s&d: True Crime! books

Wow, that's amazing. He hasn't been that prominent in the book thus far.

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.

― ShariVari, Friday, February 14, 2020 11:18 PM (six months ago)

ok i'm almost done with this and it's pretty good. i started helter skelter a long time ago but never finished it and it makes me never want to read it! since he's convinced me it's all LIES.

I just finished it recently!

Bug is widely accepted as a total douchecanoe & kinda poisoned the well

The CHAOS book is really good - worthwhile buuut but with some caveats: it’s largely an exercise in watching someone lose themself in the rabbithole;

on the Los Angeles-centered stuff he’s great & raises good questions about Melcher, the Sherriff’s actions, and Bugliosi too

But on the CIA & was he an informant bigger spook stuff he just doesnt have the connections or the right kind of investigative experience to really illuminate any new or good information, by the time he gets there it feels like he’s drowning in theories & not ruling anything out. Also a lot of “...but he’s dead” / “he refused to talk to me” / “and then he hung up” / etc

Also the moment when he caught himself imploring Sharon Tate’s *father* to “think of the victims” it definitely got very YOURE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT DONNIE

But all those peripheral people are fascinating so it still leaves you with a lot to explore, even if it doesnt quite go anywhere

Hats off to the editor because LORD that must have taken some doing to turn O’Neills notes into cogent narrative of any kind

yeah, agree with all that. at least he was contrite about his mistake with sharon tate's father but he could have just cut that whole part out, it didn't add anything to the story. i do think there was something to the fact that a lot of these guys couldn't explain their unusual actions & were funded by known CIA fronts but agree that i'd like to see someone with a background in intelligence to dig into it, because he got to the point that *it's conceivable* there's something there but not beyond. they could have the same trouble with missing info though, who knows. had someone else made these connections before him? it's not a case i'd read a ton about.

would like to know more about roman polanski too but felt like his suspicions about him were not well founded, just some odd behaviors that could have been innocent

innocent is not the right word to describe polanski at any point in time but you know what i mean

polanski suspicions wrt sharon’s murder mostly feel opportunistic, it’s just over-scrutiny of someone who was grieving in a really unhealthy unhinged way
he is fucked up and guilty of many things & not deserving of much sympathy at all but i think melcher & wilson deserved way more scrutiny than polanski

i kept thinking, if someone like an ex local news journalist had done this, and really pushed their connections, you could probably get some interesting stuff

i think a lot of stuff is known in the manson-obsessed community but not many other books that I know of collect all the wackos in one place like O’Neill has here

Ed Sanders’ The Family is a good followup now that you have all the nerdy trainspotter stuff situated - it was written in 71 and is a good ground-zero place to really start honing your what-ifs ... plus he writes in a very grooooovybaby way lol

I read several reviews, saw a couple interviews with Jeff Guinn that made his Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson seem professionally credible: he researches details and familial-societal context of origin quite a bit, not settling for The Bad Seed but not reductive either.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/819EGR5PZXL.jpg

i guess one benefit of the first-person rabbitholeness aspect of this book is that it lends the theory more credibility than if he had come at it another way. he wants to assure you he is NOT a conspiracy theorist and is resistant to believing any of this is possible, which i can relate to. i think i am going to be reading more books about the CIA. lol.

yeah i read about half of that a while ago, it had to go back to the library. but i remember liking it.

Also, one of his lost girls (who testified for the prosecution):
Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties, by Dianne Lake, seems like it might be good---not enough by the female participants and/or survivors, seems like.

Guinn’s book is the best at unravelling the mythology of Manson & just showing him as the humbug he was: a carny, a pimp & an egomaniac. Highly recommend.

I have Lake’s book in my pile of “to reads” but I haven’t read it yet — need to dig in to that

xpost Those mentioned and several others, incl. O'Neill and Sanders, cited here, in the wake of Tarentino:
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/books/charles-manson-family-murders-books-once-upon-time-hollywood-864908/

I think Guinn is a really good grounding, and the exact opposite of what-if. You really get a tangible, unvarnished & uncomfortable understanding of the reality of Manson, his crimes & his relatiinships. I think it would especially effective as a counterbalance to O’Neill’s freewheeling red-string-diagram.

Veg, pretty sure you will enjoy DES currently on in the UK: David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11656892/

oh whoa didnt know about this! thx fod the heads up

showing him as the humbug he was: a carny, a pimp & an egomaniac

i think maybe you are forgetting 'murderous sociopath', because it's too hard to describe him accurately without mentioning the murders as part of who he was at the time.

i figured that was implied but ok

A long Black Dahlia story from crimereads.

https://crimereads.com/the-black-dahlia-history-los-angeles-cold-case/

not a true crime (maybe?), but since chaos got me interested in the CIA so i read the devil's chessboard by david talbot. pretty good. author believes more in the anti-soviet project than i would have liked, but it's a good overview of the first few decades of the CIA. it touches on sidney gottlieb and patrice lumumba assassination and some other things that i knew about, but there are many more forgotten things. i kept going to myself, "they what?!" a few more books like this until i'm someone who won't shut up about the CIA.

oh interesting, i’ll add that to my list!

i feel like anytime cia involvement is revealed a family member somewhere is reading the news like “wait so crazy uncle jerry was telling the TRUTH?”

EXACTLY

i'm really angry that you go to school and learn about the kennedy assassination in history and it's just this thing that happened, a crazy guy was mad at him or whatever, *it is a mystery*. it's not a mystery! same as learning about latin america. fuck!

Plus there’s shit like Greece or Chile and it’s like these mfers are gaslighting everyone, ~also~ high school textbook writers

open yr eyes, maaaaaan

I must be a masochist ... I got this 700 page book Deconstructing Jack where the guy drains the piss out of every Ripperologist ever. He sez Jack the Ripper don't exist, he was a bunch of guys. I say "like, duh",seems kind of intuitive. I mean there's this chapter long bit on Irish Nationalists and the Times, loads of social history without someone's pet theory getting in the way.

that sounds nice though. does it presume some knowledge about jack the ripper? i confess i don't know a lot about that one.

I have just started tackling it, so I dunno, but I have watched a jillion documentaries and read a bunch of books and my impression is that the whole premise is that Ripperologists are full of shit, so you'd have to be familiar with that culture. There's really no point in the book where says, "here's what went down." I'm into it because I like Victorian history and old newspapers.

I still want to read Bruce Robinson’s Jack the Ripper book because I’m such a withnail nerd

New book on the Bruce McArthur killings in Toronto:

http://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1191-1/C8C/36D/42/%7BC8C36D42-756A-4B8A-9787-1BE4BE959616%7DImg400.jpg

Another CIA book worth a look, tho I have 0 idea how accurate: The CIA and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy, popular among New Lefties in 70,s although it's been updated and superseded by The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, most recent ed. that I've seen is 2003.

Prob got the Contras in there, with Noriega playing and plying all sides, incl. various Colombian associates.

started this yesterday, already nearly halfway done. nothing really new to me yet because i live here and i had read all the articles but may be more interesting to the uninitiated.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51cFhDXSUEL._SY346_.jpg

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved-amateur-codebreakers-51-years/

i need a new one

Just started this (quote from Jeff Guinn on the jacket):

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585172862i/52041387._UY400_SS400_.jpg

oooooh

I'm always plugging this site--you can get it pretty cheap here.

https://bookoutlet.ca/Store/Search?qf=All&q=we+keep+the+dead+close

Chaos seems to be £0.99 on Kindle this month in the U.K.

So fucked up, esp. toward the end----and "deathbed confession"=somebody in the newsroom finally heard about the attorney's memoir? I'd like to read it---like, what *else* did he do/not do?? Meanwhile, I assume this is pretty much the same as the NY Times paywalled version: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/kidnapping-what-kidnapping-the-irish-pair-arrested-in-one-of-new-york-s-most-bizarre-cases-1.4648464

Interesting piece on how true crime heightens anxiety. I've never engaged in the genre so no idea whether it's true or not.

https://www.gawker.com/culture/true-crime-is-rotting-our-brains

it's a lot more true in the past decade with podcasts and netflix and stuff. like anything now you need to get clicks and more sensationalism = more clicks = more anxiety about crime. i don't listen to that many of the podcasts and have not heard my favorite murder but from what i know about it i agree with bergquist's thesis. but yeah i am really bothered by how a lot of it plays into very right wing narratives about crime. i am still a true crime consumer but always try to select for...not that stuff.

i mean a lot more interested in historical, deep dives into like why did this person end up this way, how did the cops/prosecutors screw this up, etc.

I used to enjoy My Favorite Murder. After listening to their episode about the Vampire of Sacramento, I made a nightly ritual of locking my downstairs windows for probably a year. I'm sure I've taken many other survival tips to heart from them.

Ultimately though, there was a lot to dislike about it. The legion of obsessive fans was not great. This became more prominent when they shifted to doing a greater and greater percentage of live episodes - like, you could hear the thousands of people screaming in excitement as they were about to be regaled by a hometown murder. That was pretty gross.

it’s a good essay but man I also am living in a time where i also get v tired of these essays

i want to go back to when no one cared abt true crime & it was just mass market paperbacks in the weird section of the bookshop & i could engage w it freely via books & news items & a few dorky blogs without raising some wider concern that i am not engaging in other healthier passtimes

agree!

So my plumber just tried to kill me

— Lena (@banalplay) October 14, 2021

i just for fun looked up who the top patreon show is these days and this is so fucking bleak pic.twitter.com/uTirxDKEyJ

— venom jason (@jeremythunder) October 14, 2021

the My Favourite Murder people became so smug and cutesy after a while that I did start to feel that it was making light of the horrendous shit they were covering. had to stop listening.

i feel like there should still be a of shame about the prurient interest we take in this shit, rather than celebrating it like its Star Wars

I don't think of myself as part of that prurient "we": for one thing, my early experience further encourages me to think of it as a part of life, and I'm always interested in how all the people involved wrap their brains around violent events and the aftermath, and what more this tells me about ongoing problems (incl. fucked-up responses of the police, prosecutors, public, prisoners and guards etc). Reveal is a no-BS deep-dig series in this regard, also Teresa Carpenter's nonfiction Missing Beauty, also xpost Jeff Guin's exemplary Manson bio.