Technical Difficulties

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This excellent book must have been a bitch to write. Cep is telling nested stories: first the story (insofar as it can be pieced together) of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who may or may not have murdered 5 members of his family for the insurance payout, and who was himself murdered at the funeral of the last of his possible victims, then the story of Maxwell's attorney, Tom Radney, who was also the attorney for Maxwell's murderer (and got him off with an insanity plea, which amounted to a few weeks in the hospital and then, pronounced sane, being released), and then the story of Harper Lee trying and failing to tell the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell. All three of these stories are also stories about race in the South, itself a difficult subject, and then all obscured by the passage of time and the intrinsic secretiveness of Harper Lee. Yeah. A bitch to write.

Cep does a beautiful job. The book is gorgeously readable and she deals with her wide-ranging subjects gracefully (which I do not mean as a synonym for either "tactfully" or "ignoring the problematic bits"). And the true crime story in the middle is maddening and fascinating. (I was also very interested to learn how much Harper Lee had to do with the writing of In Cold Blood, and how ungratefully Capote treated her, his childhood friend, thereafter.) Did the Reverend do it? If he did, how did he pull it off? I completely understand why Harper Lee was defeated by the combination of the elusive nature of the story and her own demons.

I'm not sure Cep finds any answers. Certainly she does not solve the mystery of the Reverend---which to be fair is not her project at all---and the answers to Harper Lee are possibly unfindable. But Cep does say, HEY HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS, and she poses those questions extremely well.



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"Until You Are Dead": Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History by Julian Sher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Despite its clunky title, this is a very good book about the Canadian Steven Truscott, who in 1959, at the age of 15, was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper---a crime he did not commit. (His sentence was commuted to life in prison.) The book is partly a biography of Truscott and partly an investigation of the investigation into Lynne Harper's murder, pulling all the evidence out and examining it carefully, including evaluation of witnesses. The prosecution built its case on two child witnesses who couldn't keep their own stories straight but whose evidence pointed to Truscott's guilt, while seeking to discredit child witnesses who told consistent stories that exonerated Truscott. Also, because the laws of discovery in 1959 didn't require them to, the prosecution did not turn over to the defense a BOATLOAD of evidence that pointed toward Truscott's innocence, choosing instead to harp on the cherry-picked evidence that did not contradict the theory of Truscott's guilt. The trial judge was also biased toward the prosecution, and his charge to the jury was both biased and factually inaccurate. And then, of course, the authorities doubled-down as the legal question became a political question, not was Steven Truscott innocent? but were the police wrong? Judging by this book, it's almost impossible for someone living in 2020 to imagine how infallible the police and the legal system were perceived to be in 1959 and how vitally necessary the government felt that perception to be. (Many people in power seemed to feel that admitting error in the case of Steven Truscott would be tantamount to approving the downfall of Canadian civilization.) The history of Steven Truscott's attempts to prove his innocence is also a cultural history of the paradigm shift that is the 1960s, as mainstream culture learned to distrust its authority figures.

The book was published before a decision was reached in Truscott's final appeal, but Wikipedia tells me his conviction was overturned in 2007---even though, even then he wasn't declared innocent. It was merely admitted, finally, almost 50 years later, that his guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.



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Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by Jim Schutze

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a better book than I thought it was going to be. It starts off slowly, partly because Schutze is trying to convey the aimlessness of the lives of his protagonists, white middle-class high school drop outs who work minimum wage jobs (if at all) and smoke a powerful amount of marijuana along with doing a variety of other drugs. Ironically, the only one who was even trying for anything better was the murder victim, Bobby Kent, and it's not clear how much of that was HIS motivation and how much was his father's pushing. These are kids whose parents don't know what to do with them and who don't know what to do with themselves. They have no aspirations, no work ethic, and the kind of amorality that tags along with entitlement. They feel they have the right to do whatever they want, and if that includes murder, well, then, so it does.

It's also clear that the murder victim is just as bad as any of the others. He's a bully, a homophobe, a rapist. He seems to enjoy his 'roid rage and go out of his way to find people to vent it on. He and his best friend/murderer had a habit of harassing mentally disabled people. And, yes, that best friend/murderer oxymoron: Marty Puccio was Bobby Kent's best friend, but he was also his favorite punching bag, and eventually in the love/hate balance, hate got a lot heavier than love.

But this isn't just the story of Marty and Bobby. It's Marty's girlfriend Lisa who decides Bobby has to die and does all the planning, roping in a ridiculous number of people: her cousin, her friend, her friend's friend, her friend's boyfriend, a self-styled "Mafia hit man." Lisa can't commit murder herself---she tries and fails---but that doesn't lessen one iota her determination to see Bobby Kent dead.

The first half of the book, the lead-up to the murder, would almost be funny if you didn't know someone was going to end up dead, because these people are as incompetent at murder as they are at everything else. The second half of the book, the aftermath of the murder, would be funny if it weren't so appalling. They all agree they won't tell anyone, and within two days, five of them have told at least one person. They work out an alibi, but Marty can't remember what it is when he's talking to the cops. Lisa---and her mother and uncle and cousins---believes she hasn't actually done anything wrong. SHE didn't murder Bobby Kent; she literally didn't touch him. And she cannot grasp that that literal sense of murder simply isn't what's on the table. (She and several of the others are also violently allergic to the word "murder," like it's somehow better if you just say you killed someone.) She cannot grasp that what she did was just as wrong as what Marty did. She doesn't seem to have a real good grip on the idea that what she did was wrong at all. And Marty, who is a kind of ambivalent figure in the first half of the book---he goes along with all of Bobby's sadistic schemes, but he's also victimized by him, and Lisa insists that he has a softer side, that it's Bobby who makes him mean---doesn't seem to care. His feeling seems to be that if what he did was wrong, that's really not his problem. The book ends, almost triumphantly, with Marty getting the death penalty (and seems to be unaware of how this complicates the question emblazoned on the dust jacket, DOES ANYONE DESERVE TO DIE?), and I must note anticlimactically that his sentence was later commuted to life.

This is one of those cases that make pundits wail about modern youth. As a reference point, Bobby Kent was murdered in 1993.

Four stars.



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Interpreting the Ripper Letters: Missed Clues and Reflections on Victorian Society by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the kind of book I've come to expect from M. J. Trow: interesting, easy to read, refreshingly commonsensical (a rare trait in a book about Jack the Ripper), slapdash in the research. He also loses points for being the kind of guy who thinks women accuse men of sexual harassment for fun, and in general he's pretty you-kids-get-off-my-lawn about the 21st century, but he makes a surprisingly cogent point at the end, that the people who wrote Jack the Ripper letters were basically the same thing as internet trolls.

Trow does not for a moment believe that the Jack the Ripper letters were written by the Whitechapel murderer (I forgive him SO MANY THINGS for his take on Patricia Cornwell), so his analysis of them is really an analysis of the darker corners of the public reaction to the murders. Since I've read Evans and Skinner's excellent Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, there weren't any big surprises for me: the people who claim to be Jack the Ripper, the people who claim to know who Jack the Ripper is, the people who are so chaotic and dysfunctional it's hard to tell WHAT they're claiming, if anything. Trow also traces the lines of misinformation that start the instant the police decide the Dear Boss letter is genuine and goes into some of the wackier "solutions," like Stephen Knight's infamous conspiracy theory involving Sir William Gull, Walter Sickert, and the Freemasons, and an idea apparently floating around the internet right now that Lewis Carroll was the murderer. And he talks about other serial killers who did write to the newspapers and the police, like Neill Cream and the Zodiac, although he doesn't really come up with any clear-cut explanation of what he's trying to prove.

I don't know how you ought to organize a book about the Ripper letters, but Trow did not pick the best way, since I'm hard-pressed to identify what his organizational principle was. Insofar as a book 179 pages long can feel meandering, this one did. But it was a very down-to-earth and rational discussion of an extremely irrational crop of letters.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book, written in 2004, about the NYPD Cold Case Squad. As I think I've mentioned before, I love cold case stories, and Horn does a fantastic job of following the case from the time the murder was reported to the time a cold case detective either finds the murderer or has to give up. (Or until she finished the book.) She's also just a great writer, someone whose prose it's enjoyable to spend time with, and she's very good at conveying the detectives who are her subjects. And she has the ability to tell anecdotes and make them meaningful, which is a rare talent indeed.



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Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Excellent biography of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Guinn is a really good writer and has done a lot of research, including getting access to the unpublished memoirs of Clyde's mother and youngest sister. He is empathetic with his subjects without at all sympathizing with them, and he's very clear-headed about Clyde's shortcomings as a criminal mastermind. He does find that Bonnie and Clyde's legendary devotion to each other was real; neither would leave the other, even when it was clearly in everyone's best interests for them to do so. He does a good job of bringing both Clyde and Bonnie to life without indulging in stunt writing, and I love the sections in his end notes where he talks about his various sources and their contradictions.



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The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey by John Dickson Carr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is interesting, a true crime novel twenty years before Capote wrote _In Cold Blood_. Carr's book is nothing like Capote's. It is about the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678 and also, because these things are inextricable, about the Popish Plot and Restoration politics and that dreadfully malevolent figure, Titus Oates.

(For my money, Titus Oates and Judge Jeffreys--who also appears in this novel, although as a lawyer, not a judge--are two of the most terrifying figures in English history. Oates is weirdly similar to the afflicted persons of Salem Village--less than twenty years later--in that he would denounce you as a Catholic traitor for the flimsiest of reasons, or for no reason at all, and because the men in authority followed him blindly despite every effort on the part of Oates' victims to make them see the truth.)

Carr writes with a cheerfully omniscient narrator and an encyclopedic knowledge of the time period he's talking about. As one would expect from a Golden Age mystery novelist who was rigorous about the fair play of his clues and solutions, his answer to the question Who murdered Sir Edmund Godfrey? is very plausible. It makes sense of all the weird features of the case, including why the murderer was never caught.



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Shattered Sense of Innocence: The 1955 Murders of Three Chicago Children by Richard C. Lindberg

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is a not-very-good book about the Schuessler-Peterson murders of 1955 and the byzantine interconnections of Chicago-area criminals that eventually led to their (maybe) solution in the 1990s through an investigation into the disappearance of the candy heiress Helen Brach.

It's partly not Lindberg and Sykes' fault that the material of their book is hard to follow; the maze of informants and horse traders and stablehands and arsonists is inherently confusing. But I also think they could have done a better job of laying out the case against Kenneth Hansen--or of laying out the fault lines and failures in that case. They try to do both and succeed at neither.

They also have one of my personal hobby horses: sections from the viewpoints of the murder victims--also sections from the viewpoints of other people, including the chief ATF investigator (uncomfortably sentimental) and one of the informants, and maybe the problem with the book is most neatly encapsulated in the fact that this section is based on testimony that was hotly contested at Hansen's trial--testimony given by someone who admitted under oath that he was a liar--and which may in fact be a complete fabrication. So what is it doing as part of the narrative of the book, rather than merely part of Roger Spry's testimony? Lindberg and Sykes never explain why they've chosen to believe Spry, and at other points in the narrative, it doesn't seem like they do believe Spry. The same goes for the section from Herb Hollatz's PoV: the trial makes it clear that Hollatz's account may or may not be true, and the very end of the book suggests that Hollatz himself was the murderer.

This failure to distinguish clearly between things that are proven and things that are stated, likewise the failure to make clear the book's thesis--are they presenting the case for Hansen's guilt? for Hansen's innocence? are they doing a just-the-facts-ma'am presentation of the course of the investigation and trials?--make the book unsatisfying, although the subject matter was interesting enough that I finished it.



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The Serial Killer's Apprentice: And 12 Other True Stories of Cleveland's Most Intriguing Unsolved Crimes by James Renner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Because I liked True Crime Addict so much, I ordered The Serial Killer's Apprentice from Amazon. It's a collection of Renner's true crime writing about unsolved cases in the Cleveland area. The stories range from weird to creepy to terrifying, and Renner's writing is engaging, both straightforward and thoughtful, throughout. Having the defects of their virtues, these are stories without closure; Renner doesn't pretend to have solved any of these cases, only turned the spotlight back on their loose ends and inconsistencies. If you like that kind of thing, as I do, this is a great book. If you don't, you'll find it frustrating.



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The Woodchipper Murder by Arthur Herzog III

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The first episode of Forensic Files is about the gruesome murder of Helle Crafts (and, yes, Fargo is based on it, too), so I knew exactly what this book was about when I saw it. It's not like Herzog is hiding his light under a bushel, here. It is perfectly competent true crime, without being much more than that, and Herzog for some reason published his book before Richard Crafts' second trial (the first one having ended in a hung jury because one juror seems to have been a spectacularly stupid man). The second trial resulted in the first murder conviction in Connecticut without an actual body. (They found bits of Helle Crafts: a tooth, a fingernail, some fragments of bone.)

Crafts will be eligible for parole in 2021, which was unimaginably far away in 1989, when The Woodchipper Murder was published. He will be 84.



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