Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

True Crime: Some of my Best Books

The Daily Beast asked me to list what I consider to be the best books in the true crime genre, and I obliged. Many offerings are what you'd expect - IN COLD BLOOD, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, HELTER SKELTER - but there was no way I was going to come up with a list like this and not include one of the formative books of my reading experience, Jurgen Thorwald's CRIME & SCIENCE, published in English in 1967:

I received this book as a birthday gift from my college roommate during my freshman year, and I think it played a huge role in why I pursued a master's degree in forensic science. Thorwald writes with exceptional clarity about cases obscure and famous that were solved through forensic techniques like blood typing and elemental analysis of gunshot residue. They may now seem quaint in the age of DNA and CSI-style glamorization, but current criminalists owe a lot to their chemically-minded pioneers. Both this book and its earlier companion volume, The Century of Detective—which lost the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime to In Cold Blood—ought to be rescued from out-of-print neglect to educate and entertain new readers.

Jurgen Thorwald wasn't his real name, and he wasn't a practicing criminalist or doctor - he was a journalist who studied his chosen subjects in depth and then worked very, very hard to convey complex concepts as concisely as possible to the layman reader. 

And, in THE CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE, he got the essence of why Sherlock Holmes appealed to millions of readers nearly 100 years after his creation - and still appeals now:

Sherlock Holmes was the harbinger of a kind of criminological investigation which did not fit into any of these special [forensic] disciplines, and which ultimately far surpassed them in range. What Holmes did was to avail himself of all the chemical, biological, physical, and technological methods which were springing up at the turn of the century.

These are two books I'll be rereading again soon; they are well worth anyone's time, especially those looking for a good history of how the fields of forensic science and medicine came to be.

The Sad Spiral of Lisa Reardon

When I read Lisa Reardon's THE MERCY KILLERS some years ago, I felt like I was in the company of a writer whose work matched my general tastes. The writing was spare yet evocative, the story dark as all hell, and the story didn't travel down the usual noir-inflected streets. Several years passed and there wasn't a new book, and I wondered why.

Then, last fall, it emerged that Reardon more or less took a page out of her fictional playbook, as she was arrested and charged with trying to kill her father with a shotgun. Evidently she had had some sort of mental breakdown, and her mental health was examined to see if she was fit to stand trial. She was, but it ended up not mattering: yesterday Reardon pled guilty to counts of attempted murder and felony firearm possession and will serve at least two years in prison for the weapons charge, and possibly another 24 months for attempted murder.

But a plea bargain hardly seems to address what really happened to cause such a violent rupture of a long-troubled relationship. Even the court account from Reardon's father, George Hicks, last November has some ambiguities:

Hicks testified he was watering plants outside about 7:30 p.m. Aug. 21 when Reardon pulled her car into his driveway on Brand Road.

She had talked to him on the phone about visiting because she “wanted to come over and straighten a few things out before a wedding the next day,” he said.

Reardon got out of the car, pointed a gun at him and fired, hitting him in the leg and buttocks as he ran, he testified.

“I was running for the door to get in the house and telling my wife to get in the house because she was outside also,” he said.

Hicks ran into the house through a door to the garage and shut the door behind him and locked it, he testified. He told his wife to call 911.

Reardon fired another shot by the doorknob, he testified.

“She said, ‘Open the door. Open the door,” he said. “It just blew that doorknob all to pieces, but it still held.”

She then fired two more shots through the door about 11 inches higher than the first shot, Hicks testified. He told her she better leave before police arrive.

“You’ve done enough damage,” he recalls saying.

The pair had had little contact for 15 years, and yet when Hicks was on the stand, asked whether he knew what would have caused Reardon to shoot at him, he merely answered "Yes", and did not elaborate.

Clearly there's a great deal more to the story; mental illness would seem to play a part, even a large one. Mostly I feel sad that Reardon's demons ran so deep that fiction couldn't even come close to exorcising them.

In Plain Sight, At Not Enough Remove

Rodney Alcala has been in jail for almost as long as I have been alive. And yet it took three tries and three decades to get the death penalty to stick: a technicality tossed the verdict, rendered in the rape and murder of 12 year old Robin Samsoe, in 1986, and again in 2001. DNA's tied Alcala to additional killings, and based on the number of photos in his possession of unidentified women, that number should climb higher.

Comparisons to Ted Bundy are all too easy: the same rough time frame, similar appearance, frighteningly parallel pathologies all the way to their final victims, on the lowest threshold of puberty, meeting their deaths only days after the same fate befell other pretty co-eds. But Bundy's been dead for twenty years, a symbol of what America thought it was - full of free love, hitchhiking, adventure-seeking and open roads - and what it mutated into, a country where fear trumps nearly everything, especially at a time of economic strife.

Killers haven't become more or less scary, but when everything is social networked to the hilt, so too is violent death, to the point where death row inmates have hundreds of Facebook friends and children who kill other children have Twitter accounts. Even when there's a massive backlog at the nearest lab, DNA testing offers the promise of a quantifiable answer of who did it down to the base pair. "Unsolved" and "disappeared" are words of mystery, offering knowledge for those who can't figure out how to seek it, but when there is too much information to sift through, and when hundreds of millions leave some kind of trace of themselves, their intimate details casually broadcast to strangers, the mystery can't help but fade.

Which is why I keep coming back to the 1970s. It was not a decade of fun, not at all, not with Vietnam, Watergate, domestic and international terrorism (when that word conjured up hijackings and not suicide bombs) and, for one eighteen-month period in Santa Cruz, three brutal serial killers trawling for fresh meat. But its decided lack of fun was the flip side of the breadcrumbs of the 1960s, the precursor to the Dancing Queens and Disco Divas, the rise and fall of Punk and the sneak peek at New Wave. It felt fun, for those who lived through it, enough to make the risk worth it until it wasn't worth it anymore.

I look back at cases from that era, both unsolved murders and missing people, and they come from a time period so long ago and yet not far enough to be distant past. YouTube offers plenty of found footage, grainy and pristine, of the news reports people would have watched, but mostly it's a text and image show, a far cry from the multimedic spectacle that accompanies the Amber Alerts going out with contemporary abductions and killings. 

I offer all this as feeble explanation for why I keep coming back to Alcala's winning 1978 appearance on THE DATING GAME, an episode that would have been produced about halfway through his killing years. It offers skin-crawling "what might have been" voyeurism, since we, viewing it now, know the ending - or at least a piece of it. These photos Alcala took of dozens of still unidentified women may fill in additional blanks. Alcala may turn out to be Bundy's true comrade in arms, or he may just be a pale imitation.

What is clear is that Rodney Alcala bridges then and now, the dichotomies of both generations and the lessons many of us have likely forgotten. As Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy told the LA Weekly's standout crime reporter Christine Pelisek shortly before Alcala's third trial got under way, it was amazing "[h]ow naive people were about these sexual predators. Notice how many serial killers we had in the '70s or '80s? We don't have that many active today. Do you know why we don't have them now? Because of the Three Strikes law. They are going down on their first time. ... They aren't given chance after chance after chance." If that's true, it only exacerbates the fear factor those on-the-loose bogeymen still inspire.

On Howard Unruh

So Howard Unruh is finally dead. I think I've been waiting for the news all year, ever since his longtime lawyer, James Klein, informed me some time ago that Unruh's health was in very bad shape - evidently to the point of no longer being lucid. He'd spent the last 60 years of his life in various mental institutions, most recently the Trenton State Hospital. And at 88 years old, Unruh was 16 years older than Charles Cohen, who had spent those same 60 years hoping and wishing for Unruh - the man responsible for the deaths of his parents and grandmother as the then-12-year-old hid in a closet - to die. That wish came 6 weeks too late for Cohen, who himself died of cancer on September 4 - and was buried on September 6th, the six-decade anniversary of Unruh's crimes, which became the template for modern mass murder as we know it.

The NYT obit I linked to above is very good - especially for including Meyer Berger's Pulitzer Prize-winning "you are there" account of Unruh's spree, which left 13 people dead in Camden, N.J. - but the Philadephia Inquirer's obit is more immediate, more personal, in large part because it reaches out to Unruh's living victims, like Charles Cohen's wife:

"It came six weeks too late," a tearful Marian Cohen said yesterday, adding that her husband believed his loved ones never rested in peace while Unruh was alive. "He waited and he waited. We talked about it so many times. . . . I feel his spirit with me."

Cohen said that, once Unruh died, her husband had planned to bury all the paraphernalia he kept of that day and to remember the dead with Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning.

"Our thoughts are with the families of the other victims touched by this heinous tragedy," the Cohen family said in a statement released after hearing of Unruh's death. "We know that our family members and the other victims can rest in peace from this day forward...."

....Ron Dale, who still lives in Camden, was 8 years old and waiting to get his hair cut when he witnessed Unruh kill one of the victims. His father never let him attend court hearings, fearing Unruh would be released one day and go after those who helped keep him in custody.

"I figured he would die in there [prison]," said Dale, who is being treated for lung cancer and seemed unfazed by news of Unruh's death. "I'm too old to worry about it and too sick to worry about it. What are you going to do?"

For some, a bogeyman of sorts will be put to rest, as Unruh is no longer a living symbol of mass horror in a recognizable place. He's no longer the representative of post-war attitudes on justice and mental health, which ruled he was incompetent - a far cry, I suspect, from how his case would have been handled had it happened in the present day. But for me, it's a bit more complicated, as I wrote in a post this past January, the day after his 88th and final birthday:

There are a number of reasons why Unruh's crimes fascinate me. He lives on, sequestered away from the world and likely in severe decline. Before him there were serial murders and mass murders but Unruh essentially created the template for lone gunmen "going postal" or shooting up a school, and for carrying out a grudge with epic, bloody, senseless gunfire. Most of his descendants in mass killings turned the gun on themselves, were shot dead by police, or were sentenced to die in prison - or by the government's hand. And the biggest reasons are that he's never talked publicly since that September 6 morning, and we have no real sense beyond stray appearances at annual reviews as to his current state.

There is no getting around what Unruh did. He ruined the lives of an entire town and ripped families apart with the bullets from his Luger. HIs last reported public words, per the Berger article, were "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind. I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough." But six decades later, I wonder why he's outlived so many - and whether there's anything to glean from it other than the cruel randomness that is this universe, and that it truly is the quiet ones to watch out for.

Now that Unruh has passed, we're left with that very randomness. And it will probably take sifting through what must be a voluminous collection of documents housed at (or at least the property of) Trenton State Hospital to understand, even a little, how and why Unruh was what he was, and why his pathology resulted in crime once terrible and unthinkable, but now, sadly, much less so.

What California Law Does and Doesn't Say About Roman Polanski

It's been two days since Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland and I still can't let go of the subject. The firestorm of comments and opinions has been understandable. A 43 year old man, as Polanski was in 1977, had sex with a 13 year old girl, the age Samantha Geimer (then Gailey) was at the time. This cannot provoke anything but heated reactions, especially in light of what actually transpired in Jack Nicholson's house. 32 years ago. But what fascinates me most about this story is not the passionate reactions or the moral dilemmas about art vs. monstrous human behavior, but that what Polanski actually did is not what he is legally accountable for.

Before I keep going, I should point out the following: I'm not a lawyer, and my understanding of the law is based on what I've been able to research and read up on since Polanski was arrested, If I've made some wrong assumptions, I happily welcome corrections. But much of the media, blog and Twitter reaction has been by those who are also not lawyers, nor terribly familiar with the case details. It seems to me that looking at the law is a better guide to why certain things happened the way they did, and why other things did not.

When Polanski was originally arrested, he was charged with several very serious counts: rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor. The day before he was due to stand trial, his lawyer, Douglas Dalton, brokered a plea agreement with the prosecutor, Roger Gunsen, after receiving word from the Gailey family's lawyer, Lawrence Silver, that the girl did not want to testify. So the charge Polanski pled guilty to, and was awaiting sentencing for, was "unlawful sexual intercouse with a minor."

Legally, this is where things become a little murky, because of the way the charge is specified on the books for potential sentencing guidelines under section 261.5(c) of the California Penal Code:

Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison. (emphasis added)

When a crime can be classified in either of the two categories - misdemeanor or felony -  it is known as a "wobbler". See also see the U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, in relation to Lorenzo Viezcas-Soto, for how the "wobbler" designation for this particular crime affected sentencing on a later conviction.

The maximum allowable sentence for this particular charge is now 48 months, or four years (see section 261.5(d) of the California Penal Code) but in 1977 the upper limit was indeterminate - which meant imprisonment for up to 50 years. But recent precedent had those convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor get probation, as was recommended by the psychiatrist who evaluated Polanski and evaluators at Chino State Prison, where Polanski was remanded to for what was supposed to be a 90-day period (he was released after 42 days.)

The 2008 documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted or Desired may have some bias issues, but it does rightfully point to how the legal waters were muddied by the late Judge Laurence J. Rittenband's actions. The plea agreement meant that legally, he should only have certain latitude on punishment. The indeterminate upper limit meant he could impose a stricter punishment, but at the expected cost of appeals that may well have gone all the way to the State - or even the Federal - Supreme Court. Though it appears to be inappropriate in hindsight, Rittenband turning for advice to another prosecutor and a court reporter on how to sentence Polanski is understandable in light of the intense media scrutiny and pressures he faced.

Now, 32 years later, Polanski is in Switzerland, fighting extradition. I don't condone what he did; not in the slightest. His past is tragic and devastating but is in no way an excuse for his actions. But from a legal standpoint, this isn't, say, an open-and-shut case of unlawful flight from prosecution on the original, far more criminally grave charges. He fled after pleading out on a lesser, more criminally ambigious charge that could have been interpreted as a misdemeanor or a felony depending on who was making the interpretation at a given time. And should efforts to stop extradition fail and Polanski returns to Los Angeles for sentencing on what he pled guilty to, it remains to be seen which way the law will wobble.

One more thing: if the charge Polanski pled guilty to stands (if I'm reading this right) he would not have to register as a sex offender in California under Section 290 (2)(D)(iii)(II) of the state's penal code.

(Slate's The Explainer also addresses some related questions on the Polanski case.)

UPDATE: The Smoking Gun posts Polanski's 1977 plea agreement, which clarifies a number of things I had brought up and wondered about.  The "wobbler" designation may not actually apply because Polanski pled guilty to the felony charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor (even though Judge Rittenband had the power to determine if the sentence would be for either a felony or misdemeanor charge.) The maximum sentence at the time - at least that Polanski was aware of - was "one to fifteen - twenty years in State Prison." The agreement also plainly spells out that Polanski's guilty plea was not binding, "that the Court may, at the time set for hearing on the applicatioin for probation or pronouncement of judgment, withdraw its approval, in light of further consideration of the matter."

And perhaps this exchange seems a little ironic:

GUNSON: Since you are not a citizen of the United States, a possible consequence of your plea of guilty today may be that you would be deported and excluded from this country. Do you understand that the decision to deport and exclude you from the United States is made by the Federal Government? That is, the Immigration and Naturalization Service?

POLANSKI: Yes.

GUNSON: Do you understand that although Judge Rittenband may recommend to the INS that you not be deported, the Judge has not made that decision, and will not make that decision until the probation and sentence hearing?

POLANSKI: Yes.

GUNSON: Do you understand that Judge Rittenband may not make such a recommendation?

POLANSKI: Yes.

UPDATE 2: Peter Arenella, a professor at UCLA's Law School and a former criminal defense attorney, writes in with his observations about the case (which he has no connection to) and comments on my post:

While you correctly point out that the plea bargain included language noting that the bargained agreement between the defense and the prosecution could not force the judge to accept the probation recommendation, such language is “boiler plate” language which states the obvious to any attorney working in the criminal justice system. However, the plea bargaining system would fail if judges, after deciding not to accept the sentencing bargain agreed to by the parties, also then refused to allow the defendant to withdraw his plea and go to trial. The legal injustice here is not that the judge ultimately concluded that probation was an insufficient sentence for polanski’s egregious conduct; that decision lies within his discretion as the sentencer.

But, this judge then did the unthinkable by refusing to allow Polanski to withdraw his plea and go to trial. In short, he gave the state what it bargained for, the certainty of conviction while avoiding a contentious trial, yet the judge did not give the defendant what he was entitled to if he rejected the probation recommendation, the right to withdraw the plea and go to trial. This was outrageous judicial conduct then, and illegal in most jurisdictions today. If one were to put themselves in Polanski’s shoes at this juncture, the decision to flee the jurisdiction, while not the legally appropriate way to challenge the judge’s rulings, becomes understandable because of the clear message that the judge was sending: “I am willing to violate the law to ensure you get what you deserved for the rape of a minor, your real conduct, but not the far less serious crime to which you pled guilty.”

TV legal pundits have noted that the appropriate way to challenge the judge’s misconduct was straightforward: Polanski should have gone to jail and had his attorney challenge the judge’s misconduct on appeal. Such observations ignore the bad choices Polanski was then facing: should he trust a legal system to correct a gross injustice that the very same system had just committed by going to jail and hoping that the appeal will be resolved in his favor[a process that might take years] or should he flee the system’s jurisdiction. I want to be clear as a former criminal defense attorney that I do not approve of his decision to flee; nor do I view him as the “victim” then or now. However, his outrageous conduct towards his 13 yr old victim in no way justifies the legal system’s failures in this case.

Two additional observations: The Slate writer you refer to in your blog focuses on the “real conduct” that Polanski engaged in at the time of his crime to point out correctly that Polanski isn’t the victim here. True, but she ignores the fact that his legal guilt was for a plea to a much less serious crime than the facts she relied on. The Slate writer insists that the “law” demands a particular result [his incarceration] and then proceeds to ignore completely the difference between polanski’s moral guilt for raping a minor and his legal guilt for a less serious crime that usually triggers probation for first time offenders. As the father of three teenage daughters, I can readily understand why so many of the commentators in this case have insisted that the bargained for probation sentence depreciated the seriousness of his “real” crime. However, the less serious crime to which he pled guilty ordinarily triggered probation for first time offenders in that era.

Final irony: the public understands that celebrities frequently get breaks from the legal system that the average citizen would never receive; yet this case illustrates the other side of that coin-ask yourself if some average citizen was the defendant in this case with the same facts who fled the country to escape the judge who seemed so hell bent on giving him at least ten years-do you think that 32 years later the district attorney’s office would seek that person’s extradition from a foreign country when this fugitive committed no new crime in that 32 year period? I don’t think so. In making this point, I am not trying to offer some excuse for what Polanski did: he had no excuse for his behavior. Nor am I suggesting that a prison sentence for his crime would be unjust or that the mere passage of time combined with the offender’s good behavior is relevant to what sentence he deserves for his crime. I am simply pointing out that the practical realities of law enforcement sometimes favor celebrity defendants; but sometimes one’s celebrity status cuts the other way.

Newsweek's True Crime Week

Newsweek has a smorgasbord of stuff related to real-life crime, starting with Walter Mosley's essay on why America has a long-running obsession with all things illegal, criminal and murderous: it's because everyone is guilty of something:

Guilt is the mainstay of who we are and how we are organized, and is, seemingly, our undeniable destiny, along with Death and Taxes.

Our relationship with guilt is as old as the DNA that defines our species. But the nature of culpability changes with technology and technique. These changes affect the way we see the world and the way we seek to understand our predicament. True-crime stories, murder mysteries, up-to-the-minute online news reports, and (as always) rumor and innuendo grab our attention faster than any call for justice, human rights, or ceasefires.

This is because most of us see ourselves as powerless cogs in a greater machine; as potential victims of a society so large and insensitive that we, innocent bystanders in the crowd, might be caught at any time in the crossfire between the forces of so-called good and evil.

There's also Vincent Bugliosi looking at the Manson murders, 40 years later; James Ellroy on the life and death of LA teenager Lily Burk; an account of the Grim Sleeper, stalking LA's streets for the last twenty-odd years; and L&O creator Dick Wolf's favorite true crime stories.

After Andre: A Review of Cropsey (2009)

As children, Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio were among many who scared others and themselves with an urban legend given fictional life with the name of Cropsey - a maniac living in the woods who, with hook or meat cleaver or knife or machete, depending on the teller and the region, would emerge from the shadows to lure kids to their deaths in gruesome fashion. On Staten Island, where Zeman and Brancaccio grew up, Cropsey took on extra resonance thanks to the lingering ghosts of the Willowbrook State School, where mentally ill and developmentally disabled children resided and whose oft-horrific treatment was uncovered by Geraldo Rivera's 1972 expose for WABC-TV.

Such is the groundwork laid for CROPSEY, Zeman and Brancaccio's documentary on where fact meets fiction, where legend meets truth, and where the whispered-about bogeyman came to life in the form of Andre Rand, convicted of kidnapping two children - one murdered, one whose body was never found - and long suspected in the disappearances of several others. And while I exited the screening room tonight in a state of deep thought, I was troubled less by the case and of Rand than of the film's framing and presentation.

When Zeman and Brancaccio stuck to source material and primary interviews, CROPSEY was riveting. Whether showing clips of the filthy squalor of Willowbrook - long abandoned to decay in the woods - depicted in Rivera's documentary, current-at-the-time television coverage of the investigations into what happened to the missing children, or talking with family members, former law enforcement agents and those who had some tenuous connection to Rand, the film's power was unmistakable. These were children who disappeared and whose remains may be buried deep in the ground below and surrounding Willowbrook, and chances remain strong we're never going to know the whole truth of what happened.

But by framing Rand's alleged crimes in the context of an urban legend, CROPSEY unwittingly shoots itself in the foot. The real story has enough open-endedness and troubling questions that asking the audience to view it akin to a horror movie cheapens the entire concept when if anything, more investigation was necessary. And while I admit my own biases probably come into play, CROPSEY spent a little too much time going down blind alleyways. Raising reasonable doubt about Rand's guilt is perfectly fine, in light of the lack of physical evidence to tie him to the kidnappings and (probable and actual) murders. But the minutes spent theorizing about a connection to some sort of Satanic cult - especially in tossing off a reference to "Son of Sam" when David Berkowitz all but admitted it was a crock of shit devised to augment what was a more typical motive for serial murder rooted in insecurity, sexual dysfunction and outsized rage - could have been better spent on a litany of questions that ran through my mind.

For example: Zeman and Brancaccio's need to frame their movie around the urban legend that brought them to the cases came at the expense of unearthing who, exactly, Andre Rand is. It's not his real name: that is Frank Rushan, and while we're privy to a clip of the name-change document, no explanation is given as to why (or even a comment that "no explanation was given as to why.") They do track down his sister - obscuring her face from the camera in an understandable need to protect her identity - but what of school records, old yearbooks if they exist, or even the original record of arrest from 1969, when Rand was picked up for sexually assaulting a 9 year old girl in the South Bronx? Perhaps there's a deliberate metaphor to obscure Rand's background since Staten Island's general public never got to hear him speak in open court, and there is a single recording of Rand's voice left on Zeman's answering machine - the net result of a months-long letter-writing campaign by the filmmakers to secure an interview - but that seems like speculation.

And though the only fleeting reference was someone held up an old newspaper clipping about the "Unlucky Seven" children who went missing in New York City during the 70s and 80s, it was impossible for me not to compare Andre Rand with Jose Antonio Ramos, the longtime prime suspect in the disappearance of Etan Patz 30 years ago last month. Both Rand and Ramos lived transient lives, setting up makeshift camps in out-of-the-way places that were still well within reach of urban dwellings. Adults viewed their respective physical appearances and demeanor with suspicion - the drooling perp walk from Rand's 1987 arrest for Jennifer Schweiger's kidnapping and murder remains an indelible image, as is Ramos's mug shot from roughly the same time period - and yet somehow, they attracted kids to them with some degree of charisma and favors (one witness who testified at Rand's 2004 trial on kidnapping Holly Ann Hughes in 1981 described seeing Holly being enticed by a man with his face covered, holding out candy from his green Volkswagen, and never seeing the girl again after that.) And both Rand and Ramos are fond of playing games, whether dancing around their alleged crimes in letters, inviting people up to come interview them only to turn them down at the last minute, and generally maintaining some illusion of control over those who desperately want to know what happened to these children. And most importantly, the likelihood of physical evidence linking them to their alleged crimes turning up is exceedingly slim at best.

As a film, I view CROPSEY as a victim of its intentions, felled by the need to fashion a narrative that fuses fact and fiction. As a way of getting more and deserved attention about the lost children of Staten Island - Alice Pereia, Holly Ann Hughes, Tiahease Jackson, Jennifer Schweiger and especially 22-year-old Henry Gafforio, whose 1984 disappearance has been hardly written about anywhere (shockingly little information is available online), even as he made an eerie appearance in a newsclip when Holly disappeared three years before - and providing even a cursory glimpse into the unfathomable mind of Andre Rand, CROPSEY is mandatory viewing, even as it raises far more questions than can possibly be answered.

Photo credit: Jin Lee/Staten Island Advance

American Girl, Italian Nightmare, and a Update on Mario Spezi

Saturday night on CBS, "48 Hours" will air a segment on the ongoing trial of 21-year-old Amanda Knox, who stands accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher on November 2, 2007 in Perugia. The case has provoked a considerable amount of media attention and notoriety ever since prosecutor Giuliano Mignini accused Knox of murdering Kercher in the midst of a drug-filled sex orgy gone wrong, and the piece, by Peter Van Sant, asks some equally provocative questions about whether Knox is being falsely prosecuted for the crime.

Douglas Preston will also be interviewed on the show, for he has firsthand experience of Mignini's tactics as it related to his work on the book that became the NYT bestseller THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, co-written with Mario Spezi. And here I have frustrating and sad news to report. Three years ago, Spezi was arrested, accused of being a conspirator in the Monster of Florence case, and though he was eventually released - and Mignini reprimanded for his actions - things have worsened for Spezi since the book came out last summer, when he flew to New York to participate in various promotional appearances with Preston (including a panel I moderated at Bryant Park's lunchtime reading series) who reports the following in a email sent around today:

Mignini just a few weeks ago filed a new round of charges against Spezi. These include murder (yet again), as well as disturbing public order by means of the press, “vilification” of a public figure (himself), and using the press to obstruct justice. These charges stem from the fact that Mario, in his capacity as a journalist, wrote pieces critical of Mignini’s investigations in the Knox case and in the Monster of Florence serial killings.

In addition to ruining the life of an innocent American girl, Mignini’s persecution has now brought Mario Spezi to the brink of ruin. Despite a long and honorable career, Mario has trouble finding work because newspapers are afraid to hire a journalist charged with murder. His home has been searched by police and his papers seized. His health has been affected; last year he nearly died of a pulmonary infection which his doctors thought was partly due to an immune system compromised by stress. The legal bills have left him economically devastated and close to losing his home. He lives in constant fear of arrest. The police have tapped his telephone and bugged his car, videotaped his movements, and questioned his family and friends.

Because, of course, it is far easier to take the complex, conspiracy-laden route and accuse an honorable journalist of outlandish crimes than it is to prosecute the likeliest suspect, whom Preseton and Spezi identified in their book.  What angers me most is that just after our panel ended, I spent some minutes chatting with Spezi about the Kercher/Knox case, expressing my disbelief that Mignini's theories would be taken seriously after the Monster of Florence mess but never thinking Spezi would be caught in the vortex anew.

So here I am, full circle from a little over three years ago. One can only spread the word, yet again, so that Spezi will be left alone once and for all, justice can be served and Mignini's fixation on Satanic rites and needless persecution can be quashed.

UPDATE: Preston's editorial appears at TheWrap.com.

New Report Calls for Forensic Science Overhaul

Yesterday the National Academy of Sciences issued a lengthy report, two years in the making,on the current state of forensic science. It should not come as a surprise, that they found "serious problems" with the field. The report, according to NPR's Morning Edition, which did a segment on it today, "cites key deficiencies — such as the lack of mandatory certification programs for forensic scientists and the lack of standards for analyzing and presenting evidence. The study calls for new science research and major reforms to fix the fragmented, decentralized system." Not to mention that up to 80% of forensic laboratories are overworked and understaffed, and the "CSI Effect" means juries expect DNA and when they don't get it, they don't convict. It all adds up to the recommendation by the NAS that forensic science ought to undergo a serious overhaul.

Nothing brings the point home like Radley Balko's latest article in Reason Magazine, part of an ongoing series looking at Missippippi medical examiner Michael Hayne and how his less-than-stellar practice has led to innocent people on death row. One of them might be Jimmie Duncan, convicted of murdering 23-month-old Hayley Oliveaux in 1993 in part because of the presence of bite mark evidence. But as the video linked in the piece indicates, that evidence - conjured up by one Michael West - is beyond suspect:

The full 24-minute video opens with Michael West's initial examination of Haley Oliveaux's body on the night of December 18, 1993. He notes several injuries, but at no time does he mention the presence of possible bite marks on Oliveaux’s right cheek. The video itself shows no sign of bite marks, scrapes, or abrasions on the cheek.

At the 4:55 mark, there's a cut in the original video, representing the break between West's initial exam on December 18, and a follow-up bite-mark analysis on December 19. After the break, West stands over Oliveaux's body, which now contains a striking red abrasion on her right cheek—an abrasion that wasn't there before. West then takes the plaster cast of Jimmie Duncan's teeth and pushes it into the scrape on Oliveaux's jaw. Over the next few minutes he jams, drags, and scrapes the dental mold across Oliveaux’s cheek 17 times. For the entire 24-minute video, West uses Duncan's teeth mold on Oliveaux's skin more than 50 times....

...When asked how abrasions on Oliveaux's cheek not present when the video begins could later appear, [Ventura County Deputy Medical Examiner Michael] Bowers answered, "Because Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He's creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he's tampering with the evidence. It's criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods." Bowers added, "You never jam a plaster cast into a possible bite mark like that. It distorts the evidence. You take a photograph, or if there are indentations, you take an impression. But you don't jam plaster teeth into them." After viewing the video, Bowers submitted an affidavit for Jimmie Duncan's defense.

As shocking as that story is, I also understand why change may not be as forthcoming as the NAS hopes it will be. Creating new standards for established techniques, or tossing them out altogether, will be a costly, laborious, combative practice, one requiring a great deal of discussion and committees and hand-wringing. Forensic science funding has been difficult to obtain in the best of times, and these times are anything but rosy. Bad apples also don't mean the techniques themselves aren't useful, and DNA evidence is not always practical and necessary in every criminal case. And as I've said here any number of times, forensic science has moved more in the direction of repetitive specialization and away from the larger picture - which is problematic because looking for the larger story often yields the real one, while the telling detail means the forest gets lost for the saplings.

The report is the #1 topic of discussion at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences' annual meeting taking place in Denver this week, but I, like many others, hope some concrete ideas on how to tackle the issues highlighted by the NAS emerge from those who work in the field, on the ground level and further up the ladder.

Howard Unruh: America's First Modern Mass Murderer

(Editor's note: Howard Unruh died on October 19, 2009 at the age of 88, about nine months after I wrote this piece.)

On September 6, 1949, Howard B. Unruh, 28 years old, a mild, soft-spoken veteran of many armored artillery battles in Italy, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, killed thirteen persons with a war souvenir Luger pistol in his home block in East Camden, New Jersey.

Yesterday, January 21, 2009, Unruh turned 88 years old. He is still alive, a resident of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. He wasn't always there, having started out his incarceration among the mentally ill in the high-security Vroom Building (now Forensic Psychiatric Hosptal), but got transferred to Trenton in 1993 - long after any possibility of criminal charges were put to bed - and has been there ever since. 

The first paragraph paraphrases the opening sentences of a remarkable example of grace under narrative pressure by the eminent New York Times reporter Meyer "Mike" Berger (1898-1959). The 4,000-word piece, which had Berger get on a train to Camden the morning of the shootings, interview 50 people in town and get back to the city in time to write his piece and make his deadline in a little over two hours, won him a Pulitzer for local reporting. Sixty years later it more than holds up as a chronicle of chaos and terror, as a snapshot of a deranged young man, possibly suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder but just as equally an environmentally-made psychopath, and as a memorial to Unruh's victims, running the age gamut from 2 to 63.

There are a number of reasons why Unruh's crimes fascinate me. He lives on, sequestered away from the world and likely in severe decline. Before him there were serial murders and mass murders but Unruh essentially created the template for lone gunmen "going postal" or shooting up a school, and for carrying out a grudge with epic, bloody, senseless gunfire. Most of his descendants in mass killings turned the gun on themselves, were shot dead by police, or were sentenced to die in prison - or by the government's hand. And the biggest reasons are that he's never talked publicly since that September 6 morning, and we have no real sense beyond stray appearances at annual reviews as to his current state.

There is no getting around what Unruh did. He ruined the lives of an entire town and ripped families apart with the bullets from his Luger. HIs last reported public words, per the Berger article, were "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind. I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough." But six decades later, I wonder why he's outlived so many - and whether there's anything to glean from it other than the cruel randomness that is this universe, and that it truly is the quiet ones to watch out for.