truepenny | UBC: Springer, Body Hunter (Reply)

Body Hunter by Patricia Springer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In fairness to Patricia Springer, she has a very difficult task in this book. Any book about a serial killer has to find a way to organize what is inherently a very complicated story, especially if, as in this case, the killer crosses jurisdictional lines.

Between 1984 and 1986, Faryion Wardrip murdered five women, Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs, Debra Taylor, Ellen Blau, and Tina Kimbrew. After Kimbrew's murder he turned himself in--but did not confess to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, Taylor, and Blau. He was sentenced to 35 years, of which he served 11 before being released on parole. He got a job, remarried, was extremely active in his church. And two years later, cold case investigators looking at the Sims and Gibbs murders were able to get DNA, first to link the two crimes, and then to prove that Wardrip was the killer. He was arrested for the murder of Terry Sims in 1999. He confessed to the murders of Sims, Gibbs, and Blau--and then to the murder of Debra Tayor, for which no one had even considered him a suspect. He pled guilty at his trial and was sentenced to death in 1999, a sentence which still has not been carried out because the case is bouncing around the courts like a pinball. (Wikipedia says: "In 2008, a federal magistrate recommended that the death penalty be overturned because Wardrip received ineffective defense in his trial. On June 14, 2011, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that ordered the State of Texas to either give Wardrip a new sentencing trial, or agree to giving him a life sentence. The case will be sent back to the U.S. District Court for reconsideration.)

Faryion Wardrip is a person who raises a lot of questions about serial killers, and the course of the investigations of his murders raise a lot of questions about law enforcement and our legal system. Barry Macha, who relentlessly prosecuted Wardrip, also relentlessly prosecuted Danny Laughlin, who was innocent. Law enforcement officers in Wichita Falls ignored information they received, including information from officers in other jurisdictions, because it didn't fit their theory. Ken Taylor was hounded by Fort Worth police--and his life was torn apart--because they locked onto the idea that the husband is the most likely suspect. But then in 1999 everything turns around, and you get excellent detective work and interdepartmental cooperation . . . and at Wardrip's trial, while Macha and his team are performing brilliantly, the public defender falls apart, and you're left with more questions about whether Wardrip really got an adequate defense. So there are a myriad of really interesting questions that can be explored through the lens of Faryion Wardrip's case.

Unfortunately, Springer doesn't explore any of them.

She shows that what Ann Rule makes look easy is actually extremely difficult. She's a clumsy writer, exhibiting many problems that anyone who's taught beginning fiction writers (or ever looked at the Turkey City Lexicon) will recognize immediately. As an example, the first paragraph of Chapter 16:

"John, this is Judy Floyd with Gene Screen. I was able to collect a saliva sample from the cup you sent me. I'll be able to make a comparison," the DNA expert told Little, indicating there had been enough of the salivary excretion to perform the test.
(161)

And seriously, that's one example. Her descriptions of the murders are blackly, unintentionally comic, and she explains DNA at least three times, each time badly. She seems to suggest that Wardrip has Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, but she never either (a) makes it clear that she understands the difference between that and OCD or (b) indicates that Wardrip has been formally diagnosed. She has my hobby horse bad habit of writing from the victim's point of view and because she does that, it's impossible to tell, when she's writing from Wardrip's point of view, whether she's making it up or whether it's actually based on her interviews with him. She gives extraneous information that I can't tell what I'm supposed to do with. Her research is sloppy and inadequate (she says in one place that Wardrip is his parents' oldest son, but in another that his younger brother Bryce was afraid of Faryion and "their older brother" Roy (emphasis added). She talks about a learning disability, but it's not clear whether that's something Wardrip told her that she's repeating or something that she actually got independent confirmation of. When there are discrepancies (e.g., between Wardrip's version of his childhood and his brother Bryce's version), she doesn't seem to have made any effort to figure out which story is more accurate, nor does she indicate which story she thinks readers ought to believe. Should we disbelieve Wardrip on principle because we have ample evidence that he is a pathological liar? Or should we understand that his lying was in part caused by his parents' failure to get him help for his intense depression as a child and teenager? Bryce is certainly not an unbiased witness, so when he says that nothing Faryion says about his childhood is true, should we believe that?

If any serial killer's career is an Inferno, then the reader is Dante, and the true-crime writer has to act as Virgil, providing guidance and a clear path through the horrors. Springer fails to give either.

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