UBC: Rosenbaum, Travels with Dr. Death

[truepenny]

Travels with Doctor Death by Ron Rosenbaum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I first encountered Ron Rosenbaum with his excellent book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which is a collection of investigative journalism essays about all the theories people have about what made Hitler into what he was (and in fact the last essay in this book bridges the two collections). This collection is not themed in the same way; it's just a bunch of essays Rosenbaum wrote in the '70s and '80s about a whole host of crazy things: JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, Watergate conspiracy theorists, the BATFUCK NUTS things the CIA was doing in the '80s, the cancer clinics of Tijuana, the phone phreaks, the extremely uncomfortable and awkward questions raised by nuclear deterrence theory, and some splendid true crime essays: the unsolved murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer (who was, among many other things, one of JFK's mistresses); a drug dealer's murder in Brooklyn; the very strange death of David Whiting; and the title essay, which is about Dr. James Grigson. Grigson was an expert witness Texas prosecutors called in basically on behalf of the death penalty. Grigson's schtick was pronouncing the defendant an incurable sociopath, guaranteed to kill again, based on nothing but the prosecutor's "hypothetical" reconstruction of the crime (in a Kafka-esque catch-22, the Supreme Court had judged it unconstitutional for Grigson to examine the defendant himself, because that violated the defendant's 5th Amendment rights). Grigson was a terror on cross-examination and he knew exactly how to get juries to believe him. A particularly perceptive defense attorney told Rosenbaum, "If you ask me, he's the sociopath [...] He's the one who, despite reprimands, goes around making pronouncements which have been condemned by his profession. He's the one who does it over and over again with no remorse [...] Just like a sociopath" (234). And Grigson tells Rosenbaum about the defendant he does get to examine, Gayland Bradford:

"And as I was leaving he pointed his finger at me and said, 'You're slick.'"

"You're slick?"

"Yeah, it was 'Hey, man, you're slick.' It's the sociopath's compliment. It's the recognition of the sociopath for somebody who appreciates what he really is."
(233)

Grigson doesn't quite say, "it's the recognition of the sociopath for another sociopath," but that isn't very far beneath the surface of his grammatically convoluted explanation.

(I notice that, while Rosenbaum doesn't mention all the testimony of future dangerousness listed by the site I found Gayland Bradford on (which, as it happens, is the Clark County Indiana prosecutor's website, which lists all the times the death penalty has been carried out since 1976 because, apparently, there haven't been enough of them), the Clark County website doesn't mention the testimony of Dr. Grigson. Further note, because irony is good for you, Bradford wasn't put to death until 2011--twenty-three years after he murdered Brian Williams, twenty-one years after he was sentenced to death, and seven years after Grigson died of lung cancer.)

It's probably hyperbole to say that Grigson was a sociopath--but is it more hyperbolic than Grigson's own on-the-spot "hypothetical" diagnoses of incurable sociopathy?

At this point, this collection is something of a historical artifact, but Rosenbaum is a smart, thoughtful, engaging writer, and beneath the dated topicality, what he's writing about is the weird, dark, twisted side of human nature, and that, my friends, is still extremely damn relevant.



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