True Crime: An American Anthology Book

In the editor's forward to True Crime: An American Anthology, Harold Schechter begins by quoting from Plato's The Republic: "the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does." I found this amusing, for no other reason than Schechter seemed to be presumptively on the defensive, which is a position that any true crime reader will eventually find themselves in. You take it as a given that people will ask you why you'd ever want to read such horrible things. On the bus, you hide your trade paperback about the Gainseville Ripper inside The Davinci Code, to keep from getting the reputation as the creepy guy who reads about serial killers. Of course, these are the same people who slow down to watch an accident on the highway.

We all share a mortal fascination, whether we cop to it or not. I easily admit to being a crime junkie. There's nothing better than a good 48 Hours Mystery on a Saturday night. I've worked on murder trials and delved through trial records, which are filled with crime scene photos and autopsy reports and pictures you never really forget and that force you to look.

Sometimes I think we all have a deep need to look at death, as though by studying its physical outlines - that is, a dead body - we can decipher some of its mystery. The raison d'etre of true crime, though, is the same as for horror films: a good scare. Statistically, the probability of being murdered is quite small; the possibility of being murdered by a stranger is even smaller still. Indeed, the most dangerous thing most of us will ever do in life we do every day, several times a day: getting into a car. The stuff that's mostly likely going to put us in our graves is not a Berkowitz or a Spector or a Bundy or a Dahmer or a Jack the Ripper. Instead, it's the McDonald's french fries, the Marlboro cigarettes. I've seen some scary people and read a lot more scary stories, but the only thing that terrifies me is cancer.

As to the ethics of experiencing these vicarious thrills at the expense of real tragedy. Well, either way, the thing happened. Not reading about it isn't going to bring back the dead.

That's my defense. Onto the book.

True Crime purports to be an anthology of 500 years of crime writing. The forward states that only murders are included, but there were two exceptions: one a rape and one a suicide. I was excited about this book, especially with some of the famous authors included in this compendium: Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Webb, Gay Talese, James Ellroy, Ann Rule, Dominick Dunne, etc.

I read the book straight through and was disappointed.

First, some of these stories are included based solely on their status as historical artifacts. I'm speaking of a paragraph taken from William Bradford's famous History of Plymouth Plantation, and the mad natterings of Cotton Mather, who wrote a series of prurient sermons telling of men hanged for sexing their animals:

[T:]his Diabolical Creature, had Lived in most infandous Buggeries for no less than Fifty years together; and now at the Gallows, there were killed before his Eyes, a Cow, Two Heifers, Three Sheep, and Two Sowes, with all of which he had Committed his Brutalities. His Wife had seen him Confounding himself with a Bitch, Ten years before...

(Note: all the brutal crimes against grammar in that paragraph were committed by Cotton Mather. You might even say that Mather was Confounding the English language.)

Second, a lot of these stories didn't fit my definition of "true crime." In my mind, there are four parts to a good true crime story (I'm just spitballing here) that can be traced to Capote's In Cold Blood:

1. Introduction of the victim. In this section, you should tell us who the victim is, so that we can sympathize when that person is killed (It helps if your victim is young, white, and female. Call this the Natalee Holloway Corollary, even though evidence suggests that Natalee wasn't murdered at all). Capote follows this rule by first introducting the reader to Holcomb, Kansas, and the Clutter family.

2. The Crime. In this section, the crime is described. This can be done in two ways. First, the crime can be described as a narrative. Or, and this is more usual, you can describe the crime scene, then circle back to the actual crime as a flashback later in the book, as Capote does with Perry Smith's famous jailhouse confession.

3. Hunt for the killers. In this section, the dogged detectives hunt for clues, while the dastardly killer heads for Mexico.

4. Resolution. In this section, either the killer(s) is brought to justice, where there is a trial, or the story ends with a detective standing forlornly at the scene of the crime, vowing to never give up:

Captain Van Buren muses, "You know, I still keep hoping I'll meet that man someday, the torso murderer." Outside a red fuse flickers fitfully by the rails where an engine is switching, and in the distance the sky glows dully with the lights around Public Square. A Rapid Transit train rattles and rolls, leaning on the curve, its windows a streak against the black cliffs; and for an instant its headlight sweeps the foot of Jackass Hill. But only for an instant: the blackness closes in, the night...is impenetrable as ever.

(From John Bartlow Martin's Butcher's Dozens).

A lot of these stories don't fit at all within the (admittedly shaky) paradigm I've laid out. The Bierce selection is a bunch of his newspaper clippings, in which his poisonous pen is on full display (it's funny, but not true crime). There is an excerpt from Mark Twain about "frontier violence" that is not about a murder at all, and is certainly not "true." Calvin Trillin's piece on Manson isn't even about Manson; it's about the guy who owned the ranch where Manson once lived. Then there's this selection by Jose Marti about the trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated Garfield. Perhaps something got lost in the translation (Marti was a transplanted Cuban), or perhaps the American courtroom has changed a lot since 1882, but Marti's account of the trial never touches on the crime itself. Instead, it's a hysterical, mostly-incoherent retelling of what Marti thought he was seeing during trial (it really makes no sense at all).

Even when the stories were more in keeping with "true crime" as I know it, I was unimpressed. Damon Runyan's piece on the Snyder-Gray trial went on forever. It's memorable only for Runyan's endearing misogyny, and his wonderful observations: "[Snyder:] is not bad looking. I have seen much worse. She is about thirty-three and looks just about that, though you cannot tell much about blondes." The piece by Dreiser, on the Edwards-McKechnie murder (a bludgeoning in a lake, which resembled the real-life Gillette-Brown murder and Dreiser's fictional An American Tragedy murder) was nothing more than Dreiser's uninformed opinion about the defense's opening statement.

There was some really good stuff, though. The best stories, surprisingly or not, were written by women (though the Ann Rule selection simply sucked). Celia Thaxter's A Memorable Murder does an incredible job of capturing the cold and desolation of life (and death) on the Isle of Shoals, a rocky island off the coast of New Hampshire. I also enjoyed Dorothy Kilgallen's Sex and the All-American Boy, which insightfully draws a connection between our Puritanical views on sex outside of marriage and the murder of young pregnant girls by their boyfriends.

He was afraid. He was afraid to talk to any of those who might have helped him. That was what has struck me so forcibly about Bobby's puny, misspent young life. He was afraid to confide in anyone whose mature advice and counsel might have shown him a bit of daylight on the road ahead. He was afraid of society - afraid and ashamed. And out of his fear and his shame and his cowardice, he gambled away Freda's life and his own. You might almost say it was society who handed him the dice and urged him to throw.

Other highlights were: Myer Berger's account of a WWII vet who went on a killing spree in Camden, New Jersey, killing 12, which is a masterful work of fast-yet-detailed long form reporting; W.T. Brannon's account of Richard Spector's massacre, titled Eight Girls, All Pretty, All Nurses, All Slain; and James Ellroy's unflinchingly honest, introspective account of his own mother's murder.

The best story, though, and worth the price of the book, is Truman Capote's interview with Manson henchman Robert Beausoleil, titled Then It All Came Down. Now, I knew that Capote was a raconteur and a name-dropper, but reading this hilarious, pugnacious interview, I started to realize how pathological these traits were. Even though he's talking to a man on death row, Capote is still telling stories about meeting Sirhan Sirhan (Bobby Kennedy's murderer):

RB: So what've you been up to today?
TC: Just around. Had a little talk with Sirhan.
RB: Sirhan B. Sirhan. I knew him when they had me up on the Row. He's a sick guy. He don't belong here. He ought to be in Atascadero. Want some gum? Yeah, well, you seem to know your way around here pretty good. I was watching you out in the yard. I was surprised the warden lets you walk around the yard by yourself. Somebody might cut you.

Being Capote, most of the interview is him talking, which is a plus (especially if you can get his voice in your head). For instance, Capote takes obvious relish describing the gas chamber to Robert, telling him about a separate room where they gather the effects of the condemned: "Unfinished crossword puzzles. Unfinished letters. Sweetheart snapshots. Dim, crumbling little Kodak children. Pathetic."

Capote talks about Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the killers from In Cold Blood. He's also a bantam little rooster, and challenges Robert at every turn. He calls him a murderer. He calls him out on his contradictory statements. He tells him how he can see his face change as he lies. He even gives him his theory that the common denominator of crime is the existence of a tattoo. It's amazing to picture this fey writer verbally lacerating the convicted killer. But the money shot is Capote's ego, which is always on display:

I was thinking. I know Sirhan, and I knew Robert Kennedy. I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that - one person knowing all four of those men - must be astounding...I met him in Moscow just after he defected...Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square. The Metropole has a big gloomy lobby full of shadows and dead palm trees. And there he was, sitting in the dark under a dead palm tree. Thin and pale, thin-lipped, starved-looking. He was wearing chinos and tennis shoes and a lumberjack shirt...We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassination when I saw his picture flashed on television.

Only Capote would walk into a max-security prison just to hear himself speak.

Though I didn't like this collection much, it is redeeming in that it gives you a good idea of what to read next, and definitely left me with a desire to search out more works by some of these authors.