s&d: True Crime! books

the yogurt shop case reminds me a lot of this one, which occurred not far from where i lived and fucking terrified everyone. it was one of the more despicable crimes i'm familiar with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown's_Chicken_massacre

yeah they are both really terrifying

i think abt the Yogurt Shop case a lot, it really got to me having worked late night fast food shifts as a teen.

the Brown's Chicken case put me off working late nights during the summers while i was off at school, i was spooked. the sheer horror of the crime coupled with the terror of the unknown, just a crime like this occurring and the perpetrators evaporating into the night like that, and the presumption based on the location that they lived in the immediate area. which was in fact the case.

*while i was off school

well they did find Jayme Closs obviously!

haven't seen the details but it was apparently a carefully planned murder and kidnapping, and i'm sure some details will be kept on lockdown for the time being.

it seems like there has been a decent number of cases in recent years where women or children have been kidnapped and located alive months or even years later. it seems to be more cases than i remember occurring in previous decades. maybe it's just recency bias, idk.

So I just finished reading "Monster City: Murder, Music, and Mayhem in Nashville’s Dark Age" (which is really good) and seeing those two posts above about the Brown's Chicken massacre, apparently for quite a while investigators were sure it was committed by Paul Dennis Reid, who killed seven people in three similar robberies in Nashville.

never heard about Reid! guys like that are terrifying.

there's a certain vulnerability to being a late-night worker at a slightly remote location of a fast food joint or convenience store. the Brown's Chicken location was on a stretch of road going through Palatine, which late at night was not very busy. It was a standalone building sitting in the parking lot of a strip mall. All off by itself, everything else was closed.

And it was particularly singular because as far as anyone knows, the killers simply committed that one massacre just for the thrills and never did anything remotely similar again. They went on to live their lives are seemingly normal family men. Til one of their exes finally confessed to her spouse what she knew about that night, then the cops took some DNA from some half-eaten chicken left at the scene, and which they had very smartly preserved just in case, and they tied it to one of the guys.

Speaking of True Fraud, the saga of Miranda, among other names, went on for years, through the shadows of backstories of prominent men---this is quite a scroll-a-thon, but worth the effort: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/1999/12/miranda-catfish-movie-199912

so my wife is toying with the idea of doing some research and writing a true-crime book about her dad, the J***** P3t3r referenced in this article: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bzn2gnnasoeuy8q/The_Gazette_Tue__Nov_11__1975_.jpg?dl=0

his life story (what we have been able to piece together anyway) is pretty insane. have to wait til the shutdown ends to see if she can get his FBI file.

that is nuts

I’m very interested in how the Closs story develops. I’m wondering if this is a case of this guy grooming a child, maybe online, and then brainwashing her to believe they’re meant to be together and it’s her parents keeping them apart etc etc.

I heard on the news that he worked with her parents for one day three years ago, then quit. Also that the police think he was hunting, trying to retrieve her, when they apprehended him.

The blandest-looking murderer-kidnapper yet, in his early 20s.

The fact that she escaped at all is huge. Brave girl.

Also thx for posting about Monster City, Eliza!
I have put it on my “read next” list.

Vaguely related, I had an Uber driver a couple of years back in Nashville, ex-cop who worked the downtown beat in the 80’s. He was very tight lipped for most of the ride but eventually hinted at some pretty dark stories while we talked & i started asking the right questions to show I was genuinely i interested. but I didn’t get to press him for details bc we were riding with a bunch of my idiotic coworkers who kept butting in to ask him for bullshit tourist suggestions. They all left the car saying “ugh that driver was a buzzkill” and i was like “you guys go and i’ll ride around in the car with Sgt Buzzkill til you’re done.”

Οὖτις, it took me longer than it should have to realise the photo of the screaming suspended child was nothing to do with the article you referenced on the same page. Fascinating stuff, though.

Haha I know, right? Just a human interest blurb/photo of a screaming kid lol

I wasn’t sure where to put this. Yesterday was the anniversary of this horrorshow - I had never heard of it & the local news report made me cry. seeing the file footage of those little kids is so heart-wrenching.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(Stockton)

I remember when it happened. There was some hand-wringing about California leading in mass shootings and then then nothing was done as usual.

VG, after you read it, Google some of the cases because there were developments even after the book went to publication!

Can anyone recommend any books on street gangs / drug activity, especially ones written by people who got out of the business? I only have My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King, which I haven't started yet. I always avoided this type of literature, because there have always been gangs where I've lived, and it hits too close to home, but lately I've become friendly with a couple of people who spent their youth selling drugs and so I'm more interested in "the life".

Thanks ahead of time.

I finally got around to reading Prophet’s Prey about Warren Jeffs. it was one of the rare times where I had to quit for mental health reasons. It’s thorough & well written but it’s SO heavy subject-matter wise & he is so thoroughly awful. Which I expected but I guess I wasn’t ready for the onslaught.
I mean, I was halfway through & there was even wholesale dog massacre to go along with all of the other horrors.

;_;

D:

you guys
Robert Kolker's Lost Girls
cannot recommend it enough. you gots to read this srsly
― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl)

About 50 pages in--still backstory, but building well.

a lot of it IS backstory, but to me that is the power of the narrative he built.

Very well written--sad. I just hope I can keep the five women differentiated; by the time the story returned to Melissa around page 60, I had to go back and skim the first chapter.

True crime-adjacent, but I just started last night reading Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love and Overcoming by Kerri Rawson, daughter of BTK Killer Dennis Rader.

oh wow, let me know how it is!
i saw the 20/20 interview with her on tv a while back

I'm only about 60 pages in but really enjoying “The Trial of Lizzie Borden,” by Cara Robertson. It doesn't try to solve the crime, but it places the murder in the context of the social issues during the Gilded Age and includes lots of interesting stuff about the family and friends, much of which I don't remember reading about before. I've always been fascinated with LB because my grandmother lived just two streets up from the Borden house at the time of the murders (August 1892), when she was 2. She said her family used to visit the home before the crime.

Anyone read Claudia Rowe's The Spider and the Fly? A little overwritten at times, but the story--very much a Silence of the Lambs relationship between the writer and the killer--is compelling and sordid.

"the last stone" is good if you can handle detailed descriptions of sexual abuse/violence towards kids. it's very deeply researched.

The Kerri Rader Rawson book was . . . OK? A lot of it is religious testimony, which I expected given the title. But it also deals a lot of trauma, mourning, PTSD and other things in a way you don't normally get to read. And there are parts that are tough to read where she talks about her father being made to discuss his crimes in detail in court, and her putting together facts about their lives with where her father was and what he was doing at the time.

i am finally reading fatal vision. what an insane story! trying not to read anything else about it until i finish

Yeah, I never finished it. Can only take so much stabbing and mayhem.

They convicted the guy in the McStay murder case last week, announcing the penalty shortly. Either life w/o parole or death row. ultimately what probably nailed him was they pinged his phone to the location of the gravesite. whoops.

I just recently finished Norco '80, about the 1980 Norco, CA bank robbery/shootout that involved a 25-mile chase through Riverside and San Bernardino countries, 35 wrecked law enforcement vehicles and a dead state trooper. A fascinating read if for no other reason than a) the four perpetrators were dumb as hell, and b) their defense attorneys had pure brass balls.

Oh wow! Had no idea there wa a book about that

Thanks to an unidentified neighbor on my block who left a copy of it on the sidewalk, I just plowed through A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris. This is about the Jeffrey MacDonald/"Fatal Vision" case, but Morris pushes completely contradictory conclusions to the ones Joe McGinness espoused in Fatal Vision. Morris basically suggests that MacDonald was railroaded by the government, got an unfair trial in 1979, and perhaps is completely innocent.

I've admittedly never read Fatal Vision but this book certainly makes a lot of eye-opening points, while throwing a bit of critical shade at McGinniss and other journalistic sources. It appears that Morris did a good amount of legwork and was able to interview many of the people involved in the case. A lot of Amazon reviewers aren't impressed with the book's findings or hypothesis, but it seems that people have strong opinions about this case, which is a pretty inexplicable one any way you look at it. Anyway, the book's an addicting read and gave me the creeps.

Now I see A Wilderness of Error was discussed in this thread back in Feb. 2013 (I missed this because I thought the book was more recent)

i finally finished fatal vision and wasn't sure if i wanted to read wilderness of error maybe just because of internet reviewers. i was left convinced that mcdonald is an awful person and i don't want to hear that he's innocent. but perhaps later.

Of this family of products I have only read Janet Malcom's The Journalist and the Murderer lol

lol. next thing i was gonna say is one of mcginness's afterwords responding to malcolm convinced me she was rong, but i haven't read that either. i'm just in the mood to believe what i read, i guess.

'who killed garrett phillips?' by liz garbus on hbo was p good, reminded me vaguely of the steve avery case

I read Mark Bowden’s “The Last Stone” and man, it is a trip. and so Infuriating! they spend 3 years interrogating a compulsive liar, and even when they get conviction they still cant get all the details out of him. The self-preservation these assholes have where they withhold so much info & barefaced lie because they think it will be better for them, “aw i dont want to do more time, i need a deal” and its like YOU KNOW HOW TO FIX THAT? MAYBE DONT RAPE & MURDER CHILDREN YOU GODDAMN CREEP

ugh

sry

re Jeffrey MacDonald, just reading the Morris book I couldn't make sense of why so many people think he's a psychopath (unless obv you first presume he did the killing), but I guess one of the criticisms of Morris is that he downplays or ignores the evidence of his psychopathy... still not sure exactly what that evidence is, I assume it's to be found in Fatal Vision.

Not a book, but police in Korea apparently just solved the 30-year-old serial killer case on which "Memories of Murder" was based: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190918000889

About 3/4 through Casey Cep's Furious Hours--Murder, Fraud, and The Last Trial of Harper Lee. Good start, with the usually downlow Lee, unrecognized by others in the courtroom as she watches:

The defendant was black, but the lawyers were white, and so were the judge and jury. The charge was murder n the first degree. Three months before, at the funeral of a sixteen-year-old girl, the man with his legs crossed patiently beside the defense table had pulled a pistol from the inside pocket of his jacket and shot the Reverand Willie Maxwell three times in the head. Three hundred people had seen him do it. Many of them were now at his trial, not to learn why he had done it---everyone in three counties knew that, and some were surprised no one had done it sooner--but to understand the disturbing series of deaths that had come before the ones they witnessed.
One by one, over a period of seven years, six people close to the Reverend had died under circumstances that
nearly everyone agreed were suspicious and some deemed supernatural. Through all of the resulting investigations, the Reverend was represented by a lawyer named Tom Radney, whose presence in the courtroom that day wouldn't have been remarkable had he not been there to defend the man who killed his former client. A Kennedy liberal in the Deep South... and kind of a post-modernist, fearlessly case-by-case Atticus/WASP WASPJose Baez pistol of a defender--who had first met Lee at the kind of NYC party she rarely attended, but it wasn't near a typewriter and there was free booze---so we get how she, with all her chronic insecurities, and now without the agent and editors (all dearly departed)who had steered her through Mockingbird, yet still with the talent and skills she'd developed when Capote talked her into being his investigator---also with her misgivings about what he did with her results---also with her knowledge of legal research and procedure--she'd dropped out of law school six weeks before graduation---came to this case...

Main prob: overly detailed backstories--right off, we get the whole process of a populated area becoming a man-made lake and reservoir--it took a lonngg time---during which the black Reverend was born to a life of toil, for which he was overqualified, overachieving, and overdressed. There's also a history of insurance in general, and of how blacks were exploited by it---the last part of which is relevant only by contrast, since the Rev. and his attorney were adept at gaming the system, as plaintiff and defendant: anybody could take out a policy on anybody, so he did, and then they would be found dead. The author makes some good, sometimes obvious points, but tends to take a while.

If this is your one-stop for the early-to-prime-to-twilight of Lee and Capote, personally and and professionally, and for the Age of Wallace, and all sorts of Southern Gothic historical tidbits, if you know nothing about any of that, and really want to binge, you've come to the right place. If you like to edit as you read, ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto ditto.

The main storyline is clearly presented, and could make a good movie (w backstories in compressed flashbacks)

According to the Criminal Procedure Code at the time of the crime, the statute of limitations for the last of the serial killings ran out in 2006.

uh, wow