True Crime – Required Reading

African-American, History, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Top Picks, True Crime

10 Years of Required Reading: Best Non-Fiction

October 19, 2022October 18, 2022 Shay Shortt

When I first started planning a round up of my favourite books from a decade of blogging, I’d intended to make a Top 10 list. However, it quickly became clear that 10 was not going to be enough! So instead we’re having a week of lists, broken down by genre or category. Because I had a hard enough time choosing just five, never mind trying to rank them, the titles are listed in alphabetical order.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

ISBN 9780812993547

Between the World and Me uses the conceit of a letter to the author’s fifteen-year-old son to explore what it means to be Black in America. The scale is at once national and yet deeply personal; Ta-Nehisi Coates encompasses America in geography and history, but also speaks directly to his own child and his individual circumstances. Touching on everything from slavery, to segregation, to mass incarceration, Coates challenges orthodoxies and rejects easy answers in his pursuit of understanding. He writes with a unique combination of lyrical prose and pitiless clarity. By asking hard questions and rendering no easy answers Coates has penned an entreaty that has stayed with me for the past seven years.

Categories: African-American

Born a Crime

by Trevor Noah

ISBN 9780385689229

When Trevor Noah was born in South Africa in 1984, his existence was literally illegal, proof that his black, Xhosa mother and his white, Swiss-German father had violated the Immorality Act of 1927, one of the many laws defining the system known as apartheid. The crime carried a punishment of four to five years in prison, and mixed race children were often seized and placed in state-run orphanages. But Noah’s mother was determined and clever, and she managed to hold onto her son, refusing to flee her home country in order to raise him. But it made his childhood complicated, even after apartheid officially ended in 1994. Racial hierarchies and inequities persisted, and despite receiving a good education, his upbringing was anything but easy. In a series of essays, Born a Crime chronicles Noah’s experience growing up under apartheid and its aftermath. In addition to an interesting life, Noah also has a good sense of pacing and narrative style that make his recollections particularly illuminating. His funny but poignant memoir is excellent in either print or audio.

Categories: Memoir

The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

ISBN 9781328664082

In 1888, in one of London’s poorest, most downtrodden neighbourhoods, five women were murdered between August 31 and November 9, setting off a panic amongst Whitechapel’s residents, and an obsession in the public mind that survives to this day. The five women, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly were the victims of the killer called the Whitechapel Murderer in his time, but who would come to be known as Jack the Ripper. The killer was never caught, and while the five women were soon forgotten, their murderer became a legend, giving rise to “Ripperology,” or the study of the series of murders that took place in Whitechapel, and the ongoing quest to identify the person responsible. In The Five, historian Hallie Rubenhold places the five so-called “canonical victims” of Jack the Ripper at the centre of her narrative, focusing not on their deaths, but on the lives and social circumstances that would ultimately bring them to a common end. The Five felt neither voyeuristic or nor obsessive, two qualities that often leave me feeling slightly uncomfortable with some other true crime narratives. The substance of the work is given up to their lives, and their surrounding social circumstances, not their gruesome ends.

Categories: History, True Crime

Quiet

by Susan Cain

ISBN 9780307352149

Bookish folks, myself included, related powerfully to Susan Cain’s passionate message about the undervaluation of introversion in Western culture. The book cuts a broad swath, from outlining the rise of the extrovert ideal, to the psychological roots of introversion, to the perception of introversion in other cultures, to tips on how introverts and extroverts can work better together. Cain strips away the cultural stigma attached to introversion and examines the unique and underutilized skills of the quiet folks. I read Quiet all the way back in 2012, and never wrote a full-length review, though it appeared in my list of Top 5 Non-Fiction Reads of 2012. It has stayed with me a for so long because it provided me with a way to talk about my experiences that I had previously lacked.

Categories: Psychology

Spillover

by David Quammen

ISBN 9780393239225

Zoonoses are diseases that originate in animals, usually harboured by a reservoir—a species that chronically carries the bacteria or virus but is not sickened by it—and are transmissible to humans. When the right set of circumstances occur, a pathogen can spill over from animals to humans. Sometimes, that spillover is a dead end; the circumstances are so unique that they may never occur again. Or the virus can be transmitted to humans, but not between people: game over. But the thing that keeps virologists up at night is the pathogen spillovers that are not only virulent—highly deadly to humans—but also highly transmissible between humans once the species boundary has been breached. With the possibility of the Next Big One always looming, David Quammen takes the reader through famous outbreaks of zoonotic illnesses, with sections on Hendra, Ebola, malaria, SARS, Lyme, Nipah and HIV. I read a number of books about pandemics in the spring and summer of 2020 in an effort to better understand the experience we were all going through. If you’re only going to read one book about epidemics, this one combines multiple outbreaks into a single volume, highlights trends and commonalties, and provides a good basic understanding of the relationship between virology, ecology, and epidemiology.

Categories: Science

History, Non-Fiction, True Crime

The Five

October 22, 2019October 21, 2019 Shay Shortt

by Hallie Rubenhold

ISBN 9781328664082

“Much like the occupants of Whitechapel’s common lodging houses, the victims of Jack the Ripper and the lives they led became entangled in a web of assumptions, rumor, and unfounded speculation.”

Rubenhold opens The Five on Trafalgar Square in 1887, a year before the events that would claim the lives of her five subjects. Hundreds of homeless Londoners descended on the Square each night, bedding down on the paving stones, in a Victorian precursor that modern audiences might recognize in the more recent Occupy movement. Among them was Polly Nichols, who was no stranger to sleeping on the streets when she did not have enough money to buy a bed for the night. She had no fixed address. In opening on this scene, Rubenhold emphasizes that poverty and homelessness were rife in Victorian London, and that many factors contributed to the situation.

Most of the victims were born into working class families, with trades such as printing, tin making, and soldiering. Elisabeth Stride was a Swedish immigrant who arrived in London to work as a servant. Of the five, only Mary Jane Kelly’s early life remains a mystery, lost to a series of fabrications and name changes. Four of the women were, or had been married, and three of them had children. Although Jack the Ripper’s victims are commonly remembered as prostitutes, Rubenhold contests this narrative, laying bare the cultural assumptions that gave rise to an equivalency between homeless women and sex work that is difficult to substantiate. Though it is impossible to definitively rule out occasional engagement in survival sex, she finds clear evidence of sex work in the histories of only two of the women. In the case of Elisabeth Stride, she may have left Sweden in part to escape a reputation that lingered even after she had left the trade behind. Ultimately, of course, it does not matter whether Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane were, or ever had been sex workers. They were poor, vulnerable women struggling to survive on the streets of London’s East End. They were victims of a brutal murderer who felt entitled to take their lives, knowing that society would not value their loss.

If not prostitution, there are other common threads along the path that led each of the women to one of London’s poorest neighbourhoods. The breakdown of a marriage was a common catalyst; unable to legally divorce, they simply left. And since the work available to women did not pay a living wage, leaving meant falling into a makeshift existence, trying day by day to scrape together four pence for a bed in one of the East End’s filthy lodging houses. The other option was to commit oneself to the workhouse, exchanging a day’s labour for a night’s lodging and a meagre meal. However, the workhouse was fraught with shame, and many would choose to sleep rough rather than submit. Alcoholism was also a shared problem, though the relationship between cause and effect is murky. Which of the women landed on the streets because they drank too much, and which drank too much to dull the difficulties of poverty and homelessness?

The Five felt neither voyeuristic or nor obsessive, two qualities that often leave me feeling slightly uncomfortable with some other true crime narratives. Rubenhold’s stylistic avoidance of the killer is very clean; he is elided and deemphasized at every turn. No attempt is made to build suspense up to the moment of their deaths, or to speculate about what they endured in their final moments. The deaths are not lingered over, and the mutilation of their bodies is minimally described, noted only in the difficulties they lent to identifying the victims, and the impact seeing this desecration had on the family members who were called upon to performance this office. The substance of the work is given up to their lives, and their surrounding social circumstances, not their gruesome ends.

I would have liked to learn more about how Rubhenhold sifted through the conflicting and biased evidence that survives in order to piece together the lives of these five women. However, I think that such a method would ultimately have detracted from Rubenhold’s focus on centering the lives of the women, rather than their deaths, and the legend that grew up around their murderer. To ruminate too much on methodology would be to slip back into the amateur sleuthing that defines so much of the modern obsession with Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold notes in the text when the coroner’s records of an inquest do not survive, forcing her to rely on newspaper accounts of dubious and conflicting accuracy. She also states that she privileged the evidence and testimony of the people who knew the women in life. Otherwise, she steadfastly keeps her attention on the women, and the social context in which they lived.

—

You might also like How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

History, MetaBooks, Non-Fiction, True Crime

The Real Lolita

September 20, 2018September 20, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Sarah Weinman

ISBN 978-0-06-266192-0

Disclaimer: I received a free advance review copy of this title from the publisher at ALA Annual 2018.

“Lolita, when published, was infamous, then famous, always controversial, always a topic of discussion. It has sold more than sixty million copies worldwide in its sixty-plus years of life. Sally Horner, however, was largely forgotten, except by her immediate family members and close friends.”

In 1948, eleven-year-old Sally Horner was kidnapped by recently released sex offender Frank La Salle, who coerced her into going with him after he caught her shoplifting a notebook from the five and dime in Camden, New Jersey. The kidnapping, however, was anything but simple. La Salle forced Horner to lie to her mother, Ella, saying that he was the father of school friends, and that she had been invited to join the family for their seashore holiday. Ella, a harried single mother, agreed, much to her later regret. Sally would not be seen again for nearly two years, during which time she would travel around the country with her abductor, who posed as her father in public, but had much more sinister intentions in private. If this story sounds somewhat familiar, perhaps you are thinking of Vladamir Nabokov’s famous novel, Lolita, in which the pedophile Humbert Humbert travels across America with his step-daughter Dolores Haze. Indeed, the Sally Horner case is referenced in the novel, but while Lolita has remained famous, Sally Horner has largely faded from popular memory. In The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman builds her case for identifying Sally Horner as the true inspiration behind Nabokov’s novel, digging into archives, and conducting interviews, hoping to restore Sally to her rightful place in history.

The Real Lolita expands upon Weinman’s eponymous 2014 essay for Hazlitt magazine. Despite being a lengthy piece, Weinman felt she still was not done with Horner’s story, and in her book she attempts to further flesh out the case of the real girl who may have inspired Nabokov’s famous character. But although Weinman is a thorough and meticulous investigator, in some ways, there is no satisfaction to be had. Very often, the answers to her most burning questions were “we don’t know” or “the records are lost” or “we can only speculate.” And speculate she does, imagining what Sally’s days living with Frank La Salle must have been like, though no diary was kept, and Sally was never known to have spoken of it to her family after the fact. Because La Salle pled guilty in court, she never had to testify against him. Tragically, Sally died in a car accident only two years after her escape, never having seized control of her own story. Where she cannot find direct answers, Weinman tries to provide context, sharing available information, and drawing parallels to other cases of the time.

Although many answers were not forthcoming despite Weinman’s investigation, one of the strengths of The Real Lolita is the way in which it firmly centers Sally’s perspective and experience. Even when writing about the fictional Dolores Haze, Weinman refers to her as Dolores, only using the epithet Lolita when discussing Humbert’s point of view. Weinman never loses sight of the fact that Sally was a real girl who was the victim of a terrible crime. She is deeply sympathetic to what Sally suffered, both before and after her ordeal. Even after her escape, Sally was the victim of a double standard that meant that despite being a child, she was still regarded as tainted at best, and a slut at worst. Speaking to the press, Ella Horner said “whatever Sally has done, I can forgive her,” as if a child needs to be forgiven for being the victim of a crime. Sally’s time with La Salle would be the subject of gossip among her classmates for the rest of her short life, subjecting her to rude remarks, and entitled advances from male peers. As Weinman puts it, “Sally Horner was forever marked.”

I have to confess here that I have never read Lolita, and further admit that I’m not sure I ever will. The very thought of the plot churns my stomach, and even the desire to dig into Weinman’s assessment of Sally Horner’s influence on the plot couldn’t quite bring me to pick it up. Weinman herself notes that Nabokov had a long history of obsession with the theme of pedophilia, which turned up in many of his short works which predate Lolita, and even Sally Horner’s birth. Nabokov’s earliest work on the novel also predates the Sally Horner case, though it would not be published until five years after her escape. Biographers and scholars have found no evidence connecting Nabokov himself to children in that way, and in fact, quite the opposite; in his biography he recounts an episode of abuse in which he was fondled by his uncle, which may perhaps constitute the genesis of his obsession.

Given the above timelines, while the Sally Horner case may have shaped the final product, the concept for Lolita was certainly not inspired by her kidnapping. The Nabokovs, for their part, rigourously denied any connection as a matter of form; they believed in the primacy of art, and “if art was to prevail—and for the Nabokov’s it always did—then explicitly revealing what lay behind the curtain of fiction in the form of a real life case could shatter the illusion of total creative control.” It is up to Weinman, then, to gather circumstantial evidence about what Nabokov knew, and when, about the Sally Horner case. When she went missing, the story was not covered in his local newspapers. No clippings or documentation exist in his archives or papers. There are certainly parallels between to two stories to suggest that Sally’s more widely covered rescue may have helped crystalize Nabokov’s floundering obsession, but no conclusive proof. Yet Sally Horner’s story is worth remembering, whether or not she is the “real” Lolita.

Biography, Memoir, Non-Fiction, True Crime

Fall 2018 Non-Fiction Preview

August 1, 2018November 22, 2018 Shay Shortt

Last month, I spent an extended weekend in New Orleans, attending the American Library Association’s annual conference. In addition to meeting up with colleagues, and attending workshops, I also hit up several book buzz sessions, and visited the various publishers in the exhibit hall. Disclaimer: the publishers were giving out ARCs of many of these titles, and I picked up copies where I could, but I haven’t had a chance to get down to reading yet, so these are just a few of the titles I’m particularly excited to read in the coming months.

Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly

Women are often derided for being emotional, but if there is one emotion that is taboo for women, it is anger, which is regarded as the domain of men. Yet anger in the face of injustice is a perfectly normal reaction, and, Chemaly argues, can even be a source of power, as well as energy for resistance. In Rage Becomes Her, Chemaly seeks to normalize an emotion that, when expressed constructively, has the power to change the world for the better. Available September 11, 2018 from Simon and Schuster.

The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman

For true crime fans who enjoy a literary connection, The Real Lolita investigates the story of Sally Horner, whose 1948 kidnapping is referenced in, and likely partly inspired, Vladimir Nobokov’s infamous work, which was originally published in 1955. Although Horner survived her kidnapping, and eventually escaped her captor, she died young, and her story, as well as its connection to Lolita, has largely been forgotten. The book expands on an essay Weinman originally wrote for Hazlitt in 2014. Look for this HarperCollins title in stores on September 11, 2018.

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

Dubbed America’s most famous undocumented immigrant, Dear America is Vargas’ memoir about emotional homelessness, the state that arises from living in the United States without truly being able to call it home. Vargas was at ALA, but sadly our schedules never aligned, though I heard a lot of buzz from other attendees about his program alongside poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. However, I was able to snag a copy of his memoir and I’m looking forward to reading more about his experiences as an undocumented American. Coming September 18, 2018 from HarperCollins.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

This forthcoming memoir is about a Korean adoptee who was raised by a white family in small town Oregon. At ALA, Chung spoke movingly about finding her way to writing about her adoption after skirting the topic for many years. Eventually, the prospect of starting her own family prompted her to finally seek answers about where she came from, and All You Can Ever Know chronicles that journey. She is quick to note that her adoptive family was wonderful, but that they were not able to see some of the struggles she faced, and that it was important for her to reckon with the prejudice and disconnection from identity that her circumstances engendered. This Catapult title is scheduled to hit the shelves October 2, 2018.

Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

This is a big, ambitious book that includes four biographies of major and sometimes controversial figures from the early days of science fiction, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, John W. Campbell, and L. Ron Hubbard. I had a chance to meet Nevala-Lee at ALA, and we had a good time chatting about the work of Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin while he signed an ARC for me. This is the first biography that takes Campbell as a subject, and Hubbard is of course a famed and controversial figure for his journey from pulp fiction writer to founder of a religion, so I expect that this will be an interesting and informative read! Look for it October 23, 2018 from HarperCollins.

History, Non-Fiction, True Crime

Death in the Air

January 18, 2018January 18, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Kate Winkler Dawson

ISBN 978-0-316-50686-1

“The fuel was cheap, effective, and crucial—it was the only major source of domestic heating in the city at that time. But the smoke could be suffocating, and the sulphur dioxide released into the air was deadly. It triggered acid rain strong enough to bend iron, erode statues, poison land, and contaminate waterways—the pollution could destroy lungs and cause cancer. But still the coal burned.”

On December 5, 1952, a thick fog descended on London. This was nothing unusual for the British capital in winter, but as the fog bank up to seven hundred feet thick settled over the city, and then refused to budge for five days, the event become something more than the average peasouper. Transportation ground to a halt, schools and businesses closed, and people huddled up at home in front of their coal fires. Britain was still recovering from the war, and high-quality coal was at a premium, so most people were burning dirty, inefficient “nutty slack,” or coal dust, which was cheaply available and encouraged by the government. As the fires burned, and more and more air pollution was trapped in the fog, Londoners began to wheeze, and then they began to die by the hundreds. By the time the fog lifted, more than four thousand would be dead. But in the months that followed the tragedy, as the official opposition pushed for an inquiry in Parliament, the headlines were grabbed instead by the lurid details of a serial killer that had been living among them. Four bodies had been found in the abandoned apartment of one John Reginald Christie of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, and two more women were buried in the garden. So while Londoners cried out for justice for the murders of the six women, they were missing the fact that as many as twelve thousand of their fellow citizens had died during or after the Great Smog.

Fog is an indelible feature of British life, much tied up in the very image of London, as evidenced by the epigraphs Dawson includes at the beginning of each chapter. From Robert Louis Stevenson to T.S. Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle to Charles Dickens, famous writers described and referenced London’s fogs, and were even charmed by them. The French impressionist painter Claude Monet said that London would not be a beautiful city without them. But romanticized as the image has been, smoky fog made London dirty and dangerous, and the government contributed to the problem. By selling the best coal overseas to help rebuild the post-war economy, and encouraging Londoners to burn dirty nutty slack, the problem was worsened. Nor did the city’s new diesel buses, forty coal-fired power plants, or 200 steam powered locomotives help the situation. Transportation continued to try to run throughout the event, with limited success, and there was no warning system in place to tell vulnerable people to stay indoors, or discourage people from operating cars, or otherwise contributing to the disaster. Dawson clearly sketches out the tragedy, and the many ways in which the government contributed to it, and then tried to deny and cover it up. The press meanwhile, was too distracted by crime stories to pay much attention.

Death in the Air has been compared to The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and certainly the structure is similar. But it was quite different in one important respect; the fog has little or nothing to do with the murders, while the Chicago World’s Fair was actively used as a hunting ground and cover for the murders committed there. Christie had killed two women and buried them in his garden long before the Great Smog, and none of his victims were killed during the event. The author speculates that being cooped up for his wife for days during the fog might have nudged Christie towards killing her in mid-December 1952, but this is about the extent of the connection between the two events, as well as the fact that both left strangled victims behind. Rather, Dawson seems to be drawing on the fact that while the serial killer is still (in)famous, the Great Smog, though it killed many more people, is much less remembered, despite eventually ushering in some of the first clean air regulations.

Nevertheless, Dawson balances well between the Great Smog and its aftermath, and the murders and the subsequent trial. I was engaged by both stories, though they didn’t quite gel, continuing to move along on parallel tracks. Dawson also employs some secondary characters, including a policeman who patrolled during the smog, and a young girl whose father died during the event, forever altering the lives of her family. I particularly wanted to hear more from Rosemary Sargent about her experiences and recollections, and felt that Dawson could have used her to better effect. The tremendous number of deaths tells one part of the tale, but Rosemary helps to personalize the fall out of such an event.

Death in the Air is a story with plenty of contemporary relevance. As Dawson points out, four thousand people now die from the effects of smog every day in China. This little remembered English tragedy is being repeated on a daily basis in the fastest growing industrial nation in the world, with no sign of slowing. And the vagaries of the Christie case, including his bizarre confession to having been responsible for two murders a neighbour was convicted of, and executed for, several years earlier, raise the spectre of injustice, and the finality of the death penalty in the face of fallible human judgement. In short, while the two stories do not work perfectly together, I was fascinated by this book nevertheless.

___
You might also like Tinseltown by William J. Mann

African-American, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Social Justice, True Crime

Just Mercy

November 3, 2016December 26, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Bryan Stevenson

ISBN 978-0-8129-8496-5

“My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

As a young law student, Bryan Stevenson was somewhat adrift at Harvard Law School, unsure of his direction or his future. He wanted to do something that would help people, but he was having trouble connecting his theoretical education with meaningful action. Then, an internship at the Southern Prisoner’s Defence Committee led to work helping inmates on death row in the Deep South. Most of these prisoners were indigent, and could not afford legal counsel to help review or appeal their cases. The experience made a profound impression, and led him to found the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama in 1994. Stevenson would go on to appeal countless death sentences, and challenge the practice of sentencing minors to life without parole. Just Mercy recounts his experiences representing people who have been written off by society.

The main case threaded through Just Mercy is that of Walter McMillian, who was convicted in 1988 of the 1986 murder of Ronda Morrison, and sentenced to death in Alabama. Stevenson’s association with the case began with a call from the original trial judge, who got wind that Stevenson had been looking into McMillian, and called to try to scare him off of representing him. Stevenson took the case anyway, and the result is an investigation that seems like something out of a television crime drama. The tenuousness of the evidence on which McMillian was convicted is scarcely believable, the racism poorly concealed, and the unwillingness to admit an error simply stunning.

Just Mercy draws interesting parallels to one of American’s most beloved classic novels, To Kill a Mockingbird. McMillian was from Monroeville, Alabama, home to author Harper Lee. The town continued to publicize and celebrate the work, even as a wrongful conviction took place in their midst. While To Kill a Mockingbird lionizes Atticus Finch for his defence of Tom Robinson, Stevenson encountered repeated obstruction from the community, and even received death and bomb threats for his defence of McMillian. The irony is not lost on Stevenson, who also notes the unhappy ending for the accused in Lee’s novel.

Walter McMillian in the main thread running through the book, appearing in every second chapter, but his is not the only story. In the chapters between, Stevenson highlights other types of abuses that lead him to do this work, such as life without parole sentences for children, the incarceration of the mentally ill, and the prosecution of women who have suffered still births. While this results in a book that is less focused on a particular case, it ultimately proves to be a strength. These chapters serve to show that Walter McMillian is not isolated or even a particularly extreme case, and give a better idea of the breadth of the problem. The alternating chapters even serve to provide some sense of suspense in McMillian’s case, despite the fact that the outcome was widely publicized and is therefore probably generally known to readers.

Beyond specific cases, Just Mercy also serves to highlight the how short legal services are for the poor, and the lack of re-entry programs for exonerated prisoners. Every time Stevenson took on a new case, other prisoners would hear about his work and seek his help, creating an impossible case load. Once, in a case where Stevenson was representing a veteran who suffered from PTSD, and injured two children by setting off a bomb, the victims’ families asked for Stevenson’s assistance seeking financial aid they had been promised but never received. They sought his help even though he was representing the man who had caused the injuries in the first place.

Even when prisoners get help and are able to win their release, they face problems reintegrating into society. Someone who is convicted of murder and then later found to be innocent remains ineligible for services that exclude people who have been convicted of felonies. Originally setting out to provide legal help, Stevenson subsequently found himself also doing social work, providing assistance and support to those he had helped set free. Thus Stevenson paints a broad portrait of a problem that goes beyond any one wrongfully convicted prisoner, and serves to highlight a broken system in desperate need of reform.

___

You might also like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

LGBTQIA+, Non-Fiction, True Crime

While the City Slept

March 31, 2016March 31, 2016 Shay Shortt

by Eli Sanders

ISBN 9780670015719

“They had feared him, and it was fear of a certain kind. Not the primal, salable fear of violence, not fright of the unexpected arriving with sudden brutality from an unknowable beyond. Theirs was fear of a known man and an outcome not yet known but likely to be grim. Fear of a person who, regrettably, had lived and delivered pain already, a man intelligent enough to impress yet with seemingly no handle on where his disjointed thoughts, speech, and actions might be headed.”

In the early hours of July 19, 2009, a man entered the home of Teresa Butz, and her partner Jennifer Hopper in Seattle’s South Park neighbourhood. He raped both women, and slashed and stabbed them with a knife. Eventually they were able to escape screaming into the street, where neighbours came to their aid, and the police were called. Their assailant fled into the night while Teresa Butz lay dying on the pavement of South Rose Street, and her fiancée was transported to Harborview Medical Center. A four day man hunt led to the arrest of Isaiah Kalebu, a mentally ill man who had been living on the streets since his family became too afraid to continue to care for him. While the City Slept recounts Jennifer and Teresa’s love story, Isaiah Kalebu’s descent into madness, and the terrible violence with which their paths crossed.

Eli Sanders—who received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his coverage of the South Park attacks in Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger—begins by characterizing the South Park neighbourhood in which Jennifer and Teresa lived. It was blue collar and ethnically diverse, as well as friendly and supportive. When glass was heard breaking, and there were screams in the street, several neighbours rushed to their aid, and still more called for emergency services. From this crucial moment, Sanders circles back to examine the childhoods of the two women, as well as how they met and fell in love.

Jennifer and Teresa were only two months from their wedding day when Teresa was killed. Though same sex marriage would not be legal in Washington State for another three years, the two women were determined to seize their happy ending with a commitment ceremony. Teresa came from a large and loving, but religious family, which had struggled with her sexual orientation. At the time of the attacks, Teresa was not sure if her parents would be coming to her wedding. Jennifer’s single mother became addicted to prescription drugs for her back pain, and as result Jennifer was largely raised by her grandmother, who did not accept that she was a lesbian. Friends and family on both sides, as well as Jennifer herself, cooperated with Sanders for this book.

After carefully chronicling Jennifer and Teresa’s lives, meeting, and romance, Sanders turns to Isaiah Kalebu, the man accused of raping them and murdering Teresa. His story is an education in the results of deinstitutionalization, the conditions for involuntary commitment, and mental competency to stand trial. Kalebu was raised in an abusive home, where his parents were constantly fighting with one another. When he was a teenager, they would go through a messy and prolonged divorce. Although his teachers often noted his behavioural problems, his parents refused to accept these observations, or chose to ignore them. Because he was smart and made good grades, they were satisfied that he was doing well at school. By the time of the attacks, Kalebu would be living on the streets because he had alienated his relatives. His aunt and her partner died in a fire he was suspected of setting, and his mother and sister took out restraining orders against him because they were frightening by his extreme reactions to their efforts to have him committed. It is the story of one missed opportunity after another, of a young man who slipped repeatedly through the cracks in the system, despite his family’s best efforts to get him the help he so desperately needed. His family agreed to cooperate with Sanders for this book, but after a few initial emails, Kalebu himself ceased communicating.

Sanders does not recount the attack itself until it comes to Jennifer’s testimony at trial. There, he gives enough of her account to illustrate exactly how brutal and terrifying the events were, but not so much as to be prurient or salacious, though it is a delicate balance. What shines through is Jennifer’s grace and courage under pressure, as well as her path towards forgiveness and healing. One lawyer would describe her time on the stand as the best witness testimony he had ever seen. After only two days of deliberation, the jury would convict Kalebu of Butz’s murder, the attempted murder of Jennifer Hopper, as well as rape and burglary. The sentence was life without parole.

While the City Slept is a love story, a tragedy, and a gruesome murder mystery. But it is harrowing not merely because of the violence it recounts, but because of the way it methodically exposes the flaws and failures of both the mental health and criminal justice systems in Washington State.

___
You might also like Tinseltown by William J. Mann

Non-Fiction, True Crime

Tinseltown

December 11, 2014November 30, 2014 Shay Shortt

by William J. Mann

ISBN 9780062242167

“This is the story of a murder, of a single soft-nosed bullet that traveled upwards through a man’s rib cage, piercing his lung and lodging in his neck after being fired by an unknown assailant ninety-two years ago on a cold Los Angeles night.”

On the morning of February 2, 1922, film director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his Hollywood hills bungalow. The previous night, he had entertained his long-time friend, silent film star Mabel Normand. Shortly after Mabel departed, Taylor’s neighbours heard a sound that may have been a gun shot, and witnessed a man leaving his house. They did not investigate, and Taylor’s body was not found until the next morning, when his valet Henry Peavey arrived for work. In the time before the death was declared a murder, Paramount studio representative Charles Eyton took the opportunity to remove many of Taylor’s papers from the house. Subsequent mishandling of evidence by the district attorney further complicated the investigation, and the murder was never solved. This cold case is delved into by William J. Mann, the biographer of other Hollywood legends including Katharine Hepburn, and a historian whose biography of actor William Haines won the Lambda Literary Award in 1999. Mann examines the evidence, and puts forward his own candidate for the murder of William Desmond Taylor, while also rendering a perceptive portrait of 1920s Hollywood.

After describing the discovery of the body, Mann goes back in time several years and presents the significant events leading up to the murder. Even if you know nothing about the silent film era, Tinseltown is an accessible and engaging read, as Mann paints a fascinating picture of the rise of studio system in order to contextualize the murder mystery. Mann slowly lays out the players, assembles the evidence, and unspools the details, tantalizing the reader with secrets, and amping up the suspense and foreshadowing as the date of Taylor’s death draws near. 1920s Hollywood was erupting with scandals, from the suicide of actress Olive Thomas, to the multiple trials of comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for rape and manslaughter. Taylor’s friend, Mabel Normand, who was with him the night of the murder, was rumoured to be a drug addict. Taylor, a respected and seemingly upright citizen who was a spokesperson for defending films from censorship, turned out to have more secrets than anyone would have suspected.

More than just following the suspects and witnesses involves with Taylor’s murder, Mann portrays the tense public atmosphere into which the scandal of Taylor’s murder erupted. Key to this portrait is the head of the Famous Players-Lasky theatre chain, Adolph Zukor, who also controlled Paramount studios, which produced the films screened in his theatres. Zukor was a shrewd businessman who had built an empire out of nothing after coming to America from Hungary as a seventeen-year-old orphan. By 1920, film was the fourth largest industry in America, and the power and influence of the pictures was causing heart palpitations among those who were concerned about the morality of the stories and the lives of the actors playing them out on screen. Each new scandal in the press increased the calls for censorship, as the same church ladies who had advocated for Prohibition a few years before turned their attention to arranging boycotts of the films of scandal-plagued actors. Zukor’s fears were two-fold: censorship of films, and regulation of the industry that would break up his vertically integrated business model. Tinseltown is an education in Old Hollywood politics, as Zukor maneuvers to try avoid an anti-trust lawsuit, and manage the scandals that were driving the demand for censorship.

Like most true crime writers, Mann believes he has discovered the correct solution, even though he is writing about a murder that is nearing its centennial. Admittedly, his solution hinges on an uncorroborated death bed confession that relies on one man’s word about what he heard. But from that word, Mann extrapolates an intriguing theory that jibes with both the physical and circumstantial evidence in ways the popular suspects of the day never did. Ultimately, it is too late to know for sure, but Mann builds a plausible case while also entertaining and educating. You could take the question of whodunit out it entirely, and still have a riveting portrait of silent film era Hollywood.

___

This title fulfills the True Crime requirement for my participation in the 2014 Eclectic Reader Challenge hosted by Book’d Out.