Fiona's True Crime Book Reviews: N by author

Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith
Final Justice


This story is remarkable not for the actual amount of money that T. Cullen Davis had, but for the way in which he was allowed to spend it during his murder trial. Not only did he bring into Dallas the best, the flashiest, and the most vindictive defense attorney money could buy, he was allowed to turn the whole trial into an unbelievable (at least outside of Texas) circus in which even the jury members were treated to prime steaks every night, courtesy of the defendant. Naifeh and Smith deliver this tale with both tact and panache: they discover the sad substance beneath the surface glitter, they bring to life the many eccentric characters involved, and they have a fine sense of the absurd.

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Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith
A Stranger in the Family


The setting is the progressive South of the '80s, where education and hard work offer hope for the good life--until mental illness brings tragedy. This is an unusual true-crime book because it's neither a whodunit, nor a manhunt, nor an account of a trial. Instead, it's a character study of a sadistic sexual predator who is all too human in his desperate need for love, and of his family members who need, just as desperately, to believe that their love for him will make them whole again. Authors Naifeh and Smith are adept at teasing out the many-layered subtleties of the criminal mind: Here they create a thought-provoking portrait by alternating passages from the well-educated killer's own diary, with the unfolding narrative of how the revelations of his crimes are affecting his family. Includes a surprising twist, and a powerful scene of confrontation, near the end.

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Michael Newton
Bad Girls Do It! An Encyclopedia of Female Murder


Jack the Ripper may be more famous, but shortly after he was apprehended for killing five prostitutes, another Victorian murderer, Jane Toppan, was brought in on charges of having killed close to a hundred people in Connecticut. Toppan said in court, "That is my ambition, to have killed more people--more helpless people--than any man or woman who has ever lived." Bad Girls Do It! may have a jocular title and cover illustration, and Michael Newton (author of Hunting Humans) occasionally indulges in macabre humor. Nonetheless, these 182 case histories of female multiple murderers are packed with well-researched details. You will read here about "angels of death" (nurses who kill), "black widows," lethal landladies, and murderous moms. Many of them are little known, such as Rachal David, a religious fanatic who tossed her seven children off an 11th-story hotel balcony in Salt Lake City, while a crowd watched from below.

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Michael Newton
Hunting Humans: An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers


This no-nonsense encyclopedia features a preface with statistics on typology and distribution of serial killers, and detailed, well-composed entries on over 500 individual cases from all over the world--listed by names of killers and by categories of crimes (including unsolved murders by geographical region). It includes lust killers, merry widows and widowers, "bluebeards," duos and gangs, murderous cults, lethal doctors and nurses, highway and railroad killers, and four examples of killers who were dressed in girls' clothes as punishment when they were little. This reviewer was fascinated by such cases as the New Orleans ax murderer who vowed to bypass any homes where jazz was playing, and the Polish rooming house landlord who pickled some 30 of his tenants in brine. As acclaimed true-crime writer Jack Olsen writes, "Hunting Humans is a must read for anyone interested in crime, sociology or human behavior. It is a welcome addition to my shelf, and I intend to borrow from it liberally."

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Carla Norton
Disturbed Ground


The story begins with Bert--a gentle, unassuming street person who mumbled to himself and talked to trees. He wasn't an alcoholic, but he hung out at a "detox center" in Sacramento, where a volunteer named Judy took an interest in him. Judy was overjoyed when she found a home for Bert: a silver-haired grandmother who went by Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in a tidy blue-and-white Victorian. Little did Judy know that Puente (just one of her many aliases) would soon become her obsession. By the time the story ends, Bert has disappeared, and the cops are digging up seven corpses from the backyard of the boarding house. Author Carla Norton (Perfect Victim) skillfully unfolds the many-layered character of this classic "Arsenic and Old Lace"-style serial killer: "At the pinnacle of her fame and glory, Dorothea was like a junkie with a philanthropic habit. ... Everyone dipped into her pot and benefited from her largesse." She was ultimately tried on nine counts of murder, and sentenced to death.

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Carla Norton, Christine McGuire
Perfect Victim


Some may find it unbelievable that a twenty-year-old Oregon woman could be enslaved by a sexual sadist for seven years--that even after being able to move freely during the day, she would allow him to lock her into a wooden box every night. Perhaps it's a minor failing of this book that the authors do not elaborate on the psychology that made her such a "perfect victim." In other respects, though, the story is well told, with an impressive accumulation of details: the woman's capture, the tortures she endured, the brainwashing techniques, the fiendish contraptions her captor constructed, the slave contract he made her sign, and the increasingly strained relations within the peculiar family that included master, slave, wife, and child, all inside of a single-wide trailer. As well-known attorney and author Vincent Bugliosi writes, "A gripping and disturbing story of the secret life of apparently normal people. At once, horrific and engrossing."

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