Short Reviews of 3 True-Crime Books

I realize it's somewhat ghoulish to read true-crime books during the holidays. I should be reading cheerier stuff, but my timing is always off and I end up reading something like Rosemary's Baby every Christmas Eve.

Anyway, the first book was one I wouldn't have read if my dad hadn't read it first and told me a bit about it. I knew a little about the Green River killer, watched The Riverman twice, and even read excerpts from Gary Ridgway's confession. That was more than enough for me. But Dad mentioned that Ann Rule's Green River, Running Red focuses much more on the lives of the victims (very young prostitutes) than on Ridgway, so I picked up a used copy. I could not leave it alone. This book went with me everywhere. It was constantly in my purse so I could read it in lines, on buses, in the elevator. Ann Rule really does give the women and girls Ridgway killed a voice, and I applaud her for that. She could have written a gory, sensational story, but she examined the day-to-day lives of the girls who worked on Seattle's SeaTac Strip (about a mile from Rule's home at the height of the killings): You would recognize these women and girls; not as hookers, but as your teen sisters, your babysitters, your friends. I am so grateful that someone wrote about their lives and ambitions instead of rehashing Ridgway's banal acts of evil.
I also like Rule's take on the amateur psychic who tried to horn in on the investigation. Unlike the chicks on Psychic Detectives and Medium, this woman was a pain in the a** who continuously hindered the investigation with vague hints like "water" and "mountains". She did locate one of the bodies - but only because another body had already been found nearby, and she knew just where to look. If there are psychic detectives out there, they're not the ones who shamelessly promote themselves all the time.

(While reading Green River, Running Red, I also picked up Oprah's recent fave, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Addict memoirs don't interest me, but so many women on Oprah's show said they "couldn't put it down" that I decided it deserved my attention. Well, guess what? I put it down.)

Next on the list was Under the Bridge by a young Canadian novelist, Rebecca Godfrey. (Also reviewed by Wandering Coyote). This is the story of the beating/drowning death of a 14-year-old girl named Reena Virk in Victoria, British Columbia. A swarm of teenagers (all but one of them girls) who had been feuding with Reena cornered her beneath the Craigflower Bridge on a night in 1997, punching and kicking her until she seemed to be unconscious. Reena was able to get to her feet and cross the bridge, headed for home, but two kids followed her and beat her even more severely. 15-year-old Kelly Ellard, a middle-class kid with major anger problems, stomped on the girl's head so hard that her shoe print was found on Reena's brain. Then she held her under the water for five minutes and walked home. Her cohort was a boy she barely knew, a kid named Warren who had never been in any serious trouble and seemed to live for his 14-year-old girlfriend. No one understands why these two teens - who had no real connection to Reena, other than being friends with some of Reena's frienemies - launched a second brutal, unprovoked attack that left her dead. Kelly was an angry girl, by all accounts. As she told a school counsellor, "I just like to punch people." She had already been asked to leave Shoreline High School. Warren was virtually homeless: His mom, an alcoholic, lived in another state and his dad lived in another country to be with his new girlfriend. But it just doesn't add up.
This is a story that needed to be told. It has inspired countless articles and a one-woman play, but the full story hasn't been told in book form until now. I'm just not sure Rebecca Godfrey was the right one for the job. As a novelist, her writing is too high-flown and repetitious for true crime material. For example, she tells us at least a dozen times that the schoolhouse on the riverbank is "old" and "white". The schoolhouse adds some atmosphere, but has no part in the events of that night. We get it, Ms. Godfrey: It's "old", and it's "white". This is how she describes Warren's arresting officer: "A man, lean and looking like his father's twin, this man who looked so much like his dad, left the gold Taurus..." I guess this kind of prose is stylish and mod. To me it's just mushy writing. God, now I'm sounding like Andy Rooney.

Moving on. The third true crime book is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the first book to elevate crime writing far above detective pulps. The focus is on the victims, a salt-of-the-earth Kansas farm family of four, the Clutters, but we get to know the killers as well. Moody and "sensitive" Perry Smith (played by Robert Blake in the movie) and Dick Hickock weren't exactly drifters, but they didn't seem to have much purpose in life either. Smith had vague dreams of moving to Mexico. Hickock apparently just liked to kill people. He told Smith a friend had revealed to him that $10,000 was stashed in the Clutter house, but this was such an obvious untruth that you have to wonder if Hickock invented it as an excuse to kill the Clutters. Since Smith and Hickock didn't actually take anything from the house, they wouldn't have faced much jail time if they hadn't slaughtered four people.
The book is passionate, meticulously researched and written, packs a huge emotional punch. This isn't just about the Clutters or their killers; it's about an entire small town turned in on itself by a crime people couldn't (and still can't) fathom. Capote says absolutely nothing about himself or why he decided to write this book, and that's why you might like to see Capote. Phillip Seymore Hoffman is, as usual, terrific. You get to see the uneasy balance between art and exploitation as Capote actually befriends Perry Smith, hires a lawyer for his appeal, then slowly backs off as he realizes how truly callous and manipulative these two guys are. Yet that can't stop Capote from seeing something of himself in shy, artistic Perry. He tells his best friend, Nelle Harper Lee, "I feel as if Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he walked out the back door while I walked out the front." It's a compelling story, if you can somehow tolerate Seymore Hoffman's spot-on imitation of Capote's voice. He sounds a lot like the Jack-in-the-Box from the Island of Misfit Toys.
I was sad to learn that Capote fell into the long tradition of Southern writers who drank themselves to death, and that In Cold Blood was his final completed book. His childhood friend Nelle's book was her first and only, as well.

Now maybe I should read something happier, like Crime and Punishment.