UBC: Henderson, Blood Justice

[truepenny]

Blood Justice: The True Story of Multiple Murder and a Family's Revenge by Tom Henderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Interestingly, although my copy has the same (lousy) cover, the subtitle is THE TRUE STORY OF MULTIPLE MURDER AND TWO DEVASTATED FAMILIES, which is just as bad and inaccurate as the listed subtitle: on the one hand, there's no "revenge" involved: Jeffrey Wayne Gorton was caught and prosecuted legally, not extralegally, and the families of the victims, while involved, were not spearheading anything; on the other hand, it's not TWO devastated families, it's THREE, and I'm not sure who they're leaving out, given that the photographs on the cover are two photographs of Gorton and one of (I think) Margarette Eby--given the crappy interior photographs of the murdered women, it's difficult to be sure, but I'm pretty confident those eyebrows are Eby's. So where's Nancy Ludwig? And is it her family we're discounting as devastated? Eby's family? Or Gorton's family? Because it's hard to imagine anyone MORE devastated than Gorton's wife (who knew he had a fetish for women's underwear, but had no idea it went any further) and two children. And while I'm nitpicking, that silhouette at the top, with the dilapidated house and the tree? What the hell is that supposed to be? Nancy Ludwig was murdered in the Detroit Airport Hilton. Margarette Eby was murdered in her home, the Gatehouse of Applewood, the Mott estate in Flint, MI. (The virtual tour of Applewood, btw, does not mention the grisly history attached to the Gatehouse.) Nothing less like that shack can be imagined. And Jeff Gorton grew up in a middle-class household and himself maintained a middle-class household. No creepy isolated shacks, thank you.

[Here endeth the digression.]

In some ways this is a pretty good book, and in other ways it's not so great. Henderson isn't a bad writer, and he has by god done his homework. He talked to everybody he could (the two people who refused to be interviewed are (1) Gorton and (2) the bureaucrat in Romulus who forced eleven of seventeen command officers in the Romulus Police Department into early retirement two weeks after Gorton's sentencing); he dug into the inter- and intradepartmental politics that bedeviled the Flint police, the Romulus police, and the Michigan State Police, and he did a good job of presenting both sides, particularly in the ridiculous, petty war between the MSP and the Genesee County Prosecutor's office. He even talked to the public defender who made the world's worst botch of Gorton's defense in his trial for Nancy Ludwig's murder (when the prosecutor calls the defense lawyer at home and tells him to get his head out of his ass, you know you are looking at a very special version of bad) and got his version of what went wrong. Henderson's at his best when he's discussing the lawyers and the judge and what happened in the courtroom, and I'm actually giving him that fourth star for that part of the book (i.e., the end), because otherwise this was a three-star book.

Henderson's worst problem is that he doesn't trust his material and therefore tries to jazz it up with flashbacks and flashforwards and intercutting different timelines, whereas I have come to the conclusion that with true crime, you are best served by telling the story in the simplest way possible. If you need fancy rhetorical tricks, you will know. And this story, which is so complicated--Jeff Gorton's criminal history in Florida, the Eby murder and its investigation, the Ludwig murder and its investigation, the cold case squad that decided to take a second look ten years later, and then the forensic investigation that was able, because of the leaps and bounds by which DNA analysis had progressed in those ten years, to link the two murders by the DNA of the murderer's semen, then identified a partial print left in blood in Margarette Eby's bathroom as belonging to Jeffrey Wayne Gorton. And then the story of how they actually caught Gorton. This whole tangled history doesn't need to be made more complicated with narratological flim-flam. It needs to be presented in a way that is as easy to follow as possible, and Henderson irritated me mightily by failing to understand that.

Everyone involved seemed confident that Gorton had murdered more than twice--and I would tend to agree. The escalation from knocking women down and stealing their underwear in Florida to rape, torture, near decapitation, and necrophilia in Michigan is so dramatic that it seems like Margarette Eby can't have been his first homicide victim. But if any progress has been made on linking Gorton to unsolved cases in Florida, Michigan, or anywhere else, nobody's talking about it.



View all my reviews