Crime! books

that's a black spot in my aussie true crime ocd --- I haven't read a thing. Sorry, i've failed u :(

I just noticed the convo about MacDonald from a couple months ago. So here's a weird thing, my dad's best friend went to HS with MacDonald and they were best friends. At one point he dated Collette (iirc that was MacDonald's wife's name) and JM dated the girl my dad's best friend would later marry. Anyway, this man still to this day raises money for JM defense funds and swears up and down he's innocent.

xpost there are 3 books about it and all three of them look like they could be either great or garbage. The movie kicked my fucking ass a couple of months ago so I wanted to do some follow-up...

i read a shitty book about columbine and it made me feel awful especially as i was reading it during the boston marathon bombing stuff. now i'm reading "in cold blood" which is way better obv.

I just finished (like, yesterday) Dave Cullen's book on Columbine which I thought was excellent: patient, lucid, cutting, and non-hysterical. Was that the one you hated?

yeah. i thought it did a good job of analyzing dylan and eric but (gonna sound like a creep here) thought he went a little overboard on the emotional wreckage. i shouldn't have called it a shitty book, it just made me feel shitty.

oh it made me feel shitty too!

Miami New Times is re-featuring their original three part story that became the basis of the Pain & Gain movie. Bonkers story worth reading even if you're not interested in the movie.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/specialReports/pain-and-gain-from-new-times-story-to-michael-bay-film-1890864/

!! ooh yay I can't wait to read this.

Dateline is doing an update on the Michael Peterson case. Let me take this time to once again plug The Staircase and encourage those of you who might want to watch it to avoid this Dateline because The Staircase is as amazing as a mystery as it is as a true crime documentary. But if you've already seen The Staircase, Dateline!

Man, Dateline is hilarious for the cuts to the overly made-up interviewers nodding sagely.

I always think of Bill Hader's Keith Morrison impression.

going through a withdrawal of new 48 Hours Mystery episodes.

This is the second time this week we have watched Dateline.

Anybody read "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi? I thought it was amazing

this is not a book obv but the recent "this american life" episode "dr. gilmer and mr. hyde" is relevant to the interests of the people in this thread

ooh thx!

Oh yeah, that was a good one.

listening now!

god bless north carolina for their richness of local accents and expressions <3

:(

Haven't read a whole lot from this genre: In Cold Blood, books on O.J., Andrew Cunanan, and Ed Gein, and that may be it. But I put aside a couple of other things I was reading to start on Invisible Darkness: The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, which I found in a thrift store yesterday.

Have troubled reading this genre as it is just too crepey, sorry. One time read a few books by guy who was a James Joyce, Flann O'Brien scholar - no, not the pinefox, and was creped out for weeks. Fictional crime don't have quite the same problem with.

Only other thing I have to add right now is that I met Gordon Burn who is mentioned upthread a few times in London and New York and he was a super nice guy.

This thread seems to be mostly about murderers, but does anyone have any recommendations for books about other true crimes? I like stuff like Iceberg Slim or drug books like Snowblind, although it's questionable how true either of those are. Are there any good books about con artists?

check out 'the big con' by david maurer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Maurer

I liked Blowback by Lee Bullman/MIchael Forwell. Not about a con artist, but the shipping of marijuana from Thailand to the US.. Fitted in with my true crime preferences: exotic locations, no violence, insights into how becoming a multi-millionaire might change you.

cool thanks!

Perfect Victim, about the Colleen Stan case, is a good one. No murder, but it's got kidnapping, S&M, torture, captivity, Stockholm Syndrome . . . Definitely one of the weirder cases I've ever read about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Colleen_Stan

How about The Skies Belong to Us by Brendan I. Koerner, about a young amateur revolutionary couple who hijacked a passenger jet in California and ended up in Algeria in 1972. The main narrative is murder-free, though there is some grisly stuff when the author tells the wider story of the skyjacking craze of that era (plus a little Vietnam War horror). It's a cracking good read, and like the best true crime, you can't believe it all really happened.

The Big Con seconded, it's a fantastic book - cool analytic style that doesn't quite pokerface through maurer's delight in the machinations, psychology & (above all) the language of con-men. Love it so much. Found it in a random room one night after some party or another; meant to sleep but could not stop reading it, was convinced I'd stumbled on the best book in the world.

I think about the bit with marks who seek out con games often.

drug books like Snowblind, although it's questionable how true either of those are

i've always assumed snowblind is more or less true, since the same guy (right?) turns up in blow, doing exactly the same kind of thing

snowblind is a great read if you can find it, very of its time. the author makes an impassioned argument at one point that cocaine is non-addictive

Anybody read "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi? I thought it was amazing

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Friday, May 31, 2013 5:55 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i read this recently and agree it was pretty great. it wasn't until about 10 pages into the satanic conspiracy stuff that it dawned on me that wait, could this be, maybe, the same prosecutor as... [spoiler redacted]. plus the whole thing about sardinia basically being the "hills have eyes" of mafia culture, the bizarre peeping tom subculture, preston's ripley-like obsession with thomas harris, etc

Snowblind - and its follow-up, Smokescreen - are p common in the uk. Only thing I remember abt Snowblind is that at one point someone rolls up a copy of Time magazine to make a gigantic spliff out of.

pretty good: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201308/thomas-quick-serial-killer-august-2013

This is pretty interesting about how DNA testing can go wrong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/high-tech-high-risk-forensics.html

Have trouble reading this genre as it is just too creepy, sorry.
― Orpheus in Hull (James Redd and the Blecchs)

Halfway through the Bernardo/Homolka book, and what these people did, and the lives they led together--which I only knew in broad outline before--is altogether beyond comprehension.

n/a, just finished reading that GQ link - really interesting. Thanks from posting it!

strongly recommend "the skies belong to us" by brendan koerner, which is generally about the skyjacking pandemic of the late '60s and early '70s and more specifically about a couple who pulled off one of the most successful/longest distance skyjackings ever. just a really crazy, fascinating story. especially good for the people who were looking for less gory/disturbing true crime books upthread.

that was brought up somewhere else... totally want to read it!!

does it talk about the D.B. Cooper case?

Yes it does. The author thinks Cooper must have died in the jump. (It was me who mentioned this book about 12 posts upthread).

Can anyone recommend a good book on either Charles Whitman or Richard Speck? I've seen a few online, most appear to be out of print, and there's even one about the two of them together. As I posted above, I'm pretty new to this genre. Whenever reading non-fiction about something I'm really interested in, I prefer an author who just tells the story and stays out of the way.

sorry, josefa, i must have read your post at the time and then forgotten anyone else had talked about that book before me. anyways it's a really fun book.

clemenza, this book seems to be highly regarded and a good read (haven't read it myself):

http://www.amazon.com/Sniper-Tower-Charles-Whitman-Murders/dp/1574410296

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Personally I would like to find a good resource on Richard Ramirez. "Satanic" murders are pretty interesting to me. As an aside to that, does anyone know if David Berkowitz' claim of being in a satanic coven has been proven to be bullshit or not?

Thanks, missed that one--will order it tomorrow. I find Whitman fascinating too. He--and Speck--somehow seemed to belong more to Manson and what came after them than anything that came before. The Bogdanovich film gets some of that.

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Wait, what?

Now I'm reading the medical commission's report on Whitman's autopsy: http://alt.cimedia.com/statesman/specialreports/whitman/findings.pdf (pdf)

Huh, a GBM.

The GBM was associated with a congenital AVM, which is also unusual. The description of the pathology is otherwise very typical, I'm sure a panel at MD Anderson is going to be correct in making that diagnosis.

Wikipedia says it might have been pushing on his amygdala, but that's not exactly close to the "right temporo-occipital white matter", where the tumor was found.

Is that the theory in the Lavergne book?

Most GBMs of smaller size ("size of a pecan") are minimally symptomatic unless they're near eloquent cortex (which Rt T-O is not) or unless they cause seizures. Behavioral changes can be caused by persisting epileptic activity in the brain, despite showing no obvious outward manifestations of seizures ("non-convulsive status epilepticus"), but this is rare and not usually associated with violence AFAIK.

thanks for the details!

just finished reading the excellent monster of florence book, thanks to whoever mentioned it above. any similar recommendations? something well-written, twisty, turny, etc

a friend put me onto a 2011 Australian mini series 'Killing Time' starring David Wenham

Veg, did you ever see 'Blue Murder', about Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson (for those outside Aus, a very corrupt cop and his hitman/rapist offsider) -- very well done, very bleak series