The spines that are the busiest are the spines that beg to be folded backwards. Book title, subhead, description, primary colors, and a small photo, these spines call out to you. The titles are a hair riskier than an afternoon Lifetime Channel thriller or Morgan Freeman Comes Out Of Retirement Again And Gets In Too Deep PG-13 no-boiler. I remember a couple of classics from my early teens, and I remember hiding them from my parents, however unsure of what the reaction would be. Zodiac (Robert Graysmith, 1987) and Say You Love Satan (David St. Clair, 1987) were my first true crime speed-reads, no doubt acquired after addictively scaring myself silly with books about UFO’s and Bigfoot sightings. In the space of two weeks, I read four titles. Two were chosen at random, and two were chosen for their relative topicality. Laci: Inside The Laci Peterson Murder (Michael Fleeman, St. Martin’s True Crime Library), Held Captive: The Kidnapping and Rescue of Elizabeth Smart (Maggie Haberman, Jeane MacIntosh, Avon True Crime), Murder At Yosemite (Carlton Smith, St. Martin’s True Crime Library), and Deadly Secrets: From High School To High Crime – The True Story Of Two Teen Killers (Putsata Reang, Avon True Crime) crept in and out of my days with varying levels of insight (and entertainment) into this stepchild of a genre.
The Laci Peterson whodunit (duh) is still trudging on as I write, and is nowhere near closure, yet there have been two books published on the subject. Fleeman’s Laci is a dressed-up clip job of case notes glued together with his writing style, which is somewhere between People Magazine (for which he writes) and a trade magazine servicing the window awning industry. Being that the case is still unwinding into more and more delays, this book is useless to cognitive people with access to mainstream news, but tells us something about genre itself and the attention span that these crime cases are afforded.
With the two older books, Deadly Secrets and The Yosemite Murders, recognition of the cases covered would be rare amongst those of you reading this right now. Deadly Secrets is about two “goth” kids who murder an entire family in Bellevue, WA. The victims: Bill and Rose Wilson, and their two daughters, Kim and Julia, three of which met their demise via baseball bat and…a sword. It occurred in 1996, and I remember nary a media peep of it. Murder At Yosemite, on the other hand, I recalled a small amount of, but not until I was several pages in. And this case rang a bell simply because of its weirdness by way of an astounding back-story. First it was missing vacationers in Yosemite—a mom, daughter, and daughter’s friend—followed closely by the discovery of a decapitated naturalist. It was early 1999. Scares ensued for a few days and Cary Stayner was finally nabbed after much FBI fumbling. Ok, we’re paying attention, and then…whoa, that back-story hit the light and you could almost hear a resounding “holy shit” whispered throughout the news-savvy world. Cary’s older brother, Steven, was abducted in 1972 at the age of seven, while he walked home from school in Merced, CA. He incredibly re-surfaced in 1980 after eight years of grassroots brainwashing and a pinch of Stockholm Syndrome at the hands of an odd-jobbing transient named Ken. The older Stayner’s problems with re-adjusting to society and family, and his eventual death from a motorcycle accident are chronicled in Mike Echols’ mass-market I Know My First Name Is Steven. Little bro Cary’s issues are examined in the latter part of Murder At Yosemite, as it takes the meat of the book to cover the law enforcement bungling that prolonged him even becoming a suspect. The saga has enough oddball money shots to make readability quick and painless. The slapped-together cover (which is cheaper in appearance than most mass-market true crime) of the book features an image of Cary Stayner’s smirking face (complete with creepy, non-ironic mustache) hovering over the Yosemite wilds, and this subtitle: “The Stunning True Story Of A Horrific Handyman And The Brutal Murders Of Four Nature-Lovers.” The Stayner case was everywhere, and benefited from increased Internet news sources, something far fewer people enjoyed in 1996, when the Wilson family was murdered. Still, both are relative footnotes today.
Even with its conclusion in early 2003, the case of Elizabeth Smart is largely forgotten. My acquisition, Held Captive: The Kidnapping and Rescue of Elizabeth Smart, was published just three months after Elizabeth surfaced (I prefer this term to “rescued”), and four months before Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope, the dubiously opportunistic account “written” (with someone named Laura Morton) by her spotlight-gobbling parents. Your everyday under-the-overpass prophet, Brian David Mitchell, you will remember, nabbed Elizabeth out of her bedroom. Assisting the fisher king in his exploits was Wanda Eileen Barzee, who looks as if she could have been a Pablo Cruise groupie during “better” times. Gracing the cover of Held Captive is the infamous “Please Find Me” poster, with Elizabeth playing the harp, smiling, and exhibiting good pre-abduction mental and physical health. Turn to where you’ve already turned anyway, the monotony-breaking photo section (this one has 8-pages), and find the post-“rescue” picture…the one…all over the tube for at least a month, this picture shows an Elizabeth that appears to be…healthier. As an elderly relative of mine remarked when talk of Elizabeth arose at dinner, “Is that the one that got fatter while she was missing?” Readability of Held Captive hinges on the absurdities of the incident, like Mitchell attending Salt Lake City loft parties with Elizabeth, now re-christened both “Augustine” and the harrowing “My Joy In Her”, in tow. According to one party host, Mitchell “drank all of the free beer.” Or the trio squatting in a tiny apartment belonging to a generous Whole Foods cashier, whose efficiency was homage to Joy Division and other Goth-lite tastes. I surmise that Elizabeth was further brainwashed in this situation…brainwashed into thinking she was attending a 24-hour Intro To Counterculture class. It’s tough not to conclude that the whole situation stank; her denying that she was Elizabeth upon rescue, the stardom-hungry parents who acted far outside of Elizabeth’s post-rescue interests, her quiet enslavement in the woods just outside of the Smart estate, her captors more or less advertising the addition of a veiled fifteen year-old girl around town, etc. Naturally, Held Captive gingerly steps around these concerns to converge on investigative mistakes (media slaughter of the innocent Richard Ricci), and profiling the guilty parties. The account is written so poorly that a more engaging affair could have been penned by emptying a bag of squirrels onto a keyboard. It pains me to think that two people wrote Held Captive, and that these two people can go through life saying “I wrote a book.” Elizabeth’s case dominated cable news, as do most crimes against the white and wealthy (and helping this one along…Mormon). It quieted down in the middle months of dried up leads, but the rescue was omnipresent, and conveniently took place right as the U.S. was invading Iraq.
Surface research and scrutiny of any thrift shop bookrack would place an explosion of mass-market true crime around the late-80’s. This coincided, and worked hand in hand with a number of crime fads of the day. The Satan Scare, the PMRC (Parent’s Music Resource Center – Tipper Gore’s hilarious crusade against rock music), a boom in serial killers (and the media attention given to them), and endless tales of ritualistic child abuse can all safely call the 80’s home. Early, and massively popular, mass-market true crime paperbacks like The Search For The Green River Killer (also by Yosemite’s Carlton Smith) practically had their pages written for them.
I, for one, attended the same private Southern Baptist establishment for all of elementary, and most of high school. I entered the seventh grade in 1985, and for the next four years (until I was politely asked to leave before 11th grade), my classmates and I were treated to weekly assemblies that couldn’t have provided a better encapsulation of the era’s hysterical relationship with evil. For instance, there’s nothing quite like a cheap ass presentation of Richard Ramirez courtroom stock footage thrown together with Slayer’s “Angel Of Death.” This did nothing but make early comedians out of the precociously cynical lot of us that were already using drugs anyway, and we weren’t going to stop because some “former rock and rolling drug huffer” who’d blown half his face off with a pipe bomb and had since “found Jesus” was showing us a film illustrating the netherworld flirtations of everybody from Anton Le Vay to Foghat. This mindset is alive and well in Deadly Secrets, Laci, and, in all likelihood, many other true crime titles.
Deadly Secrets is pre-Columbine sensationalism that reads as if it was pulled from a cross-section of 80’s anti-rock ‘n’ roll Religious Right texts. The murderers were “goth jock” David Anderson and his pliable sidekick, Alex Baranyi—a common and exploited dynamic with killer duos. Reang’s assessments of the killer’s recreational habits in the years leading up to the crime are laughably out-of-touch and will be infuriating to anyone incensed by a media that blames role-playing or video games/music for criminal behavior. Instead of pinning it completely on bad parenting, or that either kid might have been a born sociopath, Reang spins these sidesplitting passages:
“They worshiped heavy-metal rock stars like Marilyn Manson and studied the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. They believed that the world was on the verge of an apocalypse, and so they lived as though they were already dead: sometimes wearing white powder on their faces, and often clad in all black get-ups”
(About Dungeons and Dragons) “It was a game the boys had become addicted to in their early teens, and they good at it. Other times, they would sit in front of the computer for hours, mesmerized by the images, jerking and sliding across the computer screen and machinegun noises emanating from the speakers. And sometimes they acted out their fantasies in a live setting. They would come out at night when the streets emptied out and there was room to prowl. They would ride wide plains of darkness, zigzagging across town, through neighborhoods, and into abandoned parks. There they would don their capes and white makeup, pull out their fake swords, and stalk through the trees and bushes, searching for the enemy. Trained to kill.”
Chapter 23 of Laci retells how Scott Peterson’s defense gave life to a Satanic cult theory (in the middle of a gag order, no less) by rallying around “Satanic” artwork found on industrial litter like the wood planks and discarded concrete slabs that capped “The Bulb” – a stretch of land that extends into the San Francisco Bay. This was linked to the “mysterious van” theory and “sightings of a man with a ‘666’ tattooed on his arm seen in the area around the time of Laci’s disappearance.” Fleeman makes an effort to summarize America’s fizzled romance with satanic cults in this passage:
“The country hadn’t gotten a good Satanic scare since the late 1980s with the Nightstalker case of Richard Ramirez, who treated a courtroom audience to a ‘Hail, Satan!’ In the years between the Manson Family slayings and Ramirez, it seemed the country’s criminal element was deep into black magic. Police departments had special occult units. Talk shows were full of lurid tales of Satan worshippers. Daycare workers facing charges of abusing children fell under suspicion of satanic motivations.
But the fears flamed out after Ramirez, the panic doused by the cold realities in study after study that found no evidence of widespread satanic cult crimes. By the early years of the new millennium, evil had a new face. And when the World Trade Center collapsed, it was international terrorism, not homegrown devil worship that preoccupied the country. But early in the Peterson case, black was back.”
I suspect that once a writer has a moderately successful mass-market title under his or her belt, they are doomed to the genre. Prior to Laci, Fleeman wrote If I Die…(inheritance murder), and The Stranger In My Bed (husband with a wake of dead spouses). According to Amazon, the latter is “better together” with something called No, Daddy, Don’t! by Irene Pence. The books make money, rarely enter the world in hardback form, and, of course, are relatively easy to write. But Carlton Smith’s one-hander shows an interesting facet when it comes to style, one that is presumably more prevalent than we would imagine. The prejudice is that these books ordinarily boast an easy-to-consume seventh-grade reading level, and that can be ubiquitous, but because of the genre’s incredulous reputation amongst “real” readers, these authors tend to overcompensate with busy writing and pretentious vocabularies, as this mouthful by Smith flaunts: “The problem for investigators was to winnow the grains of reality from the dry stalks of inspired imagination.” Attention! Real writer in the room! Despite any of the authors’ reliance on a style manual, thesaurus, (nor can we discount that some may be great writers stuck in a less-than-desirable place), the books are formulaically composed. Remove the crime, and they are interchangeable. For example, early chapters are consistently comprised of “James A. Michener filler”—the far-reaching history of the crime’s town or city is given in the tone of a glorified tourist brochure. “Seattle, named after the Native American Chief Seattle whose tribe settled the shores of Puget Sound long before whites arrived….” so goes a line from Deadly Secrets. The pop-cultural driving force that subsists on grim and sensational bubblegum can perhaps count mass-market true crime as a prescient medium, as the genre’s blossoming in the mid-80’s immediately predates the explosion of trash talk shows, which itself begat reality TV. It is a handheld transmitter of a bigger (and older) interest, and many cable networks, especially Court TV, have found ways to brilliantly package these book’s tales into half or one-hour series documentaries.
Mass-market true crime paperbacks have obvious similarities to a historically wide spectrum of media. True crime pulps, men’s adventure pulps, more recent grocery store “true” mags like the higher profile True Detective Magazine, all fed a need for assembly line, true crime book forms. The latter magazine has been made into several “from the pages of True Detective” paperbacks, each with 25 or so different cases reprinted. Then there is the credible, novel-form true crime has been intermittently scattered over the past four decades. It commences, of course, with In Cold Blood. From there, some notables that pop out are Joseph Wambaugh’s non-fiction (The Onion Field, Echoes In The Darkness), The Executioner’s Song, Mark Bowden’s resume, and Emmanuelle Carrere’s The Adversary. I leave out many, but with my foray into mass-market true crime, I conceivably leave out thousands. The titles infest their allotted section—one of the bookstore ghettos, along with Sci-Fi, Mystery/Crime, and Horror, which endure a lot of turned-up noses. There are instances, as with Laci and Murder At Yosemite, when mass-market true crime is farted out before the relevant case is solved or before the evil focal point even sees his or her day in court. Disposable sensationalism at its worst, or most amusing/engrossing, depending on your take, mass-market true crime shares a relevance with drug store soft-boiled crime fiction and novels based on blockbuster films (not the other way around), but feeds a hunger for phoned-in true tales of grim deeds. They are the book form of the more easily attainable media outlets. Whether we have a pinch, or an obsession, we are all gawkers, and I have a hard time believing that the mass-market true crime audience consists only of aloof “one day they will snap” co-workers with 1,257 cats.