Dominick Dunne became a chronicler of criminal justice for the rich and well-connected after his own daughter was murdered in 1982 by her boyfriend. But his fascination with high-profile crime first surfaced during his youth, as he admits in his new book, Justice, in a chapter on the 1943-44 trial and conviction of Wayne Lonergan for the murder of his socialite wife and brewing heiress Patricia Burton. "I was a teenager in boarding school at this time," he writes, "and I remember risking expulsion every afternoon by sneaking into the town of New Milford, Connecticut, during sports period to read the latest accounts in the New York Daily Mirror and the New York Journal American at the local drugstore."
The 18 articles in this collection were written originally for Vanity Fair. They cover the trials of the Menendez brothers for the shotgun slaying of their parents, of Claus von Bulow for the attempted murder of his wife and the still-in-progress proceedings against Kennedy kinsman Michael Skakel for the bludgeoning death of young Martha Moxley. But Dunne devotes most of these pieces to the endlessly absorbing trials of O.J. Simpson both the one he won and the one he lost. Dunne relates that he became such a familiar fixture in court that during the civil trial Simpson approached him smiling and offering his hand. Dunne says he declined to shake hands but notes that Simpson despite all the revelations about him still possessed an almost irresistible charm.
Dunne is at his best when revealing the personalities and social backgrounds of the principals who confront each other in the courtroom. A dogged gatherer of facts and gossip, he always seems to know the right people insiders he bumps into at elegant parties who have tantalizing information to share about the trial in question. He makes no pretense of being objective, freely coloring his accounts with his own impressions and biases. He is contemptuous of Judge Lance Ito in the first Simpson trial, less than dazzled by prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark, but quite taken with police detective Mark Fuhrman.
Socially privileged himself, Dunne brings an insider’s perspective to his coverage of the trials of the well-to-do that few other crime reporters can hope to match. Always perceptive, ever engaging, with Justice, Dunne has done it again.
Edward Morris writes from Nashville.
Dominick Dunne became a chronicler of criminal justice for the rich and well-connected after his own daughter was murdered in 1982 by her boyfriend. But his fascination with high-profile crime first surfaced during his youth, as he admits in his new book, Justice, in a…
“My favorite book growing up was Harriet the Spy,” Erika Krouse says, speaking by phone from her home in Colorado. “It’s funny because that’s what I ended up doing. [Harriet] wanted to be a writer, and she wanted to be a spy, and I did too.”
In 2002, years after Krouse’s Harriet the Spy phase, she had a chance encounter with a corporate lawyer in a bookstore. At the time, she was a 33-year-old fiction writer working a series of temp jobs, but there was something about her face that had always made people, including this lawyer, confess their innermost secrets to her. After experiencing this phenomenon for himself, the attorney offered Krouse a job as a private investigator, and she accepted. As she writes in Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, “I wanted to help people and find things out, not necessarily in that order.”
That moment in the bookstore launched Krouse’s five-year investigative career, which included work on a landmark Title IX case involving college football players and recruits who raped fellow students at a party. For legal reasons, Krouse changed their names in the book. “I was committed to keeping the survivors safe,” she explains, “but the funny thing is, I also had to disguise the perpetrators, even though they didn’t deserve it, because some of that could have splashed back at the survivors.” The only concrete details she provides are that, at the time of the case, she was living “in the Front Range foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, in a small city that hosted a university and a swarm of tech startups.” It’s enough information for readers to connect the dots with a quick internet search.
“It’s the most famous case that no one’s ever heard of,” Krouse says. “There have been whole books about Title IX sexual assault that don’t mention this case, which is amazing to me because it was the first college case like this.” Krouse’s sleuthing helped reveal that the football team had used alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. The school eventually reached a settlement in 2007, with one victim receiving $2.5 million and another receiving $350,000.
At the time, Krouse didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of her involvement. “I’ve been thinking about this recently,” she says. “How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it or work on something that’s important? That’s not ordinary life, right? Ordinary life—you’re just trying to pay the bills and get groceries and get here and get there. So when these opportunities do come up, it is actually an extraordinary circumstance. And a lucky one. A very, very lucky one.”
“How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it?”
Throughout the memoir, Krouse also writes about her own childhood experiences of sexual abuse by a man she calls X. “I would have preferred to use his identity,” she says, “but in some ways, it was freeing not to—in that, this is a person who doesn’t even get to have a name.” Another benefit of this approach was that she didn’t have to address any of the psychological factors that may have contributed to his crimes. “I could just focus on the functionality of this person, which is that he was a perpetrator,” she says, “and not have to spend a lot of time humanizing someone who dehumanized me.”
At first, Krouse didn’t plan to address her own victimization in the book. “I generally don’t talk about my history, even with friends,” she says. She didn’t even discuss it while working on the sexual assault case. But as Tell Me Everything began to take shape, she decided, “I’m writing about all of these very brave women. For me not to even talk about my own past would be cowardly.”
Krouse knew her personal history would make investigating a sexual assault case tricky. “In some ways, I think I might have been able to be more strategic had I had more distance from the topic of sexual violence,” she says. “But in other ways, I think I was able to understand the people I was talking to on a deeper level. I don’t know what the balance is.”
“I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”
Since she had no prior detective experience, Krouse learned on the job. Luckily, she says, fiction writers are uniquely qualified to be PIs. “We love the narrative. And we think, ‘Oh, wow. That moment back when they were 4 years old contributed to this completely unrelated thing.’ We like the web, and the way we figure out the next clue, so to speak, is never in a linear way. It’s always roundabout.”
Krouse’s chops as a writer, plus her talent for making strangers spill their guts, gave her an edge, but there was still plenty of trial and error. She readily admits, with a laugh, that as an Aries, her modus operandi tends to be “ready, fire, aim.” But this approach worked. “I don’t think there’s a way to prep in advance because so much is fluid,” she says. “I definitely had no idea what I was doing, and that feeling turned out to be an asset because we were in new legal territory. Nobody had done a case like this, ever.”
Krouse says she never imagined that she’d write a book about sexual assault until suddenly, she was doing it. The process has been healing—“but not in a warm bath and candles kind of way,” she says. “I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”
Headshot of Erika Krouse courtesy of the author
Meet the fiction writer who unexpectedly became a private investigator and helped crack a landmark sexual assault case.
“I loved secrets, even terrible ones,” writes Erika Krouse in her debut memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. “Especially terrible ones. When people told me things, I felt happy. The more they didn’t want to tell me that secret, the happier I felt when they did.” When a lawyer unexpectedly offered the fiction writer a job as a PI in 2002, she found herself investigating members of a Colorado university football team who had raped their female classmates. Unbeknownst to the lawyer, Krouse had also experienced sexual abuse from the ages of 4 to 7 by a man she calls X. Krouse explores both the legal case and her own emotional minefield in compelling, precise prose.
For legal reasons, and to protect the victims, Krouse changes some identifying details about those involved with the case and never names the university, although a few well-placed clues allow readers to deduce the specifics. Thanks to Krouse’s sleuthing, one victim received a $2.5 million settlement in 2007 and another received $350,000. The football team, she discovered, had a history of institutionalized misogyny and had been using drugs, alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. After these revelations, the team’s coach was suspended and later fired.
With utmost care and consideration for the victims, some of whom chose not to come forward, Krouse gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the complications of pursuing a Title IX case. Her narrative voice is engaging, and she effortlessly relates legal complexities in succinct, easy-to-follow passages. As a result, learning how Krouse and her legal team patiently unraveled the scope of the university’s involvement reads like a detective novel. Particularly riveting are the scenes in which Krouse speaks with various witnesses, often in bars or restaurants, trying to parse out what happened on the night of that ill-fated party. Instead of fancy surveillance equipment, Krouse relies on the lure of free beer and nachos, noting, “Alcohol made football players arrogant enough to tell the truth; it made women sad and angry enough to trust me.”
Alongside the story of her investigative work, Krouse explores her personal life: falling in love with an acupuncturist, reflecting on her childhood and navigating difficult family relationships. Her mother refused to address Krouse’s sexual abuse even after Krouse was an adult, and their relationship remains a live grenade throughout the book.
Both the true crime and memoir components of Krouse’s book are extremely successful, and her reflections on the injured party’s difficult choice to make their pain public are crisp and on point. “Maybe I . . . was splashing around in other people’s pain just to avoid drowning in my own,” she writes. “Maybe I was only trying to help them because nobody helped me.” Tell Me Everything is a memorable, highly personal account of a landmark legal case, as well as a thoughtful examination of the long-lasting damage of sexual assault.
Erika Krouse’s memorable, highly personal account of a landmark Title IX case reads like a compelling detective novel.
Edgar Smith is not one of the names that comes to mind when one thinks of storied American killers, but according to the superb crime writer and journalist Sarah Weinman, he was at one point “perhaps the most famous convict in America.” Convicted for the brutal 1957 murder of 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski in New Jersey, Smith spent years on death row claiming he was innocent. His story caught the eye of conservative millionaire William F. Buckley Jr., who befriended Smith and helped him publish his story in a bestselling book. After years of legal wrangling, Smith was released from prison and became a passionate advocate for prison reform.
But then? Smith was caught attempting to abduct a woman in California in 1976. After he stabbed and beat her, the woman managed to escape. He confessed to killing Zielinski while being tried for his second crime, and ultimately died in prison in 2017. Scoundrel is the electric story of a man who managed to fool everyone around him: his wife, his mother, the famous neoconservative who founded the National Review and even the legal system.
The most interesting detail Weinman uncovered during her research for Scoundrel is that Smith had an affair with his editor, Sophie Wilkins—or at least as much of an affair as one can have from the confines of prison. Weinman found a trove of correspondence from Smith to Wilkins, some of which are love letters and others of which are more sexually graphic. “Those long letters, exceeding twenty single-spaced pages, weren’t sent through the Trenton State prison system, lest snooping censors create problems and revoke the privileges of its increasingly famous Death House inmate,” Weinman writes. Instead, Smith gave the letters to his lawyers, who passed them along to Wilkins. Wilkins would later claim she was only using Smith’s affection to produce the best book possible, but the letters suggest a more complicated and sincere relationship between the pair.
Despite his crimes happening more than 60 years ago, Weinman paints a complete portrait of Smith in all his complexity, with an unsettling ending that left me breathless. A chilling and deeply satisfying read, Scoundrel injects life into a story nearly forgotten by time.
Scoundrel is the electric story of a killer who managed to fool everyone around him, as told by the superb crime writer Sarah Weinman.
Timothy Dumas, former managing editor of Greentown News, is obsessed with the most infamous murder mystery to occur in America’s wealthiest community, Greenwich, Connecticut. For years, Dumas has written about the headline-grabbing slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, found beaten to death on the lawn of her home on Halloween, 1975. Now, with Greentown, Dumas offers one final examination of the case.
The brutal murder of the young all-American beauty, as chronicled by Dumas, begins with a no-holds-barred overview of Ground Zero, the remote Belle Haven community of Greenwich, nicknamed “Greentown,” a place where nothing is as it seems. Something evil and decadent lurks in the rows of gabled mansions along the tree-lined streets in the monied enclave, home of the nation’s tony jet set, Hollywood royalty, and political power brokers. Dumas shatters the myth of this suburban Shangri-La with his probing, uncompromising look at the girl’s last hours and the crime’s aftermath. However, it is the author’s crisp, lean writing style that lends the work its power. Dumas’s relentless search does not prevent him from finding the underlying humanity of the principals in this sordid event. The author ventures bravely into the minds of each of the key players, using their individual voices to weave a colorful tapestry of grief, deception, and hypocrisy. The writer is at his best when he allows them to speak their deepest fears and secrets. Some elements of the case surfaced immediately police disclosed that the murder weapon was a woman’s golf club and that the last person to see the dead girl was Thomas Skekel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy. Others, however, remain a mystery. With the complete revelation of the grisly murder, the Belle Haven community, long protective of its reputation and distrustful of outsiders, closed ranks, stymying the police investigation. Every lead rushed to a frustrating dead end, witnesses suddenly became strangely mute, suspects were captured and quickly released.
To his credit, Dumas veers away from the type of doting fascination with the rich and famous that writer Dominick Dunne exhibited in his popular A Season in Purgatory, which is also based on the Moxley case. Instead, Dumas focuses his attention on the seemingly ill-fitting puzzle pieces of the unsolved murder. Why would a killer choose the carefree, fun-loving Moxley teen for such a gruesome death? Why was the clumsy six-iron used as a murder weapon? How did a stranger get past the defenses of the heavily guarded Belle Haven community? Was it an inside job? In short, Dumas’s Greentown is the perfect example of what a treasure trove of research can become in the hands of a capable writer.
Reviewed by Robert Fleming.
Timothy Dumas, former managing editor of Greentown News, is obsessed with the most infamous murder mystery to occur in America's wealthiest community, Greenwich, Connecticut. For years, Dumas has written about the headline-grabbing slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, found beaten to death on the lawn of…
A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover. Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperCollins, $14, 0060928336). Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.
Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.
And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).
Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.
A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you're contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you'll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We're talking summer reading.…
Nowadays, encountering news stories about sexual crimes is a daily occurrence. But in the late 1970s, when the FBI noticed a marked uptick in reported sexual violence, such crimes were considered a strange new trend, which the agency decided they should address by educating all their agents.
However, as Ann Wolbert Burgess explains in her captivating and chilling A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind, there was a major roadblock to the FBI’s mission. “None of the agents had the background or expertise to speak about issues of sexual assault, rape, sexual homicide, or victimology,” Burgess writes.
That’s where she came in. For several years, Burgess—a forensic and psychiatric nurse with a doctorate in nursing science, et al.—had worked on a major study of what was called “rape trauma syndrome.” When Roy Hazelwood, a new agent in the FBI’s nascent serial killer-focused Behavioral Science Unit, caught wind of her work, he asked her to share her methods for analyzing and finding predictive patterns among sexually violent crimes.
Burgess sees her ability to “ground an infinitely complex human trauma into quantifiable data and research” as a hallmark of her work, and she taught FBI agents how to apply her methods in order to establish a reliable foundation for their investigations. For starters, standardized questions for all suspects are key, as well as analyses of perpetrators’ childhood experiences and similarities across crime scenes.
Although the BSU toiled in underground offices without a dedicated staff or budget at first, as the unit employed Burgess’ methods, their successes grew. Delving into the minds of everyone from Son of Sam to the BTK strangler, they solved dozens of cases, eventually garnering press coverage—and subsequent respect via above-ground digs. Their work also sparked the popular fascination with profiling borne out in a seemingly never-ending stream of books, movies, TV shows and podcasts. In fact, Burgess inspired a character in the popular “Mindhunter” Netflix show, which is based on a book by her FBI colleague John Douglas.
With A Killer by Design, Burgess takes center stage at last, offering important, fascinating new context and details about the history of crime-solving in America. It’s an inspiring and meaningful story, too, with its up-close look at people who have dedicated their careers to catching murderers and pushing for justice. As Burgess writes, “My decades studying serial killers weren’t for the game of cat and mouse, nor because I found these killers entertaining. . . . For me, it’s always been about the victims.”
When the FBI noticed a marked uptick in sexual violence in the 1970s, they called on Ann Wolbert Burgess to teach them how to profile—and catch—serial killers.
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime As a former literary editor for Outside magazine, author Miles Harvey knows a thing or two about the importance of maps when it comes to defining a subject. But in 1995 when he came across the true story in the Chicago Tribune of Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., a contemporary map thief whose cartographic crime spree made him the most famous such bandit in American history, Harvey was more than intrigued. So, as any adventurer is apt to do, he set off down the uncharted trail of this “Al Capone of cartography” to learn why a South Florida antiques dealer would become master map thief. What began as a lengthy feature article for Outside turned into four years of researching the methods and motives of his enigmatic subject, thus The Island Of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime became a readable chart of these unusual crimes and the man behind them.
Visualize if you will a contemporary map thief. Beyond generating an image of a tweedy, nondescript, and somewhat less gadgetry-enhanced version of James Bond, it’s more of a challenge to imagine why someone would habitually pilfer hundreds of old maps from prominent research libraries across Canada and the United States. In his investigations, Harvey descends into the intriguing subculture of map collectors and experts and the peripheral eccentrics who encountered Bland as he slipped undetected through the doors of various libraries with centuries-old maps of all kinds hidden on his person. Most interesting are the many obscure side trips Harvey makes during his trail of investigations which, written in highly descriptive and well-paced prose, create the mood of a dimly lit library during a thunderstorm. As we learn with each incident involving maps Harvey encounters, behind every map is a significant story. The story behind the greatest map thief in America is an entertaining adventure in history, humanity, and the fascinating role cartography plays in it all. Jamie McAlister writes from his home in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime As a former literary editor for Outside magazine, author Miles Harvey knows a thing or two about the importance of maps when it comes to defining a subject. But in 1995 when he came…
Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig’s subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of a fascinating memoir by St. James, an Alig friend/foe and well-known gadfly on the city’s predominately homosexual nightclub circuit.
Chronicling the scene and all its excesses between the demise of Warhol and the rise of the Club Kids, St. James is the catty tour guide to a Felliniesque netherworld. In it, days are spent deciding which outrageous way to dress or dye your hair for the evening’s activities, Special K is a designer drug and not a breakfast cereal, and the after-party entertainment just might include a middle-aged drag queen pulling fully lit Christmas bulbs out of his (or her) anus. St. James is the epitome of the literary convention known as the unreliable narrator. His recollections (amazing that he even has them, since he admits to being drugged up during much of the period) are filled with subjectivity, petty and pithy personality shredding, and yes a flamboyant queenly bitchiness accentuated by the hefty usage of bold, italic, and all-caps typefaces. But rather than off-putting, this is actually the book’s biggest strength, as St. James’s inimitable voice in full Diva mode rings through loud and clear even if it is a bit shrill at times.
Along the way he introduces many true-life and pathetic (but unforgettable) characters, happy when they’ve schmoozed successfully or gotten a mention in The Village Voice, but desolate when their supply of coke and the latest boy toy have run out, sometimes simultaneously.
So while the title might bring to mind a bad ’70s drive-in flick and no literal carnage takes place on the dance floor populated by has-beens, wannabes, and never-wases, Disco Bloodbath is a journey into a land of strange creatures with bizarre manners. Hmm, maybe they could also put a few copies in the Science Fiction section.
Bob Ruggiero is a freelance entertainment journalist based in Houston.
Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig's 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig's subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of…
It is impossible to read The Murder of Helen Jewett and not be reminded of the O.
J. Simpson murder trial. The similarities are striking: a beautiful young woman found murdered, the victim of a brutal slashing; a handsome, prosperous man arrested for the crime; a mad scramble by reporters to reveal every detail of the case; a high-profile trial complete with bungling prosecutors and slick defense attorneys; and finally, a stunning acquittal of the accused.
So why bother reading Patricia Cline Cohen’s account of a 19th-century prostitute when we have O.
J.? Perhaps to understand that history does repeat itself; maybe to realize that elements we find abhorrent about today’s legal system and media coverage have been commonplace since the infancy of our nation; or simply because the demise of Helen Jewett makes for an interesting potboiler.
Cohen is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and she approaches her subject with the keen eye of an historian. This prosaic style can lead to some dry spots in the text. There is, for instance, more information than most readers need about the history of the sex trade in New York City, the setting for the story. But much of the chronicle of Helen Jewett’s life and violent death is engrossing, and the care Cohen gives to relating each detail paints a vivid portrait of the crime.
Helen Jewett was discovered murdered in her bed on April 10, 1836. Three bloody gashes covered her face, and her body had been set on fire by her assailant. When the flames were extinguished, constables discovered a man’s handkerchief near the bed. Later, a hatchet was found in the back yard. Evidence quickly mounted against Richard P. Robinson, a frequent client and sometime suitor of Jewett. The mercantile clerk, an educated man from an established East Coast family, was arrested, setting the stage for a lurid passion play that enthralled New York and the nation.
Among the more interesting facets of the book is Cohen’s analysis of how the press covered the crime and subsequent trial. Jewett’s murder occurred at the beginning of a circulation war among a dozen or so New York newspapers, many of which used the grisly crime to sell more copies. The intense competition compelled reporters to constantly dig for new information, and some resorted to fabricating evidence and confessions. Even the reputable newspapers were forced to chose between responsible journalism and higher revenues, most settling for the latter.
Actions in the courtroom were equally reprehensible. Cohen shows how the prosecution failed to introduce key evidence, including a series of love letters between Jewett and Robinson. One of the last letters Robinson wrote was threatening in nature. Meanwhile, his trio of high-profile lawyers took courtroom oratory to new heights, mesmerizing the jury. Robinson’s eventual acquittal resulted in the same kind of shock waves as when Simpson was found not guilty.
The Helen Jewett case ultimately fails to match the excitement and emotion generated by the Simpson trial. But readers can come away from Cohen’s book with a deeper historical perspective of the imperfections inherent in the criminal justice system and the press and a realization of how little things have changed in 160 years.
John T. Slania is a writer from Chicago.
It is impossible to read The Murder of Helen Jewett and not be reminded of the O.
J. Simpson murder trial. The similarities are striking: a beautiful young woman found murdered, the victim of a brutal slashing; a handsome, prosperous man arrested…
Review by Michael Breen The first thing that will strike you after reading No Heroes is the irony of its title. Heroes fill the pages of this book, men and women doing a dirty, dangerous, and often thankless job for little reward. Their quarry are people who have no respect for the government or its laws, and view law enforcement officials as nothing more than targets. Danny Coulson is one of these heroes, a 31-year FBI veteran, serving in numerous roles including the first head of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Though Coulson did go after bank robbers and drug dealers, the heart of this story is the conflict between the FBI and those who rejected the government and used violence to forward their goals. Coulson discusses several anti-government groups, from the black revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s to the white supremacist groups of today, and vividly describes the struggle against these forces. It is a deadly contest, one made more difficult by the government’s unceasing efforts to use lawful and non-violent means against opponents who had no such restrictions.
But the struggle against the forces of crime and terror is only half of this story. Coulson also describes the conflict within the Bureau itself. This second war is one of doers vs. drivers. Drivers were those who worried more about rules, their reputations, political maneuvering, bureaucratic infighting, and spelling errors than catching lawbreakers. This tension is a constant in the book, beginning with the ossified late Hoover era administrators and ending with the finger-pointing after the Ruby Ridge debacle. Coulson shows numerous occasions where the drivers’ shortsightedness led to problems and even risked lives. Coulson’s portrayal of his stresses and their cost is powerful, though his writing style may be a little rough he is, after all, first and foremost an FBI agent. But it is this raw voice of experience that makes the book so gripping. Not only a tale of stakeouts, investigations, and sieges, it is a story that engenders a greater appreciation of those who are on the front lines of the war against terrorism.
Michael Breen is a reviewer in Lawrence, Kansas.
Review by Michael Breen The first thing that will strike you after reading No Heroes is the irony of its title. Heroes fill the pages of this book, men and women doing a dirty, dangerous, and often thankless job for little reward. Their quarry are…
My fascination with the story of The Wicked Boy began when I read a newspaper report from July 1895 about a horrific murder in East London. The body of a 37-year-old woman had been found rotting in the front bedroom of a small terraced house while her two sons, aged 12 and 13, played cards in a room downstairs.
When confronted by the police, the older boy, Robert, immediately confessed to having stabbed Emily Coombes to death 10 days earlier. He said that he and his brother, Nattie, had plotted together to kill her. Both were charged with murder and remanded in jail.
Intrigued by why the boys had killed their mother, I decided to seek out more information about the crime. There were scores of newspapers published in England in the mid-1890s, many of them digitized and easy to search, and their richly detailed reports helped me chart the movements of the brothers in the days before and after their mother’s death. Then I started to look further afield.
1. THE FINAL TRANSCRIPT
Almost as soon as I began searching online, I found a digitized transcript of Robert’s trial for murder at the Old Bailey. (Nattie had been discharged so that he could testify against his brother.) The transcript gave me a wealth of leads: names of the boys’ neighbors, relatives, schoolteachers, employers; the pawnbrokers with whom they pledged goods; the owner of a coffeehouse at which they dined; the shopkeeper who sold Robert the murder weapon. It also supplied details of the mental instability in the family—Robert’s as well as his mother’s.
2. THE FOLDER OF EVIDENCE
At the National Archives in Kew, southwest London, I found transcripts of the witness statements and the documents submitted in evidence at the trial. Among them was a letter in which Robert tried to scam money from a cashier at the London docks; a letter in which he tried to persuade his father, who had sailed to New York, to send money home; and a letter from Emily Coombes to her husband, written on the day before her death. This last note gave me my first direct glimpse of the victim of the murder, not just as the object of her son’s violence but as a loving, protective, agitated woman.
3. THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
I visited the working-class East London street on which the family had lived. Their house had been demolished, but most of the buildings in the terrace were still standing. Directly opposite was the brick wall of a school playground, with the word “BOYS” inscribed by the entrance arch. Robert had graduated from this school just a few weeks before the murder. He had been a star pupil, a clever and musical boy much praised by his teachers, but after graduating he had faced a lifetime of grinding labor in a shipbuilding ironworks on the Thames. I walked from the schoolyard to the site of the shipyard by the docks.
4. THE PENNY DREADFULS
Some commentators argued that Robert had been inspired to murder by the “penny dreadful” stories that had been found in his house. I tracked down as many as I could of the titles identified in court, many of them reprints of American dime novels. It was astonishing to sit in the British Library reading the very stories that Robert had read, and to imagine the fantasies that they fed: of wealth and glory, adventure and escape.
5. THE GRAVESTONE
At the Old Bailey, Robert was found “guilty but insane” and sent indefinitely to an asylum for criminal lunatics. I learned from the asylum records that he had been discharged 17 years later, at the age of 30. At first, I could find no trace of his life after this, but eventually, on a website about Australian cemeteries, I came across a photograph of his gravestone in New South Wales. The stone bears a plaque inscribed with his name, his date of death and his military rank and number. By checking these against First World War records, I learned that he had served with honor at Gallipoli.
My only clue to what became of Robert after the war was a phrase on the gravestone: “Always remembered by Harry Mulville & family.” I traced the Mulville family through the New South Wales telephone directory, and then traveled to Australia to meet Harry Mulville’s youngest daughter. Thanks to her, I was able to learn the ending of Robert Coombes’ story. Though he seems never to have spoken about the murder to those he knew in Australia, in 1930 he performed an act that could be understood both as an atonement and as a kind of explanation of his crime.
This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best crime stories. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.
My fascination with the story of The Wicked Boy began when I read a newspaper report from July 1895 about a horrific murder in East London. The body of a 37-year-old woman had been found rotting in the front bedroom of a small terraced house while her two sons, aged 12 and 13, played cards in a room downstairs.
Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in her raucous romp, Confident Women.
I spent most of 2019 perched on a stool in a coffee shop, “writing.” I was supposed to be writing a book about con women—con women in the court of Marie Antoinette and con women in Olympic-mad Beijing and con women who came down from Canada to wreak havoc on the tender hearts of Cleveland’s finest businessmen. But there were times when I clutched my almond croissant like a woman possessed and just sat there, staring into space, consumed by one burning question:
Have I ever been conned?
I had a mercenary reason for asking myself this question. I had been struggling with the introduction to my book, trying to cram every single thing there was to say about cons and women into a few punchy pages, and the resulting introduction read like a Google Drive document that was being edited by 10 people at once. I needed a better way in. I needed an anecdote—something to start the book off with a bang. And wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if the anecdote involved me being conned?
If I could just dredge up some suppressed memory about being cheated by a crook or swindled by a spiritualist, the introduction would practically write itself. Sure, I knew on an intellectual level that being conned was not something to wish for. The victims in my book were seriously damaged by their run-ins with con women. They were broke, despairing, ashamed, traumatized. Some of them were even dead. But I couldn’t help trawling through my memories anyway, searching for con artists at every turn, asking myself, Wait, was she a con artist? Was he?
There was the roommate who lied to me about . . . well, everything. She told me, for example, that she’d been given the phone number of the lead singer from Dashboard Confessional while sunbathing on an abandoned beach.
There was the man who convinced me that he needed money for a tow truck to come and get his broken-down truck. He sat with me on the curb, chatting about his tattoos, as my boyfriend took $40 out of an ATM behind us. We were entirely convinced that he was going to come back in the morning and repay us. He was even in costume as a construction worker. It was as though we had attended a piece of interactive theater, not a petty fleecing.
And then there was the time I chatted with a known con artist on Facebook Messenger. I had been researching her cons but ultimately decided not to include her in my book after our interaction. She told me that Roman Polanski wanted to make a movie about her life. I decided to leave her story up to him.
But none of these interactions felt compelling enough to make it into my book. Instead of the stuff of great introductions, they felt like the stuff of . . . life. Who among us hasn’t been lied to on Facebook Messenger, or had trouble with a roommate, or given money to someone who may have been pulling the wool over our eyes? Instead, I found a fantastic article from the 1970s about a con artist named Barbara St. James who changed her hair color a lot and used her as my opening anecdote. But afterward I was left with all those small stories from my past—those microswindles, if you will—wondering what to do with them.
“The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.”
As much as the microswindles irritated me, I had to admit that I was a bit of a microswindler myself. I have lied more times than I care to admit. (Ask me about the time I made up the story of my first kiss.) In living rooms and on Facebook Messenger and while sitting on plenty of curbs, I have pretended to be a little bit different than the person I truly am. It didn’t seem fair, then, to interpret the interactions I’d had with microswindlers as examples of Me Being Good (or at least naive) and Other People Being Bad. I started thinking of them less as moral and more as transactional. They were a sort of payment, I thought—payment for the privilege of trusting other people.
If I am going to trust most of the people I interact with, then yes, every now and then I will have to fork over $40 for something shady or listen to an anecdote about Dashboard Confessional or Roman Polanski that probably isn’t true. And the payment isn’t entirely one-sided, either. I only chatted with the con artist on Facebook Messenger because I was thinking about writing about her—thinking about absorbing her life story into my book, like some sort of soul-sucking spirit. And as far as my old roommate and my friend on the curb? I have used them as anecdotes in conversation again and again. I am using them now. The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.
The macroswindles that made it into my book were more clear-cut. After opening my book with Barbara St. James, I lined up the rest of my chapters—the woman from Beijing, the woman from Versailles, the woman from Canada and all the rest—and the resulting cast of characters was big, fascinating, compelling. Their tales were twisted and bizarre and sometimes confusing, but there was often some clarifying moment: a trial, say, or a prison sentence. Their stories were special, for lack of a better word—special enough to be worthy of a book. But their stories were just bigger, not other. They were still on the same spectrum as the woman on Facebook, as the guy on the curb, as my old roommate, as me.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
