Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

384 pages

Published May 2013 by Skyhorse Publishing

Publisher's Summary: On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme—better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry—and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora’s determination to keep them apart. Their incredible story made shocking headlines around the world and would provide the subject for Peter Jackson’s Academy Award–nominated film, Heavenly Creatures. 

A sensational trial followed, with speculations about the nature of the girls’ relationship and possible insanity playing a key role. Among other things, Parker and Hulme were suspected of lesbianism, which was widely considered to be a mental illness at the time. This mesmerizing book offers a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial and shares dramatic revelations about the fates of the young women after their release from prison. With penetrating insight, this thorough analysis applies modern psychology to analyze the shocking murder that remains one of the most interesting cases of all time.

My Thoughts: 

I'm playing catch up on reviews so I'm going to just do a quick bullet point on this one. 

• I don't remember where I first heard about this book but the idea that a well-known author had been involved in a murder as a young woman intrigued me. How, I wondered, had she gotten past that to become a respected writer? 
• By the time I actually got around to reading the book, I'd forgotten that Anne Perry was actually Juliet Hulme and thought that she was involved in some other way. Except that I always, always look at the photo inserts in a book before I start reading so I quickly figured it out. 
• Both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker had difficult childhoods that caused them to have attachment issues with their mothers. Neither mother was ideal - Honorah Rieper ran hot and cold and Hilda Hulme struggled to connect with her daughter at all. Juliet was considered quite pretty and very bright - she thought perhaps even more highly about herself because of this than did anyone else. Both girls clearly struggled with mental health issues. 
• That being said, so little was known about mental health as recently as the 1950's that both doctors and the judicial system struggled to explain how two girls who showed no remorse and clearly understood that what they did was wrong could also be mentally ill. Also, the idea that these two young ladies might be lesbians was a big story - inherently this seemed to make them worse people but did it mean that they were just worse people or even more mentally ill? It seemed that it must be one or the other. 
• If this happened today, it would still be big, international news. We'd still struggle with the idea of matricide and how two young girls could be so remorseless. 
• As bad as the penal system was in the 1950's, as terrible as the conditions in the places where these young women were sent were, they were both allowed to continue their educations and actually served very little time, relative to the crime they'd committed. What was even more strange was the fact that they were both treated so differently when they were released. Parker was force to stay in New Zealand on parole, while Hulme (who took on the name Perry because her mother had taken that name on after she became involved with a new man by that name) was allowed to travel to Britain. 
• The two women dealt with the aftermath of what they had done very differently. Parker appeared to be very repentant and lived a quiet, religious life, trying to stay out of the spotlight. Perry (whose name evolved to Anne Perry) was able to live without anyone knowing about her past and became quite wealthy and well known with her writing. In many interviews, after it was discovered who she was, she showed very little remorse. 
• Director Peter Jackson got his big break when he and his wife produced a film adaptation of the case. Heavenly Creatures starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. Now I want to track that movie down. 
• Reviews on this one are very mixed. Some think it's terrific. I thought it particularly dragged in the middle and that Graham tried to stuff in everything that he'd learned about the case. At the end of the book, we learned what had happened to all of the people who had played a part in the trial - honestly, I didn't really care. I don't know what that says about me. Did I want it to be more sensational? Not particularly. But I also thought it was a story that should have better held my attention. 

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks by Patrick Raddon Keefe

Rogue: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks by Patrick Raddon Keefe

15 Hours, 28 Minutes

Published June 2022 by Penguin Random House

Publisher's Summary:

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface “They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” 

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism. 

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.

My Thoughts: 

Rachel Maddow says, "Every time he writes a book - I read it." Same here, Rachel, same here. She also reads all of his articles, something I'd never done before. Until now. Rogues is a collection of some of his writings for The New Yorker and now I'm wondering where I can find the rest of his New Yorker back list. 

In this collection, Keefe covers every kind of rogue from murderers (drug kingpin El Chapo, Dutch criminal Wim Holleeder, and a rare female mass murderer, Amy Bishop) to celebrity chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain. The essays cover topics from counterfeit wine to the dirty secrets of Swiss banking to illegal arms trading. In these articles, he looks at two different lawyers who defend killers, both for very different reasons. 

Keefe's great skills are his ability to make the articles relatable and readable. He looks for ways to help us understand why people do the things they do. He never tries to make the bad guys look good but he tries to help us understand who they are. And while he has always clearly done his research, his work never feels like he's dumping every thing he's learned into the article, obliterating the story underneath. And the story is the point - Keefe is a storyteller, even if his stories are those of real people and, in this case, their misdeeds. 

Of course, like all collections, there were some stories that struck me more than others. The story of Astrid Holleeder, a lawyer who fears for her life because she fears a notorious killer she helped put in prison for life will find a way to have her killed. That criminal is her brother, a man who became famous when he was part of the kidnapping of Freddie Heineken (yes, those Heinekens). She and her sister had known for years that their brother was a criminal but finally they had enough of living in fear of what he might do to them so they wore wires and got him to incriminate himself. And still they live in fear of what he might do to them. 

Another story that will stick with me was that of Mark Burnett. Burnett, as you know, is the producer of Survivor. In 2002, he leased the skating rink in Central Park to host the season finale. The Trump skating rink. Burnett had already had the idea for another reality show and as soon as he saw Donald Trump sitting in the audience, he knew what to do. He immediately began feeding Trump's ego, cultivating a relationship that would allow Burnett to convince Trump to star in his new show, The Apprentice. Until then, Trump was considered something of a joke in the business community and the building they were set to film in was more than a little worn at the edges. The production company not only made their floor of the building look good, they turned Donald or The Donald into Mr. Trump. Burnett allowed Trump (partly because he knew it would make good television and partly because Trump wasn't able to learn his lines), to let his own personality come through. The show created an image of Trump as a straight-shooting master businessman. It seems almost impossible that Trump would have become president if not for Mark Burnett. And now I have to stop watching everything else Burnett produces. 

Another is the story a lawyer, Judy Clarke who defends notorious killers, the worst of the worst. Amongst Clarke's clients have been Ted Kaczynski and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the younger of the Boston Marathon bombers). Clarke is a staunch advocate against the death penalty and had never had a client sentenced to death until Tsarnaev. While the death penalty has resulted in the deaths of innocent people, Clarke isn't representing those people. The people she represents are guilty and she doesn't try to present them as otherwise. Still, she fights hard to save their lives. In no small part because, as in the case of Tsarnaev, the families of the victims want that as well. They want to be spared the emotional toll of endless appeals and all of the publicity that comes with it. I didn't come away from this article caring any more about those terrible people, but it certainly heightened my conviction that the death penalty is wrong. 

Finally, there was the piece on Anthony Bourdain. I'm not entirely sure that this piece fits in with the others, although Bourdain would certainly be considered a rogue and a rebel. While Bourdain became famous as something of a punk rock chef and all-around bad boy, in later years, Keefe revels, Bourdain was disciplined and hyperorganized, controlling every aspect of not only episodes of his show but his life as well. He was also a man that didn't have a lot of old friends but who made a lot of friends in his travels. If you're a fan of Bourdain, you'll enjoy this piece. If you're not a fan going in, you may rethink your opinion when you learn more about a man who overcame addiction but never overcame his demons. 

As I've done with Keefe's other books, I highly recommend this collection. I especially recommend it for those who can't face the idea of reading a 500-page book about criminal activity but could manage an essay. You, too, will become a Keefe fan. You may even find your self having the same opinion as Rachel Maddow. 

Three Bodies Burning by Brian Bogdanoff

Three Bodies Burning: The Anatomy of an Investigation into Murder, Money, and Mexican Marijuana by Brian Bogdanoff

Published 2011 by Press, LLC at Smashwords

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

A haunting triple murder... the inside story of the investigation.When two worlds collide-the illegal transportation of tons of Mexican cartel marijuana to inner city gang members in a Midwestern city's "hood"-three bodies end up burning, caught in a web of greed as a major international drug deal goes very bad.The chilling trail of evidence from a remote wooded area where three bodies are set on fire leads homicide detectives across the country chasing down witnesses and conspirators in a two-year search for cold-blooded killers. This case has it all: murder, piles of cash stashed in the most unlikely of places, a blood-soaked crime scene, the remote dump site for bodies, luxury cars, flashy jewelry, and hundreds of pounds of illegal dope.An unbelievable break takes detectives down the rabbit hole where CSI meets Law & Order and where good old gumshoeing and meticulous forensic procedures bring down a mega-million-dollar drug conspiracy and lock up the bad guys for life.Follow the case through the eyes of the gritty homicide/narcotics detective. A handbook for the amateur criminologist, this book is for true crime fans, prosecutors and defense attorneys, and cops and robbers.Warning: This book contains graphic crime scene photos and adult language.

My Thoughts: 

In my previous job, we were required to have a certain number of hours of fraud training annually. To that end, we attending several lunches hosted by a fraud group every couple of months. Finding people who wanted to speak became difficult and the tie to fraud was often tenuous. For example, the lunch where the county attorney spoke, along with former police officer, who were, to the best of my recollection, talking to us about fraud caused by drug dealing. Completely irrelevant to my line of work but one of the most interesting lunches we ever attended as the former officer was Brian Bogdanoff who spoke about his work in the narcotics division and in solving the crime to which the book title refers. I had every intention of picking up a copy of the book shortly there after and thought of it again when my daughter began studying criminal justice. Eight years later I finally got around to reading it. My thoughts about this book would certainly have been different had I read it years ago. 

I can remember watching the morning news fifteen years ago and learning that three bodies had been found burning just on the edge of Omaha. It's frightening to think that you live in a city where that kind of thing happens. And then, as happens when something ceases to be a news story, I forgot about it. A year later, I recall the trial, in no small part because of the fact that my husband was serving jury duty at that time and, fortunately, was excused from this case. Five years after that, I had forgotten about it again until Bogdanoff talked about it at our lunch and I was fascinated about how the police managed to identify three bodies without identification on them and then track down their murderers. 

I'm still fascinated by that and by the amount of luck, tedious work, and detail it takes to solve crimes like this one. And how much the police rely on the criminals to screw up. Two pieces of paper were left in the pockets of the three men who were killed; had those not been overlooked when the killers emptied the victims' pockets, this case might never have been solved. Finding out who the victims were was key to solving the case - that led officers to their families who confirmed that the men were in Omaha on drug business and gave them the street names of the men the victims had been working with. Still, those were not names the police were familiar with and it would be some months before their identities were discovered. The amount of paperwork and the number of people involved in solving this case are staggering. The detail involved in putting together a case that won't be able to be overturned later due to some technicality is unbelievable. I 100% believe that the men who committed these crimes were terrible people who deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison and I'm glad that Bogdanoff and the people he worked with were able to find them and get them off the streets of Omaha. 

That being said, in light of things I've learned in the past few years and of my new way of thinking about the way police departments work, I did have some problems with the book. For example, in the first chapter, Bogdanoff says, "...very few times do the good guys, the cops, catch a break or get lucky." It wasn't the only time he referred to the police as "the good guys," setting up "us versus them" mentality that I'm growing to believe is one of the problems with how our criminal justice system works. 

That's reinforced when he defends a practice the policy use known as a "bar check" which caused some problems for him once. He, of course, says he and the other officers involved did nothing wrong and that the leaders of the African-American community who "claimed they were threatened, harassed, and intimidated by officers coming into a celebration they were having" might have been doing so as a media ploy. I can't say for certain, but knowing what I know now, I'm guessing that these "bar checks" were more often done in neighborhoods were persons of color live. Bogdanoff says that they went into that particular bar because there was a "large volume of foot and vehicle traffic in the parking lot of a bar that was directly next to one of the housing projects." It clearly never occurred to him then, or in retrospect, that it might have been anything other than suspicious. Bogdanoff grew up in this town, he'd worked extensively in that neighbor, and I can't help but think that he surely must have recognized some of the people going into that bar. But he says "I...learned that I would face people...who have certain agendas, and to support those agendas, they will manipulate situations and facts." I'm sure he's not wrong, that he did encounter people who did that. Again, though, it doesn't seem to occur to him that he may have done the same thing. 

I wish Bogdanoff had had a better editor - I didn't need to know that the prosecutor from the county attorney's office looked like Diane Lane or that once he could "literally hear [another office] crap his pants." And perhaps a little less of the braggadocio. It's a book that could have been tightened up and more focused. Because there is a hell of a story here and an impressive job of bringing two murders to justice. 

Say Nothing by Patrick

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Read by Matthew Blaney
Published February 2019 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress—with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past—Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.


My  Thoughts:
In 2013, Patrick Keefe happened upon the obituary of Dolours Price, formerly a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He knew a great story when he saw one. After reading that obituary, Keefe began a four year journey that would take him to Ireland seven times and have him interviewing more than 100 people. Many people refused to be interviewed and others backed out - The Troubles may have ended, but the fear had not left Northern Ireland. Many of the primary "characters" in the book were either dead or refused to be interviewed. Keefe was left to piece together the truth, as best he could, from other interviews and extensive research.

Top to bottom, left to right: Marian and Dolours Price at
10 Downing Street, Dolours Price, Dolours Price from the
book cover, Dolours and Marian Price at the march that
radicalized them, Marian's and Dolour's mug shots.

It's telling that I have looked at the front of the this book perhaps a hundred or more times at this point and it never once occurred to me that the person on the front of the book, a person I understood to be a member of the IRA, was a woman. That is not a man. That is Dolours Price. I am not alone in not thinking of a woman as an violent radical; Dolours and her sister, Marian, used their femininity to get into places they could not have gotten into if they were men and back out of plenty of trouble. The Price sisters were, in fact, more than willing to resort to violence for their cause as part of the branch of the IRA known as The Unknowns. They were inexplicably tied to many others who believed in the fight to rid Northern Ireland of the British including Brendan Hughs and Gerry Adams, who led the IRA (although Adams denies any involvement); Pat McClure, who led The Unknowns; and Bobby Sands, the IRA soldier who was the first IRA member to be allowed by the British to die on a hunger strike.

Jean McConville with three of her children, Gerry Adams
and Brendan Hughs at Long Kesh internment camp, newspaper
headline about the death of Bobby Sands, the aftermath of the Old
Bailey bombing for which Dolours and Marian were arrested.

It's clear that Keefe has little sympathy for the British but finds plenty of blame for what happened in the thirty-year period known as The Troubles. That bit of bias takes nothing away from this book. It is deserving of every accolade it earned last year. Keefe dives deep into the history of the IRA and The Troubles and the lasting impact of the divisions. Three decades after the Easter Sunday peace accord was reached, The Disappeared still have not all been found, the IRA, while, in theory, disarmed, still strikes fear into people, and Britain is still in Ireland, a fact that many still fight against.

Matthew Blaney is marvelous reading the book but the audiobook doesn't include the notes. They weren't necessary for me to be blown away by the book: I didn't even know they existed until the end of the book. But once I was aware for them, I really wished I had a copy of the physical book to refer to while I listened. If you're going to read this book, and get your hands on both the audio and print book, I certainly suggest you do that.

If you're looking for a book filled with fascinating people, a little known history (at least in the U.S.), and a remarkably well-told tale, I'd highly recommend Say Nothing.

I'll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for The Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

I'll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
Published February 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: ebook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic—and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer.


My Thoughts: 
I've had this book on hold at the library for weeks and weeks. And when does it finally become available to me? While my husband is out for town. Yep, couldn't read a word of it while I was in the house alone and never at night. Of course, the subject matter alone is unnerving but it's also a credit to McNamara, and those who finished the book for her. It was so easy to visualize the scenes of the rapist/killer's attacks, to imagine what it must have been like for his victims.

For three decades this killer disappeared but he was never forgotten, not by law enforcement officers who worked tirelessly to try to catch during his crime spree, not by the officers who picked up the cold case, not by the criminologists who used DNA to tie all of the crimes to one man, and not by the legions of ordinary people, including McNamara, who became obsessed with solving these crimes. McNamara took it the next step, meeting with many of the officers involved in the original search and those who picked up the mantel and, literally, following in the killer's footsteps.

McNamara is a marvelous storyteller and if there's any flaw in the pieces where others filled in, it's that the storytelling piece is missing to some extent. Fortunately, McNamara left copious notes, rough drafts, and articles she had previously written on the subject. It's a shame she didn't live long enough to complete her vision but even more of a shame that she died before Joseph D'Angelo was arrested and charged with being the rapist and killer that McNamara dubbed the Golden State Killer. I wish she had been able to see him caught but I also would have loved to have gotten her take on D'Angelo and how he fit who she believed the killer to be.

This one is deserves all of the praise it has received and I highly recommend it. But only if you're not alone. Or reading at night.

On a personal note, this book completely vindicates all my years of paranoia. The Golden State Killer spent a considerable amount of time studying his victims before he attacked. He watched the houses, knew when they came and went, peered through blinds to track how they moved in the house. When I'm home alone I work hard to make things look both as normal as possible while at the same time changing things up enough that anyone watching my house wouldn't be able to track a routine, as best I can. My family thinks I'm nuts but I feel completely vindicated now!

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
Read by Hillary Huber
Published May 2019 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.

Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more years working on her own version of the case.

Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country’s most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.


My Thoughts:
In the prologue to Furious Hours we see Nelle (Nell, not Nellie, a mistake so many people made that she decided to use her middle name only on her book) Harper Lee sitting in the gallery, watching the trial of Robert Burns, accused of killing the Reverend Willie Maxwell. And then we don't see her again until the final third of the book. To be honest, I felt a little gypped by this. I was expecting her story to be tied in throughout the book. When Cep finally got back to Lee, though, it was well worth the wait.

There are three parts to this book. First is the story of the Reverend Maxwell, a man who took out literally hundreds of life insurance policies on family members, some of whom didn't even know he'd done it. After two of his wives died, a nephew, and a step daughter, most of his family lived in fear of him. Almost every one believed he was guilty of these murders but the law couldn't seem to find him guilty, thanks in no small part to his lawyer, Tom Radney.

When Radney flips and defends Maxwell's killer, the book moves into the crime story that Harper Lee hoped to make into her In Cold Blood. This part of the book is Radney's and he's every bit as much a character as was Maxwell. Lee worked closely with Radney and he even gave her a giant folio of material for a book about Maxwell and his murder.

But...as we all know, Lee never wrote that book. In the final section of this book, Cep returns to Lee. It's the first time I've ever really felt like I knew Lee and the first time I ever felt like I really understood why she never published another book. It certainly wasn't because she didn't want to write. But by the time she was ready to write the book about Maxwell, most of the people who had supported her when she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird were gone and she appears to have been lost as to how to put the material together.

Any one of the sections of this book could stand on its own and Cep includes a lot of interesting back story (including the origins of life insurance and a background of voodoo) that really add to the book. I definitely recommend this book and the audiobook is especially good. Just know, going in, that this book is not exclusively Lee's story. If you know that, you won't be disappointed.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson
Read by Amanda Carlin
Published March 2019 by Simon and Schuster
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher’s Summary:

When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her murder trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?

An essential piece of American mythology, the popular fascination with the Borden murders has endured for more than one hundred years. Told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is [a book] that offers a window into America in the Gilded Age.

My Thoughts:

Lizzie Borden took an ax,

Gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Why ever in the world an elementary-school girl in the 1960’s would have grown up knowing this ditty? Was it a rhyme we used when jumping rope? How gruesome is that for preteens? Then in1975, I watched a made-for-t.v. movie about the killings, starring Elizabeth Montgomery (of Bewitched fame) and the story has stuck with me ever since then. Yet, for some reason I had never picked up a book about the murders. So when I came across this book on my library’s website, I knew it was time to remedy that situation.

Cara Robertson is a lawyer (she clerked for the U. S. Supreme Court) who has been researching the Borden case since 1990. She’s done an impressive job of pulling together the research and facts of this case. Moreover, she’s managed to put it all out there for the reader without pointing the reader in one direction or another. And she’s managed to do share her research in a way that brings the case to life: the image of the jurors miserably being shuttled about, the oppressive heat in the courtroom, the little bouquets of flowers Lizzie held each day, the sartorial splendor of the esteemed counsels, the claustrophobia of the Borden household, and clamor to be a part of the proceedings.

Lizzie, Andrew, Abby, Emma Borden - top, left to right

Robertson lays out the cases of both the defense and the prosecution, both their strengths and their weaknesses. She explores the ways that class, gender, and ethnicity impacted the investigation and the trial. In exploring this trial so thoroughly, Robertson also points out the difficulties in all trials – contradicting witnesses and experts, society’s expectations of how a defendant “should” behave, allowable evidence, bias, egos, the role of the media, and all of the ways the investigation can be compromised.

While Kirkus Reviews says Robertson “manages to avoid the tedious repetitiveness inherent in a trial,” I did find that the book occasionally repetitive. This might have been because it sometimes felt like Robertson was trying to pack in every bit of information she had discovered in her research. And while Amanda Carlin does a fine job reading the book, I did wish that I had read this in print so I could refer back to some passages. Nothing I can see says that the book includes maps or lists of the players, but I think that would have been helpful.

I know you’re all wondering if Lizzie really did take an ax and murder her father and stepmother. Armed with all of the facts, I can’t see who else could have done it or why. But because of the sloppy police work and the questions raised by the defense, I doubt I could have voted to convict Lizzie Borden.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Published April 2017 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: bought my copy for book club

Publisher's Summary:
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

My Thoughts:
People! How have I never heard about this before? And how many other amazing stories about our history have we never heard of until an author chances upon a fragment that tweaks their interest? And do you think that David Grann thanks Truman Capotes in his prayers at night for inventing narrative nonfiction? Oh, sorry, I got carried away there. About the book...

Because the U. S. government, and white people in general, hadn't done enough to harm the Native Americans, after the government had settled the Osage onto a piece of land in Oklahoma, they decided each person should have only a small allotment of that territory and that the government would give away the rest to white people. The Osage had learned from the Oklahoma land rush and negotiated wisely, giving each of them each more land than was originally planned and, most importantly, allowing the Osage to retain the mineral rights to all land in their territory, no matter who owned the land above them.

Then it turned out there was oil under that land. A lot of oil. And the white men, who were already treating the Osage like small children and already unbelievably corrupt, got even worse. If all of that weren't enough, this all happened during Prohibition. We all know what that did for crime in this country and the Osage territory was no exception.

And J. Edgar Hoover? Also, not the nicest guy in the country. But the case of the Osage murders happened just as he rose to power, determined to turn the Bureau of Investigation into an efficient crime-fighting machine. Without him, and his dogged insistence that these crimes be solved, these people's murders would likely never have been solved.

The story of these murders and the attempt to solve them is fascinating and Grann keeps things moving along at a pace that should keep even those most leery of nonfiction interested. I couldn't put it down once I got started. I'm still just astounded at the level of corruption and incompetence and wondering how many more stories there are out there like this one that have yet to be unearthed.

I could have used a cast of characters list that I could refer back to throughout the book. There were so many people involved in the corruption on this area and in these crimes that it was often hard to remember who was who. If decide to read this, I highly recommend making your own as you go along. That goes along with my strong recommendation that you read this book; it's quite the eye-opener and, heaven knows, we could all use to have our eyes opened to the past because it has so much to do with the present.