s&d: True Crime! books

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

xp yea i read the cep book and found it somewhat disappointing overall

Guess these texts, being written, could also be considered true crime as True Crime and thus literature, Your Honor:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michelle-carter-convicted-texting-suicide-case-wants-early-release-prison-n1056396

she was a gr8 texter, deserves release

Word. Oh I went on and finished Cep book---last 100 pages are pretty solid, esp. since I now know when to leap past her tangents. Yall might better wait for the screen or Reader's Digest version though.

after hearing about it on My Favorite Murder i got a used copy of Gregg Olsen’s “Starvation Heights”.
just started today, looking forward to digging in.
er. as much as one can “enjoy” such a awful story.

Just read The Man From The Train, written by sabermetrics baseball dude Bill James with his daughter Rachel McCarthy James. In what seems like a pretty amazing instance of historical detective work, they find connections between more than 20 axe murders of entire families that had mostly gone previously unlinked in late 19th/early 20th century America. Their case seems rock solid on at least a dozen of them, and pretty likely for most of the rest. They managed to dig up a lot of details about the investigations at the time and the innocent men who were sometimes put to death for the crimes. It's pretty impressive!

WBUR's On Point has posted audio and some text of today's interview with the co-author of a new book about the or a child-snatching-selling biz in Memphis, from the 1920s-1950 (some rich folks were customers, incl. big Hollywood names, which added to very eventual tumult). Also phone interviews with survivors and descendants.

On how Georgia Tann, of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, would kidnap children:

Lisa Wingate: “She would take children off the street, off front porches. She would canvas poor parts of town, shanty towns along the river. If she saw availability, she took advantage of it. And, it was a different time. There was no air conditioning. People used to leave children out to sit in the yard, or put a crib out on the porch. Children played outside. That was before the day and time, ‘Don't talk to strangers’ and, ‘Don’t get in a car with anybody.’ And, so, it was very easy for her to roll up. Many children had never been in a car, during those years. And, so, it was very easy for her to roll up and say, ‘Hey, would you like a ride in my nice car?’ And she's this grandmotherly looking woman. And in the children would go.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/10/22/lisa-wingate-before-and-after-orphans-tennessee-children

just reread mikal gilmore's shot through the heart (praised in the O/P), first reread in a while, spurred by lending it to a friend bcz i thought it might chime with her (she has big family problems) and she handed it back after a few pages saying "their problems were way worse, i'm not sure i can handle it"

anyway it's still very strong writing, abt being gary gilmore's brother, in a family carrying terrible secrets, many never revealed (bcz MG fails to uncover them) -- and the ghastly physical abuse and self-loathing and self-destruction that came with this, which wrecked the lives of all his brothers, not just gary's (and those gary murdered), and nearly wrecked his also. i never really rated him as a rockwriter: too much knock-off greil marcus -- but this is rockwriting also and very strong. MG casts it (lightly, but this is definitely there) as a case of being rescued by rock'n'roll, precisely bcz it was a music that faced up to and played with darkness (as of the mid-90s lou reed was his favourite artist): born 1951, when his dad was 61, MG was a decade younger than his brothers and unlike them was able to spin off into the counterculture as a way of saving himself. saving himself in part via elements we maybe look really quite askance at these days? (such as a commodification of rebelling against yr parents; and attitudes towards sex and shame just massively changed from those of his parents times -- and his parents had been rebels and, in his dad's case, worse-than-petty criminals when younger, unknown crimes he was always on the run from)

it's pitilessly grim though, haunted and ghost-ridden, and intensely complicated morally (which is why it's strong: i think MG faces up to a lot and faces down a lot): so much declared love, in all directions, from hateable abusive ppl for hateable abusive ppl. this time through i was more sceptical perhaps than i've been before -- nightmarish as it all, it sometimes felt more pat than it did formerly (i'd have to reeread i think to pin down why i felt this tho, maybe i'm just getting old and cynical myself). a quarter century on i wonder what mikal gilmore now thinks are its strengths and failures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJzGE00wncU

That was a really tough book to read but this looks like it could be good.

Sweet Beadie Russell!

oh wow, def on board for this

Liz Garbus is directing and I just realized she directed Who Killed Garrett Philips? which I’m in the middle of watching

Just started this:

http://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/4C5/8A5/98/%7B4C58A598-1499-49CE-B63E-503057B7D693%7DImg400.jpg

Story may only be familiar to Canadians: in 1959, Steven Truscott, 14 at the time, was convicted of raping and murdering 12-year-old Lynne Harper. He was sentenced to hang, that was reduced to life imprisonment, in 1969 he was paroled, and in 2007 the verdict was overturned. Truscott is still alive and living in Vancouver.

I primarily bought the book because I found a newish hardcover dirt-cheap, but when I started reading and learned how close all this happened to where I recently moved, I've become fascinated. I'm in St. Marys, between London and Stratford; the murder was in Clinton, about an hour away. Two highways I use, 8 and 4, both take you right into Clinton, and it's even part of the school board where I'm just about to apply for supply/substitute work.

I love where I'm living, all small towns and country roads, but there is a weird Ed Gein vibe when I drive around at night.

Okay this story:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/us/idaho-missing-children-couple-found-hawaii-trnd/index.html

I mean the end result seems grimly obvious and awful and boy these two are real pieces of work.

Something v weird going on with cult/religious stuff

yeah that whole story is deeeeeeply fubar