s&d: True Crime! books

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of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy, popular among New Lefties in 70,s although it's been updated and superseded by The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, most recent ed.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.

That story is very weird. It’s still not clear to me if they found dismembered? The articles I read sort of implied it with the wording: “remains” used instead of “bodies”; uncertainty over how many people were found; the descriptions of “limbs sticking out of the water”.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/oklahoma-missing-men-killed-dismembered

without knowing the full details, it seems like they were trying to commit a crime and got caught in the act.

on a reddit thread someone linked this unrelated story, just as an example of a lot of the violence in rural areas of Oklahoma.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/15/oklahoma-murders-white-supremacists/

two different things obv, for one this recent story could have been a crime borne of economic desperation that ran smack-dab into "stand your ground", but who knows.

Has anyone read The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth, about the Austin TX “servant girl annihilator” killer (a sobriquet coined by O. Henry)? Grabbed it from the library, going to dig in soon.

Currently in the news: there’s that horrifying murder case in Idaho, which is a nightmare scenario and I hope it’s solved ASAP.

so that Idaho case seems to have been solved but boy that is a terrifying case. the reddit/internet sleuths were all over it, in predictably disgusting ways, with lots of casualties of the true crime theorizing occurring along the way (an ex-bf, the roommates, a neighbor, random party guests, etc)

the real standout being the tiktok psychic who implicated a U of Idaho professor, was subsequently sued, and then doubled down on her theory. some real "tell me you want to go broke without telling me you want to go broke" stuff there.

yeah. still some pretty big unanswered questions. i’ll be interested to read a full accounting once the details have been pieced together.

I was actually impressed with the quality of the police work, from my POV of internet guy with opinions.

so i did finish The Midnight Assassin, which is a really good one. basically, this was the first serial killer in the united states (known serial killer, that is) and this was less a crafty creepy guy who was quietly killing people, and more an unhinged opportunistic type like the Zodiac, and one who likewise remains unidentified and likely always will be. it's an interesting book, very good, tapping into racial tensions in Austin at the time, the effect it had on city life (this case seems to largely be what inspired the city to implement light towers everywhere several years later), and how it cost multiple politicians their careers despite the case being effectively buried by history over time.

Thanks I’m downloading that one

Finally read David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI: screwed out of their ancestral homelands for chump change, a deal you really can't refuse, they buy land in rocky, barren hills of the Oklahoma backside, going cheap and to Indians because white men don't want it and prob never will, so at least they can subsist peacefully, finally. Then: Oil, and what many, not all, white men consider consider to be crazy rich Indians (actually, the "headrights," mineral rights, of each share are held in collective trust by the tribe, so it's really mostly a matter of being able to afford new clothes, jewelry, store-bought liquor if that's your pref, housing, cars, albeit often sold at significant profit by whites)(one of whom is satisfied to report that Osage spend no more foolishly than whites)
The reaction reads like a slow-mo, much more "rational" improvement on the Black Wall Street massacre, with local interests prevailing on D.C. to create "guardianships" for each adult Osage, dispensing funds, also, in some cases, marrying into and decimating their families, including their own resulting off-spring, to inherit as much as possible---but in any case, many white law men are at least pliable (coming from an ill-educated professional tradition established via recruitment of gunslingers), also signif involvement of other officials, lawyers, undertakers, aforementioned merchants of various kinds, doctors---for quite a few years, despite increasing headlines and even real pressure, also a countervailing force of whites, though many of these are also killed, made examples of.
(J. Edgar balancing everything on fulcrum of career interests duh)
Pulled me along but Osage tend to get overshadowed by battlin' white people in most of the book, though they keep reappearing for good scenes, quotes---the last section is its own countervailing force, as Grann talks and travels with descendants of the Osage victims and of their white murderers, in several cases. There are still personal and professional (privately funded) investigations ongoing, including of killings and historically significant death rates that have never been dealt with by Authoritahs: they got a few good convictions and moved on to other matters.

Is that a spoiler? omg the details though.