Misshelved True Crime

While one might think the content of a non-fiction work indicates where in the store it will be shelved, this isn't always true. Today we will examine three books, all of which by content are clearly True Crime, but might be shelved elsewhere at the behest of the publisher's marketing department.    

     The first and most horrific title is A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Dugard. The author was abducted at age eleven and lived the next eighteen years in a backyard shed in Antioch, CA. Her captor was a sex offender and the book does not spare much detail as to the circumstances she faced. I haven't read it, and maybe never will, as these particular gruesome details are too much for me. This title is marketed as a memoir, and I do trust the people at Simon & Schuster to know how from whence their stock will best sell. John Glatt's book on the case, Lost and Found, is shelved in True Crime, and there's no reason for Dugard's account to be anywhere else, except the belief that folks who do not browse True Crime will buy it.

      Just recently published and expertly done is Killer On The Road by Ginger Strand, published by the University of Texas Press. The back cover identifies the subject matter as "History," which is true in a sense but also disingenuous. The author looks at the effect the national highway system has had on murder in America. Most people today have lived with highways all their lives, so do not appreciate what an incredible change this public works project had on the country. She looks at particular cases in depth, and has no shortage of material to draw from. From my perspective, the greatest chapter concerns the Atlanta child killings of the early 1980s. The stated goal of building the freeway system through the heart of the city was to provide rapid access from the suburbs to the downtown core. As it happened, many thousands of residential housing units were destroyed, almost all of which had been occupied by black people. The black neighborhoods remaining in the shadows of the on-ramps were physically and economically divided from each other and the rest of the city. The result was neighborhoods which had not been poor became so, and those that were poor became desperately so. As readers of True Crime have noted again and again, the poorer the missing person, the less the police investigate. Students of the genre will be excited here, as for this chapter, Strand relies heavily on an out-of-print & scarce title, The List by Chet Dettlinger. He was an detective with the Atlanta police, one of many assigned to the case, and became rather critical of how the investigation was handled. When Wayne Williams went on trial for two of these killings, Dettlinger worked with the defense. Strand meshes the disregard for downtown Atlanta blacks by federal and local governments with the inability of all involved to stop these children from being killed. Once Williams was convicted of the two counts of murder, almost all of the twenty-plus remaining unsolved cases were closed. The final chapter of Killer On The Road examines the physically and psychologically punishing job of cross-country trucking, and the extent to which this profession attracts and/or creates killers. This book is highly recommended.

     Our final tome today is 2009's Police Interrogation and American Justice by USF professor Richard Leo. We shelve this title in Legal Studies, and have been able to sell roughly one a year since it came out. I'm not sure how much longer it will remain in print, but this book is important to an understanding of how the criminal justice system works in practice. Leo sat in on hundreds of hours of interrogations in East Bay police departments, and his research does not instill confidence in their methods. The list of True Crime books wherein a false confession enables the actual perpetrator to continue to victimize others would be long indeed. I: The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen, Central Park Five by Sarah Burns, and The Devil's Knot by Mara Leveritt are three we carry new. This nearly happened in Bringing Adam Home by Lee Standiford. Edward Humes's out-of-print Mean Justice describes the production of false confessions as being considered quality police work in the eyes of exceptionally dangerous Kern County cops and prosecutors. Of course, coercing someone into an undeserved prison term is a hell of a crime in itself. Society is doubly victimized as the actual criminal remains free. Police and prosecutors have proven extremely reluctant to re-evaluate their techniques, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their failures.

     Crime and anti-social deviance permeate our society. For sure Business, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and any History section will have books just as fearsome as those to be found in True Crime.

   

           

Please Compare and Contrast the Following Titles

Further back in the recesses of our Fiction and Music Annex one can now find our expanded True Crime section. We have more room for oversize material, more new books, and, while they last, two giant shelves of mass market paperbacks. On a related note, two quality titles have been published in paperback this month.

 
     Popular Crime, by well-known baseball statistician Bill James, is a fascinating look at nearly two hundred years of crimes, mostly murders, which have captured the American imagination. James is a logician, a contrarian, and a voracious reader of true crime books profound, obscene, obscure, pedestrian, and trashy. His chapters of the Jon Benet-Ramsey case and the Butcher of Kingsbury Run (aka the Cleveland Torso Murderer) are particularly strong. I do not endorse his thinking on public policy, which can be reactionary in the extreme. But I love this title and now it's new at $15.

     Also hitting our shelves in paperback this month, to be found on our Staff Favorites display, is Sarah Burns' The Central Park Five. It tells of one of biggest crime stories in this history of New York City--the "Central Park Jogger" case of 1989. Five teenagers from public housing were quickly arrested and convicted, though the evidence at the scene indicated only one perpetrator was involved. Their convictions were voided in 2002.

     This title is an excellent companion to last year's paperback release of Finding Chandra by Washington Post reporters Scott Hingham and Sari Horwitz. Modesto native Chandra Levy vanished in a Washington DC public park in 2001. It was over a year before her body was discovered. The police focused on the man with whom she'd been having an affair, serial adulterer and then-Stanislaus County Congressman Gary Condit. He was not responsible and was never charged. Her killer was convicted in 2009.

      These cases share quite a few similarities. Both concern professional women in cosmopolitan big cities who were attacked in public parks. In both cases, police and media quickly focused on individuals who had been doing, well, dumb shit that sure made them look bad. The New York teens had been punching strangers in the park that night, going so far as to steal food from a homeless guy. Condit was an amoral philanderer, for whom Levy was just the latest in a string of women who hid their relationship with him while dreaming of the day (which he assured them would be soon) he'd quit Congress, divorce his wife, and settle down with them. Both cases occurred in cities with extremely sophisticated, numerous, relentless, and ravenous media. Only London is worse (better?) in this regard than NYC and DC. In both cities black and brown people became greatly angered that an assault on a wealthy white woman generated such rapid reactions from city bureaucracies, when so many similar crimes against their demographic were, um, not exactly top priorities. Both perpetrators proved to be Salvadorian immigrants who were already in jail for other, similar crimes when their guilt in these cases was revealed.

     The biggest and most obvious difference was the status of the original suspects. The black and Latino teens from public housing were bereft of legal assistance of any kind, leaving their guardians to be jerked around by the police while detectives (illegally) leaned on the kids. Condit was white, telegenic, well-spoken... Oh yeah, and a sitting Congressman. He treated with deference by the police despite being their prime suspect. In the Central Park case, the media took their cues from the police, including the coining of the infamous term "wilding" to describe the kids' behavior. The term was attributed, falsely, to the teens, but came from the cops. In DC, the cops took their clues from the media. Calmer and wiser heads immediately realized that Condit was scumbag, but not a murderous one. But the "Representative-denies-affair-with-missing-intern" angle was much too strong for the media to pass up. The cops had nothing else to go on and so wasted their time trying to figure out where he stashed the body. The Central Park case was cracked when the perpetrator met one of the convicted teens, now in his 20s, in jail. He came forward with a detailed and accurate confession which led to their convictions being overturned. No arrests were made in DC until the Post reporters utilized geographical profiling to identify a likely suspect, already imprisoned for attacks on women in the same park.

     True crime is another window onto the power structures and prejudices of our society. These two books in particular are a sad but worthwhile education.  

            

A Time Of Darkness and Despair

My first visit to Green Apple Books? I remember it well. The creaky floors, Cruddy (by Lynda Barry) on display for $6, and, up on the mezzanine, my favorite section of all - True Crime. As with Mystery and Science Fiction, it is the (hopefully not too) worn and tattered paperback which is the linchpin of this section. Repressing a shriek of delight I grasped Say You Love Satan (David St. Clair) and The Search For The Green River Killer (Carlton Smith). Foolishly I set them down to wander the store some more, then was unable to find the mezzanine again! Years later I was able to read the Carlton book, but St. Clair's renowned work on the hessian Satanic drug addicts of New Jersey continues to elude me.

     Eventually I started working at Green Apple, and am known as the store's resident authority on this section, though our bookkeeper is more widely read in this field than me. The dynamics of used true crime had changed in the meanwhile. As I remember the glorious '80s and '90s, every used bookstore was hip deep in trashy, gnarly paperbacks priced under $3. Browse shops in San Francisco these days and these titles are few and far between. So, a few weeks back, when two boxes of of mass market true crime treasure came in across our buy counter, I glimpsed for the first time many titles which captured my attention. Convinced a ravenous market existed for these books, I was determined to read as many as I could before they hit the shelves. Over a period of two weeks, I tore through Angel of Darkness (Dennis McDougal), The Misbegotten Son (Jack Olsen), Freed To Kill (Gera-Lind Kolarik with Wayne Klatt), Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door (Steven Winn & David Merrill), and The Gainsville Ripper (Mary Ryzuk).
   
     It wasn't all good times. I knew immersion in this level of depravity would have negative effects on my mental health. Children cannot understand that even though a bad thing happened, it is incredibly unlikely to happen to them. After reading true crime for two weeks, I developed this same problem. Before, I was able to control my fear of being abducted and cut up about by realizing, if this terrible thing happens to one person, that's too many, but it does happen. But if it happens in the US to 270 people in one year, the odds of any one individual falling victim is 1 in one million. In practice, even these odds are lessened by my being male, fairly privileged, and avoiding dangerous situations. For example, I do not get hell of wasted drunk, climb in a stranger's car, and take the pills he offers. I don't accept offers to pose naked and tied up for money, even a hundred bucks. This kind of risk reduction has served me well over the years. But logic was defeated after 1500 pages of terrible happenings. The most casual encounters seemed to me to be a set-up. Many men seemed to be hiding a secret and horrifying life. Stopping to tie my shoe, I felt like a limping and lonely antelope on the savannah. While camping, I had to struggle not to run the 50 yards from the river back to our campsite (it looked more like 50 miles) after a branch broke in the distance. I thought it a security breach that my friend told a staggering drunk the name of the campground we were looking for. He seemed an ancillary character, no doubt soon to be picked up by his brother, a maniac with a history of fire-starting and head injuries, recently released from prison...  

     Plato recommended all things in moderation, but that's not really me. In this instance, I am more like the character sang about by Johnny Cash on Live At San Quentin - "I had all that I wanted of a lot of things I had, and a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad." It will be at least ten days before I'm ready for Driven To Kill  (Gary King), while Camouflaged Killer (David Gibb) still waits on the shelf at home.