UBC: Rule, Last Dance, Last Chance

[truepenny]

Last Dance, Last Chance and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

• "Last Dance, Last Chance": Buffalo NY 1999: Anthony Pignataro capped off a long and despicable history of medical malfeasance by attempting to murder his wife as part of a convoluted plot to clear himself of culpability in the death of a woman who came to him for breast-augmentation surgery. Despite the phenomenal amount of arsenic Deborah Pignataro's doctors found in her system, some twenty times the naturally-occurring rate of arsenic in the human body, she survived. Pignataro pled guilty and was paroled in 2013.
  
• "The Accountant": In Seattle in 1948, Jack Gasser murdered Donna Woodcock (beaten, raped, strangled with her own bra, and sexually mutilated after death). Sentenced to life without possibility of parole, he was nevertheless paroled in 1962. He violated his parole in 1964 and was sent back to prison, then was paroled again in 1969. Got an accounting degree; got a job as a state auditor, traveling around Washington state; got married. Got divorced in 1981. Murdered another woman in 1982. (And as Rule points out, there are plenty of unsolved murders between 1969 and 1982 that might be his work as well.) As of 2003, he was 74 and still imprisoned.
  
• "The Killer Who Begged to Die": James Elledge beat a motel owner to death with a ballpeen hammer in 1974. He was paroled and reincarcerated, paroled and reincarcerated, paroled for the last time in 1995 and murdered again in 1998. He said there was something evil in him that he couldn't control. He refused to allow his defense attorney to argue against the death penalty and refused to allow him to file appeals. Elledge died by lethal injection in 2001.
  
• "The Beach": Moclips WA 1975: William Batten picked up two girls hitchhiking, took them to Moclips, then that night found them where they were camping on the beach and murdered them. He was caught partially because of the knots he used to tie their hands, which were exactly the same as the knots he'd used eight years previously when he kidnapped several young boys, tied them to trees, and threatened to castrate them. (He was sent to Western Washington State Hospital's sexual psychopath program and "released shortly thereafter." Rule's had things to say about the culpable negligence of that particular program in earlier books in her Crime Files series.)
  
• "The Desperate Hours": Kent WA 1963: man murders his girlfriend's mother because he thinks she's broken up their relationship, murders his best friend in order to steal his car (which then doesn't start), then invades the home of a woman alone with her three small children, kidnaps her, forces her to drive him to his brother's house, then when the brother (not realizing that the poor woman is a captive) refuses to help, forces her to keep driving him until law-enforcement officers mercifully force them off the road. Psychiatrists argued about whether he was psychotic, schizophrenic, sociopathic, and whether he was or was not legally sane. He was found sane and guilty and sentenced to death in 1971. The death sentence was commuted to life, and the "life" sentence, as per usual, fell a fair ways short. He was paroled in 1991.

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Comments

[akaten.livejournal.com]

(1)Your reviews are great, thanks for posting them.

(2)If you haven't read "While the City Slept" by Eli Sanders, you might want to; it seems in line with your interests.

(3)If you ever put the ancillary material for the Doctrine of Labyrinths online again, please let us know; I was looking for the explanation of the calendrical systems yesterday and was disappointed to find your site down.

Thanks again for sharing your brilliance!