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Fiona's True Crime Book Reviews: N by author
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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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[All reviews copyright © Amazon.com, Inc. 1997-8]
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