s&d: True Crime! books

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.

I trust books over electronic media in most cases. I've never seen a short True Crime book---they gotta fill up with *something*---and, however clumsy some of them may be, they're less likely to elide or skip details for reasons of format (like room for all those commercials on ID, Investigate Discovery TV) or style (kewl podcasts)

Also, even good radio and pod can have me missing what they've just said because I'm still thinking about an earlier part, from maybe just a few seconds ago (yeah can download and replay, or re-stream, but not the same as re-reading, real-time-wise.)

I recently read "Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder" by Piu Eatwell (2017)

If like me you gave up on reading anything about Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia because the whole thing had become a parade of liars and idiots and sentimental weirdos trying to embody Elizabeth herself, I can highly recommend this.

Fuckin FIVE stars for investigative shoe-leather. Not only offers up maybe the only watertight suspect but does so in a very straightforward, journalistic way. The author has a background in documentaries so that clearly helped. Everything's based on newly released files and FOI requests and original case files and interviews where possible, and the suspect she offers up, Leslie Dillon, has always been on the list but the information that seals the deal I guess wasn't released until now because the guy's boss was on the take with the LAPD and they conveniently made everything go away.

Honestly, I'd happily burn everything else I've ever read on this case and just keep this one book.
I mean, there was a time when I thought John Gilmore's "Severed" was legit but it has since turned out to be mostly if not complete bullshit, and don't even get me started on the Steven Hodel nonsense, etc. etc.

seriously: the abundance of primary source material used in this book is enough to recommend it.

Looks good, thanks. Every part and chapter seems to be named after a noir.

yes!

What did you think of that Wondery podcast from a few years ago that linked a bunch of other murders? I can’t remember all the suspects they looked at.

Elizabeth Short is buried at the big Mountainview cemetery in Oakland

xpost I didnt end up fininshing that Wondery cast, but it was more just overproduction exhaustion than anything

Just finished the aforementioned Piu Eatwell book. Wow. I had no idea there was this whole dimension of police department malfeasance surrounding the case. I've never read any other Black Dahlia books but up to now I was led to believe that the eccentric doctor George Hodel was a serious suspect; in fact there seems to be next no evidence he had anything to do with anything. Not being a Dahliaphile it's hard to judge how convincing the author's case truly is, but can anyone deny that the LAPD sabotaged the investigation and that there was a cover up? Loads of circumstantial evidence does apparently point to this one tawdry motel the book zeroes in on. I still have some questions about certain odd aspects to the hypothetical scenario laid out here, but the book is absolutely a page-turner.

Majority of stuff about the LAPD coverup wasnt released til 2016 i think, which was why it went unreported for so long

Interesting. Now I'm wondering if there's any serious researcher out there who can dispute the points made in the book. That also would be interesting. Seems that the main point the naysayers come back to is that Leslie Dillon was proven to be in San Francisco when the murder was committed... but this seems iffy?

that was how Eatwell presented it, yeah

it was interesting reading reviews of this on goodreads, there were some averagey reviews that said it was too matter of fact and not empathetic enough towards Short. I was like are you kidding me!?!, that’s been half the problem with the modern writing on this case, everyone falling over themselves to fetishize Short to the point where she stopped being a real person. i think Eatwell’s emotional distance is a plus here.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/15/us/oklahoma-river-missing-bikers-search/index.html

This is a chilling ongoing case. Without knowing the full details here obv: I just really believe that generally speaking we are largely safe anywhere but there’s a particular horror to perhaps going about one’s life and being ambushed in what seems to be a safe spot. Thinking also about that terrible story a couple weeks ago in NorCal, the family who was grabbed from their store and murdered.

Separately, I read CHAOS after it was gifted to me. I thought it was very interesting, albeit one without any real answers. Lots of defensiveness among the interviewees, which I don’t necessarily chalk up to complicity but more along the lines of people being deeply ashamed they were ever involved with Manson but not wanting to admit it, preferring to forget it instead (Melcher in particular.) The CIA stuff veers towards Oliver Stone territory but there’s some smoke there.