Tag: true crime

Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler

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Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler

I didn’t know what this book was, until I was in it. And then I couldn’t stop reading. By the end, I was heartbroken and frustrated, not only for the individuals who shared their stories of incarceration and attempts at reintegration afterwards, but also for us, the rest of American society, for our lack of understanding, compassion, and knowledge about this very real, tangible human tragedy.

Free is about the failure of the American judicial and prison systems to manifest actual reintegration of paroled and released persons after they’ve served their sentences, and the impotence these individuals must confront as they try to forget their pasts, forge new pathways, and defeat recidivism. Kessler delivers the gravity and causes of recidivism to the reader through the lived experience of a handful of individuals, six men and women of different races and backgrounds. Free is deeply human-focused; Kessler highlights and allows the voices of those who live this trauma and oppression to speak for themselves, making this a very emotionally charged and profound read.

It’s not a comfortable read. Free made me reflect on my own prejudices and biases, enlightened me to facts and processes I was unaware of. I’m grateful for this.

Kessler’s subtext is not subtle. The responsibility of recidivism lies with us, the members of society who have never been incarcerated — those of us who have the power to vote, demand fairer forms of justice, manifest real compassion for those who have been imprisoned (rightly or wrongly). The issue is this: society as a whole continues to punish those who have been incarcerated and released, as if the serving of their sentences were the beginning of the penalty, and not the end of it.

The call to action is this: The sentence once served should be the only punishment. We as a society need more compassionate, more inclusive and supportive systems of reintegration for these formerly incarcerated individuals if we want to reduce rates of recidivism. It is us who need to change, not the convicted. The systems which govern incarceration and reintegration need adjustment at the very least, a complete reform in some areas. And we, voters and citizens who must live alongside the incarcerated and the paroled and the released must speak up and demand these changes.

Free is a powerful book with a powerful and empowering message.

Free was introduced to me through my local library system. It was one of the “Revolutionary Reads” the Fort Vancouver library system hosts annually. The chosen book is usually one that is local in some way to the Pacific Northwest (Free is grounded geographically in my local region). Copies are given away to the public and there is attendant programming in the form of Zoom and in-person events along the lines of interviews with the author and/or subjects, experts on the topic, film screenings, and so on. I absolutely love this program and am so glad it introduced me to this book, to this issue, and helped me gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of recidivism.

Alcatraz Ghost Story: Roy Gardner’s Amazing Train Robberies, Escapes, and Lifelong Love by Brian Stannard

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Alcatraz Ghost Story: Roy Gardner’s Amazing Train Robberies, Escapes, and Lifelong Love by Brian Stannard

Roy Gardner was pretty impressive… even if he was also abhorrent as a human being. This reader found him perversely interesting, like a train wreck you can’t stop staring at. There is an element of action movie magic here, a kind of wonderment and expectation that the hero (Gardner) may not survive the next car chase. But he does.

Alcatraz Ghost Story is a biography of Roy, the man, but in true prosopographical fashion it paints a landscape of the early twentieth century through Roy’s life.

The result is a compelling read on multiple levels: Roy himself led an amazing life, if an unethical one, and tracing it reveals much about the expectations and norms of his life, as well as others in his orbit. His wife, for instance, and her reactions and behavior through his incarceration reveal the gendered notions of their age.

Readers who enjoy true crime, history, and biographies of so-called ordinary individuals will find that Stannard successfully develops a textured experience for the reader.

Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton

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Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton

I thoroughly enjoy my true crime reads, gruesome and terrifying as they are. I especially enjoy the intricacies of police work and investigation, probably that’s a side of the analysis that I can both relate to and have no idea about. I love learning about the ways in which investigations of this nature are conducted, the nuances of analysis and the low and high technology that comes into play.

Lay Them to Rest delivered… and yet, also didn’t quite hit the high notes for me.

The bad part first. I didn’t enjoy the degree of personal involvement and commentary Norton provided. While it is common for writers to relay their personal trajectories and use it to form the narrative arc of their non-fiction books, I found the way in which Norton did this to be distracting. The injection of her personal thoughts felt like intrusive minutiae. This is, of course, a subjective opinion; other readers may very much enjoy Norton’s personal journey. For this reader, not only did this detract from the primary story of the victims and their cold cases, but Norton’s self-deprecating approach undermined her credibility and authority, coming off as fumbling. I believe the intention was to code Norton’s “character” as endearing, but its delivery did not persuade me of this view of her.

But now, the good. Norton’s partnership with a biological anthropologist produced an academic perspective which I greatly appreciated. It is clear a great deal of research had been conducted, both by Norton and Amy Michael, as well as the many others Norton shadowed, interviewed, and worked with. The book provides a great deal of information, and Norton’s delivery of that — along with the abundant necessary context — was accomplished with both straightforward utility and finesse. Norton’s prose was smooth, its language accessible while still necessarily full of the argot of the subject matter. Norton distills an enormously complex subject into easily digestible and palatable parts.

Lay Them to Rest is built through the cold cases of several victims, Jane Does, found dead and abandoned. Norton uses these cases to relay to the reader a nuanced view of the layered landscape of police work, forensic analysis, and dysfunctional systems of databases for DNA tracking used for investigating and solving crime. The focus here is not on the victims, or their families, or even on the police or investigators who strive to solve their crimes; Lay Them to Rest focuses on the structural elements of criminal investigation, the organizations and systems which organize and sift through the millions of bits of data and information that can be gathered about victims and the crimes against them. This angle into the world of criminal investigation was a novel one for me; most of the true crime I have read have not delved into this specific aspect of investigation. I found this perspective refreshing and intriguing.

Readers of true crime will find Lay Them to Rest a worthy addition to their libraries. Or, at the very least, well worth the time and effort of reading it.

Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail by Andrea Langford

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Trail of the Lost:
The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail by Andrea Langford

This work of true crime utterly possessed me; I am torn between wanting my hiking friends to read it, because I don’t want any of these awful things to happen to them, or not wanting them to read it, because it will terrify them into never venturing into the wilds again. (I am probably going to buy a few copies of this book this Christmas as gifts for those same friends!) Anyone who knows someone who hikes or camps or goes “off trail” for any reason should have an eye out for this book.

The depth of Lankford’s research, the number of interviews and observations, and the countless hours and days and weeks spent in Search and Rescue to make this book happen is staggering; that alone is a draw for anyone interested in this kind of crime non-fiction. Lankford themself is well-positioned to write on the subject. As a former ranger involved in several S&R investigations, Lankford is more than a hiker. Here, Lankford takes on the role of investigative journalist, detective, social worker, and friend.

The book focuses on the disappearances of three men (primarily) from the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs along the West Coast, from California up to and through Washington State. Kris Fowler, David O’Sullivan, and Chris Sylvia vanished from the trail in mysterious circumstances and have yet to be found, alive or otherwise.

But, of course, the book is about more than them and their individual cases; Trail of the Lost is also about their families and loved ones, the grief and pain of their loss, the process and protocols of police and other investigations into vanishings, and — perhaps this is where the book truly shines and connects with readers on a wholly different level — the culture of the trail and of extreme hiking. By giving readers a view into the the lure of these activities and the perils they entail, Trail illuminates certain flaws in our societal ideals and in the normative flows of life around work-family-friendship-community. Lankford highlights what might be missing in our urban/suburban spaces that trails like this offer. Chapters that seemingly veer off onto tangential subjects, like the Yellow Deli Group, or suspicious and creepy “trail trolls” in fact, draw attention to deeply inclusive, welcoming, altruistic, and connected the culture of the PCT and hiking is (or can be).

The irony is, of course, that individuals take on these hikes individually; they seek isolation — and yet, the culture of the trail highlights the deep dependence we, as humans, have on each other, and our need for social contact, a sense of belonging with others, a sense of community.

The Forever Witness: How Genetic Genealogy Solved A Cold Case Double Murder by Edward Hume

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I am such a fan of true crime (not an amateur expert in it, but I enjoy it a lot!) and Humes’s The Forever Witness delivered in all the best ways. This book details the context and circumstances of a cold blooded double murder of a young man and woman in Washington state, near Seattle. They disappeared while on an overnight roadtrip, running an errand. Their murder was a cold case for decades until new technologies became more available.

What makes The Forever Witness so compelling though isn’t just the fact that Humes gives us an account of how such DNA identifying technologies worked or even how the case was eventually solved (though those are good enough reasons to pick it up!), no, what makes this book unputdownable is Humes deeper delving into the larger national and world wide considerations and context of using DNA, genealogical, and qualitative research together in combination to investigate such crimes. Humes provides the reader with a landscape of criminal methodologies, giving them a glimpse into a world often over-dramatized and glossed over with unspecific details in news media and hour-long television serials. As if often the case, when compared with film, the book is better. The Forever Witness is full of nuanced context and specific information, perfect for the true crime fanatic for whom details are everything.

Readers should be aware that this wide fish-eye lens of the book and its subject matter does mean that Humes veers on occasion away from the specific case. He draws upon similar cases, discusses parallel crimes and explores the use of genealogy in other, related cases. Humes also provides the reader with a view from the other side; included here are not only the investigators, the family of the victims, but also the perspectives of genealogists and other criminologists not directly involved in these cases. The varied perspectives adds to the book’s appeal, giving the reader a deep understanding of the crime-solving process, with all its obstacles and victories.

Humes’ prose is also deeply compelling: dramatic and yet not overblown, succinct and yet brimming with knowledge, informative without overbearing being pedantic, flowing and smooth throughout. It is clear Humes has a vast and thorough grasp of his subject matter, but he does an exceptional job at breaking this down for the average reader. Terminology is explained, procedures and protocols are laid out step by step and their logics revealed.

In short, a fantastic read and one for every fan of true crime.

The Nurse: Inside Denmark’s Most Sensational Criminal Trial by Kristian Corfixen

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The Nurse: Inside Denmark’s Most Sensational Criminal Trial
by Kristian Corfixen

Reading nonfiction true crime is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I enjoy it with a professional historian’s interest: the analysis of evidence and its presentation in text, the exploration of the social and cultural impact on the communities in which these events occur, and the dissection of the institutions and the systems that enable or hide the crimes and the criminals. Corfixen’s The Nurse, about a young woman’s murder of four of her patients in Denmark and her conviction for these crimes, delivers on all three points. It is a well-researched book on the crime, the criminal, and the Danish healthcare, law enforcement, and judicial systems.

Corfixen interviewed the nurse herself, Christina Aistrup Hansen, her colleagues, detectives, victims’ families and friends, as well as one of the survivors. It presents a fleshed out, rounded account of the events. [If you’re interested in news of the case, you can read more here.]

The Nurse: Inside Denmark’s Most Sensational Criminal Trial begins well before the case and the trial itself. This first section of the book provides the reader with the necessary background knowledge to understand Hansen as well the hospital system in which she committed her crimes. (The book is published in English, presumably for Danish and non-Danish readers.) This part is told through the experiences of Hansen’s colleagues, one in particular. In subsequent sections, Corfixen takes us back in time to Hansen’s childhood and into her personal life, then into her professional life, through the period of her nursing education, and finally into the microcosmic society of the hospital. The reader is immersed in the community and culture of nurses and medical staff at the Nykøbing Falster Hospital. The book continues on to detail the crimes themselves and the investigation that was initiated against Hansen. The Nurse ends with the trial and Hansen’s incarceration. These parts of the book are especially intriguing as Corfixen is given rare access to Hansen herself. The reader is treated to a perspective often absent in true crime accounts.

Corfixen’s prose and the way in which they exhibit these diverse perspectives is a critical part of the book’s success. The writing is smooth, but more significantly, it is seamless as it moves from one point of view to another. The reader gets a privileged view of the events from Hansen as well as from her former colleagues, from the family members of her victims. These are often conflicting — Hansen maintains her innocence throughout — but Corfixen manages to give each perspective time, space, and voice in a balanced way.

The result is an engrossing read that captures the reader’s attention and offers them a textured sense of the macro Danish world and the micro-culture of the Nykøbing Falster Hospital in which Hansen lived, worked, and committed her crimes. From the book’s beginning to its end, despite knowing the final outcome, I was compelled to keep reading, not to know what happens, but how it happened and why.

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

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The Fortune Men
by Nadifa Mohamed

A colleague recommended this book to me and oh my, do I owe them BIG now! The Fortune Men is devastating in every way. The story, without question, is a profound lesson in the paradoxes and insidiousness of racism, the tragedy of putting faith in a prejudiced judicial system, how thin the line is between life and death, past and future, the awfulness of history.

The novel revolves around a young Somali man who has found his way to Britain and built a life for himself there, complete with a wife and children. He is an ordinary man, a flawed man, but not a bad man; his morals are imperfect but not malicious. In his Welsh town, there is a sundry shop, owned and run by a Jewish woman. She is murdered. He is arrested. The novel spins from that point around his trial and his incarceration.

The details of the crime and his arrest are revealed, it becomes clear that things are not so black and white, literally and figuratively, according to the shade of his skin. In this Welsh neighborhood, there has been the recent in flux of many immigrants: those from the Caribbean — coming off the HMS Windrush — as well others like him, from Somalia, parts of West Africa, Nigeria, South Asians from India, Pakistan. There are Jews, Muslims, Christians. And then there are the White Welsh and English. The only thing they seem to have in common is their denizenship in a working class milieu: they are each trying to survive in their own ways, struggling with the constraints put upon them by their race, the color of their skin, their gender.

Mohamed’s prose weaves together the multiple layers of this crime, both the murder and the crime of injustice via complex characters who each come to this place armed with their own ambitions and hampered by their past experiences; they are as flawed as the main protagonist — and like him, we can see that they are not truly “bad” people, but merely making decisions based on the ethnic, racial, and class based expectations put on them. Reader, you will weep for all the characters in The Fortune Men, for they are as trapped as the prisoner in his cell.

It is hard to write a review of this book without giving away its ending, because its ending is really the beginning of the question that led to its creation. It is based on a true story, which is what makes this even more tragic and heart-rending.

All I can say is: You must read this. You must weep for the man, the woman, his wife, his children, the families torn apart by the events that took place in 1952-1953 in this small Welsh town. And you must be angry.

Butcher’s Work: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness by Harold Schechter

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Butcher’s Work: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness by Harold Schechter

The premise of Schechter’s Butcher’s Work is intriguing enough to entice any fan of true crime to pick it up: Serial killers and murder are nothing new, why have we forgotten some crimes and remembered others? And, more curiously, what are those cases which we have forgotten? The easy answer is that they weren’t horrendous enough, disgusting enough, criminal enough to earn a place in our long, collective memory. But the cases in Butcher’s Work dismisses that possibility quickly; the crimes highlighted in this work are all that and more chilling. The fact that they have disappeared from our remembrance is itself quite a horrific notion.

Butcher’s Work is divided into four sections: Butcher’s Work, The Poison Fiend, Lady-Killer, and The Ragged Stranger. As their titles suggest, each one focuses on a particular method or victim of murder. There is a featured case of each, but interspersed within the pages of the chapters are cameos of other criminals employing the same method. Collectively they form a creepy landscape of crime, where trusting another human being is something to fear. Lady-Killer was one of my favorite sections. Marriage and murder form the central focus here, a gendered violence perpetrated by men against women. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but DANG, how did these men get away with this? Oh, right, but still!

Schechter is a marvelous story-teller. The prose flows, as compellingly as the stories and characters. And, as a researcher myself, I deeply appreciate the depth and details Schechter has excavated in this work. The result is not only a focused, historically rich, and keen archival piece of work; Butcher’s Work is also a nuanced landscape of American life in the 19th century. Schechter brings to the reader’s attention how it is not only the ambition of the criminal, but also the systems and structures of society that permit and foster these crimes. How else might a man such as Hoch in Lady Killer commit bigamy and murder so successfully and remain for so long undetected? What gave him the confidence to believe in his own acquittal? Of course, the criminals here were apprehended, so there is a more optimistic ending. We can rest knowing the authorities — police, witnesses, lawyers, courts, etc — did succeed in forcing them to confront their crimes. But, I could not help but wonder how many others got away with it altogether? The idea is spine-chilling.

Butcher’s Work is a fantastic read for any fan of true crime and 19th century American history.

Victorian Murderesses by Debbie Blake

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Victorian Murderesses by Debbie Blake

I am sucker for a good true crime non-fiction, any time — and Blake’s Victorian Murderesses absolutely satisfied my every expectation of the genre. It was gory and chilling, all the more so because of the historical grounding of each case covered here.

Each chapter — there are seven of them — examines a specific killer and the details of her crime(s). Four of them focus on British murderesses: Sarah Drake, Mary Ann Brogh, Kate Webster, and Mary Ann Cotton, while the remaining three cross the Atlantic to provide accounts of the disturbing murders perpetrated by Kate Bender, Lizzie Borden (of course), and Jane Toppan. I was grateful that Lizzie got only a chapter; the fame of her crime has sullied my interest in her case. I’ve simply read it too many times for it to invoke any novel shock, but I acknowledge that the Borden murders warrant a place in a book like this.

What makes Victorian Murderesses such a fantastic read is the way in which Blake colors in the context of these women’s lives; not only do we get a rare glimpse into their worlds, but the Victorian world as a whole, especially as it was for women of a certain working and middle class. The reader also gets to see how these women got away with their crimes for a significant part of their lives and how police operated to discover them. In some cases, like with Sarah Drake, I could not help but feel a bit sorry for the murderess as much as the victims; institutionalized sexism drove some of these women to extreme lengths — though I cannot say I condone their decisions to take innocent lives. In some cases, like Cotton’s and Webster’s I found myself wondering how it was possible for them to commit so many crimes without getting caught earlier! I wonder at how it was that Lizzie Borden became so famous when these other women committed so many more criminal acts.

Kate Bender and the Bender family were — for me — the most dastardly, the creepiest of the seven chapters. Their crimes were like those out of a grisly, B-rated horror where a family of four drives down a lonely farm road… and is never seen again… Brr. I feel shivers thinking of it now.

This was a fantastic true crime read, fun and gore all around, enough to keep you wanting more.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Memories of a Homicide Detective by Steve Ryan

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The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Memories of a Homicide Detective
by Steve Ryan

These memories have haunted Steve Ryan, and now they haunt me too. Ryan warns the reader that the contents of this book will be dark, warns us to close it and move on if we value our peace of mind. He’s right. This book will cleave to my bones like scars from bites. The murderers in Ryan’s cases are depraved animals, creatures looking like humans but lacking humanity. The crimes recounted to us are sweat-inducing-chills-on-the-soles-of-my-feet terrifying. The thing is, they were committed for such trivial, banal, forgivable reasons, sometimes for no reason at all except for the purpose of inflicting pain.

Ryan weaves into his account the effect of these crimes on his psyche, giving us — those who have not worked in policing work or its related domains — insight into the damage being witness can cause. We don’t just see the effect on Ryan, but on the entire community of those who do this work. It becomes quickly clear that this work is as emotional and psychological as it is mired in materiality: these people study the severing of a life from its body, but in this memoir we see how deeply entwined the soul is to the the gory material left behind. In a sense, the homicide detective is required to lend the dead their own soul, a poor but necessary substitute in the effort to ameliorate the injustice of the victim’s murder.

The reader will weep for Ryan and for all homicide detectives as much as they weep for the victims and their families. And, let us also not forget, the families of the murderers — in some cases, the extended family of the murdered and the murderer are one and the same, a double slice, the cut twice as deep.

Ryan takes us through six of his most memorable, most awful cases, the ones which made him value his humanity. They are baffling in different ways: How could this have happened? In some cases the murder was sudden, a crime of impulse and opportunity. In others, it was planned with meticulous attention to detail. Some murders were the inevitable outcomes of years of abuse, the eventual killing a culmination of many crimes perpetrated. The scars were not always only the fatal ones.

These cases occurred in Canada, Ryan being a detective in Toronto and serving the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), but these will be familiar to any urban resident. The cases here involved immigrants, travelers, transnational cultures and expectations, mothers, wives, husbands, lovers, children, fathers, brothers. There is the odd stranger as well, a crime committed via a random encounter by someone the victim does not know — to be fair, the discovery of a murderer in the family can invoke a feeling of utter strangeness and dissonance, it is so unfathomable that someone we hold close and love could be capable of these kinds of crimes — but Ryan proves to us that intimacy is not a prerequisite for really knowing the interior mind of anyone. We can never really know the person we sleep next to at night. That’s the horror here. Trust is malleable in the mind and hands of murderers.

I’m glad to have read this book, chilling as its contents are. I sleep worse for it. But I a little less so because of people like Steve Ryan. I am grateful people willing and able to sacrifice a little of their soul to deliver justice to victims of crimes like these.