UBC: three books about murderers
Dec. 12th, 2011 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyStarr, Douglas. The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 2010.
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell. 1998. New York: Owl Books-Henry Holt & Co., 2000.
(1.) Joseph Vacher, the subject of The Killer of Little Shepherds, was a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. He killed, raped, and mutilated (in some order) twice as many people as the Ripper, most of them teenagers, both male and female. You've never heard of him because he was caught, tried, convicted, and executed; there's no mystery to build a myth around.
The Killer of Little Shepherds is probably the best of these three books. It's well written, thoughtful, and persistent; it recognizes that its subject raises very difficult questions about mental illness and legal responsibility and evil, and it talks about those questions both as the authorities of the day understood them and as we understand them now. And it distinguishes clearly between the two.
Also, reading about late nineteenth century scientific in-fighting is always fun.
(2.) (Most over-used words in the genre of true crime: "shocked" and "shocking.")
For the Thrill of It is, conversely, the most disappointing of the three books. It suffers from a number of problems, the first and probably worst of which is that Leopold and Loeb just aren't that interesting. Or, perhaps, the ways in which they are interesting are things that this book failed to illuminate.
Baatz is an academic historian deliberately trying to write a "popular" book, which is not an auspicious combination. He says in his author's note that he wanted to write about the competing scientific paradigms/understandings of mental illness and crime duking it out in the Leopold and Loeb trial (i.e., in a nutshell, free will vs. determinism), but it's not clear from the actual text of the actual book that this was his goal. In fact, what the book is most signally lacking is a thesis of any kind. He's not making an argument about anything, just collecting and sorting the mountain of primary source material. (Apparently, there are great wodges of transcript which have been neither stolen nor written about already; see above re: L&L not being interesting.) And he's not even particuarly good at organizing--he never seems to be sure where he thinks the story starts.
And there are two problems with source material. The first is that, while Baatz clearly dislikes Nathan Leopold and distrusts his autobiography as a source (for neither of which, let me be clear, I blame him), he (a.) uses Leopold's autobiography as a source anyway and (b.) never offers explicit evidence that Leopold is lying. The second is that, although he's careful to assure readers that all dialogue is taken from transcripts, he has an awful, awful habit of describing the thoughts and feelings of murder victims--for which he can have no reliable source.
I got the feeling, as I read, that Baatz wasn't very interested in L&L either. He doesn't follow up even very obvious contradictions, e.g. the contradiction between Loeb not being interested in sex (as he himself said in interviews with psychiatrists) and the claims that he extorted sex out of other inmates at Stateville. (I'm not saying that Baatz should have an answer, because there may not be one; I just want him to point out the problem.) And there are plenty of others. Baatz doesn't provide any kind of analysis, even of the psychological/psychiatric questions he says he's interested in, and he makes no effort even to articulate the paramaters of the question that underlies the whole trial (and what continuing interest in the case there is): Why did they do it? Or, the other way around, why did they fail not to do it?
(3.) Unheard Cries is the most problematic of the three, in some ways more frustrating and in some ways less frustrating than For the Thrill of It. Its subject is Mary Bell, who murdered two little boys in 1968, when she was eleven, and who subsequently got dragged through the British justice system in ways that Sereny is quite right to want to protest. My problems with the book are not with that part, or with Sereny's general point that child criminals are very badly served by adult legal systems. My problems are with her discussion of Mary Bell's crimes and what caused them.
Sereny displays a dreadful historical naivete: "The uncertainties of our moral and--yes--spiritual values have caused a fracture in the bulwark of security with which earlier generations protected children from growing up prematurely" (370), which I think contributes to her failure to interroagate the question of classism in Mary Bell's biography as rigorously as she needed to. There are a number of other questions that she doesn't pursue as far as she should (and she irritates me by hinting at things), but the real flaw in the book is the other little girl.
Norma Bell (no relation) was Mary's best friend. She seems to have had nothing to do with the first murder, but everything to do with the second, and I really wanted Sereny to talk about that shift in a meaningful way--even just to talk about the transition for Mary from her first murder (which she committed alone and for which, you could make a pretty good case, she did not have a clear understanding that death was irrevocable) to her second (which she committed with Norma either as a participant or an audience, and which she did know was murder and permanent).
Sereny wants to generalize from Mary Bell to all children who kill (as her nested subtitles suggest), and while I think that's reasonable when talking about their treatment by the justice system (as in, one may safely generalize from Mary Bell's specific case to say that better protocols need to be in place), I'm not convinced that all children come to murder by Mary Bell's path. And I'm not sure that the commonality Sereny wants to argue for (that children who kill are all victims of prolonged and serious abuse) is actually as useful as the obverse difference: why do all child abuse victims not become child murderers? The question may sound glib, but I'm perfectly serious. The question of what enables some people to resist doing evil, while others cannot or do not, is one that morality, philosophy, and psychiatry, put together, still can't answer. And it's a question that the cases of Vacher, Leopold & Loeb, and Bell--in different ways--all shed illuminating darkness on.
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell. 1998. New York: Owl Books-Henry Holt & Co., 2000.
(1.) Joseph Vacher, the subject of The Killer of Little Shepherds, was a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. He killed, raped, and mutilated (in some order) twice as many people as the Ripper, most of them teenagers, both male and female. You've never heard of him because he was caught, tried, convicted, and executed; there's no mystery to build a myth around.
The Killer of Little Shepherds is probably the best of these three books. It's well written, thoughtful, and persistent; it recognizes that its subject raises very difficult questions about mental illness and legal responsibility and evil, and it talks about those questions both as the authorities of the day understood them and as we understand them now. And it distinguishes clearly between the two.
Also, reading about late nineteenth century scientific in-fighting is always fun.
(2.) (Most over-used words in the genre of true crime: "shocked" and "shocking.")
For the Thrill of It is, conversely, the most disappointing of the three books. It suffers from a number of problems, the first and probably worst of which is that Leopold and Loeb just aren't that interesting. Or, perhaps, the ways in which they are interesting are things that this book failed to illuminate.
Baatz is an academic historian deliberately trying to write a "popular" book, which is not an auspicious combination. He says in his author's note that he wanted to write about the competing scientific paradigms/understandings of mental illness and crime duking it out in the Leopold and Loeb trial (i.e., in a nutshell, free will vs. determinism), but it's not clear from the actual text of the actual book that this was his goal. In fact, what the book is most signally lacking is a thesis of any kind. He's not making an argument about anything, just collecting and sorting the mountain of primary source material. (Apparently, there are great wodges of transcript which have been neither stolen nor written about already; see above re: L&L not being interesting.) And he's not even particuarly good at organizing--he never seems to be sure where he thinks the story starts.
And there are two problems with source material. The first is that, while Baatz clearly dislikes Nathan Leopold and distrusts his autobiography as a source (for neither of which, let me be clear, I blame him), he (a.) uses Leopold's autobiography as a source anyway and (b.) never offers explicit evidence that Leopold is lying. The second is that, although he's careful to assure readers that all dialogue is taken from transcripts, he has an awful, awful habit of describing the thoughts and feelings of murder victims--for which he can have no reliable source.
I got the feeling, as I read, that Baatz wasn't very interested in L&L either. He doesn't follow up even very obvious contradictions, e.g. the contradiction between Loeb not being interested in sex (as he himself said in interviews with psychiatrists) and the claims that he extorted sex out of other inmates at Stateville. (I'm not saying that Baatz should have an answer, because there may not be one; I just want him to point out the problem.) And there are plenty of others. Baatz doesn't provide any kind of analysis, even of the psychological/psychiatric questions he says he's interested in, and he makes no effort even to articulate the paramaters of the question that underlies the whole trial (and what continuing interest in the case there is): Why did they do it? Or, the other way around, why did they fail not to do it?
(3.) Unheard Cries is the most problematic of the three, in some ways more frustrating and in some ways less frustrating than For the Thrill of It. Its subject is Mary Bell, who murdered two little boys in 1968, when she was eleven, and who subsequently got dragged through the British justice system in ways that Sereny is quite right to want to protest. My problems with the book are not with that part, or with Sereny's general point that child criminals are very badly served by adult legal systems. My problems are with her discussion of Mary Bell's crimes and what caused them.
Sereny displays a dreadful historical naivete: "The uncertainties of our moral and--yes--spiritual values have caused a fracture in the bulwark of security with which earlier generations protected children from growing up prematurely" (370), which I think contributes to her failure to interroagate the question of classism in Mary Bell's biography as rigorously as she needed to. There are a number of other questions that she doesn't pursue as far as she should (and she irritates me by hinting at things), but the real flaw in the book is the other little girl.
Norma Bell (no relation) was Mary's best friend. She seems to have had nothing to do with the first murder, but everything to do with the second, and I really wanted Sereny to talk about that shift in a meaningful way--even just to talk about the transition for Mary from her first murder (which she committed alone and for which, you could make a pretty good case, she did not have a clear understanding that death was irrevocable) to her second (which she committed with Norma either as a participant or an audience, and which she did know was murder and permanent).
Sereny wants to generalize from Mary Bell to all children who kill (as her nested subtitles suggest), and while I think that's reasonable when talking about their treatment by the justice system (as in, one may safely generalize from Mary Bell's specific case to say that better protocols need to be in place), I'm not convinced that all children come to murder by Mary Bell's path. And I'm not sure that the commonality Sereny wants to argue for (that children who kill are all victims of prolonged and serious abuse) is actually as useful as the obverse difference: why do all child abuse victims not become child murderers? The question may sound glib, but I'm perfectly serious. The question of what enables some people to resist doing evil, while others cannot or do not, is one that morality, philosophy, and psychiatry, put together, still can't answer. And it's a question that the cases of Vacher, Leopold & Loeb, and Bell--in different ways--all shed illuminating darkness on.
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Date: 2011-12-14 02:31 am (UTC)Baatz has an endnote on "Leopold and Loeb in Fiction," which does at least give a rundown of their fictional career, but it's only three pages long. No analysis to speak of.