s&d: True Crime! books

Mikhail Gilmore's Shot Through The Heart & Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven = Mormon deathcult awesomeness

also those Best American Crime Reporting annual collections! any read the latest?

these and big fat sleazy rock star bios are like mac & cheese to me

seriously, nobody else?

Not sure if it'll be what you're looking for, but As If by Blake Morrison is really excellent. It's not so much about the crime itself (the James Bulger murder in Liverpool in 1991) as about the aftermath, the societal circumstances leading to it, and the darker recesses of the author's own psyche.

Jerry Bledsoe's Bitter Blood is deeply underrated. Went on about it a couple of years back via my blog here, as well as talking about my own interest in true crime stories.

this book is NOT well written but the story is amazing
http://i897.photobucket.com/albums/ac173/jumpwithjoey/LobsterBoy_FredRosen_GradyStiles.jpg

Perfect Victim, the story of Colleen Stan, is one of the absolutely weirdest stories I've ever read.

Also, Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me is a must read.

I can't remember the exact title, but J. Curtis' book about the murder of Maria Marten is so so so good. The part at the end where you can read letters from girls responding to William Corder's person ad are priceless.

The Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten, maybe?

Also Charles Bowden's Down by the River is greeeeeeat

person --> personals

I'm a sucker for true crime!

it takes a lot to find stuff that doesn't get too...um, 'porny' is the word I'd use. Some of those mass-market pbs are gross, you're halfway through and you're still up to your eyeballs in long descriptions of the mind of the killer and fantasy sequences and 'putting you in the crime scene'... Ick. And it's not so much that I'm squeamish, I just don't want to read a 'how to guide'.

Will definitely rep for Shot Through The Heart - great book.

Severed by John Gilmore -- good non-trashy analysis of Black Dahlia murder, raises some new information that's pretty interesting. Gets a little Robert Graysmith towards the end but otherwise a good revision of a story that seemed like it was overdone. Could have done without the photos though: YEESH.

A Mind For Murder - The Education of the Unabomber & the Birth of Modern Terrorism by Alston Chase -- good background on Harvard experiments, also some interesting detail about his family & his brother.

I'll stan for Zodiac by Robert Graysmith because it's a good first-time read. But Graysmith is kind of a loop-the-loop about the whole thing which makes it more of an account of his obsession than meaty Zodiac analysis.

Mindhunter - John Douglas. His books get a little samey, and he's got ego for days, but his books at least don't have the leering/tabloid/porny feel. The information's often at least useful/interesting, and he does often circle back to talking about victim/the victim's family. He's got a bit of authority to his voice which is at least a little comforting. And you know, he's the real life "special agent Jack Crawford".

OTM re: Stranger Beside Me. I'll rep for some of the older Ann Rule stuff (she's still churning them out but I haven't read her stuff in years)- I feel like Small Sacrifices, STranger, and the Green River Killer book are her best, and the personal aspect of Stranger makes it really intriguing.

Oh and James Ellroy - My Dark Places? That's a good'un.

(Sorry for overdoing it...like I said, I'm a total TC nerd.

Oh, and Dave Cullen's Columbine, which is really much, much more than a true crime book, but is absolutely riveting. And terrifying.

Not exactly true crime genre, but Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets is an excellent read. Lots of source material for the
Tv shows Homicide and the Wire.

I try to read as much Manson stuff as possible.

Right now I have a stack of these "from the pages of True Detective" books.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GC89NMQML._BO2%2C204%2C203%2C200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click%2CTopRight%2C35%2C-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

They are slee-zee. Some gross stuff.

Last year I read Cruel Sacrifice about this case, that was the last one that I read that was really good.

Until recently there was a bookstore within walking distance of me that had an entire wall of true crime books, I agree that some of them are boring as hell.

Also AWESOME and a must have is this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VJF98M8NL._BO2%2C204%2C203%2C200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click%2CTopRight%2C35%2C-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

a bit dry but extremely well researched: anything by david a. yallop

Justine, thanks for the reminder about Yallop! I loved his pope conspiracy book (I love conspiracy books & I don't agree with any of them!). After I read that I wanted to read more, but didn't finish.

haha me too!! i love conspiracy theory stuff, even when i'm buying it at all!

the pope one was the first i read too - have you read the one about arthur allan thomas, the new zealand guy falsely imprisoned for murder?

Not yet. I should read more about non-USA murders but I don't, the only one I LUV is Jack the Ripper, any and all, and a lot of them are bullshit, I think. Good bullshit, but probably bullshit.

I'm telling you -- the murder of Maria Marten is full of juicy parts, including, but not limited to, testimony from a murder trial bound in the SKIN OF THE MURDERER.

yeah.

*not buying it

i believe it, but even if it's not true it makes a good story, and that's why we like this shit, no?

no, i was xposting myself - i meant to say that i often don't buy the conspiracy stuff, but that doesn't lessen my enjoyment of it! the thing i like about yallop's stuff is that it avoids being trashy or hysterical; i think his style would make a believer out of anyone.

That's true, David Yallop had me peeing my pants about the Pope and his heart attack. Then I went through this Vatican Bank phase.

FYI, Laura James' blog has been a gold mine of true crime book recommendations. (and her book is terrific too)

Not true crime specifically, but I watched a bit of <a href="http://www.trutv.com/shows/conspiracy_theory/episodes/index.html";> Jesse Ventura's</a> tv show today and it looked pretty good.

http://www.trutv.com/shows/conspiracy_theory/episodes/index.html

Oops, sorry about link.

I haven't read that account of Andrew Cunnanan, but I really loved "Three Month Fever," Gary Indiana's novelization of the guy's life.

Also, Emmanuel Carrere's "The Adversary" is a true crime favorite.

As mentioned above, "The Stranger Beside Me" is 100% essential. Almost too scary and ominous.

This piece on a new collection of work by New Yorker crime writer St. James McKelway prompted me to check out an older anthology of his from UCI, collecting a fair number of pieces talked about as being in this new one.

I just ordered this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51g1Fz%2BPv3L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Gordon Burn's two true crime books, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, about the Yorkshire Ripper, and Happy Like Murderers, about Fred and Rose West, are v good, intensely miserable. The one on the Wests really knocked me into a pit when it came out. But a bit literary maybe?

(not 100% what I mean by 'a bit literary'. have to go out anyway)

No I know what you mean. Some are told in a very tabloid way, and some are written in a way that's more about the story somehow.

The Wrong Man by James Neff, about the Dr Sam Sheppard Murder case is another one I'd consider very literary in style. and god talk about gripping.

I think - I dgaf about 'serious' writers pondering what nasty crime means for society. But then Burn doesn't do that much iirc, is better than that - concrete, precise, observational. But anyway, going out!

intensely miserable

you are SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE! will add to wishlist.

Slightly OT, but true crime fans may enjoy this little tale:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/20/thomas-quick-bergwall-sweden-murder

Almost done with the Ressler book (Whoever Fights Monsters)- it's pretty good!

Interestingly enough, even though Ressler and John Douglas worked together in the FBI, Douglas barely rates mention, which I find funny. I guess they're in some kind of ego smackdown these days, lol.

Douglas' Mindhunter covers similar ground to Ressler, since they both interviewed a lot of the same criminals, but the styles are different enough that you could read both and come away with something from each. Douglas is much more narrative-focused, tries to bring you into the stories he tells and definitely has a much more intense focus on the victims and their families. Much more dramatic, and he has a lot of interesting detail about his own life and involvement in the cases.

Ressler's more analytical, he's not as interested in putting you there as he is in giving you facts and data, still very much a case-study kind of guy, you feel like you're more part of a lecture series or a class than fireside chats.

Kinda feel myself going down the rabbit hole again - will have to dig up a few more books to get the curiosity sated again. It seems like once or twice a year I go on a tear. Except I find it starts to mess with my head irl, like I start looking for windowless vans and get obsessed with local missing children reports... :/

One of those two wrote a book called "The Cases that Haunt Us" in which he discusses the Lindbergh kidnapping, Jack the Ripper, JonBenet Ramsey and other famous cases. I think it was Douglas, but in either case it's a really good book.

yeah it was Douglas. It's a good one, you're right.

I got to meet Douglas last year at a speaking event - he's a very nice man! He signed a couple of my books for me. I found his books were more productive (?) than others because he was always at great pains, much as Ressler is too, that the killers don't get too much credit or are not made out to be more than they are. They're always very quick to remind you of their failings as humns vs their successes as killers.

Picked up 'Road Out Of Hell' by Anthony Flacco from the library, about the 1920's Wineville Murders. Hoooolllly fuck. I'm only a few chapters in and it's already more harrowing than anything I've read in a long time. Scary shit.

and I also got Lisa Cohen's 'After Etan'

Not a book but True Crimers should check out the mini-series The Staircase. It's about a murder in Raleigh, NC and it is 100% amazing.

oh yeah that is incred

And if you do decide to watch it, which you should, avoid reading anything about the documentary or the case before hand. It is so much better if you go in cold.

Happy Like Murderers, about Fred and Rose West

think the prob I had w/ this book - which is esp good on the way that fred and rose's home became a manifestation of their banal evil - is that the high quality of the writing turns the whole thing into an aesthetic experience, somehow - that burn had given his subjects a better book than they deserved, maybe?

Any recs for definitive books on the Night Stalker or Hillside Strangler cases? Those are two I've always wanted to read more about. (Is Ramirez unique among serial killers in being apprehended by people on the street?)

thanks for the rec, carl -- I'm def gonna look up the Corridor!

no shit, that Wineville book gave me bad dreams last night, I've never had that happen before. Think this is a 'read in the daytime only' book.

It's not that the details are any worse than anything I've read, I think it's just that this acccount is written really WELL, and written as a firsthand account of events as they are unfolding by the nephew who was on the ranch & endured almost as much as the victims themselves. Being part of his thought process, and feeling like you're witinessing everything right along with him...it's a lot to handle.

Wait, the Wineville murders were the ones that figured in that Angelina Jolie movie, right?

The Staircase! If you look up the corridor, I can't say what you'll find...

lol corridor - staircase, I meant

xxpost Phil - yeah apparently Changeling was based on Wineville. I never did see the movie

xps re: Happy Like Murderers

I think that's otm, a good articulation of the problem that was nagging at me about it. But then it feels hard to know what one's asking for - worse books? No books about this kind of thing?

it's tough, because my other huge peeve is the leering, 'mind of a genius' style writing that seem to salivate over the details, and/or oversimplify.

I dunno what the answer is. I'm kind of glad there are books we can read about this kind of stuff, when they're well written, because there's things that can be learned. but yeah, they should come with mind-showers or something.

that Ressler book got a little tiresome in the end. He was kind of obsessed with 'we need to keep these killers alive so we can study them' and omg so passive agressive about pointing out 'this person complained about a thing I said but time passed and it turned out I was correct all along, lol that these poor plebs don't understand my genius'. I get the whole keeping them alive to study *in part*, but it's still kind of offensive somehow for me? after a while reading his book it starts to feel like Ressler has spent so long interviewing the perpetrators of these crimes that he has lost sight of the victims, and what that does to the families to have these men treated as though they're fascinating specimens. He's a bit too in love with his own role as interviewer, I think.

i read this book as a young beatles buff:

http://img3.etsystatic.com/000/0/6698079/il_fullxfull.321643311.jpg

completely unconvincing even to a teenager, but pretty entertaining.

I finished the Wineville murders book, Road Out Of Hell and I will go as far as to say it's one of the best books of its kind, in this genre, that I've read.

The story itself is literally unbelievable - a 13yo boy is for all intents and purposes abducted by his uncle, with full knowledge of his own mother, to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere where the uncle abused him constantly for 2 years, and abused and murdered at least 20 young boys. and coerced his own nephew into helping.

There are so many events that unfold that made me gasp or put the book down or have to walk away. the book is almost entirely told from the perspective of the boy. You go through what he goes through, which is why it's SO harrowing. It's like you're living it with him for so long. And the uncle is never exactly analysed or examined, because everything you need to know about him is witnessed by this boy.

He survived! It's insane. But that boy went on to be a wwii veteran, a husband, and adopted two at-risk boys who they raised as their sons. he told his oldest son everything when he was old enough. but he never passed any of the horror onto his family, because of a few key people who showed compassion for him when he needed it.

I'm honestly still open-mouthed at what went on at that ranch. The uncle was beyond Gacy levels of inhumanity. But that kid just seemed to have something in him that was built for survival. It's a really amazing story.

also those Best American Crime Reporting annual collections! any read the latest?

These were really good--I just found out the series has been cancelled, though, so last year's edition was the final one.

u guys read this? im into it, read 200 pp in like a day

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514GoYVgT6L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Happy Like Murderers, about Fred and Rose West

theres a booknotes youtube of the ppl who eat darkness writer & he namechecks gordon burn, whom ive never heard of, but it sounds like something worth looking into for me. i think i need these to be at least a lil literary or else i just cant really deal

that People Who Eat Darkness looks intriguing

it's good; the perpetrator is such an enigma, and the best part is that the author recognizes it and doesnt at all try to pretend like he can fully explain him

i don't read a ton of these things, but i'm about halfway through ed sanders' The Family right now and it's pretty gripping.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307279081/ref=aw_d_iv_books/185-7597314-6346743?is=l

The killer of little shepherds, not perfect but fascinating story about a French serial killer in the late 1800s.

Also rep for the aforementioned Charles bowdens works. On a similar subject, The daughters of Juarez:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743292049

Basically reads like the fourth part of bolano's 2666 but grimmer for being true.

Black mass isn't a bad account of whitey bulger's tenure as crime boss + his relaysh w the FBI. ymmv in terms of how fascinating you find mob stuff. I find most of it pretty tedious tbh but this was solid.

"The Staircase" doc that carl agatha recommended upthread is finally on youtube if anyone's interested.

I just started watching - gripping stuff!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oMpwP2e7fY

killer of little shepherds was good in a "devil in the white city" kinda way
people who eat darkness was pretty good but the author was annoying and i wished he had focused less on the girl's family

xp there'er gonna be 2 new "episodes" of the staircase on sundance channel in march

Awesome!!!!!

Thought I might have mentioned them already, but the two Lawrence Schiller bks on O.J. Simpson's trial and Jonbenet Ramsey are both pretty great - obviously subsequent events have dated them a little, but Schiller had tremendous access and a formidable research team, far more so than on average true crime bk.

gahhhhh only episode 1 of Staircase is online

fuckers

I'll have to investigate getting the rest of the episodes when I get home tonight. Jerks

You can get the DVDs through Netflix. Add them. Move them to number one in your queue. And then ilx mail me as you watch it because hearing people's theories and opinions about the case develop as the documentary progresses is one of my favorite things ever.

re: OJ, the paralegal students I'm teaching this term were asking me a heap of questions about the OJ trial and I had to admit that I didn't know too much about it. Perhaps I shall read that book.

i have no netflixes ;_;

but I have ways & means. this will happen imo

So there are like three books on the Snowtown/Bodies In Barrels murders. Can anyone recommend any of them?

carl agatha - bk is told very much from the defense team POV, if that helps or hinders, tho Simpson later tried to sue Schiller:

http://www.gba-law.com/press/oj-brills-content/

Happy Like Murderers, about Fred and Rose West, are v good, intensely miserable.
― woof, Tuesday, October 23, 2012 2:45 PM (3 months ago)

u were not kidding abt 'intensely miserable'. guh. brb, need 2 look @ some kitten blogs or w/e

Homicide by David Simon (I know, kind of obvious)
Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr
Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Thomas McFadden
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley
Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II by Brendan Koerner

i'm reading "wilderness of error" by errol morris. it's a weird book - obsessively detailed to the point of being boring sometimes, really short chapters with little cute illustrations at the start of each - but, without knowing too much else about the jeffery macdonald case, i think it makes a very strong case for macdonald's innocence or at least that he shouldn't have been convicted based on the evidence

Patton Oswalt was tweeting about this a few months ago - his wife is a True Crime writer who has taken exception to the book (I haven't read this, because I still want to read the book): http://www.truecrimediary.com/index.cfm?page=cases&id=186

I don't know why I capitalized "True Crime"

otm, her blog is fascinating.

that's interesting but she hadn't read morris' book at the time of writing that post - in the book, he addresses some of the "telling details" she thinks point the finger at macdonald's guilt

I am never going to be able to remember what it was I read/saw/heard... oh god, was it maybe on Radiolab??? (to quote n/a: ugh radiolab ugh) but whatever it was, it really laid into Errol Morris's logic re: that book.

God, nominate that for the least useful comment ever.

but, without knowing too much else about the jeffery macdonald case, i think it makes a very strong case for macdonald's innocence or at least that he shouldn't have been convicted based on the evidence

HE TOTALLY DID IT. I'm sorry, but I get a little crazy about this case.

This is a great article that discusses the case in depth and also goes into the Morris book: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/since-1979-brian-murtagh-has-fought-to-keep-convicted-murderer-jeffrey-macdonald-in-prison/2012/12/05/3c8bc1c6-2da8-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html

yeah i know its been criticized and i don't know a ton about the case but he did interview a lot of people involved in the case who had serious questions/issues with how things were done. also it's just weird that errol morris wrote a true crime book.

I need to read the Morris book to see how he addresses these things, but my understanding was always that the blood/hair evidence (with every family member having a different blood type), the perfectly circular puncture wounds in MacDonald's pajama top, and his lack of serious injury were kinda evidential slam dunks.

It bothered me that Morris admitted in the article that he left out facts that didn't support his idea that MacDonald was innocent.

These paragraphs indicate to me that Morris is trying to get away with an awful lot of handwaving and speculation, far beyond the idea of "reasonable doubt":

“A Wilderness of Error” doesn’t dwell long on the blood evidence. Citing shoddy detective work — much of the initial police work was, indeed, sloppy — Errol Morris basically dismisses all of it as tainted. Outside the courthouse in Wilmington, he tells a camera crew that he doesn’t see “a shred of evidence” suggesting MacDonald’s guilt.

It was an odd choice of language, considering. Shreds of MacDonald’s torn pajama top were central to the case against him: Broken pajama threads were not found in places they should have been if his story were true — near the sofa on which he was allegedly attacked, for example — but were found in places they should not have been, such as beneath Colette’s body.

And then there was Murtagh’s smoking gun — his big triumph at trial.

McDonald had told police that after he woke up, he put his pajama top on Colette’s chest. Forensics showed that 21 ice pick holes in Colette’s body lined up perfectly with 48 holes in Jeffrey MacDonald’s pajama top, when the pajama top was folded a certain way so that some punctures went through more than one layer of fabric. Murtagh argued that the only explanation for this was that MacDonald had delivered those blows himself to a dead or dying Colette. The jury bought it. But “A Wilderness of Error” finds this preposterous — the prosecution never established that this was the only way the pajama could have been folded to get that pattern of holes, Morris argues; conceivably, you could manipulate any piece of cloth into innumerable shapes that would produce the same pattern.

I caught up with Morris during a break in the hearing, and told him that I thought he was wrong: I described an experiment I had done, in which I used two sheets of paper and a dart. I folded the upper sheet on itself, irregularly, like the pajama top, and then stabbed through it, counting carefully so as to make exactly 21 holes in the lower sheet but 48 in the upper.

Then I tried to fold the upper piece of paper in a different way, so that all the holes still lined up. It becomes obvious almost immediately that you just can’t do it. Each change you make radically alters the relationship of one puncture hole to all the others.

Morris listened, nodded.

“That remains on my mind,” he said.

Morris said he’d suspected that might be true and worried about it a little, but then decided it didn’t matter, because even if it seems “nonsensical” that the holes in Jeffrey’s pajama top align with the holes in Colette’s body through mere coincidence, the alternative is equally nonsensical: That Jeffrey MacDonald, while trying to get away with a murder, would be stupid enough to stab his wife through his own garment. Think about that, he urged me.

good article, Nicole, thanks

morris mainly focuses on the crime scene/evidence being poorly processed/tampered with and unfair practices by the prosecution and the judge in the trial as the main reasons why macdonald was falsely convicted. he also goes after the in-laws (who originally supported macdonald and then turned against him) pretty hardcore, especially the father-in-law, implying he was drunk and henpecked and obsessive.

It bothered me that Morris admitted in the article that he left out facts that didn't support his idea that MacDonald was innocent.

― Ulna (Nicole), Wednesday, February 20, 2013 12:48 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ironically (or not?) this fits in with his overall theme in the book about narratives - he thinks it was not the evidence that convicted macdonald but that the narrative that he was guilty was easier for people to process

again, not supporting morris' theories here - i don't know much about it. i was thinking about also reading fatal vision and the journalist and the murderer.

xxp I mean, if you're seriously arguing, "What's more likely, that this man put his pajama top on top of his wife and stabbed her repeatedly through it; or that an effectively impossible miracle of topography took place? I'd say the latter!" you may not be making the best case in the world.

gahhhhh only episode 1 of Staircase is online

fuckers

I'll have to investigate getting the rest of the episodes when I get home tonight. Jerks

fwiw there's a good torrent out there, I just downloaded all eight parts and a load of dvd extras in less than 2 hours

ooh thanx!

I watched that first to on youtube and initially thought it was a reenactment - that dude is the fakiest-faker, so insincere - really interested to see the rest of it now.

Malcolm Gladwell takes down FBI profiling: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

man, i really hate that smartypants dude >:(
(for no rational reason, surprise surprise)

fiiiiiiiiiiiine

I'll read it

He's a smug fuck and I think that article is too short to authoritatively reach his conclusion BUT he's making some interesting points & I would like to read something more in depth that takes the same critical approach to profiling.

a friend put me onto a 2011 Australian mini series 'Killing Time' starring David Wenham - it's on Hulu Plus. Omg highly recommend. am kind of obsessed with Aussie underworld crime, so this is totally my ballpark.

It's based on the true story of 80's Melbourne underworld lawyer Andrew Fraser (mad murdering bastard Dennis Allen was one of his most famous clients, as well as the Morans, even Alan Bond) - he's still alive today, served time for cocaine smuggling and ended up informing on a notorious murderer to get his sentence reduced. Shaaaady character if there ever was one.

less soapy than Underbelly, well worth a look. Oh and script was edited by Ian David, who did my other favorite 'Blue Murder'. You want an eyebrow raiser of a true story, check that one out too.

VG can u recommend me the best book on the Snowtown murders?

that's a black spot in my aussie true crime ocd --- I haven't read a thing. Sorry, i've failed u :(

I just noticed the convo about MacDonald from a couple months ago. So here's a weird thing, my dad's best friend went to HS with MacDonald and they were best friends. At one point he dated Collette (iirc that was MacDonald's wife's name) and JM dated the girl my dad's best friend would later marry. Anyway, this man still to this day raises money for JM defense funds and swears up and down he's innocent.

xpost there are 3 books about it and all three of them look like they could be either great or garbage. The movie kicked my fucking ass a couple of months ago so I wanted to do some follow-up...

i read a shitty book about columbine and it made me feel awful especially as i was reading it during the boston marathon bombing stuff. now i'm reading "in cold blood" which is way better obv.

I just finished (like, yesterday) Dave Cullen's book on Columbine which I thought was excellent: patient, lucid, cutting, and non-hysterical. Was that the one you hated?

yeah. i thought it did a good job of analyzing dylan and eric but (gonna sound like a creep here) thought he went a little overboard on the emotional wreckage. i shouldn't have called it a shitty book, it just made me feel shitty.

oh it made me feel shitty too!

Miami New Times is re-featuring their original three part story that became the basis of the Pain & Gain movie. Bonkers story worth reading even if you're not interested in the movie.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/specialReports/pain-and-gain-from-new-times-story-to-michael-bay-film-1890864/

!! ooh yay I can't wait to read this.

Dateline is doing an update on the Michael Peterson case. Let me take this time to once again plug The Staircase and encourage those of you who might want to watch it to avoid this Dateline because The Staircase is as amazing as a mystery as it is as a true crime documentary. But if you've already seen The Staircase, Dateline!

Man, Dateline is hilarious for the cuts to the overly made-up interviewers nodding sagely.

I always think of Bill Hader's Keith Morrison impression.

going through a withdrawal of new 48 Hours Mystery episodes.

This is the second time this week we have watched Dateline.

Anybody read "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi? I thought it was amazing

this is not a book obv but the recent "this american life" episode "dr. gilmer and mr. hyde" is relevant to the interests of the people in this thread

ooh thx!

Oh yeah, that was a good one.

listening now!

god bless north carolina for their richness of local accents and expressions <3

:(

Haven't read a whole lot from this genre: In Cold Blood, books on O.J., Andrew Cunanan, and Ed Gein, and that may be it. But I put aside a couple of other things I was reading to start on Invisible Darkness: The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, which I found in a thrift store yesterday.

Have troubled reading this genre as it is just too crepey, sorry. One time read a few books by guy who was a James Joyce, Flann O'Brien scholar - no, not the pinefox, and was creped out for weeks. Fictional crime don't have quite the same problem with.

Only other thing I have to add right now is that I met Gordon Burn who is mentioned upthread a few times in London and New York and he was a super nice guy.

This thread seems to be mostly about murderers, but does anyone have any recommendations for books about other true crimes? I like stuff like Iceberg Slim or drug books like Snowblind, although it's questionable how true either of those are. Are there any good books about con artists?

check out 'the big con' by david maurer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Maurer

I liked Blowback by Lee Bullman/MIchael Forwell. Not about a con artist, but the shipping of marijuana from Thailand to the US.. Fitted in with my true crime preferences: exotic locations, no violence, insights into how becoming a multi-millionaire might change you.

cool thanks!

Perfect Victim, about the Colleen Stan case, is a good one. No murder, but it's got kidnapping, S&M, torture, captivity, Stockholm Syndrome . . . Definitely one of the weirder cases I've ever read about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Colleen_Stan

How about The Skies Belong to Us by Brendan I. Koerner, about a young amateur revolutionary couple who hijacked a passenger jet in California and ended up in Algeria in 1972. The main narrative is murder-free, though there is some grisly stuff when the author tells the wider story of the skyjacking craze of that era (plus a little Vietnam War horror). It's a cracking good read, and like the best true crime, you can't believe it all really happened.

The Big Con seconded, it's a fantastic book - cool analytic style that doesn't quite pokerface through maurer's delight in the machinations, psychology & (above all) the language of con-men. Love it so much. Found it in a random room one night after some party or another; meant to sleep but could not stop reading it, was convinced I'd stumbled on the best book in the world.

I think about the bit with marks who seek out con games often.

drug books like Snowblind, although it's questionable how true either of those are

i've always assumed snowblind is more or less true, since the same guy (right?) turns up in blow, doing exactly the same kind of thing

snowblind is a great read if you can find it, very of its time. the author makes an impassioned argument at one point that cocaine is non-addictive

Anybody read "The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi? I thought it was amazing

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Friday, May 31, 2013 5:55 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i read this recently and agree it was pretty great. it wasn't until about 10 pages into the satanic conspiracy stuff that it dawned on me that wait, could this be, maybe, the same prosecutor as... [spoiler redacted]. plus the whole thing about sardinia basically being the "hills have eyes" of mafia culture, the bizarre peeping tom subculture, preston's ripley-like obsession with thomas harris, etc

Snowblind - and its follow-up, Smokescreen - are p common in the uk. Only thing I remember abt Snowblind is that at one point someone rolls up a copy of Time magazine to make a gigantic spliff out of.

pretty good: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201308/thomas-quick-serial-killer-august-2013

This is pretty interesting about how DNA testing can go wrong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/high-tech-high-risk-forensics.html

Have trouble reading this genre as it is just too creepy, sorry.
― Orpheus in Hull (James Redd and the Blecchs)

Halfway through the Bernardo/Homolka book, and what these people did, and the lives they led together--which I only knew in broad outline before--is altogether beyond comprehension.

n/a, just finished reading that GQ link - really interesting. Thanks from posting it!

strongly recommend "the skies belong to us" by brendan koerner, which is generally about the skyjacking pandemic of the late '60s and early '70s and more specifically about a couple who pulled off one of the most successful/longest distance skyjackings ever. just a really crazy, fascinating story. especially good for the people who were looking for less gory/disturbing true crime books upthread.

that was brought up somewhere else... totally want to read it!!

does it talk about the D.B. Cooper case?

Yes it does. The author thinks Cooper must have died in the jump. (It was me who mentioned this book about 12 posts upthread).

Can anyone recommend a good book on either Charles Whitman or Richard Speck? I've seen a few online, most appear to be out of print, and there's even one about the two of them together. As I posted above, I'm pretty new to this genre. Whenever reading non-fiction about something I'm really interested in, I prefer an author who just tells the story and stays out of the way.

sorry, josefa, i must have read your post at the time and then forgotten anyone else had talked about that book before me. anyways it's a really fun book.

clemenza, this book seems to be highly regarded and a good read (haven't read it myself):

http://www.amazon.com/Sniper-Tower-Charles-Whitman-Murders/dp/1574410296

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Personally I would like to find a good resource on Richard Ramirez. "Satanic" murders are pretty interesting to me. As an aside to that, does anyone know if David Berkowitz' claim of being in a satanic coven has been proven to be bullshit or not?

Thanks, missed that one--will order it tomorrow. I find Whitman fascinating too. He--and Speck--somehow seemed to belong more to Manson and what came after them than anything that came before. The Bogdanovich film gets some of that.

The Charles Whitman case fascinates me too because it's part spree killing, part neurology.

Wait, what?

Now I'm reading the medical commission's report on Whitman's autopsy: http://alt.cimedia.com/statesman/specialreports/whitman/findings.pdf (pdf)

Huh, a GBM.

The GBM was associated with a congenital AVM, which is also unusual. The description of the pathology is otherwise very typical, I'm sure a panel at MD Anderson is going to be correct in making that diagnosis.

Wikipedia says it might have been pushing on his amygdala, but that's not exactly close to the "right temporo-occipital white matter", where the tumor was found.

Is that the theory in the Lavergne book?

Most GBMs of smaller size ("size of a pecan") are minimally symptomatic unless they're near eloquent cortex (which Rt T-O is not) or unless they cause seizures. Behavioral changes can be caused by persisting epileptic activity in the brain, despite showing no obvious outward manifestations of seizures ("non-convulsive status epilepticus"), but this is rare and not usually associated with violence AFAIK.

thanks for the details!

just finished reading the excellent monster of florence book, thanks to whoever mentioned it above. any similar recommendations? something well-written, twisty, turny, etc

a friend put me onto a 2011 Australian mini series 'Killing Time' starring David Wenham

Veg, did you ever see 'Blue Murder', about Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson (for those outside Aus, a very corrupt cop and his hitman/rapist offsider) -- very well done, very bleak series

I think I was the monster of Florence guy. It's sooooo good. Unfortunately I haven't found much that is similar, but I've got a bunch of stuff on the to read list so I will let you know.

THE SKIES BELONG TO US looks fascinating--have ordered it

I just saw the Charlton Heston film Skyjacked from 1972 because it was mentioned in The Skies Belong to Us as having inspired one of the hijackers in the main hijacking incident in that book. Indeed, the plot of the movie was freakily similar to the real-life hijacking that happened less than two weeks after the film came out. One of the clearest cases of life imitating art I've ever seen.

OK, found and read The Skies Belong to Us over the weekend--fascinating! I had no idea about the huge number of US skyjackings in the late 60s/early 70s, and how chill the airlines were with it: 'As long as we get the plane back OK, everything's cool!'. All these nutters wanting to go to Havana.

Plus it has an Algerian thug called No Nuts.

Thanks to Josepfa and n/a for the recommendation!

started rereading Helter Skelter this week. Haven't read it since high school. I have some v embarrassing memories of reading it then thinking, 'he's biased because he prosecuted Manson, this isn't the TRUE story' and going out and reading Manson In His Own Words and realizing afterwards 'ohhhh right Charlie's nuts'
but I was fifteen, whattyagonnado :/

Anyway am enjoying it much more on the reread. Forgot how crazily detailed it is, and how horrifying the murders still are when you read the stats on stab wounds etc.

The thing I'm most struck by is it took the police so long to link the Hinman, Tate & LaBianca murders. Hindsight being 20/20 and all

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Li9H-ADoL.jpg

i picked this up v. cheaply today and it is AMAZING - format is modelled on bruce bernard's Century, ie page after page of well chosen/reproduced photographs, accompanied by a few judicious paragraphs on the pictured atrocity/murderer/victim/assasination/lynching/mob hit etc - everything from a terrifying pic of Lucky Luciano to the trial of the truly repugnant Dr Petiot(and yes, parts of it, esp the war crimey stuff, are p lurid/hard-hitting) - alongside obv candidates like Crippen and Hindley, there are lots of other terrifying/fascinating killers from the around the world that i knew nothing abt - its just a great fuckin' selection/primer on all sorts of ghastly human behavior - highest possible recommendation!

btw i think it has been issued w. a number of diff titles/covers in the uk and us - the above has a new price of £7.99 and is a bargain at that, nevermind cheaper prices on the net - actually the cover design looks a bit generic (weegee pic, standard typography) and doesn't really reflect the richness/range of the material inside

RIP colin wilson

Half tempted by Weegee: Murder Is My Business which was published by Prestel last year.

read somewhere about "the yoga store murder," a book about the lululemon store murder in 2011 in bethesda so i downloaded it for kindle. lo and behold there was already a book called "murder in the yoga store" about the same topic. this is hilarious to me for some reason. the yoga store murder has a higher amazon review rating and more pages though.

aaaand i already finished it! it was decent

i feel like this is the only kind of book i can read right now with my tired anxious brain. i was reading gomorrah and i like it but even that is too dense at the moment. quick recommend me something on kindle i can start tonight to get myself to bed on time and to work tomorrow even though it's a holiday.

have you read debbie nathan's book about satanic ritual abuse? i recommend that! it's totally bazonkers and i am 100% sure you will enjoy it. also, it's well written and full of insane details.

whoa is this the same case as in bakersfield (i think?) where the whole neighborhood of kids said they were abused and they weren't? the blurb on amazon uses the phrase "victimology feminism" which is one of my favorite topics though i have never used that phrase. relevant to my lawyerly interests. i also got the skies belong to us. i got part of my tax refund from turbotax in an amazon gift card because they give you a 10% bonus so i'm going crazy with the kindles.

totally understand that, esp when it comes to sensationally weird true crime books
also you should obvs read sybil exposed if you haven't read that!

ok i will!

i was thinking today about how that girl who killed the guy in pennsylvania after soliciting him for sex on craigslist and now admits to killing 22 others will make a great true crime subject someday

with a satanic cult tie-in

yeah that case could be really crazy(ier)

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/justice/craigslist-thrill-killing-confession/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

A law enforcement source close to the investigation said Miranda Barbour's new claims could be "the real deal." "It's conceivable," the source said, who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing investigation.

Forget the exact title, but if you search ILE for Sybil, you will find a thread of freaked-out suburban legends and their media funhouse mirrors: classically 70s, but before and after (especially 80s) too.
Speaking of hijackers, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, 2004 movie with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, is based on a true crime played down in the 70s. I was an all-media junkie back then, but don't remember it at all. Penn's character is so sad, then ridiculous, then truly dangerous, remaining all that as he wrings involuntary sympathy, another sense in which the character and plot are so deftly, damnably twisted---it ain't no masterpiece, but it works.
Never read Helter Skelter, but engrossed/grossed by Ed Sanders' The Family. He did his footwork too: for inst., entering Hollywierd's scum side as a bootlegger of porn loops, incl. supposedly purloined Warhol outtakes, and eventually inquiring about spare footage involving blood. Also literal footwork, like when he and Phil Ochs went down the hill andover the wall to the house where the Tate (or was it the LaBianca?) murders occurred.
This one came out in '13: I guess it's good; anyway, stuff I didn't know, and read it in one sitting
http://www.laweekly.com/imager/jeff-guinns-new-book-posits-charles-manson-as-a-con-man-who-preyed-on-youn/b/original/4175176/92e6/manson_book.jpg

Teresa Carpenter's Missing Beauty is about an over-the-hill prodigy, from an area with very many doctorates per square inch, who meets a former high school princess, in a sketchy urban zone of their own. It works out for a while. This won a Pulitzer, but it's not overdone in any way: the material's dense, the presentation's clear, and the author knows the characters don't need any tarting up, or tarting down, for that matter. Rec'd to Dreiser fans too, but don't worry, she doesn't write like him.

xp The Family, the author also talked to musicians, some of whom he already knew, others with mutual muso connections, also and involved in the case---one of the latter put a snapshot on the diner table, like it was a card. It was a close-up of Sharon Tate, dead. The expression on her face...

also *cops* involved in the case, I meant.

Speaking of cons, frauds, here's something from WSJ's Five Best series, orig. pasted into ILB's current What Are You Reading thread: non-fiction and fact-based novels:

Ferdinand Mount
on stories of fraud
Mr. Mount's books include 'Cold Cream' and 'The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy.'

Little Dorrit

By Charles Dickens (1857)

Debt haunts these pages. William Dorrit has been imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison for so long that he has become known as "the Father of the Marshalsea." His daughter, Little Dorrit, was born in the jail, and she skitters out through the gates into the world of supposed solvency, which is in fact a shakier and more frantic place. It is not until a third of the way through the book that we meet Mr. Merdle, the miracle-working financier. "Nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money." He is reluctant to let outsiders in on "one of my good things," but special friends are allowed a slice of the action. He is, in short, the Bernie Madoff of his day, the Ponzi before Ponzi. At the time, "Little Dorrit" was taken as a straightforward polemic against debtors' prisons. But really it is a greater fable about universal illusions and one of Dickens's greatest, if least regarded, novels.

The Way We Live Now

By Anthony Trollope (1875)

Augustus Melmotte is a big, flamboyant man of mysterious foreign origin, "with an expression of mental power in a harsh vulgar face." The amazing thing about him is that, right from the start of Trollope's irresistible novel, he has the reputation of a gigantic swindler who has already ruined those who trusted him. Yet respectable types still come running to the door of his office in Abchurch Lane. His prize speculation in Central American railroads is revealed as a cynical scam, and, like Mr. Merdle, he does himself in. "The Way We Live Now" offers another marvelous panorama of mid-Victorian London, but the difference is that most of Melmotte's victims aren't innocent dupes but greedy chancers well aware of the sort of man they are dealing with. Melmotte is based on George Hudson, "the Railway King," whose swindles bankrupted Trollope's father-in-law, but his whole career is a dead ringer for that of the newspaper baron Capt. Robert Maxwell, MC, MP, who was discredited time and again but always bobbed up until, in 1991, he went down for the third time off his yacht.

The Tichborne Claimant

By Rohan McWilliam (2007)

In the spring of 1854, Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy and a large estate in Hampshire, took ship out of Rio de Janeiro. Neither the ship nor Roger was ever seen again. It was 12 years later that his French mother placed ads in Australian newspapers, in the belief that he might have fetched up there, and a bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga called Arthur Orton slyly confessed to being the long-lost Roger. Roger had been as thin as a rake, Rohan McWilliam notes in his compelling history of the affair, but Orton weighed nearly 400 pounds. Roger had gone to a first-rate school and was half-French; the claimant was barely literate and couldn't speak a word of the language. The best that could be said was that the way the claimant waggled his eyebrows was reminiscent of Roger. Yet his cause attracted a national following. It took George Bernard Shaw to point out the irony of laborers clamoring for a working man's right to pass himself off as a baronet. Orton's two trials were the longest in British history, and when he was finally sentenced to 14 years for perjury, the Lord Chief Justice declared that not since Charles I had a trial "excited more the attention of Englishmen and the world than this." Certainly never was there a more delicious demonstration of willful public gullibility.

A Romanov Fantasy

By Frances Welch (2007)

The Bolsheviks had taken great care to shoot every member of the imperial Russian family in the early hours of July 17, 1918. But in no time Siberia was swarming with Romanov impostors who claimed to have survived, including no fewer than 14 Grand Duchess Anastasias. The most famous of them was a Polish peasant born Franziska Schanzkowska, who was fished out of a canal in Berlin in February 1920. Now calling herself Anna Anderson, she first claimed to be the Grand Duchess Tatiana, but when told she was too short to be Tatiana, she switched without blinking to Anastasia. Anna was squat and square-jawed, whereas the real Anastasia had been tall and long in the face. Nor could Anna speak Russian. Yet it wasn't until 1994, 10 years after her death, when a piece of her intestine was compared with the DNA of Prince Philip and some of his genuine Romanov cousins, that it was definitively proved that she wasn't related to the Romanovs. Frances Welch takes as the epigraph to her entrancing account the maxim from "The Ship of Fools": "The world wants to be deceived." You can say that again.

Falling

By Elizabeth Jane Howard (1999)

After she had left her third husband, Kingsley Amis, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard fell for a con artist who wheedled his way into her lonely life after hearing her on the radio. This is the novel she made out of her scary experience, which might have ended in marriage or murder, or both. She is rescued in the book, as in real life, by the inquisitiveness of her daughter, from whom she had been estranged for years—one good thing to come out of her humiliation. "Falling" is another. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about it is Howard's ability to think herself into the mind of the con man Henry, who tells the first half of the story. She makes him plausible in every sense of the word, so that we begin to see how he got into the habits of deception, without our beginning to like him. He gets creepier as the book goes on. Elizabeth Jane Howard died on Jan. 2 this year at the age of 90, and if you read one thing of hers, I recommend this.
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― dow, Tuesday, February 11, 2014 10:04 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, I really want to read Falling, after having such an emotional reaction to the selfish, self-obsessed not-hero of Love All. She does have the ability to make you emotionally connect with very unlikeable people.

― "righteous indignation shit" (Branwell Bell), Tuesday, February 11, 2014 10:15 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

satanic ritual abuse book is v good. i'm about 40% done. it mentions a 20/20 about devil worship, which i found on youtube and started to watch but i felt too enraged that this was an irl witch hunt so recently so i stopped.

Yeah there's a point where it becomes genuinely terrifying. Also it made me worry that people would think that I am a witch and try to discredit me.

Read several reviews of this new book sorting out the --can't call it urban legend, because it's based around the actual murder of Kitty Genovese---but made into the ur-fable of urban anomie, in the 60s. WSJ reviewer thought the book was padded, but even so, basically valuable, and others agree. Good interview with the author here: http://www.npr.org/2014/03/03/284002294/what-really-happened-the-night-kitty-genovese-was-murdered

yeah I heard that on the radio last night, seems interesting

i finished satan's silence. p good. not perfect. worst was the cheap transfer to kindle that got some words wrong! but i liked it. devil's knot: the true story of the west memphis three came in the mail too.

Kevin Cook's xpost Kitty Genovese is, judging by excerpts and reviews apparently a true crime book in the traditonal genre sense as well, with, you know, scenes, thoughts of participants, dialogue all helpfully enhanced by the author...but basically, this one's really done his homework as well.
(For the unpadded, unfiltered, but still plenty readable approach, try "The Reckoning," Andrew Solomon's New Yorker account of conversations with Peter Lanza, interspersed with some astute, unpretentious comments by the author. Solomon also talked to the Klebold family in Far From The Tree, which is always checked out of my library, but real good reviews.)
Back to true crime old school, here's a thing about a couple of homegrown books meant to prove the innocence (or lesser culpability) of Caril Fugate. The 12th Victim and Pro Bono are on Amazon now, with others along the same line, I think (plus those of the opposite persuasion, of course)
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120903/NEWS/709039923

i'm reading "far from the tree" now and it's extremely sad. solomon is a great writer, though. i really love his simple, precise, direct style.

Solomon on Lanza blew my ass away.

i was listening to an interview on local radio with a guy who wrote a book called blood will out about clark rockefeller/christian karl gerhartschreiter and i wanted to read that but some amazon reviews said it wasn't so great so i found another book someone else had already written called THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT. seems pretty good so far.

that's a pretty great title imo

I'm reading the skyjacking book! It's really good so far.

Seconding The Man In The Rockefeller Suit - the other book (Blood Will Out) is more of an annoying "hey, I'm a famous writer who was friends with a sociopath" memoir.

yeah this is a must read. so unbelievable!

So this guy went looking for his real father and determined that his real father is the Zodiac Killer - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062313169/ref=nosim/0sil8

It has to be bullshit but I am intrigued anyway.

this is a little different, but that reminds me of some of those killers who are arrested who have regular family lives but they're actually these horrible killers on the side. like the BTK. i don't know how rare that is but most serial killers are loners.

most useful thread on ilx. loved the rockefeller and skyjacking books - anyone reading anything written as well as those two? is the zodiac book worth a look?

zodiac book def worth it imo

Graysmith is a nutbar, let him show you how

read the sequel only for lols

was it someone itt who recommended Richard Parry's The People Who Eat Darkness I couldn't find the post but holyyyyyyy shit I picked it up from the library this week and read it in 3 days, couldn't put it down.

Highly recommend it for some serious wtf, on all levels -- family dynamic, killer, procedure, everything is just seriously weird and kind of bonkers.

whoever recommended it - thank you and otm

veg! i did. it's here, in the compressed portion prob. yeah, great book

looks so good.
agree with the upthread thumbs down to "blood will out". snooze.
anyone read that Jeff Guinn Manson book yet?

I heard an interview with Guinn on NPR a while ago, I'm curious to read the book.

A friend was raving about it, but he's a Manson obsessive so not really to be trusted. I only read Helter Skelter when I was a teenager, and kind of got turned off by all the borderline lionizing of him and pretty much avoided Manson shit after that - but this one does sound like it might be worth a read.

Helter Skelter is worth the re-read if you are inclined. Even just the craziness of the trial itself makes it well worth it, and the procedural stuff like how LONG it took them to link all the murders. there's so much about that case that I had forgotten, I definitely got a lot more out of it reading it recently.

the hook for the Guinn book, at least from the reviews I've read, seems to be that it places his life and acts in a larger historical context - but if's just the "nightmare end of the hippy dream" narrative I don't know how much detail I really need on that again - but there must be more to it than the old cliches, it is getting great reviews

manson's early childhood and prison life prior to the killings always seemed kinda interesting to me. I hope there's some decent meat on the bone, research-wise.

the michael morton doc is up on netflix instant. the article was so in-depth, not sure i need to see it, though.

I posted about Guinn's Manson book upthread: it's worth reading for the focus on individual Manson Family members and the group dynamics, incl. what they told him about Charlie's direction, attempts to break into show biz; also how they seemed to bizzers and affiliates, like Gail Zappa. The new interviews and research also cover his early life, what family members and neighbors said, often vs. his own claims, though his mother does come off...well, the Bad Seed tales do seem a bit convenient, if full of plausible details, considering later behavior (and if not a Bad Seed, certainly an early bloomer, incl. his juvenile record).
Ed Sanders' The Family still seemed good when I re-read it in an updated edition, but even the re-read was a long time ago, Pretty sure it's worth checking out. He does his research, and he gets to L.A. fairly soon after the murders, conveying the impact he feels (not just the lingering vibe, also the evidence he's shown, the things he's told). Haven't read Helter Skelter.

i'm halfway through people who eat darkness but i started something else. i like it though.

was it someone itt who recommended Richard Parry's The People Who Eat Darkness I couldn't find the post but holyyyyyyy shit I picked it up from the library this week and read it in 3 days, couldn't put it down.

read that last month. just amazing

it's gonna haunt me for a while

the michael morton doc is up on netflix instant. the article was so in-depth, not sure i need to see it, though.

what article is this?

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/innocent-man-part-one

It's a really fascinating read

thanks!

all bow down before Harold Schechter, the classiest of all true crime writers....his new book The Mad Sculptor looks great. A good interview here if you can handle the interlocutor Jon Batchelor, whose manner of speaking is annoying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXyP9re45lM&list=PLKRXaVyH4J7fr3pwuD3PpeDAx8rHhd3Ix&feature=mh_lolz

which is the best schechter book?

the one about H.H. Holmes is the best, I think

I might check that out. The HH Holmes story is so fking creepy

I just started reading Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh, about arsonist John Orr. We'll see if it's any good... on the fence atm

I hate books that dont grab me right away, I'm too impatient

I'm not far into the Wambaugh book -- I am having a love hate relationship with it.

The information he's giving is intense and compelling and I want to keep reading but the way it's written is seriously offputting at times. He'll mostly maintain a passive voice but then every now and then will for reasons unknown just randomly inhabit the voice of the douchey perp and using phrases like (shudder) 'whacking the weasel' & it's so jarring and gross like WHY would you do that

Can't ppl just write stuff that I want to read & not be gross really is it too much to ask

that's funny veg, i was just thinking to myself how i was curious about firefighters who are also arsonists. and curious about arsonists in general. i wish i would read more instead of just thinking about all the topics i'm curious about and all the true crime i want to read. anyway the book i'm reading is on the run by alice goffman and it's ok so far. i just liked the cover. at the same time i bought the new kitty genovese book too. this and being a little too excited to pay my mortgage two weeks early (idk why) contributed to me overdrawing my bank account.

arsonists interest me too! this is the first time I've read anything specific

I worked with a guy a long time ago, there was talk among the other staff that he was a firebug and I always wondered about him. He had tried to become a professional firefighter but they wouldn't take him, for whatever reason. Always got about in army fatigues and wore a hitlerish mustache and by the time I worked with him he was legit unstable enough that I was kind of scared to even talk to him

(this was at a commercial laundry who pretty much hired everyone in my hometown that was otherwise unhireable)

he shouted at the washing machines fyi

whether or not he lit fires I never really ascertained. he kinda seemed a bit too looped to be an un-nabbed arsonist, didn't seem really able to be coldly calculating but who the hell knows

but this guy John Orr is like the perfect profile of an arsonist, it's kind of amazing that he worked for so long not being caught, because he was setting off like every alarm bell even in his early career

it fits with my other interest in police impersonators. like guys who buy old police cars at county auctions and stick a red and blue light on the dash and pull people over.

TOTALLY

i always give side-eye to those middle-aged dudes who ride around on police-style motorcycles

this is gonna make one hell of a book someday:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/mcstay-murder-mystery/index.html?c=us&page=1

whoa

xxpost harbl i just reached thepart in the book where the arsonist totally purchased an old crown vic & added lights & a siren loool

I usually don't read true crime, but couldn't resist _The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber. I guess I'm not devious in my thinking bc when it became clear how this nurse was murdering people for years and years, I was really taken aback. The way the hospitals kept letting him go but not even reporting their suspicions to their state's Boards of Nursing... unbelievable. My only annoyance (as a person who IS a nurse) is the way the audiobook kept pronouncing "dig" (short for digoxin).

I like the line in Fire Lover where Orr is described as "burying the accelerator pedal" in the old Crown Vic.

I live in Glendale and remember the Ole's Home Center file. Had to read it even though Orr is such a cypher.

I'd never heard of that fire til the book- so awful

After seeing it recommended here I checked out Fire Lover and finished it in two days. Man oh man. You almost have to admire his brazenness, but good lord. California is very lucky that there weren't a LOT more deaths as a result of his fires.

Loved the stat about the number of brush fires after his arrest going from like 60-80 per year to one.

right? crazy

ok i NEED to read that. last night i was thinking about the dc snipers and found no apparently decent books exist about them. just shitty ones. too bad.

I was stopped at a traffic light last week behind a beatup old caprice and found myself thinking 'wow yeah that is a really roomy trunk, totally get why the dc snipers used that model'

:/

Finally got a copy of the Charles Whitman book Viceroy recommended many months ago.

Vegemite, I guess that is how I progressed from the knives and gore books to mafia books. After so many slashers, you conclude, these people don't know how to do a "job". Refreshing to read, say, "Black Mass" and learn how to get rid of a body. When I see a Caprice Classic, I immediately think of dope deals and body dumping - they were so common back in the day that a crook driving one is less noticeable. We had one Caprice after another when I was a kid.

I loved renting Caprices/Crown Vics for band stuff because I could fit two amps, guitars, keyboards, *everything* in the trunk.

*nods, writes in notebook*

have started The Suspicions of Mr Whicher -- loving it! So cleverly written, I'm hooked already

Lots of good points and some appealing recommendations here, mostly recent books I hadn't heard of (most true crime books don't get much promotion budget and/or coverage, seems like):
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/sleazy_bloody_and_surprisingly_smart_in_defense_of_true_crime/
I even wrote her a fan letter, and I never do that! Honest! Tried not to make it like I was one of *those* fans, hope I didn't try too hard...

i think i heard her on npr this morning or yesterday

wow such a great list in that article. gotta read em all like true crime pokemon

Yeah she was interviewed at the end of the most recent On The Media episode, which is still on the OTM site. That's where I found out about the article.

yay! more books to read!

Heard back from author, thanking me for tip on Teresa Carpenter's Missing Beauty and mention of 2666 as novel drawing on same strengths as some true crime she describes, esp. Lost Girls.
Also, I just now recalled this venerable site, which has always developed in various directions, incl. quality of writing (but worth checking)
http://www.crimelibrary.com/index.html

i finished people who eat darkness yesterday morning. i thought it was decent but something about it annoyed me. i gave it 3 stars on goodreads. then i got right to work on green river running red.

oooh that's a good one

Finished A Sniper in the Tower, the Charles Whitman book by Gary M. Lavergne. About a third of the book is a meticulous and exceptionally harrowing account of the 90 minutes in which Whitman did his killing (stretch that to 13 hours, if you begin with his wife and his mom). I'm sure any account of such an event--Aurora, say--would be just as harrowing, but there's something extra unfathomable about the idea of this guy up in a tower, gunning down people in various directions and up to 500 meters away (how far a man who peered out from a barber shop was when he got hit). The author is really good at conveying the incredible risks people took that day to assist those who'd been shot, and also at placing the shootings in the shadow of Capote's In Cold Blood and the Richard Speck killings, both of which were headline news when Whitman happened.

One odd oversight in a book so extensively researched: calling The Deadly Tower, a 1975 TV movie, "the first attempt to dramatize the Tower incident." Bogdanovich's Targets ('68) is not obscure.

Didn't he seek help, and/or make notes, realizing he was gradually losing it? And maybe had a brain tumor?

That became a big point of contention for years. Whitman thought something was wrong with him, and visited a UT psychologist. (Amazing: the psychologist stepped before microphones the day after the shootings and admitted that Whitman had told him he was "thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.") Family and friends claimed it was the tumor. The author and most professionals dismiss that based on the careful and methodical planning that went into the shootings.

To clarify: yes, he was diagnosed with a small tumor.

Thanks. Think John Hinckley Jr. was shown to have some cerebral abnormalities, but connection between those and his shooting of Reagan were strongly disputed by experts on both sides of the case, as often happens. Correlations can be hard to establish in any case, it seems.
Also, brace yallselves for this, there's a new book out, The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases (not published by Reddit, far as I can tell). Interesting interview with the author on On The Media, with a comment from someone who says online sleuths have helped her search for her sister, missing since the 70s: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/online-supersleuths/

reading that whitey bulger book 'black mass' at the moment. about 20% through and so far it's just a load of admin about the fbi chain of command. no real drama or gripping tales or anything (full disclosure: been rewatching sopranos lately), does it get better or should i ditch it for that 'going clear' scientology book?

Don't skip Going Clear, whether you continue with Black Mass or not. Haven't read that one, but so far Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and The Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice, by Kevin Cullen and Shelly Murphy---two Boston experts on WB from way back, especially Cullen---is pulling me right along.
Also want to read the memoir by Jennifer Mascia (who also wrote a lot for the NYTimes' Gun Report blog). Her father was a low-level Mafia brokester and murderer; she gets to the meat of it in this intro:
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Tell-Our-Business-Strangers/dp/B008SLDY1A

thanks dow. so the 'most wanted gangster' one is worth reading? this one is so dry and unengaging but has wild raving reviews online, people saying to read that one first etc. tempted just read that jenna jameson book and be done with it

mascia book sounds much more like what i'm after

Well, the Most Wanted is mainstream newspaper journalism (why go tabloid, when it's more effective to let the litany of typical atrocities speak for themselves), but not like a clipping file. Murphy was digging deep when he could've been digging his own grave, and has continued to do, not sparing the local and Fed elements who aided and abetted Bulger for so many years.

Also, if you like Mascia, check this one: http://www.amazon.com/Five-Finger-Discount-Crooked-Family-History/dp/0375758704

Oh guys this thread is great. I don't really read true crime as much as use my monthly audible credit on it. The stuff I have 'read' is pretty trashy so far with the exception of 'Stranger Beside Me'. That one had me jumping at shadows for a good month. A couple of recent hits and misses:

Search:
'Lost and Found' by John Glatt - This is about the Jaycee Lee Duggard case.

Destroy:
'A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop' by Kathryn Casey - I usually like Kathryn Casey's books when I'm in the mood for a story about some crazy, small town texan, ex-high school football star having no concept of divorce as an option. All that heat and concussion. You know someone's about to get brutal. This one though. Ugh. I mean it was okay but there was zero info on the relationship between the cop (killer Kent MacGowan) and his victim (Susan White. I man, I guess he was harassing her but its all very vague.

Gregg Olsen's 'Bitch on Wheels' (originally released as 'The Confessions of an American Black Widow') - This book 11 hours long (lol audiobook) but I'm fairly sure if all of the 'slut' references were cut out it would maybe 45 minutes. Less if you take out the foreword where we have to hear Olsen's opinion that everyone is obsessed with slutty female murders. Again, not really sure why she was having these guys killed except maybe some smallish insurance claims and, of course, her slutty magic vagina. Why one person, somewhere, was once maybe heard to claim 'If Sharon had as many dicks sticking out of her as there had been put in her she'd resemble a porcupine!' (<-- highlight of the book, honestly). Anyway, I went away with the feeling that Gregg Olsen is way creepier than the instigator of these murders.

Thinking about maybe Ann Rule's 'Small Sacrifices' next.

Small Sacrifices was the first Ann Rule book I ever read (way back in early high school). It's SO good.

does 'methland' count as a true crime book? anyway, methland! thanks to la lechera for mentioning it somewhere elsewhere, it piqued my interest.

Another one I've always meant to read---think I saw the author on Book TV way back; must check their archives---description from Amazon (don't look up the rest of it if you're a spoiler weenie)

The Murder of Helen Jewitt
Patricia Cline Cohen

In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.

From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness.

But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder...

not a book but I couldn't remember if there was another thread on true crime docs etc

Watched the HBO 'Cheshire Murders' doc today. Holyyyy shit. I must have been living in a hole because I dont' remember this one at all. Home invasion murder of a mom & 2 daughters in Connecticut in 2007, dad was beaten with a bat & tied up in the basement - he survives. The 2 perps get the death penalty. The scene was fucking horrible, confessions are completely chilling.

One of the weirdest details of the case though is that at some point early in the morning one of the perps drives the mom to a bank and sends her in alone to make a withdrawal. She told the teller that 2 men were holding her and her family hostage so the bank manager calls the police (the documentary starts with that 911 call detailing exactly what's going on). Next thing you know, approx half an house later the house is in flames, mom & 2 girls are dead...and the cops appear to have been surveilling the house that whole time! And this whole time the police have been 100% radio silence on why exactly no contact was made with the occupants or any rescue attempted once the house was burning...the family has written letters, no-one's talked to them, nothing. It's crazy!

Anyway, definitely watch it if you get the chance.

*half an hour, not half an house

the 2 girls were verifiably ALIVE in the house when it was set alight. Even when one of the perps was caught near the scene, apparently one of the first things he said was that the girls were still in the house and that they were alive.

Is it only on HBO or can you get it on Netflix or Amazon or other?

I don't even know if I can watch it.

i watched on hbo ondemand... idk if it's available anywhere else, though you cd probably t0rrent it

It may be available to watch in the most obvious free online video watching place if you hurry....

i started the Pamela Smart doc this afternoon on hbo as well... that's an eyeopener too

just obtained cheshire murders. now maybe i will get some things done now so i can watch it before bed.

let me know what u think

this is really good but i can't watch it all tonight. i recommend it.

It's a fascinating, upsetting doc; Hayes' defense attorney is a lousy liar. K is pitiable, which is hard to take.

the stuff with K's girlfriend was really disturbing to me

or wife, or whatever she was

Very, very much so. I think it's good to be reminded of the sad humanity behind the perps of terrible crimes when it is there, and damn, K is a hard luck case. He also belongs in jail for the rest of his life, but the biggest failing of US society was letting him become who he became, not its failure to kill him by lethal injection.

banality of evil etc, yeah.

I got the impression from k's shrink, and his girlfriend, that he is very good at reflecting other people back to themselves. k's romantic letters to his girlfriend read exactly like someone who is choosing the exact right words to say. even the taped confession, his choice of words at times was odd, like an alien practicing idioms or something. I dunno. he seemed more mask than anything to me.

it was awful that he continually referred to the Petit girl by her family nickname.

"KeKe" and that he often left off the definite article when talking about "the mom" and "the dad" were terrible and telling details to me.

yep

Whoa I need to watch this!!!

i am reading anatomy of an injustice which is pretty good and at a low reading level so i read 40% of it in a few hours

sorry, anatomy of injustice

Xpost I watched it on YT, it was amazing, WTF Cheshire PD

just bought "Crimson Stain" by Jim Fisher at a used bookstore

know nothing about it except that it's THE SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF THE ONLY AMISH MAN EVER CONVICTED OF HOMICIDE

so far so good

about a third of the way in and it's actually pretty good

very workmanlike structure/writing, nothing flashy...but the story kind of tells itself anyway. 26 year old Amish guy murdered his wife...but to say murdered makes it seem far less maniacal than the scene actually was. He pretty much mutilated her.

He was clearly disturbed for some time, but the craziest thing is that just from the little I've read it seems like he had some form of solvent-induced schizophrenia from working with engine degreaser in an unventilated garage. Dude's brain is deforming right in front of his whole community for months, it's just crazy.

ugh

maybe only loosely fitting into true crime category, but there is an hbo documentary on amazon prime called "there's something wrong with aunt diane" that is so weird and scary

sorry meant to say it was about the 2009 crash where the lady was driving the wrong way and 8 people died

I watched that! Weird + scary is a v otm description

jesus aunt diane and the cheshire murders were like my life u guys, guess i shldve talked abt them here

you still can!

fyi I started reading the Black Dahlia Files by Donald Wolfe

It's really well-written, but I think a lot of it is pretty fanciful as far as 'solving' the murder. I guess it's kinda like the Zodiac stuff, the further away you get from the actual crime the more everyone is at great pains to come up with super convoluted solutions

Makes for fun reading though. I was wondering, are there any books just about the showgirls/call-girls/struggling starlets to-be in Hollywood during the 40's? It just seems like those women all knew each other and had this kind of network that I think would make for really interesting reading.
idk

xpost 'fun' as in reading about a theory I hadn't read before, not fun in terms of murder etc

did they ever print a Murder Can Be Fun book? -- a compendium of all the issues of that zine? I only had a handful of issues

xpost---VG, I hope there is a book like that; great idea for one, anyway. Anybody read Ellroy's My Dark Places? "Part memoir, part investigative reporting":

On 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten year-old son James had been with her estranged husband all weekend and was informed of her death on his return. Her murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son - he spent his teens and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict.

Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking novel WHITE JAZZ, he determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the 38-year-old killing.

ok I'm living in the Black Dahlia rabbit hole now

Finished the Wolfe book - but a) the last third of it basically regurgitates interviews from John Gilmore's 'Severed', b) he makes it way more complicated than it needed to be, and c) it seemed very handwavey to me in general. I think he's a good writer, but even not being a huge BD nerd I just got this vibe that he was working really hard to make connections stick

So I went to the library yesterday afternoon and picked up the Hodel 'Black Dahlia Avenger'.

This one's even more tenuous right from the getgo because those photos that belonged to his Dad that Hodel says OMG IT'S THE BLACK DAHLIA...they don't look like Elizabeth Short really at all except for having black hair and a flower in her hair. But Hodel's dad was a MEGA creep and they have a really fascinating family history so I'm more reading it for that than anything else. As a Black Dahlia book I dunno how much value it has.

that ellroy book sounds great, has anyone read it?

I read it a long time ago but I don't really remember it :/

i read half of it. no reason i didn't finish it other than i don't finish most books. i liked what i read.

the Ellroy book is like the nuttiest bio this side of Klaus Kinski. Highly fucked up and very entertaining

This one's even more tenuous right from the getgo because those photos that belonged to his Dad that Hodel says OMG IT'S THE BLACK DAHLIA...they don't look like Elizabeth Short really at all except for having black hair and a flower in her hair. But Hodel's dad was a MEGA creep and they have a really fascinating family history so I'm more reading it for that than anything else. As a Black Dahlia book I dunno how much value it has.

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, September 22, 2014 5:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's a fascinating book, mainly like you said just for the twisted family history. Hodel's case for his dad being the killer of Elizabeth Short is laughable, even more so now that he's written a follow-up book accusing his dad of being the Zodiac murderer as well.

the book is literally called MOST EVIL

xpost I saw something about his Zodiac theory last night. I'm just to the point in the Black Dahlia Avenger where he's listing every unsolved murder from that period and pinning it on his Dad, along with the two kidnapping/disappearances, and it's like, shhhhhhh, it's ok we KNOW your Dad's a creep, shhhhhh, just let it go

and then I was looking up stuff about the Sowden House & found out this guy had cadaver dogs on the property and they did soil analysis to find out if bodies were buried in the back yard. What a surprise they came up with a big fat zero

I found Larry Hamlisch's website; honestly the most amusing thing about all of this reading is finding out how bitchy the authors are towards each others theories. Hamlisch seems the bitchiest -- he blogged every chapter of the Wolfe book in semi allcaps for most of it.

the proprietariness that these guys have over their halfbaked ideas is just hilarious to me

Reading this right now: fantastic, crammed with details about media coverage, loads of stuff you can't get from YouTube. It had me in tears.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0813337259/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

Sorry. Book is "Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD". By Lou Cannon.

interesting!

that's cool i was looking for something ilke that

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/us/btk-killer-to-write-book-about-murders.html?_r=0

WICHITA, Kan. — A serial killer said in a letter from prison that he was cooperating with a book about the 10 people he killed in the Wichita area to help the victims’ families monetarily.

“I can never replace their love ones, my deeds too ‘dark’ to understand, the book or movies, etc. is the only way to help them,” wrote Dennis L. Rader, who during his killing spree called himself “B.T.K.,” which stood for “bind, torture, kill.”

In a four-page, handwritten letter labeled “From the Desk of: Dennis L. Rader,” he explained that he was barred from profiting from his crimes by a court settlement, The Wichita Eagle reported. Mr. Rader, a former code compliance officer, signed over his media rights to the families of the people he killed from 1974 to 1991 after he was sent to the state prison in El Dorado in 2005.

Mr. Rader said “the long work on a book is close to a deal.” A percentage of any profits will go to the families, said James Thompson of Wichita, one of the lawyers representing most of the B.T.K. victims’ families.

Katherine Ramsland, the author corresponding with Mr. Rader on the project, envisions an academic book that will help investigators and criminologists understand serial killers.

“I’m trying to make this a serious effort that will have some benefit for people who study this kind of crime,” said Ms. Ramsland, a forensic psychology professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania who has written 54 mostly academic nonfiction books.

Mr. Rader wrote that he turned down many requests by the news media to talk with him in the last nine years because he was trying to stay true to the court agreement with the victims’ families.

“I mean to burn no bridges,” he wrote, “and hope someday to open up. People like me, need to be understood, so the criminal professional field, can better understand, the criminal mind. That would be my way helping debt to society.”

what a great way for him harness his inherent egomania O_o

haha that was my first thought too.

Still, let's not pretend we're not all going to read the hell out of that book.

Just finished Catherine Pelonero's Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences. I only really ever had a very superficial knowledge of the Genovese murder -- mostly the conventional wisdom stuff -- so it was very revealing for me. Had no idea her killer was both still alive and the longest-serving inmate in the NY system.

It was mentioned on another thread but the new This American Life-affiliated podcast "Serial" is essentially a true crime story in serialized form and is pretty good if you can get past the TALisms.

At least the first "season" is a true crime story, they might go another direction after this.

might be tough to keep people listening if there's not at least some kind of whodunnit or big reveal promised. episode 3 of Serial already felt like they were dragging things out a bit, but I agree overall it's pretty great and true crime heads will definitely be hooked

Oooo I love true crime, podcasts, and TAL!

I have scarcely ever listened to TAL. I found out about Serial almost by accident, but I got all caught up on the 3 episodes so far today and I'm fully on board.

phil d. i just started kitty genovese!

you guys

Robert Kolker's Lost Girls

cannot recommend it enough. you gots to read this srsly

Ooh this looks great

one of those rare true crime books that values the lives of the victims over their deaths.

jesus aunt diane and the cheshire murders were like my life u guys, guess i shldve talked abt them here

― johnny crunch, Sunday, September 21, 2014 2:44 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these were great and i only watched them cuz this thread hipped me to them-thanks this thread!

The first ep of Serial didn't grab me, but orig found listed (on TAL) as a pilot for the series, and we know how pilots usually are, so I'll keep listening for a while (positive response from everybody I know who's followed the eps, and Patton Oswalt very excited about it on Twitter). Here's the link for all three eps so far: http://serialpodcast.org/

who *have* followed, geez

i ordered the Lobster Boy book off Amazon, shd arrive tomorrow :D

also started reading Richard Rayner's A Bright and Guilty Place a true crimer abt LA in the 30's

Omg lobster boy!! One of my favorites! Like quadruple twisted into infinity for the role the writer of the book plays in the story. I'm ashamed to find it so fascinating when its so hard and gruesome but here I am.

I guess filing it under: 'things real people have done to one another' is a bit more charitable so welcome to the family.

I'm listening to the Serial podcast and not finding the 'craft of storytelling' intrusive at all. Good story so far!

LL you are part of the reason I bought it finally!

I think last time I looked it up it was out of print? idk. Awnyway the new American Horror Story has a lobster-boy character & it reminded me to look up the book again & voila!

Aw that makes me feel useful.
My mother would be proud on a number of levels (she's the one who helped my friend and I watch Sybil at the age of 10 :)

hey did i ever tell you guys about the true crime story that dealt with some locals from our area my mom knew?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gauger

i found the first part of _lost girls_ to be totally amazing, this generous humanist journalistic take on ppl who are usually completely marginalized and anonymized. the post-murder stuff felt rushed and much slighter in comparison. still, highly recommended.

yeah, true. the in-fighting between the moms was kind of a bummer.

Wow---I've read/heard about other cases along these lines, but this is one of the most extreme:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-woman-vanished-20141012-story.html

anyone read John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster? going for a quid on kindle today

I did! It's really good. Lawyer makes a very good case that the search warrant that got Gacy arrested did not cover the items that were seized at the time nor were they in plain sight, but nonetheless says he was guilty as sin.

great thanks, just bought

I just started reading Lost Girls!

:D

well, I mean content :( but yay

omg Serial podcast is so good! very transporting, ie i am engrossed from start to finish

not finding it draggy at all. it's such a nebulous case that even the minor details have weight

am bummed the detectives wouldn't interview on record tho :(

tell you what, only 2/3 way through but that james ellroy book is fantastic. started reading on a crummy epub scan but ended up paying full wack for it. just the most out-there horribly gripping story ive read in ages. his whole "I opened the door. I ran. It was dark. I stopped." short sharp noir sentence style bugs me a little so don't think i'll read anything else but this book is up there as an all-time great for me (no spoilers!)

span off from this article in case anyway wants the condensed read, before he starts investigating it himself (i think it's before then, not 100%)

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/200707/james-ellroy-murder

also, this is free on uk amazon today: Landed On Black - Zach Fortier. dunno if any good, sounds ok like that massive david simon book

Serial Ep. 3, "Leakin Park," getting me going ("Dig there, and you'll find one body while lookin' for another""Oh, they found my uncle's body there too")A site for seekers:
http://baltimorecrime.blogspot.com/2010/11/bodies-of-leakin-park.html
All eps here (scroll down)
http://serialpodcast.org/

Gacy is the one serial killer im too freaked out to read about. maybe one day.

Oh I watch the Aunt Diane doc yesterday. What opinions do you guys hold on what happened? To me it seems pretty cut and dry but I tend to have black and white vision until I listen to other people.

Also, do you guys ever listen to to Dan Zupansky's True Murder podcast? Each week he interviews a true crime author about the subject of one of their books. Not always thrilling listening but definitely a good source discovering new books.

there was a press conference yesterday for that guy who admitted to 7 murders in NW IN
it felt like a true crime book
also reminded me of the situation in cleveland where they found a bunch of bodies no one was even looking for
sad

reminded me of this too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpGfQ0EUgWk

Over the weekend read Joseph Wambaugh's "The Blooding" as an e-book, about the Colin Pitchfork murders in the UK, the first crime where genetic fingerprinting was used to prove that someone *didn't* do it. The book is primarily about the DNA component and the horror of the crimes, but definitely shows how a not-very-bright suspect that the police really like for the crime can be made to confess to it even if he is innocent.

There's a really good Frontline documentary about false confessions. US police are very good at getting innocent people to confess to murders.

Also well-covered in John Grisham's "The Innocent Man," where the police basically asked the suspect, "Well, let's say you DID do it, how would you have done it? Like if you did it in a dream, how would it happen?" then had him sign it as an actual confession.

caught up on the serial podcast, love it want more now

Bringing the Shirley Collins performance even more into the context of this thread: http://www.folkradio.co.uk/2013/04/new-programme-the-tale-of-the-poor-murdered-woman-an-interview-with-shirley-collins/

<3 her so much

I often wonder about the underlying neurology of 'serial confessors'. You know those people who call police tip lines and confess to murders they clearly had nothing to do with?

Oh I watch the Aunt Diane doc yesterday. What opinions do you guys hold on what happened? To me it seems pretty cut and dry but I tend to have black and white vision until I listen to other people.

― smoochy-woochy touchy-wouchy, (sunny successor), Tuesday, October 21, 2014 1:40 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the only explanation that makes sense to me is that she for whatever reason decided to kill herself and all the kids, premeditated. the accidentally got too fucked up self medicating theory kind of works but why would she keep driving when she had so many chances to get help? plus that one couple who saw her face when she was driving the wrong way and said she had a look of steely determination on her face or w/e they said.

i wasn't totally convinced by the self-medication theory either. i thought she might have had some kind of psychotic episode or maybe a very severe migraine in combination with the alcohol and the marijuana exacerbating any mental symptoms she was experiencing. i can't remember if they said the level of THC in her system was consistent with having smoked marijuana that morning though.

This looks promising-:

Piper KermanVerified account ‏@Piper

#CJreform #OITNB MT @DebKilroy: @MichelleLA22: Tenacious - A magazine created by incarcerated women http://bit.ly/1AbdOqP #prison

And this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29835159

eeesh. got as far as the cat torture and stopped.

I should have flagged that. I'm sorry.

The author of that article wrote a book about her experience. Might be interesting?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/07/justice/mcstay-case/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

they arrested someone in the mcstay family murders and it was the guy who supposedly received a phone call from mcstay that night but 'didn't answer it' and 'regretted not picking up'

so he alone killed all 4 of them in their home & there were no signs of struggle.......will be interesting to know what evidence they have on this dude

i finished kitty genovese and started lost girls. true crime is my life now i guess.

:D

Reading Robert M. Lombardo, Organized Crime in Chicago. The author had an uncle in the Outfit. Starts with Chicago's beginnings as a gambling capital, goes on into Prohibition to the present day. Published in 2013, it has loads of colorful facts, lots of stuff that was taboo ( like mob neighborhoods and hang-outs) until now. I'm on the chapter about black gangsters. They had saloons and gambling houses and even white people went to them to hear the new "jazz" music. 200 pages, it's a quick read but packed with stuff esp. about gambling.

theres a cnn special on the mcstay case @ 9 est tnight

i'm pretty good at armchair crime solving sometimes, but i feel like this guy talking about a phone call he didn't answer an hour after the "family left" the house is such an obvious red flag i can't believe more people didn't notice it, like one of those details that with hindsight seems so false and wrong and too right for that particular guy,

w/ hindsight it def does but according to this guy, he and joey mcstay talked on the phone dozens or twenty times or w/e that day, and im assuming the phone logs back that up? so if there were calls all right up to the last faked one, its sensible it wouldn't stand out

also, not sure if mcstays cell was found still in his house? thats what im assuming. otherwise if it was found with the remains out in Victorville near where the arrested dude lives, then maybe the cops have the fake call pinging out there cuz it was in the killers possession and he called himself from his own home. thatd obv be p dumb but wouldn't surprise me really

reminds me that The Serial's convicted/maybe at least partially framed dude said to have called himself etc and much else re phone logs, incl. iffiness (xpost, but now w own thread)

yeah i'm sure the logs back that up, it just seems like....why would he call that guy? if he was in trouble (the speculated reason for the call from merritt himself iirc?) he had his brother and dad or, idk, 911.

i finished lost girls. i thought it was kinda meh. i think i'll read the hijacking book next.

great article on Texarkana's "Phantom Killer":
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/the-story-of-the-phantom-killer-a-texarkana-murder-mystery

Totally fascinated by the story of Ann and John Bender. It's a real-life version of The Mosquito Coast
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/Love-and-Madness-in-the-Jungle.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-death-of-john-bender-suicide-accident-or-murder/

I finally got around to reading "Lost Girls" and it made me depressed and angry. I posted on FB after reading it that for all the mystery-fan conjecture over the years about "How to commit the perfect murder," it's depressingly easy in this country: Kill transients and sex workers.

It seems like the Long Island police department is hopelessly corrupt and the locals are keeping their mouth shut, too, which isn't helping

haven't read any of these but you guys might like them http://longform.org/lists/best-of-2014#crime

The bank-robbing family article is the best one. Texas Monthly's crime writing is always A+

I guess it's kind of an obvious recommendation but carrere's The Adversary will knock your socks off.

not heard of this but buying now - don't be afraid to be obvious on this thread!

damn no ebook to buy, only thing out there is an unreadably blurred pdf scan

I watched the doc on this thing -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cruces_Bowling_Alley_massacre

it was ok, didn't really truly quench my true crime thirst cuz theres really minimal info w/r/t suspects and it is mostly just very sad

i hadn't heard of it either. looks great. i'm buying a one cent copy on amazon. just watched "murder on a sunday morning" which was amazing, there's a high-enough resolution one on youtube from channel four. i'll get it for u all later.

(that pdf scan above is only unreadable on calibre, weirdly. works fine on olde style kindle, if a little small)

ashamed to admit that i never read in cold blood. started it after seeing discussion re: it's ethicalness on serial thread. also started manson book but stopped. it's good though. i just constantly start and don't finish books. i think i'll finish it. it's 2015 though and 2014 was my year of true crime. i need to read other types of books too.

i was obsessed with in cold blood in high school

Only TV, but Dateline tonight: re victim of his beating:"She was suffering like an animal. I had to put her out of her misery." New one on me

Not making light, I just never heard that before. Think he's about to claim he's victim of abuse (pleaded Not Guilty after confessing).
Yes, that's what he just did.

Charge is Second Degree Murder, don't know why not First, ffs

Been meaning to pick up The Good Nurse for a few months now, but reading that it was going to be the subject for Aronofsky's next film made me bump it up a little in the queue. Haven't cracked it yet, but I feel like I'll be digging into true crime in 2015 and this thread seems like it'll give me some good recs.

Think I already mentioned this, but been seeing more about it recently, reminding me I still need to read
Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. From NY Times review by Jennifer Gonnerman:
[
i]Leovy...started a blog at her newspaper {LA Times] in late 2006 called The Homicide Report, in which she attempted to cover every murder in Los Angeles County in a single year. It was a radical idea — at the time, her paper reported on only about 10 percent of homicides — and also a near-impossible task: In a 2008 article, Leovy acknowledged that the report “has merely skimmed a problem whose true depths couldn’t be conveyed.” So, she took the opposite tack, to convey more via narrowing the focus:
In “Ghettoside,” she tackles this “plague of murders,” as she calls it, with a book-length narrative that enables her to write about it with all the context and complexity it deserves. Her protagonist is John Skaggs, a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, whom she portrays as both compassionate and relentless...The narrative arc of “Ghettoside” traces one of Skaggs’s homicide cases: the murder of Bryant Tennelle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/books/review/jill-leovys-ghettoside.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20150123&_r=0

Messed up the formatting: from "Leovy...started" to "conveyed," the post quotes the reviewer.

ooh i heard her on frrrrrresh air this morning and preordered the ebook mid-interview
it sounds really interesting

Yeah, just now saw the download/stream on their site, didn't know!
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/26/381589023/ghettoside-explores-why-murders-are-invisible-in-los-angeles

i can't stop this true crime thing, i am just so voyeuristic about these ppl in these books it's bordering on gross. life is too short to worry about that though. i finished in cold blood. i started the good nurse. that one is already so insane and great. i am 10% done. like some commenter on amazon said don't read it on kindle because there are so many footnotes but i'm doing ok, just have to remember the location you left to go back.

did u like in cold blood?

i did but i didn't believe it was true? like is it a novel?

It's a true story that Truman Capote took a lot of artistic license with iirc.

otm

ok, i get it. the good nurse is so terrifying and amazing and fucked up, love it.

ok sold i am going to put it on my kindle for my trip next week :D

Ghettoside is really good. Story unfolds slowly and naturally, respectful of everyone involved imo. I'm only about 45% done but it's a solid book afaict.

I devoured "Cries in the Desert" by John Glatt about the "toy box" torturer / murderer in New Mexico. It was just fascinating, this scene in Truth or Consequences, NM with bikers and drinkers and meth abusers - a lot of people who just live cheaply in the desert and do drugs all of the time. It even has Satanism in it.

This book covers decades of tangled lives--families, lovers, friends, frenemies etc.--in and out of the projects, streets and prisons. Case in point: dealin' prodigy Boy George, a hero to some and sentenced to Life Without Parole by the time he turned 21 (the Rockefeller Laws, solution to drug epidemic uh-huh). So how does he deal with that? Better than I expected, but it's a long & winding road--ditto life in women's prison, which now seems like a prequel to Orange Is The New Black, the series more than the book. The author got to know these people as well as she could, seems like:
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

holy shit Good Nurse (harbl's rec upthread) is kerrrrrrrrazy

i cant put it down!!

yeah and

just have to remember the location you left to go back.

took me half the book to realize you just hit the left arrow :D

yeah u were right abt the footnotes jeez louise

really like the sound of Cries in the Desert but it's not available on kindle in the uk, only america. really don't like reading physical books anymore and even then i'd have to order that from america, mustn't have been published over here. has anyone had this before where a book is only available on kindle in another country? is there any way around this?

Cries in the Desert was interesting because the crimes were part of a sad criminal subculture in some awful desert town.

Anyway, got a fresh stack of crime books this week - currently reading "Harvard and the Unabomber: the education of an American terrorist." It talks a lot about the academic work Ted Kaczynski was exposed to. I worked in academic libraries when the Unabomber was doing his deeds, so I was getting exposed to similar literature. I read a lot of Anarchist and environmental literature back then. I even wanted to quit my urban job to become a park ranger. It includes excerpts from Kaczynski's journal and letters.

I also got True Crime: An American Anthology which is an anthology and history of American writing about crime. Haven't started it yet but it looks fantastic.

Harvard &The Unabomber is really good...def recommended!!!

and the academic work he was exposed to is waaay beyond reading material, lemme tell ya.

I read The Good Nurse last weekend. Good god, just . . . so much to cope with in that book. The idea that someone who is supposed to be caring for you could just blithely kill you, the complete lack of attention at every hospital he worked at. I wish more of the story of the institutional failures had been covered in the book proper rather than the footnotes. After reading I went to YouTube and watched the 60 Minutes story on this, and it included recordings of the phone calls between Somerset and the NJ Poison Control Center. The audible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ from the hospital authorities is staggering.

The hospital's desire to save face in every instance is just so unbelievable

it's interesting how different he is from the mercy killer or angel of grace or whatever. it's all him, it has nothing really to do with them except as means to an end. from what i could figure out, killing all these people was like a stress release instead of going to the gym. the level of dissasociation from his victims was really terrifying

and the numbers are !!!!! O_O

Wow, this Unabomber book is really good. The author, Alston Chase, does a great job of portraying Kaczynski as not at all insane and possibly someone to be envied - he lived in one of the most beautiful places in the United States, didn't have to work for a living, read all of the time....then you get to the pictures and there is bombing material alongside all of that literature...the idea of retreating so you can kill people is horrifying. Other true crime books don't make this point well. It's also stunning to find how much of the same literature you may have read.

I wish someone would do for Timothy McVeigh what Chase does for Kaczynski.

i never felt like chase portrayed kaczynski as someone to be envied, am a liiiiittle concerned that you would come away with that reading imo

I feel moderately guilty that I stopped reading The Road Out of Hell after the demise of Uncle Stewart ... good lord and good recommendation ppl!

Hey, would this be the thread to talk about The Jinx on?

xpost - dont feel bad! even reading up to that point, you feel like you've been *through* some shit

xpost yeah i was wondering, seemed like this would be as good a place as any!

who else watched?

it was pretty satisfying to finish The Jinx and later that day see ROBERT DURST ARRESTED on the scrolling led news thing downtown.

right!?

he's such a strange guy overall...jarecki said in an interview that he thinks durst has a compulsion to putting himself at risk/at odds with those around him, as an explanation for why durst first reached out to do the initial interview

like, if he had kept to himself most of this stuff would just stay buried
then again what's a true crime story without ~ego~

that double eye blink he did every time he told an obvious lie. great stuff. apparently he was carrying a full face latex mask when he was arrested.

!!

the guiltburp at the end was so weird, i was hoping he'd start speaking in tongues

I dunno -- I think Durst and the story are completely fascinating and the series started out very strong, but it totally lost me when the filmmakers started playing Hardy Boys late in the fourth episode. Playing ominous music when it became that Durst had HIRED AN ATTORNEY (GASP! HORROR!) when his wife went missing, that the attorney hired a detective who claimed attorney-client privilege (GASP! ETHICS! BEHAVING IN ACCORD WITH HIS PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES!), and that the detective had prepared a sheet pointing out discrepancies in the client's story (a client who smoked a lot of pot and was drunk). There were no critical questions posed to anyone -- especially cops and DAs -- who claimed Durst had done it. The last episode was too much amateur cop hour, the "confession" hardly that, and I ended up with the feeling that DAs co-opted the project somewhere along the line.

Mind you, I am fairly certain he killed two out of the three people he is said to have killed. I think he had professional help with Suzy and felt bad about it.

He burped when he went up to his brother's house as well.

Ugh I want to see this so bad and we don't have HBO life is so unfair

There are means...

I'm sure he has some Dursty alibi for the alleged confession, like "Gotcha!" And/or "I was just giving you what you wanted," thus launching a thousand more thinkpieces. Also, "I'm craazy, 'member, chopping up the guy and all? I can't hep it (burp]!"

i dont buy that he had help with susan's death.

I'm not selling it. My complaint is that this doc was selling the prosecutorial position.

i never felt that they were "selling" that. durst as a subject makes it kind of hard to *not* end up there just trying to find explanations for his behaviour.

it is pretty formulaic, but i guess i'm so used to this kind of stuff it didnt bother me

But see, I think the Durst Organization's behavior was also weird and disturbing and, frankly, suspicious -- but there was no attempt to "gotcha" them in any way, and I think that because there was no police/prosecutorial support for that project. I think I am the only non-lawyer left who gets mad when the cops frame guilty people, though.

reading The Good Nurse

halp

this shit is making me fucking dizzy

I just read the part where St. Luke's nails him for stealing and using (on someone!!!) tons of vec and when they offered to not press charges and give him 'neutral references' if he resigned, my FUCKING JAW DROPPED. Obv he gets put away eventually but dear god.

yeah that floored me

you guys can borrow this when i'm done with it!

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11083862_10153794778677137_2609858839527614647_n.jpg?oh=c6389f26c3b0bc1fe4e11835947a897e&oe=55B0FF2C&__gda__=1434471241_a85fbf41f10c477b3024463520964165

dame say hi to bear

Arghhhh this is nuuuuuuts

So glad I didn't know much about this case

three word username i thought you were a lawyer!
haven't done any jinx watching or looked at any articles about that stuff yet. too busy lawyering atm :(

i haven't seen the series but i loved the dunst durst movie so much. that movie freaked me out in a big way. i had to google that shit after watching because i couldn't believe that it was even near true. (one of the best movies i've seen in a long time and i had no hopes for it. just random netflixing and the fact that i will watch any and all dunst i have missed...)

Haven't practiced for a very long time, but yeah I guess it is a stretch to call myself a "non-lawyer".

i think i'm going to skip the good nurse
seems like it might make me flip out and i can't afford to flip out recreationally atm

it is making me flip out. But also blowing my mind. I feel like it is laying out the nuts and bolts of a specific type of irrational sociopath that I did not previously know about and which -- this is key -- has lessons to teach about the smaller-scale but similar maladaptions we (the merely neurotic) engage in. If that makes sense.

also it has shown me that hospital admin world is way way more fucked than i ever dreamed

Binged on the Jinx this week-end. I could relate to Jarecki (altho, damn that goatee makes it hard to take him seriously) starting out pretty open to hear the guy out and progressively get caught up in the anguish of having to bring down someone he obviously got pretty close to.
But yeah Durst what a character. I dunno if there's such a thing as mild schizo but the constant referring to himself in the 3rd person, the weird risk-taking and the final "confessional" dialogue all point towards a guy very much at odds with himself, to put it mildy.

finished The Good Nurse. The scene with Cullen and Amy in the restaurant was just astonishing and will probably stick with me forever.

this terrifyingly irrational guy, these terrifyingly rational hospital administrations

I also read The Good Nurse recently. Reading it, I felt pretty gross, bummed out and anxious. I think it was partly the setting- hospitals, end of life care and all that.Depressing. The sense of shared moral failure also made me feel bad- reading about stuff like this, or people who don't call the cops while they overhear their neighbor being murdered or whatever make me feel kind of guilty and anxious myself for some reason.
Also one of the images that sticks with me is the supposedly excessive amount of lotion Cullen would use on his patients.
I am reading some other kinds of books now but I think the next true crime might be Lost Girls, which also seems like it could be depressing and frustrating.

"When Buddhism goes bad": good tag, attention-grabbing-wise, but shouldn't blame it on the Buddha, just more moneyed and multivated young-ish Americans cuttin' up, in a (relatively) non-Dursty way, though plenty spacey and somewhat haplessly manipulative. Good presentation here of Scott Carney's A Death on Diamond Moutain by Laura Miller, who also provided an astute round-up of True Crime books in a piece I linked upthread:
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/15/when_buddhism_goes_bad_how_a_yoga_and_meditation_retreat_turned_cult_like_and_deadly/

i am halfway through the jinx. i love it. it reminds me a little of the clark rockefeller thing.

durst's guilt-burps immediately reminded me of anwar congo in 'the act of killing,' the only other place i think i've seen anything like that. gave me chills

not all the way through 4 but i did reach the "lawyering up" part and was pretty disturbed they made so much of it. "so why is he getting a CRIMINAL lawyer?" uh because you guys keep saying he killed her, which is a crime? even if he hadn't done anything wrong, come on. also didn't like how jarecki stalked doug durst and filmed himself doing it.

also the trying to ask the investigator privileged info and then somehow obtaining his report, which is privileged. not necessary imo.

Finally finished "True Crime: an American Anthology" and it is a must-read. I loved the Damon Runyon piece, I'll have to check out more. It has two Manson pieces - one by Gay Talese and an interview of Bobby Beausoliel by Truman Capote. It ends with Dominick Dunne's account of the Menendez murders, which are much more interesting than I'd realized. Jose Menendez is just not a sympathetic guy.

Anyway, it's 800 pages but worth it!

Watched The Cheshire Murders documentary last night. All recommendations OTM

we watched the first 40 mins of the cheshire murders doc earlier (don't know anything about the case other than ET's preceding post) but it didn't seem all that gripping, just an examination of an admittedly nasty case. is it worth watching the rest? no spoilers if there are any big twists and revelations please

WATCH

IT

GODDAMMIT

i mean if it doesnt grab you after that idk but cmon, at least watch it through

I loved it
Still trying to find a good book on the snowtown murders
Read some Robert keppel after the good nurse bc I guess I needed to hurt my brain some more

i bought masha geffen's book about the tsarnaev brothers, haven't started it yet though
i guess it's true crime?

The author was on Fresh Air a couple nights ago. Haven't heard all of the interview yet, but it's here (stream or download):
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/07/398061941/tracing-the-roots-of-the-brothers-and-the-boston-marathon-bombing

Also heard some of the discussion re Tsarnaevs during the first hour of WBUR's On Point this morning (not yet posted): incl. typological context; also somebody pointed out that there were almost no traces of the bombmaking, even though the flakey brothers seemed unlikely to have anything close to Unabomber skill sets. Possible that they were yer alienated loser textbook children *and* tools of conspiracy.

yup
i can't wait to learn the deets!

there's a masha geffen and a sasha geffen?

i guess so!

i kept wondering if her name was marcia or mosche (?) but apparently it's masha

masha geSSen

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/04/the-brothers-masha-gessen-tsarnaev-brothers-book?mbid=social_twitter

She's a pretty great reporter, I'm looking forward to this. She's been writing about the verdict in the NYT, lots of interviews this week too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/in-the-boston-marathon-bombing-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-verdict-but-few-answers.html

woops sorry masha!

I'd take anything Masha Gessen reports with a pinch of salt. Her brother Keith is excellent though.

So I just did something I've been wanting to do for a long time, which is create a spreadsheet of every book recommendation in this thread. I can't access Google Drive from work, but if someone wants to make this publicly accessible/editable, I will email it to you if you ILX mail me an address.

Also halfway through The Jinx. I like it, although I keep comparing it to The Staircase which I liked much better (obviously, if you happen to read through this thread gathering book titles and see the like 70 posts I posted about how great it is).

81 books mentioned by name. I pretty much put any book people said they were reading or said looked like something they wanted to read unless the person specifically un-recommended it.

sasha geffen should write true crime

Oh man I need to bump The Staircase up on our Netflix queue.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh dude you really do.

what kind of pinch of salt?

Carl, I want to talk about the staircase with you, but don't wanna spoil it for anyone in this thread!!!!

ILX mail me!!!

this is a v troubling corner of tru crime - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_abduction

I watched a Web of Lies show on the KY case.. 1 detail that I can't shake is that post-abduction (& murder obv) and before going to the hospital, the woman GOT A FRIEND OF HERS to take a picture of her w/ the baby (sitting behind the wheel of her car was the way the show restaged it) to post on facebook in order to make her ex think it was his kid to get him back, like delusions w/in delusions for this woman it was so sad

Update, The Staircase is apparently unavailable from Netflix, even on DVD? I swear it used to be on our queue.

re: fetal abduction - "Fetus abductions often happen at the hands of a friend"

Some friends.

the staircase is on tpb if anyone wants it. it was on youtube (i downloaded the files a few months back) but it's been deleted now.

looking forward to seeing the list, carl, nice work!

jesus murphy, that fetal abductions shit is fucked up

Yeah I watched all eps of the staircase on yt

Murder on A Sunday Morning, a doc by the director of The Staircase, is also on YouTube. Really good.

Here you go. It's editable!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDauY2Ll7tceSnoE60V-OQdocFgI2wNJqWfuscqig_c/edit?usp=sharing

damn, nice work carl!!

you get the true crime gold star (possibly bone fragment, according to unconfirmed reports)

gold star under fingernail of vic

what kind of pinch of salt?

She is quite compelling at creating narratives but her reporting often has fairly basic factual errors. She also has a pretty challenging relationship with other writers on Russia, especially ones in the same field as her (anti-government, anti-corruption, etc, like Anna Arutunyan), which seems to be based on the idea that she's the only person who can be trusted to be infallible / honest and doesn't seem to lead to a lot of self-reflection. Maybe the Tsarnaev book is good though.

the tsarnaev book looks good - she emigrated from Russia as a teenager herself, speaks Russian, travelled around to get the family's back story before they came to the US. I wasn't aware of basic factual errors she'd made, though I see she's been in a bunch of feuds with other Moscow journalists.

xpost yeah she's one of them snooty Westernizing troublemakers, look out carl

thanks for the info -- good to know it's fairly minor inter-professional bickering?

i told some people about Sybil Exposed last night and I felt myself getting super excited about it. I wish there were a movie!

carl, i ilxmailed u!

I just wish there were a new Debbie Nathan book!

Xp

good to know it's fairly minor inter-professional bickering?

i really don't know - ShariVari seems more informed than me

finally got a hold of Raven: The Untold Story of Rev Jim Jones & His People by Tim Reiterman

It should surprise zero ppl to learn that he was a weird, creepy dude even as a teenager.

oh and I got McGuinn's recent Manson bio too, yknow for laughs :/

i had to return that to the library, didn't finish. not because it was bad but because i read too many books at once and finish none. but i am bad at returning books to the library on time and i'm afraid to even look at my fines.

can i just quit my job, get a dog, and read true crime books all day

god yes. i wish it was an employable skill

half the time i borrow three books, read half of one & quietly return them all in shame

but true crime like this i usually gobble up, feel confident that these will get finished

i need to add that i live 2 blocks from the library and i used cold weather as an excuse to not return books. the first day it was warm i did it but it was like 6 weeks late!

bought a bow saw to remove one of those awful "trees of heaven" growing unwelcomely from the side of my planter box and was thinking of THE JINX and his bow saw. as i stood in line forever at the hardware store i imagined an awkward conversation with the cashier about whether she had seen the jinx. i did not mention it.

the adversary is amazing btw. very novel-like in the best way.

Cashier: "Don't throw the body parts in the lake, remember they'll float!" (laughs)

Harbl: (laughs) "I won't! Whaddya think this is for?!" (points to bag of quicklime) (shared laughter)

jfc this Jim Jones story

like i am barely an eighth of the way through this tome & he's already convinced a guy (who is an irl lawyer) to sign over parental rights to Jones for his newborn baby

high-up members of the temple routinely, like ALL the time, would go out at night & dig through other members' trash looking for dirt on them, or enter into their houses specifically for spying

and this is in the v early 70's!

a lot of it reminds me of scientology, but even crueller & machiavellian & much more isolating if that is even possible

it's crazy how many people gave *everything* they had to the Temple, with like, of months of joining.

66% (lol Kindle) through People Who Eat Darkness. That's a great book to read if you want to be furious at patriarchy and sexism and inept police.

otm

Just got this, a freebie at the library shop---has blurbs from Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, which I'm told is good re the problems & dangers of female adolescence, also Harold Kushner, who wrote When Bad Things Happen To Good People, and many others (incl somebody in O Magazine)
(if the image is gone, it's The Sociopath Next Doorby Martha Stout, Ph.D)
http://taboojive.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/sociopath-next-door.png

I have that one but only made it a short way in before getting distracted by something else. Let us know your thoughts when you are done.

watched the staircase over the past week, and it blew me away. so well-made and (spoiler alert) cannot believe the jury vote at the end. i'm guessing a lot was missed out, and this semi-hysterical website seems to say as much: http://www.peterson-staircase.com/ my opinion on guilty/not guilty changed about a dozen times throughout it all. are there any more legit details about this to explain one way or the other? confidence of head defence guy at the end seemed so certain.

Where did you watch it?
A few things:
I LOVED The Jinx! I watched dr drew's HLN show the Monday after he was busted in New Orleans. In his medical opinion Durst clearly has a brain surgery scar and the gait of someone with Parkinson's . He also thinks he is schizophrenic and that the muttering in the bathroom may not have been a confession but rather him answering to a persecutory auditory hallucination. I don't know. I mean was that the case when he offed those people and hacked up the Galveston neighbor?

Secondly, a big THANK YOU to Carl for the rec list. Exactly what I needed,

Thirdly, have any of you listened to Dan Zupansky's True Murder podcast? He interviews a true crime author every week and gets into the details of the murders actions and psyche. It's pretty great. I used to listen all the time but then I was unemployed for 6 months a dropped out. Checking it again tonight I found an episode with Charles Graeber discussing 'The good nurse'. Can't wait to listen to it in my commute tomorrow. Here is the link if you're interested:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/true-murder-most-shocking/id393525078?mt=2&i=336202069

ooh cool thx sunny

Yeah, I've been looking for a new podcast and that sounds great, Sunny. Thanks! (Also: you're welcome!)

xps yeah his defence lawyer even offered to work his appeal for free, that's how confident he was in his innocence. also, the courtroom scene, when lawyer is rehearsing the night before and the old tech guy is totally ballsing everything up - cracked me up so much.

has anyone watched all the west memphis 3 docs?

ha yeah, that tech guy scene was hilarious. jaw dropping to see this multi-million dollar trial turn into farce, hours before the opening day. it was a slow starter, the first episode we were all shrug, so what. but the way new details opened out throughout the series, so great. ss, i downloaded a great quality torrent from KAT. i'd downloaded all the files from youtube before they were taken down but that torrent is your best bet

justin3 (and anyone else who's seen it), did you finish the series thinking he was guilty or not? i changed opinion so many times it became a whirlwind but by the end i was on the side that he was innocent, but reading through that exposé site im guessin there was a lot of stuff left out

That about not really a confession because schizo w voices is fairly consistent with defense re cutting up neighbor, so might work again, esp if he makes plea deal, agrees to extended confinement x treatment, tho obv his theme song is "Don't Fence Me In."

Xp I still don't have a solid feeling either way!

justin3 (and anyone else who's seen it), did you finish the series thinking he was guilty or not? i changed opinion so many times it became a whirlwind but by the end i was on the side that he was innocent, but reading through that exposé site im guessin there was a lot of stuff left out

― NI, Friday, April 24, 2015 11:02 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I went back and forth 1,000,000 times, too, which is part of what I loved about the doc and why I always tell people to avoid reading anything about it before watching if at all possible.

As I told just1n3 over email, I've read enough true crime to know that if two of a man's wives die in the same way, he probably did it. But there's also enough there for reasonable doubt. I don't know. My favorite alternate theory out there is the one that says owls killed her. So I think it was probably owls.

The owls are not what they seem, etc.

I was going through the public library's available true crime ebooks and downloaded People Wasn't Made to Burn: A True Story of Housing, Race, and Murder in Chicago by Joe Allen. I'm only a few chapters in but so far so good (although the precipitating tragedy is very difficult to read about). It's a good book for people who want something more along the lines of The Skies Belong to Us, with lots of historical perspective leading up to a watershed moment. Also good for people interested in Chicago history, Black American history, the Great Migration, and housing justice.

i think i read that but i'm not sure. i know i read a book that dealt with a fire in a slum in chicago.

This was creepy.
https://medium.com/matter/have-you-ever-thought-about-killing-someone-9abedcc531ad

Got through about half of that, just seemed like tedious horde of details, for a gross-out tale told by the ol' yarn-spinnin' cowpoke, that kind of half-jokey tone.

hoard, that is.

Many xposts

I used to listen to that Dan Zupansky podcast---it has such creepy production values, like listening to Late night AM radio back in the 90s. And the guests are such grizzled oddballs with obsessive minds.

A 1997 Texas Monthly bank robbery story turned up on my feed and it's a good one:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/last-ride-polo-shirt-bandit

Bloodletters and Badmen!

Just finished watching the Staircase this weekend - and yeah like most people on this thread, I changed opinions a dozen time before starting to cheer for Peterson (loved the defense lawyer) by the end of the series. A lot of people online argue that a lot of stuff was left out and that things are not as ambiguous as the documentary make them out to be. Seen a lot of recommendations for "Written in Blood" by Diane Fanning for a more complete account of the case, so I might check that out.

I'm still dying for a definitive answer on this - I know it's wildly unlikely unless he decides to confess on his deathbed or whatever but nggggh

me too!!!

Owls did it.

Decided to work my way through the St. Martin's True Crime Classics, since the writing and research are better than in the average true crime book.

Am on Adrian Havill's "The Mother, the Son and the Socialite", was up late reading this, it's about the Kimes, whom I've always wanted to read about.

Not a book, but exorcised some demons listening to this:

itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-must-remember-this

Part of the "You Must Remember This" podcast.
Many hours of detailed Manson tales.

i like that podcast, her monty clift ep is pretty good

Thought this revive might have been for RIP Ann Rule.

almost done w/ http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61EaSiSMyvL._SL500_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-big,TopRight,35,-73_OU01_AA130_.jpg

is nicely structured & detailed esp considering dudes guilt is such a foregone conclusion

I flagged those multi-posts, god damn.

xp fyi this guy was writing to himself in an alien star wars language during his murder trial

yeah i was v bummed about her passing

she was my first entry into true crime: a paperback copy of small sacrifices when I was 12 or 13

i said on fb her best quality was her ability to tell the victim's story, make them the focus & bring them to life. especially the Green Rivers Running Red book - she changed the tone of the story & gave the girls a voice

her book about knowing ted bundy, ''the stranger beside me', is really excellent

yeah, really good

Yeah, I read her Bundy book too, a true crime classic.

I really liked the "You Must Remember This" podcast too! A friend recommended it to me because we had read Helter Skelter concurrently in middle school. I had to have a parent/teacher conference because I brought some other Manson-related book to class and left it in the cubby by accident.

Anyway, being that I read it in middle school, it completely washed over me that a couple of the victims were high on MDA on the night of the Tate murders. I thought about bringing that factoid up when ecstasy was revived last week, but thought better of it.

manson in the cubby

I have never read any Ann Rule

In honor of her passing I just started the green river one this morning. Digging it so far. I spent 6 yrs living in the region before the tech explosion and she is really evoking that hopeless sasquatch deathtrash feeling I got from driving around some of those towns

Yeah I found her writing in that so affecting. I think it's of a piece with the recent "Lost Girls" by Kolb

Green river book is straight up amazing btw

Rule is so much better than I thought she would be all these years

I'm about 75%

And holy fuck they really aren't going to catch him before I move to Seattle in May 90 are they?

nope

Ann RULE(S)

:D

they aren't going to catch him before I move to Seattle in May 90 are they this reminds me (hadn't thought of it in decades) a girl I knew finally made up her mind to transfer to FSU in fall '77, and in January, she finished a letter about wild rumours from Sorority Row, ones she'd just overheard while writing. She put it in the mailbox that evening, and by the time I got it, a couple days later, the news was all over TV, about a month before Ted Bundy was caught.

Finished a letter by mentioning wild rumours, that is; it wasn't all about them. We were used to wild rumours; before she transferred from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, our campus officials and local cops had tried to put a lid on an outbreak of stories of rape, which had the opposite of the desired effect.

(Turned out the stories were basically true, duh.)

Come to think of it, I also knew a family who left San Francisco for sweet Columbine, right before the high school shootings.

Personal connections dept, while in Seattle I knew the son of Bob Keppel (instrumental on the bundy and green river investigative teams). And another guy I knew was whispered to be the son of a GRK suspect who had been ruined by the accusation (based on Rule's account and the guys last name, I'm doubting that rumor)

finally got into the Manson episodes on 'You Must Remember This' podcast -- recommendations itt are otm, it's really good!
it was also a good reminder that I need to get onto that Jeff Guinn Manson bio. So I ordered it from amazon :)

Because what I need in my life is more Manson rabbitholing. ffs.

Not wanting to break my mood, I have segued from green river running red to Fred and Rose, Howard Sounes book about Fred and Rose West. Jesus this awful awful couple, the details beggar the imagination, just stick an ice pick right in the imagination's eye socket.

i believe i need to read that right now

haven't read it but Happy Like Murderers is meant to be the definitive West book

I believe they may be the worst people I have ever read about in my life

That should be very thorough; Sounes' Dylan book uncovered several noteworthy items apparently not in any of the many, many previous Dylan books. Speaking of tenacity, would like to check xpost intrepid police investigator Bob Kepner's books (hoping co-authorship didn't get awkward).

xxpost Sounes was the journalist who broke the story of the Wests. i havent read either book but I would have thought his book to be the go-to

anyone read happy like murderers? sounds interesting:

An account of two people - Fred and Rose West - who lived together, raised (and killed) children, provided sexual services for anyone interested, and pretended to provide social services for single women. Investigated and told by one of the greatest journalists and writers of the last twenty years, this is the most powerful and upsetting true crime book you will ever read.

we talk about it upthread a bit - it's an amazing & profoundly grim book. Burn was a really serious, first-rate writer & you can see a couple of us have some nagging reservations that come from that, but tbh it's a great book, strongly recommend.

Gordon Burn was an incredible writer, and both that one and Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper are unmissable

The Brian Masters book on Rose West's trial - She Must Have Known - is also worth reading, if only because, by complicating the matter of Rose's guilt or innocence, it moves a tiny bit beyond the standard tabloid conception of 'evil' that sometimes blights more give-me-the-facts true crime books. Masters' books on Nielsen and Dahmer are also highly recommended.

Burns' book on the Yorkshire Ripper is best read in conjunction with Wicked Beyond Belief by Michael Bilton, a more straightforward narrative that offers a very full picture of the 'hunt' for Sutcliffe, and the many false turns that investigation took.

One of Robert Keppel's criminology textbooks has a very in depth analysis of the Yorkshire investigation and where things went wrong.

There is a Manson special on CNN at 9 PM EST tonight.

just finished Happy Like Murderers. I see what you guys were saying up thread about the dissonance between Burn's brilliant writing* and the sheer sordid evil of the subject matter. The cruelty of the Wests is genuinely unimaginable at times. Still, an incredibly powerful book.

*pretty obvious David Peace is a big fan

Started reading Krakauer's Missoula yesterday and every page makes me want to turn into The Hulk.

i do not need to read that book, esp after i heard him on the radio when he said that he didn't think really understand rape before he wrote it.
i understand it just fine! glad other people are getting it too, but it's definitely not a book for me.

he didn't think really understand rape
*he didn't think he understood rape -- i think he actually said he didn't understand what a big deal it is to victims. he thought it was more like a scary event but not a total violation of one's person. it was pretty shocking to hear that from an otherwise reliably ok person.

Jeez
How old is he?

idk, 40 something, 50 something? not boomer old.

young enough that i expected him to know better (although i gotta give him some credit for being honest)

I haven't read that many reviews of it yet, but a couple present it as not up to his usual standard of investigative journalism---not that it's likely(?) to blow up a la the Rolling Stone article, but his previous books have set the bar pretty high.

i've read a couple of his others, under the banner of heaven is all-time, but i have been wary of this one

This is a review of The Man In The Monster, about convicted serial rapist-killer Michael Ross. The author, Martha Elliot, is a legal journalist who got too involved with him, according to the reviewer, Nancy Rommelmann, who wrote a book about Gacy. Rommelmann really does review Elliot's book, rather than use it as a point of departure for her own show of expertise and righteous indignation, unlike so many others with such an opportunity. Don't know if she's right, but, as a journalist of some evident integrity, at least here, she includes information that doesn't necessarily sell her opinion (ditto Elliot, looks like). Anyway, the story is too brutal to paste; here's a link:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-1439586517

If any of these are new recs, feel free to update the spreadsheet of book recommendations from this thread - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDauY2Ll7tceSnoE60V-OQdocFgI2wNJqWfuscqig_c/edit?usp=docslist_api

Or don't! This isn't work, after all.

xxp It definitely borders closer to polemic than investigative journalism at times so far, but one gets the sense that Krakauer became genuinely outraged once he got an up close look at how victims suffer, how perpetrators get away with it, and how unfair and insensitive police and other authorities can be.

If you're likely to be triggered, I'd definitely avoid it. He does not shy away from very graphic description.

Have we ever discussed Ann Rue's Bitter Harvest on this thread? Amazing book. Probably my favorite True Crime book.

Rule even

ooh havent read that one! what's it about?

omg. this crazy as fuck woman who burns down her house so her husband wont leave her and then we he finally does leave her she burns down a bigger house with her kids inside to get back at him. I mean, obviously so much more goes on but that's the very general idea. She makes Diane Downs look like mother of the year in comparison.

holy shit

adding it to my "want to read" list

i didnt know where else to put this

I was poking around finding out about erotomania. had not heard about this woman (obv pretty famous at the time tho?)

makes me sad for her
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mary_Ray

some more interesting reading here, relating to its disappearance from dsm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-everyone-became-depressed/201507/erotomania-haunts-female-tennis-stars

NY Mag on the Slender Man stabbing: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/slender-man-stabbing.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/a-death-at-torrey-pines/403186/

I found a very good true crime podcast--"Sword and Scale"

It's mostly told through old interviews, news reports, 911 calls.
Episodes 5 & 6 are about the Larry King Bohemian Grove sex ring conspiracy. Pretty crazy.

wow, looks great. thanks, president.

i think vg posted about sword and scale, either here on fb, so i started listening to it this week - it's really good. i just finished up the two-part carnation murders episode, which was really weird.

that one bugged me because it was just an audio dump. i can kindacan see why he did it that way, it WAS weird but he didn't cover hardly anything else about the case & it just felt like "lol @ this guy"

the fetal homicide ep was interesting but v traumatic to listen to

the 911 calls in this podcast are hella stressful too, jfc

yeah it was less a story about the crime itself and more a study of this dude joseph. i felt like the podcast guy was... idk, like really really biased? i don't think that's the right word, but he just kept reading all this really negative stuff into everything joseph was saying and sounding kinda spiteful about it? i mean the guy murdered six people but clearly was a really fucked up dude and i felt pretty sorry for him.

but i did want to know more about the crime and more about michelle.

yeah he can be v immature & judgey with his comments, it's a bit offputting at times

he seems like a reddit dude, yknow, zero experise but likes acting like he knows ~stuff~

but i dont hate it so...shrug... lol

holy shit i just finished the two eps about toni ingram... what a clusterfuck!!! and that poor dude... i honestly can't believe he's managed to live 16 years dealing with this awful shit :(

I just finished the Robert Reed two-parter, gahhh racist small towns are the worst

Listening to the sword and scale psychopath episode. It's pretty amazing.

Listening to the sword and scale psychopath episode. It's pretty amazing.

the noreen gosch eps are pretty... unbelievable. especially when she says that her grown up son visited her in 2007 and is in hiding.

Skip the Luka Magnotta episode if you ever want to listen to True Faith again.

Listening to Ted Bundy's last interview again. This fucking guy.

i watched a horrible documentary about noreen gosch. a great documentary could have been made about her. she is unbelievable! i am fascinated by paranoid suburban mom narratives though.

oh that was mentioned in one of the podcasts, and i was really interested til the director said 'irregardless' during the interview.

i didn't look her up online til after i listened to all 3 episodes, and looks nothing like i expected! her narartive is way more crazy than toni ingram's, yet i'm more convinced by noreen bc she's so stern and articulate.

what did she do for a living before her son went missing?? what has she been doing for a living since he disappeared??

in the middle of that fred west 'happy like murderers' book and it's pretty good, if relentlessly bleak. gordon burn's writing style is frustrating though, constantly repeating things, writing in that studenty ultra-declarative way, rambling, confusing, childish and just outright bad at times.

Episode 54 of Sword and Scale has the singlemost horrifying series of 911 calls followed by the best discussion of Florida's stand-your-ground and Castle Doctrine laws. If say, you happen to listening to this late at night just be prepared to stay up a couple more hours to recover - both from the crime and the intense discussion. I love it when niche podcasters put in effort to make an actual show.

Has anybody read this?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/418OS6fIFxL.jpg

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell

In a searching examination of how children become violent criminals, and how the judicial system treats them, Sereny focuses on the case of Mary Bell. At age 11 in 1968, Bell committed the motiveless murder of two boys, ages three and four, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The British tabloids demonized Bell as a "born killer" and "vicious psychopath." But Sereny, who extensively interviewed Bell, her therapists and social workers, portrays Bell, at the time of the murders, as a cauldron of repressed rage and anguish who lived in a grotesque fantasy world dissociated from reality. A prostitute's daughter, Bell was forced to watch as her mother was whipped by clients; she was also sexually abused by her mother's customers. Sentenced to life in prison but released in 1980, Bell, according to Sereny (who covered the trial in a 1972 book, The Case of Mary Bell), today feels profound remorse, sees a parole officer regularly, has a stable relationship with a caring man and is raising a daughter. Sereny's account of Bell's 12-year incarceration is disjointed and overwritten, but it offers a scorching look at British women's prisons as cesspools of drugs, abuse and coerced sex. Sereny proposes that children under 14 should not be held criminally responsible and should be tried by a specially convened panel instead of by jury. Her harrowing inquiry, marked by a rigorous and by no means easy exercise of sympathetic imagination, will compel people to rethink how to deal with children who kill or commit other serious crimes.

I read this in 2002, just once (I was visiting someone who had a copy). Still think of it from time to time, no doubt in part because I haven't read that much about crime, but also because this was just an unbelievably wrenching read.

I just listened to the jonestown death tapes on sword and scale. holy shit! like my chest hurts.

I read Tim Reitermans 'Raven: The Untold Story of Jim Jones' just couple of months ago and it completely wrecked me. I already knew a lot and I still had to put it down and walk away several times, it's fucking horrible. Knowing the Sword & Scale dude's proclivity for audio-dumps, and knowing how much Jones loved recording himself and all the tapes that are out there, I knew there was no way IN HELL I was going to listen to that episode. I would never sleep again

Is this the right place for magazine articles too? This was a good'un

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-talented-mr-khater/

Finished this a couple months ago: http://www.amazon.com/Darker-than-Night-Homicide-18-Year/dp/0312936761

Any good? Looks interesting

VG, I hadn't read much at all about Jonestown and figured it would be a relatively safe ep to listen to...no 911 tapes etc. WRONG.

;_; (hug)

I recently watched The Sacrement, which is a horror movie in which three Vice reporters (LOL) get involved in a People's Temple-style cult, with a People's Temple style resolution and I thought it would be fiiiiinnnneee because I'm so familiar with the story and I was not particularly attached to the Vice reporters as characters but it was really tough to watch.

I can't remember which documentary about Jim Jones it was but there was one where they interviewed one of the survivors and it was basically impossible to get through without stopping to go get some fresh air. It's such a brutal, brutal story. Also: children.

Jesus Christ Sword and Scale is incredible and hard

Carl, yes, the children dying in those tapes is what got me. Note to self: never listen to audio of children dying ever again.

People's Temple is just bad bad bad ... In the book there's detail of the last hours of Jones' right hand Sharon Amos who upon hearing that shit was going down murdered two of her 3 kids. Then her oldest daughter helped Amos take her own life, & then the daughter killed herself ---all while the ex husband was waiting at the airport hoping to get the kids to safety

the levels of fuckedupness are endless

my husband's uncle & his family were good friends with Leo Ryan :/

ugh....so bad