10% off coupon If any of the books mentioned here are too appealing to resist, and if you order them from Barnes & Noble, here's a 10% off code that gives you a discount on one item. Barnes & Noble gave me permission to share the coupon code: N3K4N8W. It expires soon; details are here.
A Review of 'Father of the Year'
The city of Las Vegas thought so highly of resident Bill Rundle that, at one point, he was actually named Father of the Year. The irony was not lost on the women in his life. One by one, he treated them to abuse and abandonment, and before he was done, he managed to be charged for a couple of deaths.
A new book out from Berkley about the Rundle case, Father of the Year
As the author describes the defendant:
Bill Rundle was a mean, coldhearted son of a bitch by the age of twenty-nine, and the tragedy of his life so far was that it hadn't had to be this way. Unlike a lot of criminals, Rundle had been given a pretty great shot at succeeding in life. He'd been born into a loving family, and showered with affection and care. [His parents] had tried to groom him for college and gave him every opportunity to succeed in North Hollywood. But Rundle preferred lying and gambling and chasing girls and drinking....
This book had me thinking again of the criminology theories developed by Cotton Mather, strange as that may sound. Harold Schechter's True Crime: An American Anthology included some of the Puritan minister's gallows sermons. Mather also made careful note of the lamentations of condemned men and women as they went to the gallows. Of one doomed criminal, Mather noted,
And one of them, said, That his Disobedience to his Parents, had brought this misery upon him. His Father, he said, gave him Good Instructions, when he was a Child; but he Regarded them not. He would not go to a School, when his Father would have sent him to it. He would not go to a Trade, when his Father would have put him to one. After his Father was Dead, he would not be Subject unto them that had the Charge of him; he ran away from Them; and after that, he ran away from several Masters. Thus he Ran into the Jaws of Death.
And back to our modern example. Given the fact that Bill Rundle admitted being a chronic liar, a cheater, a leech, a self-confessed specialist in "flim-flam" who started early by fudging his school report cards, faking his entire college career for his unsuspecting parents, doing "a little collecting" for the mob, doling out "brutal" treatment to the many women in his life, and confessed in detail to what he did to his last wife, one has to marvel that, after all that, he stopped short.
Though the book does not solve every riddle presented by this man, it certainly held my attention for the day-and-a-half it took me to devour it. The author is Glenn Puit, a journalist who found several marvels in the criminal courts of Vegas before moving recently to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This is his third book, and a fourth is coming out in the fall. I was particularly impressed by the first strange tale he told [see the CLEWS Q&A with the author], while at the same time I half-hope he finds the U.P. a tad less exciting a place for a true crime writer with a knack for finding such unusual stories.
Comments