UBC: The Cases That Haunt Us
May. 12th, 2011 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDouglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Lisa Drew-Scribner, 2000. [library]
FBI profiling techniques applied to famous unsolved (or dubiously solved) crimes: Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, the Zodiac, JonBenet Ramsey, the Black Dahlia, the Boston Strangler, and Laurie Bembenek. (It's odd, looking at that sentence, how some crimes are known, in shorthand, for their victim, some for the criminal, and some for the person accused. And the Lindbergh case is immediately recognizable from both sides.) Douglas and Olshaker are very rational, very commonsensical, and fundamentally their technique is to say, This is the crime. These are the requirements for a perpetrator. This is how we might (in 2000) go about catching such a perpetrator. This is how the accused does, or does not, meet these requirements. They figure Lizzie did it; that Hauptmann did it, but didn't act alone; and that accusing JonBenet's parents is nonsense.
This was a good read, very engaging, well laid out as a narrative, very convincing. My only complaint is that Douglas and Olshaker have been infected by the Polish Jew Theory of Jack the Ripper, just as Paul Begg has. The vector seems to be Martin Fido--I need to read his book, obviously--and while I understand why the Polish Jew Theory is compelling (three different police officials talk about a Polish Jew as either a top suspect or the man they "know" committed the murders), I'm just dubious as hell about it. The only one who gives a name is Macnaghten, who is self-evidently an unreliable source (he also fingers M. J. Druitt and Michael Ostrog); Anderson and Swenson, writing twenty years or more after the fact, don't give a name, don't have anything more than a lunatic ID'd by a witness (the witness refused to swear to it), and do show bias against immigrant Jews. Also, which witness was it? He must have been a Jew, since both Anderson and Swenson claim he refused to swear to the ID on learning that the suspect was also Jewish, which means he was most likely Joseph Lawende (who always maintained he didn't get a good look at the suspect and wouldn't recognize him again) or Israel Schwartz (who didn't speak English--and, of course, if you argue the theory that Liz Stride wasn't a Ripper victim, he didn't see the Ripper anyway). The fact that Fido found two Polish Jewish lunatics who more-or-less fit the vague stories of Macnaghten, Anderson, and Swenson (one of them has the right name, the other one seems to have been homicidal) . . . all that means, assuming that the Anderson/Swenson story is true, is that the police heard of a likely lunatic, dragged their poor witness to look at him, and got him to agree--though not to swear--that it was the man he saw. There's nothing in the crimes themselves that points to a Jewish Ripper (if you argue that the Goulston Street graffito was written by the Ripper, there's even evidence that he wasn't Jewish), and I'm just deeply suspicious of the police finding a suspect who so tidily fits their preconceptions of what the Ripper would look like (lower-class, "foreign," visibly, violently insane). Especially when our knowledge of that suspect is limited to (a.) Macnaghten's untrustworthy memorandum, (b.) Anderson's coy hints, and (c.) Swenson's extremely weird story, none of which amount to, well, much of anything.
Otherwise, excellent book. Recommended if you're interested in criminology at all.
FBI profiling techniques applied to famous unsolved (or dubiously solved) crimes: Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, the Zodiac, JonBenet Ramsey, the Black Dahlia, the Boston Strangler, and Laurie Bembenek. (It's odd, looking at that sentence, how some crimes are known, in shorthand, for their victim, some for the criminal, and some for the person accused. And the Lindbergh case is immediately recognizable from both sides.) Douglas and Olshaker are very rational, very commonsensical, and fundamentally their technique is to say, This is the crime. These are the requirements for a perpetrator. This is how we might (in 2000) go about catching such a perpetrator. This is how the accused does, or does not, meet these requirements. They figure Lizzie did it; that Hauptmann did it, but didn't act alone; and that accusing JonBenet's parents is nonsense.
This was a good read, very engaging, well laid out as a narrative, very convincing. My only complaint is that Douglas and Olshaker have been infected by the Polish Jew Theory of Jack the Ripper, just as Paul Begg has. The vector seems to be Martin Fido--I need to read his book, obviously--and while I understand why the Polish Jew Theory is compelling (three different police officials talk about a Polish Jew as either a top suspect or the man they "know" committed the murders), I'm just dubious as hell about it. The only one who gives a name is Macnaghten, who is self-evidently an unreliable source (he also fingers M. J. Druitt and Michael Ostrog); Anderson and Swenson, writing twenty years or more after the fact, don't give a name, don't have anything more than a lunatic ID'd by a witness (the witness refused to swear to it), and do show bias against immigrant Jews. Also, which witness was it? He must have been a Jew, since both Anderson and Swenson claim he refused to swear to the ID on learning that the suspect was also Jewish, which means he was most likely Joseph Lawende (who always maintained he didn't get a good look at the suspect and wouldn't recognize him again) or Israel Schwartz (who didn't speak English--and, of course, if you argue the theory that Liz Stride wasn't a Ripper victim, he didn't see the Ripper anyway). The fact that Fido found two Polish Jewish lunatics who more-or-less fit the vague stories of Macnaghten, Anderson, and Swenson (one of them has the right name, the other one seems to have been homicidal) . . . all that means, assuming that the Anderson/Swenson story is true, is that the police heard of a likely lunatic, dragged their poor witness to look at him, and got him to agree--though not to swear--that it was the man he saw. There's nothing in the crimes themselves that points to a Jewish Ripper (if you argue that the Goulston Street graffito was written by the Ripper, there's even evidence that he wasn't Jewish), and I'm just deeply suspicious of the police finding a suspect who so tidily fits their preconceptions of what the Ripper would look like (lower-class, "foreign," visibly, violently insane). Especially when our knowledge of that suspect is limited to (a.) Macnaghten's untrustworthy memorandum, (b.) Anderson's coy hints, and (c.) Swenson's extremely weird story, none of which amount to, well, much of anything.
Otherwise, excellent book. Recommended if you're interested in criminology at all.
