s&d: True Crime! books

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

Jeeezus

more details
https://www.businessinsider.com/timeline-mysterious-events-surrounding-doomsday-couple-chad-daybell-lori-vallow-2020-2?amp#click=https://t.co/VCKI6mJ8dd

insane story. i am interested in mormons, cults, and doomsday preppers. venn diagram isn't it.

i am reading american predator by maureen callahan

law enforcement seems to be giving them a surprisingly long leash...i mean the kids are nowhere to be found and they still haven't taken them into custody.

Yeah I’d really like to know if there are particular legal reasons for that. It seems v weird to not be demanding they produce the kids immediately

what the actual

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/missing-idaho-boys-former-school-190833864.html

New information continues to surface in the bizarre case of Joshua “J.J.” Vallow and 17-year-old Tylee Ryan, two missing children from Rexburg, Idaho.

Before the family’s move to Rexburg, JJ attended Lauren’s Institute For Education (also known as L.I.F.E. Academy) in Gilbert, Arizona.

Margaret Travillion, the co-founder & CEO of L.I.F.E., has released a statement outlining the timeline of the little boy’s enrollment — as well as the news that his mother, Lori Vallow, has repeatedly continued to sign into the school’s classroom monitoring system using a special app, even though JJ has not been a student at the school since September 2019.

“It would appear that an application or phone identified as Lori Vallow has been continually monitoring JJ’s classroom communication system we use between the classroom and the parents, in addition to our organization as a whole,” Travillion says in the statement, which was provided to PEOPLE. “Upon discovering that Lori’s name was used to sign on to this app, the name Lori Vallow has been tracked multiple times since JJ was unenrolled.”

Travillion says some of these log-ins occurred around Thanksgiving, as well as around Christmas, when the news about JJ and Tylee’s disappearance took the media by storm. She also said someone using Lori Vallow’s name continued to access the school’s app even as recently as last week, after which administrators removed her access. “We cannot speculate as to why Lori or someone using her accounts or electronics would continue to follow the classroom or our organization during this time frame,” Travillion says.

weird

No criminal charges are pending against either Lori or Daybell, although authorities previously said that her refusal to produce the children last month as ordered by an Idaho court would risk civil or contempt of court citations that have not been issued.

^^^wow call me crazy but seems like a harsh punishment for two missing kids

i finished american predator. it was ok. low grade reading level, the author is a new york post critic, which i didn't realize until the acknowledgments. i'm not a big serial killer person, but it was interesting enough. i need another book now.

yeah i need some fresh recommends too

Has anyone read Chaos by Tom O’Neill?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/07/chaos-charles-manson-cia-secret-history-sixties-tom-oneill-dan-piepenbring-review

It’s as much about journalistic obsession as it is about the weird links between the Manson family and a whole host of government agencies, and is inevitably inconclusive, but it’s pretty wild.

I finished Grace Will Lead Us Home by Jennifer Berry Hawes, about the Charleston Mother Emanuel church shooting. author is a Local journalist, which lately I have found is usually a good sign of a sensitive telling. Really, really good. Mostly devoted to the survivors, does a great job of telling their stories. the details of the shooting itself were even more awful than I knew, and I knew it was beyond awful
alreeady.

sharivari i was looking at that. my library has the kindle so i will queue it. i started the last stone by mark bowden.

it’s a good one. harrowing though.

–Kaua‘i police arrest Lori Vallow on $5 million warrant from Idaho– pic.twitter.com/n2ghadtfal

— Kaua'i Police Department (@kauaipd) February 21, 2020

i am a little entertained watching her bail hearing because i do this irl like every day and it's equally mundane. i like people's accents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAbLceWMVkI

the guardian review of the o'neill book abt manson and mk ultra (weirdly not mention: call it by its name dude) is shockingly crappily written, given that its author peter conrad "is an australian-born academic specialising in english literature" (and also that the guardian has good sub editors some of whom we know on ilx)

"chaos" was interesting but exhausting

TIL that mari gilbert, the mother of one of the "lost girls" of the book of the same name, and whose tenacity lead to the investigation of those deaths, was murdered by her other daughter. gilbert is being played by amy ryan in the new "lost girls" movie based on the book but apparently they don't include her murder in the movie either. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/26/the-tragic-tale-of-a-daughter-accused-of-stabbing-her-own-mother-to-death/

oh god that is awful. that poor family :(

I never read the book -- and obviously won't, now -- but the FX series about The Most Dangerous Animal of All is pretty good. I think "guy desperately wants to believe his dad was the Zodiac killer and deluded himself into believing it" is actually weirder and more interesting as a show

catching up with this thread---re clemenza on British Columbia, thought of this, in latest dispatch from The Crime Lady (AKA Sarah Weinman, who has written about true crime and edited domestic suspense anthology, also that d.s. box set for Library of America):
If you are not listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About — and if not, why not, it’s wonderful — they are doing a book club-in-progress on Michelle Remembers, the long out-of-print 1980 tome by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Larry Pazder, that was essentially the “Patient Zero” of the Satanic panic. I am beyond fascinated with this story, since it originated in Victoria, BC, and 40 years on, encapsulates everything about the panic in a single story.

From her enewsletter before that one: true crime and (mostly) related fiction:

So many authors are seeing their book tours canceled, years of dreams supplanted. Amy Klein, who has a book coming up in April, on https://electricliterature.com/what-its-like-to-try-to-promote-a-book-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ and alternative ways of doing so.

Which is also why I want to stump for my favorite books of 2020 so far, some that aren’t yet published yet:

The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg (I reviewed it here: https://airmail.news/issues/2020-1-25/chasing-rainbows)

Weather by Jenny Offill — a timely novel that’s only going to get more classic over time.

Pretty As A Picture by Elizabeth Little — the voice! The insight into moviemaking! The scathing commentary about sexual politics and true crime! The teens! We did an event at Chevalier’s Books last month and I’ve never wanted an event to go on for many more hours. That’s what the book is like.

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong — a brilliant collection as a whole, but I was particularly taken with her piece on the life and murder of Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, an artist I’ve long wanted to write about (Dictee is one of my favorite books of all time) but now I don’t have to.

Lurking by Joanne McNeil — for the Internet old-timers, for those who want to know when the Internet was good, why it went bad, how it can foster community, it’s just a wonderful, thoughtful book.

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson — for pure confection, post-modern mystery escapism.

Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar — my favorite debut crime novel of 2020 (out in April), just spot on about transforming life into art and who gets sacrificed — particularly women — as a result.

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker — Lost Girls was a stone masterpiece and so is this book, out in April.

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins (it’s out in May, and it singed my soul for how good it is)

My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman — chances are you’ve read some of the essays already published in venues like Longreads and Glamour, but trust me, the entire collection — also out in May — is dynamite. I’ll be thinking about the final piece for a long, long, time.

These Women by Ivy Pochoda (also out in May, and it reverse-engineers the serial killer narrative from the vantage point of all the women — victims, loved ones, those on the margins — who don’t end up in his orbit, but supersede his orbit.)

Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak (also out in May!) — I loved how it mined a woman’s drifting ambivalence through life, marriage, travel, and there are no easy answers, nor should there be.

Mother Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman (out June 23) — this novel had me questioning all of my life choices, and it wrung me dry. I felt changed reading this.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Duchess Goldblatt (out in July) — it stole my heart and is a damn good memoir about creating a new identity to save yourself.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby (out in July) — my other favorite debut crime novel of 2020.

The Devil’s Harvest by Jessica Garrison (out August 4) — I blurbed this because it’s a propulsive and incisive look at a hired killer who targeted those on the margins — often poor, undocumented immigrants living in the Central Valley — told with necessary compassion.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman (out September 29) — another book I blurbed because it made me understand the complex, hard-to-pin-down man that was Marvel Comics’ id and superego, and the archival research is amazing.

There will be more added to this list, of course. Let’s keep reading, let’s keep supporting authors, in this time and at all times.

Jenny Offill book is fantastic, Peter Swanson book is fun but daft as a brush

Got this from the cheap online remainder house I buy from:

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328347182l/8728693.jpg

As I started reading, I realized the story made an appearance on Mindhunter.

man the whole Dean Corll story is so fuuuuuuucked up. thats one that kept me up at night

Definitely. I'm just where Elmer Wayne Henley has killed him and they're digging up bodies. The first part of the book is mostly about a completely uninterested police department.

plus iirc that was published in 74... Brooks & Henley’s cases were still going through court up til like 79 or 80 i think. helluva long sad tail to that story.

Brooks died this year of COVID!