CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

Clews - the Podcast!

UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 2021

CLEWS: The Podcast is coming soon to your favorite platform! Featuring the very best of the true crime genre - stories. Books. Authors. Reviews. Interviews. 

 

Covid woke me up. I quit practicing law to resume my true crime studies full-time from my private library near Ann Arbor. After months of searching for the ideal audio expert, I found a four-leaf clover in Boston. The CLEWS podcast is expertly engineered by Christopher Robert Ray of CounterpointSoundWorx.

If you are an author with a book in the theme - kindly advise by email, [email protected]

CLEWS is solely for non-fiction murder stories, with a preference for historical cases; the culturally significant; domestic murders. Let's talk about our favorite genre -- true murder stories -- the biggest bestsellers in literature since 1621. 

Laura James

#podcast

#true crime

#clews

Which Ann Rule book was set in Buffalo? A little literary mystery

In our recent interview with Harold Schechter on the true crime genre, a book by Ann Rule came up in the conversation. The book was about a case in Buffalo. I can't remember anything else about the story, and Google isn't helping. Does anyone know the name of the book?

 

 

An interview with Harold Schechter on Ed Gein, Belle Gunness, Graphic Novels, and True Crime Today

Our inaugural podcast interview is with Harold Schechter, whose first true crime book came out in 1990. Back in the day, true crime was mass market paperback and hard to find. You had to sneak to the back of the bookstore, and a special order got you a long look. Today, true crime tops the charts in every format, every channel. We can’t get enough. How did that happen? Harold Schechter knows. He’s now written dozens of books and just retired after 40 years as a professor of American literature in New York City. His specialty is serial killers, and he’s written on the most challenging murder stories in the history of the United States.

You can find the audio here, and the transcript below. 

HS: I sort of feel I was ahead of my time. Even when I started writing, which admittedly was a while ago – 30 years ago – true crime was still regarded as so sub-literary, sub-cultural, that I could not persuade my publisher at that time to publish my first book, the Ed Gein book, DEVIANT, in hardcover. You know, it seemed to them as though it was something more appropriate to the paperback rack at a Greyhound bus station or something. And even at that time I had a hard time persuading them that anybody would be interested in reading historical true crime. Because the received wisdom at that time in publishing was that people are only interested in contemporary stuff. So yeah, things have changed a great deal. Obviously, two things happened simultaneously, the HBO documentary THE JINX. and the podcast Serial. Those attracted such a large mainstream audience that I think it kind of sparked this fascination with true crime.

CLEWS: That makes me want to go on addall.com for a first edition paperback of DEVIANT. But even after becoming a best-selling author, he still had to put up with the self-appointed arbiters of literary taste, who don’t have taste in their mouth and actually believe that true crime was born in New York in 1965.

HS: When Wikipedia first started, for the entry for true crime, which has of course since been corrected, it said that it began with Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD. Which is basically off by about 300 years. Because true crime narrative predated the Gutenberg printing press with oral murder ballads and so on. But as soon as the printing press was invented, true crime literature, in the form of printed ballads and crime pamphlets and so on, began to be printed and disseminated. And even in our own country, one of the first pieces of literature to come off the press was what they called a gallows sermon, which is a description of a particular homicide accompanied by the sermon that the preacher preached on the gallows so there is a perennial fascination with true crime but again, it’s always been regarded as a kind of guilty pleasure.

CLEWS: Speaking of guilty, Harold recently wrote an essay on Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the former Green Beret still in the brig for killing his wife and little girls in 1979. The Chris Watts of the seventies, in terms of furious public interest. Jeffrey MacDonald is the subject of the next big budget true crime production on FX. Which leaves some of us wondering how in the sam hell they pick their cases. There’s no mystery in Jeffrey MacDonald.

HS: I think – I’ve always thought he was guilty. I never had much doubt about that. His story about the drug-crazed hippies chanting acid is groovy, kill the pigs, always seemed laughable to me.

CLEWS: But what do you think of Joe McGinnis, Fatal Vision and all that?

HS: That is a complicated situation. When I was writing my little thing on the MacDonald case, we read Janet Malcolm’s piece, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER. Very interesting. I myself do not feel that McGinnis betrayed MacDonald. I think he genuinely became convinced of his guilt. I mean, he did mislead him, to the extent that he allowed him to continue to think that he was his friend and his book was somehow gong to exonerate him. Which is an obviously an ethical issue. Part of Janet Malcom’s argument is that journalists are always engaged in unethical activity. And she herself as I’m sure you know got embroiled in that stuff.

CLEWS: Big fat mess but you brought up Truman Capote and the New Journalism. Truman Capote who fell out of bed and thought he invented something. I’m not a fan either. The whole New Yorker…

HS: I’m a big fan of IN COLD BLOOD but there were precursors to what Capote was doing going back to the 19th century. There was some questionable activity he was doing, like making stuff up. Part of the problem was his claim that he had perfectly photographic memory, and everything he put down was absolutely true. He was really inviting the kind of scrutiny that the book has received in the following decades, uncovering a lot of the fabrications in the book. But as a piece of literature, I think it’s brilliant.

CLEWS: Should it be in the fiction section?

HS: Well, there’s a lot of true crime that you read – I was just reading a book for my research – it was on the case from the 1930s, Anna Marie Hahn, you may know the case, she was supposedly a nurse – who was winning the hearts of these elderly German guys – and having them sign all their property over to her and poisoning them. And the book I was reading – Cincinnati? – Yes – the author of this book which is a well-researched book, but he begins by saying that there’s nothing in the book that he invented, everything is based off – and then he started and it’s like, Anna Marie Hahn breathes deeply as she saw the sunset over – and immediately there’s all this stuff he’s making up. It seems endemic. I was guilty of a little bit of that myself in the beginning but not anymore and I haven’t done so in a long time.

CLEWS I remember reading an Ann Rule book about a murder in Buffalo and she said, he could feel the salt spray on his face -- and in Buffalo that would be fresh water. We all make mistakes.

HS: I lived in Buffalo for four years, yep. The impulse to novelize or fictionalize or elaborate on certain things, I don’t think that should be part of true crime. It’s hard to resist that temptation. And I think a lot of readers kind of want and expect it. Some of the best-selling true crime books have always, in the way we were talking about, feeling the salt spray on the face. You read true crime books and they’ll say, it’s very likely that so and so is thinking this at that moment. Maybe they were feeling this. But again, you know the temptation to evoke this scene and pictorialize it, it’s hard to resist in your writing. To give you on instance of where I was guilty of that myself, in my second book DERANGED about Albert Fish, I knew that he had gone to have lunch with the family of the girl he ended up murdering. And I describe the contents of the lunch. Now. I did a lot of research into what kind of meal might have been served by a family of that social class in New York City in 1928. But I didn’t know for sure that that was exactly the menu. But to evoke the scene, I describe the meal. I can’t remember what I wrote. It wasn’t a huge thing, just a couple of sentences. It was very effective, and I’m sure it made it much more alive for the reader. But I’ve come to resist even that kind of thing. I take a good deal of pride. At least my last six or seven books, there’s literally nothing in it that I can’t cite a particular primary source document as the source of what I wrote.

CLEWS: How do you choose which case to write about because you have written about every kind of killer – the bomber, the poisoner, the serial killer and H.H. Holmes who covers the whole catalog. There’s so many thousands upon thousands of cases to choose from.

HS: Part of the reason I kept clippings for a while was just because I was interested in how on a daily basis there are all these horrific murders that take place all the time. But 99.9 percent of them become yesterday’s news instantly. The cases that I’m attracted to – A question that interests me a great deal and that I deal with explicitly in my last book MANIAC, about the Bath school disaster, is why certain crimes enter into our cultural mythology. They become these legendary crimes that everybody has heard of. Lizzie Borden, to take just one very obvious example. Whereas other crimes, that are equally heinous, sometimes way more heinous, fade into obscurity. They might make headlines for a few days, then everybody forgets about them.

HS: What it is about certain crimes that give them this lasting interest – what I have come to believe is that the crime has to tell a certain kind of story. It’s not just the actual gruesomeness of the homicide. There are some very famous cases where the murder hasn’t been particularly gruesome. Leopold and Loeb, the jazz-age thrill killers, really, murdered this one adolescent boy. But the story persists. People are constantly making movies about it, writing books about it. Another example, the case I just wrote a book about, the Bath school disaster, this guy blew up the whole school and killed 38 kids. Even in Michigan, many people haven’t heard of it. But there have to have a certain number of elements in the case that make it gripping and intriguing. In a way, they’re the same elements that make any kind of narrative gripping and intriguing to a mass audience. There has to be something about the characters, something about the motivation, something about the discovery and the whole plot as it were of the case. And there really aren’t that many crimes that have all those elements. It has to be a story worth telling, it has to be a story that can support an entire book, and also very importantly, I have to determine if there’s enough material for me to write a book about it. There’s a case that I was very, very interested in writing a book about, this guy named Carl Wanderer, in Chicago, you might have heard of him? Who orchestrated the murder of his wife. He enlisted some homeless guy who came to be known as the Ragged Stranger in the tabloids. Nobody really established his identity. And paid this guy to mug him and his wife. The whole thing was a setup so Wanderer could while supposedly defending his wife actually shoot her. It was a very sensational case and a case again with a lot of interesting elements, but I ultimately decided I couldn’t write the book because even though he was tried three separate times, there are no existing trial transcripts. And for a case like that, you can’t really write about it without that kind of information.

CLEWS: And do you think you have a bead on public taste at this point? It seems so fickle.

HS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Certainly, some of my books seem to have struck more of a chord than others. I wrote a book about Belle Gunness, the lady Bluebeard of LaPorte, Indiana a few books ago. That book has done very well. Suddenly there is this interest in women serial killers.

CLEWS: It seems to me that the renewed interest in female killers gets renewed about every six months, when there’s another good one.

HS: Yeah. When I first started writing true crime books, again the received wisdom was there’s no such thing as a woman serial killer. Not until maybe Wournos came along. Years ago, I wrote a book about Jane Toppan, who was this nurse who ultimately confessed to 31 murders and also confessed to experiencing what she called voluptuous delight in watching them die. It was clear she was a classic serial kinda lust murderer, the difference is that she, like other women serial killers, tend to poison their victims as opposed to the way male serial killers dispatch their victims. I also came to feel that her victims suffered a lot more, for example, than Jack the Ripper’s victims did. Jack the Ripper killed them pretty swiftly. So yes, I’ve long been interested in the female serial murderer.

CLEWS: Well Belle Gunness looms large in the Midwest to this day and I’m not surprised at all that the book is doing really well. She’s fascinating. Just the fact that she was so intentional and methodic in luring men to their deaths and feeding them to the pigs, my God.

HS: When you read her letters, the potential victims that she’s trying to lure to what they called her death farm – she was a scary character, no doubt about it. There were so many things about that case that are fascinating including the whole question of whether she ended up killing herself or surviving, it’s a mystery that has surrounded the case from the beginning. They exhumed the bones that are in Belle Gunness’ grave in Chicago and they ran these DNA tests on them and they came back very, very ambiguous, and unclear so, nothing was really resolved.

CLEWS: Maybe that’s why she’s still infamous. That’s the je ne sais quoi of Belle Gunness. We don’t know for sure.

HS: It’s certainly part of it. I think also as you were suggesting the fact that she lured all these guys to her farm, killed them and then butchered their bodies is another aspect to it because you don’t really find that many female serial killers that engage in that sort of butchery.

CLEWS: You made this remark that all works of literary or cultural analysis are autobiographical one way or another, why pretend otherwise? What did you mean by that? How does that apply to Herald Schechter?

HS: To some extent it was an observation out of my academic career. People, myself included write these analyses of whatever, I wrote articles about stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and Henry James and so on and I came to see to some extent I was writing about myself inevitably. It’s one of the reasons I – I wrote an article about Melville’s story, Bartleby the Scrivener, and I thought, this is it, this is the definitive explanation of what Melville intended to mean. I discovered that many, many people disagreed with me. In a way, you’re always writing about yourself. Your own perceptions, your own intuitions, your own obsessions. So that’s what I meant by that comment. And obviously in my true crime, when I first wrote my book about Ed Gein, I was drawn to that subject because of my own life long fascination and obsession with horror and psychopathology and so on, so it’s autobiographical – and you know there’s another aspect too which is, in order to write about some of these criminals convincingly, you have to understand them. And that means often going to some dark place in your own psyche which allows you not to sympathize with them but to empathize with them to the extent that you understand why they did what they’re doing, how they felt when they were doing it, what kind of gratifications they were deriving from it. There’s always a strong autobiographical element in stuff that is supposedly written very objectively.

HS: When I first started pitching the book to my editor, I didn’t know a lot about him. I knew, I was fascinated by him because I had been writing a book about the movies which is when I discovered that he was the inspiration for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which are my two favorite horror movies. Silence of the Lambs hadn’t come out yet. So I knew very little about him. So everything came as a surprise to me then. Every fact I turned up.

CLEWS: Ed Gein. Now he was a necrophile. He not only did some grave robbery he actually did commit some murders. As you point out in your book, he has a lot of fictional shadows. Why did he hit the public so hard? And his brother in necrophilia, also from Wisconsin, Dahmer. He hit the public hard. Why? I would think the instinct of a small community in the Midwest faced with an Ed Gein would be to burn the house down and forget about it.

HS: Well that was the instinct and that’s exactly what happened. They did burn his house down, they tried to forget about it, but of course the culture wouldn’t let them forget about it. The thing about Gein was, there’s something about this monstrous – Gein was himself on one level this sad, pathetic character, but he was performing these archaic rituals of sacrifice and skin-flaying and worship of the great mother in this little tiny farmhouse in the middle of the American heartland during the supposedly balmy Eisenhower era of the 1950s. It’s even now really hard to wrap your head around what was going on there. Very rarely do you get these again homicidal maniacs who seem to living out some kind of atavistic, ritualistic stuff that you associate with primitive tribes of headhunters and cannibals and so on. And again, doing it in this little small-town USA under the very noses of his neighbors. … Gein had this enormous cultural impact ultimately largely because the pulp horror writer Robert Bloch wrote Psycho. Psycho is not a great book. It’s an effective little pulp chiller. But it fell into the hands of Hitchcock, who created this great masterpiece out of it. And it set off the whole modern genre of the slasher movie. But it also, in a way, Americanized horror. Before Psycho, all the monsters populating the screen were imports - either from eastern Europe, Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Nosferatu, they emerged from the Black lagoon or came stomping from post-Hiroshima Japan. But suddenly you had this all-American monster, Norman Bates. Horror was never the same after that. So, there’s a sense in which Ed Gein was really responsible for the whole of modern American horror for – well, half a century now.

How do you turn Ed Gein – you can’t say comic can you, it’s graphic novel. You did a brilliant job. You did have to introduce elements of fiction in order to translate it into a graphic novel and I want to ask you about that. The artist you worked with, wow. I was surprised that the book – it’s not as gory as one might expect; it didn’t need to be to relay the horror. Well done. But, what a challenge.

HS: There have been a number – I was just looking at a graphic novel published some years ago about the Cleveland torso killer. There’s a famous graphic novel by this British writer Alan Moore, FROM HELL. I think they made it into a movie starring Johnny Depp, about Jack the Ripper. There definitely have been true crime graphic novels. There is a very good graphic novel called MY FRIEND DAHMER, I think they also made a movie of that. Made by a guy whose name I can’t quite remember, [ED. Note: John Backderf] who was a high school friend of Dahmer’s. So it’s not that DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE? is the first of the genre, it might arguably be the best.

HS: The way we worked was, I did a kind of script, well, Eric and I, this was all pre-pandemic, he was supposed to visit me, but that didn’t happen. So part of our interactions were on Zoom. But we spoke a lot. We had slightly different visions of what the book should be. But we worked very, very well together, a great collaboration. I wrote a narrative in the form of a movie script that Eric Powell – he’s one of the greatest comic book artists alive. He is very famous for his one comic called THE GOON. He turned it into comic book format and edited it and - I basically turned it over to him. We keep consulting during the process which took over a year. But obviously it’s Eric’s artwork that has made the thing into what I do not hesitate to call a masterpiece. We both agreed and Eric felt very strongly that he wanted to avoid any kind of sensationalism in terms of what he depicted, and we were both very interested in exploring what we speculate to have been going on in Gein’s head. I’m really proud of the graphic novel which is called DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE?

CLEWS: The book is quite affecting and I thought the most horrifying image in the book had no blood or violence in it, it was a family portrait. The Gein family. Mother, father, and the two little boys. That was chilling. Well done. What’s your favorite image in the book?

HS: I have a lot of favorites but the two that freaked me out the most are the close-up of Ed spooning beans into his mouth that he’s eating out of a human skull. And a scene where he is helping his ailing mother undress, preparing to get into bed. I’ve looked at the book many, many times because Eric’s artwork is so remarkable, and I’m a long-time comic book fan. So I am just studying almost every panel, seeing how beautiful and affective and powerful it is. It is a real source of pleasure for me.

CLEWS: Now in trying to avoid sensationalism was there anything you thought of doing and changed your mind? Or was there anything you decided not to put in the book to try to avoid that label and try to tell the story properly?

HS: For example, the discovery – when the sheriffs break into Gein’s summer kitchen and discover Bernice Worden’s disemboweled and beheaded and dressed out body, hanging by its heels from the rafters, Eric handled that as tastefully as he possibly could do. People can go online and see the actual horrific images of that, but that’s not the kind of book we wanted to produce. We were more interested in producing a book that explored Gein’s life and what influenced him and his relationship to the community. And also this other element that I gave a lot of thought to – having to do with these ritualistic fantasies that I think he was in the grip of.

CLEWS: It’s fascinating isn’t it that Ed Gein alone in the middle of the USA in his deepest psychopathy he comes up with these recognizable behaviors as you point out. Is this singular? Is he the only person who has psychopathy the way it was expressed with Gein.

HS: Ed Gein is singular, no question about that. That’s a large part of what makes him so fascinating. But the thing about Gein was, as you know, most serial killers, Bundy and Gacy and Richard Ramirez and Manson – they’re psychopaths, which is they’re intelligent people who are rational in their behavior but who put their intelligence and rationality to these malevolent uses to satisfy these sadistic drives and so on. Gein was one of the rare – first of all, I don’t consider Gein a serial killer in the way that the people I just mentioned were. He was not a sadistic lust murderer who derived this sick ecstatic pleasure from torturing and murdering villains. He was basically as you said before, a necrophile who needed women’s bodies to create these weird relics and try to reconstitute his own mother. He wasn’t a psychopath, he was a psychotic, he was a schizophrenic, and it’s not unusual for schizophrenics to live in this world of again archaic fantasies and so on. The psychologist Carl Jung, who treated a lot of psychotic patients, formed his own theories about the mythic unconscious from observing the kinds of fantasies they had. Which were fantasies which often paralleled these ancient myths and so on, but they couldn’t – they had no way of knowing about them. It seemed to arise spontaneously from the depths of their psyche. I think something similar happened with Gein. He lived in this -- part of the time, he lived in the actual world. And at other times, he lived in this world of archaic myth. The flaying of bodies and wearing the skin. You find that in Aztec religions and other religions. Aboriginal religions. Keeping the heads and faces and body parts -- that’s very, very common among what used to be called primitive tribes. So in that sense Gein is certainly singular in terms of the annals of American crime. But in terms of what was going on in his psychosis, I think there are other examples of that.

CLEWS: The Nazis influenced him. The journalism around the liberation of the death camps and some of the atrocities that were documented at Nuremberg. He read that didn’t he and that influenced what he did.

HS: Yes that is right. At the time Gein committed his crimes, from around 1947 until he was caught, yes, that was the time when news of death camps was coming out of the media and being disseminated. So yes he was very, very fascinated by the accounts of Nazi atrocities. They did find chairs upholstered in human skin and apparently he got the inspiration from accounts of the Nazis using human skin for lampshades and so on.

CLEWS: But many of his ideas were his own weren’t they?

HS: Oh absolutely, yeah. I don’t think he had read anything about digging up the corpses of middle-aged women who reminded him of his mother and trying to make a skin suit that he could put on and pretend he was his mother.

CLEWS: Let’s hope he remains singular.

HS: Yeah. Absolutely.

Thank you for listening. This is
THE END.

#haroldschechter #edgein #thejinx #serialpodcast #didyouhearwhateddiegeindone #truecrimegenre #truecrime #clews #jeffreymacdonald #joemcginnis #fatalvision #trumancapote #carlwanderer #bellegunness #janetoppan #annrule #ericpowell #alanmoore #myfrienddahmer #johnbackderf #hhholmes #psycho #texaschainsawmassacre #silenceofthelambs

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Emeric Spooner

Emeric Spooner probably won't mind if I call him a "murder fancier," for I am one too, and I can appreciate his research passions, which, like mine, include archaeology and, well, axe murders.

Mr. Spooner has already penned three books of historical true crime stories from his native Maine -- a place with hundreds of years of history from which to draw fascinating specimens.  He is now blogging at Maine Supernatural

His books are Return To Smuttynose Island: And Other Maine Axe Murders, In Search Of Melissa Thayer: Reinvestigating The Trim Triple Homicide, and In Search Of Sarah Ware: Reinvestigating Murder and Conspiracy in a Maine Village [Amazon; not on B&N]. (As to the somewhat controversial Smuttynose case, he agrees, as do I, that justice was served with the hanging of Louis Wagner.)

When not working as a librarian or collecting chert and arrowheads, Mr. Spooner is astonishing Maine with reports on cases infamous and obscure both in his books and his website Maine Supernatural.

So I had a chance to ask the author a few questions about his research and his books and he was kind enough to reply. Here is our Q&A.  

Q. It is a curious hobby, collecting, researching, and writing old murder cases. What got you started on each of these subjects?

I grew up in a town known for its legend of a Witch's Curse, marked by a supposed leg on the Town Father's monument. When you grow up hearing stories like this and when you're old enough to find out that it was made up, you begin to look for answers.

My first book is the town's second favorite legend - the story of a woman that disappeared one night and was found 2 weeks later abandoned. When they picked her up to place her in a casket her head fell off. Historical stories like this always tend to get falsehoods surrounding them, and if told long enough become facts. Since this case happened literally in my backyard in 1898, I wanted to find the truth. When I found the truth, I wanted to share the truth.

In researching my first book, I began to hear mention of a triple homicide that occurred 22 years earliar, all but forgotten. These 3 innocents including a mother and her 4 year old daughter were lost to time. I brought them back from the brink. 

My fifth book, third dealing with murder, started out to be a casebook on axe murders all over the state, but then finding there was to many to account for I focused on the first, the Purington Massacre, and the biggest, the Smuttynose Island Murders, with a third case dealing with a nearby axe murder, with the convicted being hung at the same time as the Smuttynose Murderer Louis Wagner.

This book became personal for two reasons. The first is that when I investigated my second book on the Trim Triple Homicide, the sea captain convicted was sentenced to life because the death penalty in Maine had been abolished the year before just after Wagner and Gordon were hung at Thomaston. Secondly, because when you hear Smuttynose Island thanks to recent books and movies, you think New Hampshire or Portsmouth. In actuality Smuttynose is in Maine; Wagner was tried in Alfred, Maine, and hung at Thomaston. So in essence it was an attempt to clarify it and an attempt to reclaim it as a Maine Murder, placing the blame on the rightful murderer and not an innocent survivor.

Q.  What is it about the dark chapters of Maine's long history of murder cases that keeps you interested?

I have written all I can from my hometown, the latest branching out statewide. People come up to me and say, "I have a great uncle that was killed with an axe!" or "there is a murder in my hometown that went unsolved are you looking into that?"

If I can get behind a story, and find it interesting enough to hold my attention, then I will continue churning out books. Whether or not I intend to self-publish them or stick them on a shelf for a rainy day is entirely up to the readers. I had all of my research on shelves unpublished and then Amazon comes out with on demand publishing through createspace and I let the books fly. It doesn't mean that I churned out 5 books in a year, it means I finally got a outlet for my research of the past decade.

With all of my books I look at it as a chance to save and record the true past that if not taken the time to be written down might be lost or is lost to future generations. I get accused of needing a fact checker, only because the individual doing the accusing isn't aware of the original documents written as the events occurred, but has grown up with the false stories made up on the subject.

Q. As a New Englander you do, I suppose, admire Edmund L. Pearson?

I like Pearson, I read all books on Smuttynose that I could, he was one of the better. I read everything on a subject I can, so have been reading a lot of true crime and historical non-fiction of late. When I write, I attempt to keep the words moving and add humor when I tactfully can, which is sometimes not appreciated by those looking for a dust-covered textbook.

I have been accused of writing like I am telling the story or reciting a narrative, which is obviously the point. But then again, people of all ages tell me how much they enjoy my books, so it can't be all bad.

# # #

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Marek Fuchs

If Truman Capote's influence is seen in the title and contents, it's also being seen in the reviews of first-time true crime author Marek Fuchs's new book.

The title is A Cold-Blooded Business: Love, Adultery, and Murder in a Small Kansas Town [Amazon; B&N]. 

Set in the same town where the Clutters met their sad fates, the crime described here is quite different from the one Capote lyricized. The book details the story of the murder of a young married man and the surprisingly successful lives led by his killers, who got away with the crime for decades.

Kirkus has hailed the book's "breakneck pace," no mean feat for a book that spans decades.

So I had a chance to ask the author a few questions about the case, about Capote, and he was kind enough to reply. Here's the Q&A.

Q. Are you satisfied that justice was served in Olathe?

A. Satisfied? No. One of the saddest notes of this story is that no one—from the good guys to the bad guys to the guys who alternated between good and bad—emerged satisfied.

But am I relieved that at least it was not worse? Certainly. And that, in a sense, is a mercy, a form of victory for justice. Could circumstances have turned better? Sure. But sometimes avoiding utter chaos is all you have and, at the end of the day, you better take it. 

Q. I'd love to get your take on Truman Capote and his, um, more controversial features.

A. Truman Capote was a flamboyant New York City social figure and I’m a low-key New York suburban dad who when he isn’t writing serves as a fireman. But outside of that we have a lot in common. In all seriousness, beneath his great flair and generosity of heart, Capote was, at root, a man guided by an abiding curiosity.

And in the end, that is what binds all writers together—from the wildly talented like Capote to the rest of us. We all seem driven toward uncovering the mysterious details, answers to questions like why humans can lose their humanity. Then gain it right back. 

Q. Did you cave in to Truman's temptation - meaning, was any bit of the story fictionalized?

A. No, for one I’m inherently lazy and fiction is harder than non-fiction.  Plus, in a story like this one that rips from a Bible college, to Harvard Business School, to the creation of Starbucks Frappucino and the height of New York society, who needs to make up details?  Truth is, at least here, stranger than fiction.  

Q. What you think of authors who goose their facts?

A. It’s a waste of time and breaks the trust of readers.  Anything you write should either have the creativity of fiction or the rigor of non-fiction.

Q. What are you working on next?

A. I am finishing a novel on stock brokers gone bad.  I started my working life as a stock broker and…well, I don’t want to give away the plot. But, in a different way, it explores lives of undetected crime. Plus: another true crime book.  Details to come.  Shhhhh…

Q. What is the most unforgettable, satisfying true crime book you’ve ever read?

A. I love them all, from Ann Rule to Ron Franscell to Phil Carlo, but it probably begins and ends for me with In Cold Blood. 

Whatever its possible flaws—and all books have them—it showed me as a little kid (I wasn’t too well supervised, that’s why I first read it at 10) how a book could conjure up a time and places in such haunting tones.  When I first went to Kansas, all those years later, I was spooked—as if Dick and Perry were lurking in the corner.  (Maybe I should have been better supervised.  I seem a touch too jumpy, no?) 

Most of all, though, I loved the way In Cold Blood brought back to life, if only for a fleeting moment, the Clutter family, who were killed 50 years ago.  But all their proclivities, all their triumphs and sadness, all the workaday little details of their lives were alive again, if only on the page and just while you were reading.  It’s not perfect, but it’s the only life they have.   

# # #

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Caitlin Rother

Caitlin Rother is coming out with a new title to add to her ever-growing true crime curriculum vitae. The newest book to be squeezed onto the "R" shelf of our favorite genre is Body Parts [Amazon; B&N], published by Pinnacle this month. It concerns a serial murderer whose capture was not actually the result of a dogged police investigation -- the vicious lust-killer actually turned himself in and confessed to startled strangers at great length and with much apparent remorse.

The facts of the case are quite curious, and the author is putting her psychology education to use in explaining the strange dichotomy that is Wayne Adam Ford. She also obtained access to previously unreleased information once the trial court proceedings ended.

Meanwhile, Caitlin has more books coming out and in the works, as her website explains. I recently had a chance to ask her a few questions about the Ford case, and she was kind enough to reply. Here is our Q&A.

* * *

Q. What do you make of the fact that this serial killer turned himself in? (Is this unusual? I'm not sure.)

This is what initially drew me to the case because I'd never heard of that happening. The defense made a big deal of this, and the prosecution tried to downplay it, saying Ford wasn't the only one to ever do this.

Nonetheless, I still think it's rare enough that it makes him quite an unusual killer, especially when he said he did it because he wanted to stop killing.

On top of that, he surrendered himself when he wasn't even a suspect, he spoke to detectives for several days without an attorney, he broke down in tears during those interviews and he asked the detectives to tell the victims' families that he was sorry. All of these factors made me feel Ford was worthy of a book.

Q. As you no doubt know, books about serial killers often sell quite well -- but at the same time, they're a lightning rod for the genre's critics. Did you have any qualms as you began this project?

Yes and no. I want people to read the books I write. And now that I'm doing this as a full-time career, they have to sell for me to continue writing them. So, I not only have to pick a case that will do well in the marketplace, but I have to choose one I can live with for the years I will spend writing, researching and promoting it.

I won't write a book that I wouldn't want to read and I don't like gore. I also don't believe in glorifying or sensationalizing violence, especially when it's mixed with sex. I have my own code of honor and integrity, and I do my best to maintain my journalistic objectivity. I strive to allow the dead to maintain their dignity, to be sensitive and sympathetic to the victims and their families, and also to be fair to the defendant's family, because they, too, will lose a loved one (to prison and/or execution).

I don't see even the most violent offenders in purely black and white terms, especially where mental illness is concerned, which means I give him/her a careful and thorough psychological exploration. My ultimate goal is to explain WHY these killers did what they did, not to rationalize or justify their actions, but so that we as a society can understand what made them this way.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic here, but how else can we try to stop it from happening? The bottom line is that if I succeed in carrying out all these goals, I can only hope that most critical and intelligent readers will appreciate the detailed research I've done and the care I've put into telling the story. So far, they have.

Q. Why were some of the court records sealed, and what did you have to do to get them?

This case started in Humboldt County, where it was getting so much publicity that the judge issued a gag order. Ultimately, the case was moved down to San Bernardino, where apparently it was common practice to withhold all investigative reports -- including those concerning the victims' criminal records and Ford's confessions -- from the public.

Other journalists covering the case had to go to court to free up some materials, but the confessions still remained under seal until after the trial. Even after the trial, I still had to get a court order to look at the victims' records, which I've never had to do for another book.

Also, many of the interviews with the Ford family, which contained many of the interesting stories about his past, were not available until after the trial. Most of them were not admitted into the trial, so they never made it into the public domain, and therefore were also exclusive for the purposes of my book.

Q. Did you learn anything about the case that surprised you?

I learned a lot about paraphelias, the bizarre series of sexual practices that Ford enjoyed, such as sticking needles into women's breasts, etc. I also found it fascinating to watch Ford go from crying to killing and back again, the type of black and white behavior that is symptomatic of his Borderline Personality Disorder. I'd never encountered that, either.

Q. Are you satisfied that justice was served? And do you think Ford will ever be executed?

I don't feel comfortable expressing my opinion about cases and outcomes because I feel people may read bias into my books, but I will say that even Ford and members of his family have said Ford is where he is supposed to be: on death row.

I will be surprised if he gets executed before he dies of natural causes -- or commits suicide. About 680 people are now on death row in California, and if only 14 condemned inmates have been executed since 1978, it's easy to do the math. Also, no one has been executed in California since 2006, when the court decided that the lethal injection protocol was too problematic, and it's unclear when that temporary moratorium will be lifted. The whole system is under review.

Q. Are there any particular authors or titles you turned to, to learn more?

 No, I did all my own research for the book. Although I've read books in the past about serial killers and profiling, and watched interviews on TV, I didn't rely on any of them to write BODY PARTS.

Years ago when I was still a newspaper reporter, I interviewed a serial killer here in San Diego and covered the mentally ill in jails and prisons. My interest goes all the way back to college at UC Berkeley, where I was a psychology major and learned quite a bit about aberrant human beings.

Q. Are you working on another book? I'm going to have to start calling you prolific, dear!!

The paperback version of TWISTED TRIANGLE comes out in April: the crazy but factual account of a kidnapping, attempted murder, and a lesbian love affair between two married FBI agents and famous novelist Patricia Cornwell.

I recently co-authored a book with TV reporter Alysia Sofios, which will be released by Simon & Schuster in September. WHERE HOPE BEGINS tells the story of how Sofios risked her career to help several surviving female members of the Marcus Wesson family recover from a cult-like life of polygamy, incest, abuse and the murder of nine of their children.

And as we speak, I'm working on a book about the murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks, who were tied to an anchor of their yacht, the Well Deserved, and thrown overboard off Newport Beach, California. The Hawkses were murdered by a clan of outlaws led by Skylar and Jennifer Deleon, who, along with a third defendant, Crips member John F. Kennedy, have been convicted of murder for financial gain. Juries have recommended the death penalty for Skylar Deleon and Kennedy and they are scheduled for sentencing on March 27. The fate of two other defendants, who were involved in the conspiracy and testified against the others, should be resolved this summer. The working title is UNDESERVED.

* * *

For more about Caitlin's new book, check out the review by the San Diego Weekly Reader, which calls the story "excellent."

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Pat Brown

A new book out about Armin Meiwes explores the psyche of a disturbing criminal whose vile crime was rivaled only by the fact that his victim consented to it. Meiwes was a sexual cannibal who lived out his grotesque fantasies on a willing victim he found on the internet. The book, Interview with a Cannibal: The Secret Life of the Monster of Rotenburg by German journalist Günter Stampf, was edited by American true crime writer and criminal profiler Pat Brown. She also wrote an introduction and postscript to help the reader understand the German reviled as a monster.

Having finished the book  (see the Clews summary), I can attest that it is disturbing, gory, and very hard to put down. Curious about how the American contributor to the book viewed the case and particularly the victim, I could not pass up a recent chance to ask Pat Brown some questions about it, and she kindly replied.

Here is our Q&A.

Q. The book is a tough read, but it is hard to put down. How were you affected by the story that Gunter Stampf tells here, when you first read it?

A. Actually, when I was asked to edit this book, I was rather skeptical that I would want to be involved with such a story. I am notoriously anti-gore, anti-slasher, anti-gruesome type of movies and books. I am not a big true crime reader and I pretty much only like books that emphasize the police investigation and the victim. I told the publisher I would have to take a look at the material first before I committed to the project.

I was surprised to find I was very caught up with the story – the author does an excellent job in interviewing Armin Meiwes and brilliantly develops the landscape in which the story evolves – the history of the German town, the society in which Meiwes grows up, his family dysfunction, and the concerning issue of rising Internet sites dedicated to cannibalism and role playing such despicable acts. It was specifically this frightening increase of online violent ideology that locked me into editing the book and adding my profile and commentary at the end.

Our society, any society, needs to get the message this book includes about the danger of violent and negative ideology proliferating across the web, influencing the psyche of young people and those who are emotionally unstable in a very detrimental way.

Q. What on earth do you make of the psychology of Armin Meiwes's pitiful victim? His actions seem just as horrifying as those of Armin Meiwes.

A. I think many who heard this story were more shocked by the willingness of the victim, Bernd Brandes, to submit to being killed and eaten than by the fact Armin Meiwes wanted to commit such an ungodly act. While Meiwes shows all the signs of a deviant, a sexual psychopath, Brandes seems more to be a confused and pitiful character. It is my feeling Brandes was one of those who has lost the ability to find meaning and joy in life and continues to explore the dark side in order to uncover some emotion. Severe narcissism also plays a role which causes Brandes to be unable to reach a level of self-acceptance as his standards are always so unreasonably high that the glass is going to be half empty no matter what he experiences. By going to the ultimate level of submission and bizarreness, Brandes hopes to cross a line that is “proof of his grand existence and success” and will prove himself to be the center of everything. Not surprisingly, he isn’t all that satisfied with the results – whine, whine.

Q. I'd love to know which authors and titles you consider the best in true crime -- your personal favorites. What is the most memorable, emotionally evocative book you've ever read in the genre?

A. Well, as I said, I am not that big a true crime reader! My favorites, though, would be Trace Evidence: The Search for the I-5 Strangler by Bruce Henderson, which details the story of the great detective Ray Biondi as he fights his department to go public with information about a serial killer, and Stalking Justice The Dramatic True Story of the Detective Who First Used DNA Testing to Catch a Serial Killer by Paul Mones, which is about another great detective, Joe Horgas, who fights his department to bring the right man to justice, the first serial killer ever convicted in the US by DNA. I love detectives who believe in doing the right thing, not the easiest or most political acceptable thing.

Q. Do you have any more books in the works?

A. Actually, my agent is busy at work putting together a deal right now which means readers can expect to see it out in 2010. Always seems so far away, but that is how the publishing world works.

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CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author R. Barri Flowers

R. Barri Flowers tackled a bizarre type of murder for his book The Sex Slave Murders: The Horrifying True Story of America's First Husband-and-Wife Serial Killers. Bluntly titled, it's sold out seven printings -- and the author, years after its publication, still fields requests to appear on camera to discuss the extremely strange and thankfully rare form of homicides committed by Gerald and Charlene Gallego.

This author's pen is rarely still; he has written many books of true crime and criminology, along with genre fiction, and has several more at different stages. Recently I had the chance to chat up Barri about the Gallego case, the documentaries, and the best true crime literature of all time. Here is our Q&A.

 Q: That must have been one tough case to study.

A: Indeed, it was a difficult case to write about. The nature of the crimes--abduction, sexual assault, and violent murders---would be tough for anyone to stomach. In their sexually motivated murders, Gerald and Charlene Gallego took the lives of ten people, including nine women, one of whom, was four months pregnant.

The Gallegos turned sexual fantasies into real life rape-homicides afaccross three Western states--California, Nevada, and Oregon--during the late 1970s and 1980--before their reign of terror came to an end.

As a criminologist who had written a number of nonfiction books on violent, sex male, and female offenders, I felt compelled to write about this case due to its unusual nature, involving husband-wife serial killers. Thus was born, THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS, which was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996 and excerpted in Cosmopolitan magazine the following year.

It became a bestseller and only recently went out of print after seven printings. However, the book and subject matter has seen a resurgence in popularity this year and there is now interest from a number of publishers in reprinting THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS.

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing your book?

A: Perhaps the most surprising thing I discovered was that Charlene Gallego served so little time, relatively speaking, for her role in the sexual murders of ten people.

She lured most of the victims to Gerald by charming teenage girls and young women into believing they were headed out to parking lots to pass out flyers or smoke marijuana, only to find the gun-wielding Gerald waiting for them in a van.

Yet because of a plea bargain in which Charlene became the State's star witness in testifying against Gerald, she served less than seventeen years behind bars.

Hard to imagine this being the case were she directly involved in ten brutal murders today.

Another somewhat surprising thing was that it took two and a half years and a number of missed opportunities before the Gallegos were finally brought to justice. The fact that they operated as a couple compared to most serial killers who go it alone and therefore can evade the authorities more easily, would have seemed to work against them in remaining at large and for the most part, unknown as a killer pair by authorities for this length of time.

To be sure, the Gallegos benefited from perpetrating their crimes at a time when security cameras, cell phone cameras, DNA, the Internet, and other reliable ways of identifying criminal suspects were in their infancy.

The same is true for many other killers from the last century prior to the 1990s. A number of these, including serial killers and mass murderers, I examine in my true crime reference book, MURDERS IN THE UNITED STATES: Crimes, Killers and Victims of the Twentieth Century (McFarland, 2004).

Q: And what was your recent TV experience like -- do you think Investigation Discovery did a good job on the documentary about such a terrible series of crimes?

A: Actually I have done two TV interviews this year in relation to THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS and Gallegos.

The first was in May on the Biography Channel's series, Crime Stories. The episode, entitled, "The Love Slave Murders." It is now on DVD and available through the production company, Partners in Motion. The episode can also be seen via the Internet on Factual TV.

My second interview will be shown on Investigation Discovery channel's new series on killer couples, Wicked Attraction. The episode, entitled, "Twisted Twosome," will debut on 9/11 at 9 p.m., EST, and be shown several other times in the weeks to follow. Coincidentally, and perhaps eerily, the Gallegos abducted and murdered their first two teenage victims on September 11th, 1978.

Both interviews were an interesting experience. The production crews were professional and knew their stuff. The directors definitely came prepared and, in spite of the violent nature of the crimes, were strictly business in doing their job. I was surprised that both interviews took around five hours to complete (I was told on phone in each case that it would take half the time) with plenty of questions being thrown at me and additional time spent on the background set up, angles, and such.

Unfortunately, much of the footage never reaches the TV screen for an hour episode that includes other interviews and reenactments. The Investigation Discovery channel interview was shot in HDTV, so I will have to see if it really makes a difference in presentation at the end of the day.

Q: And what parallels did you see between Gerald Gallego and his father?

A: Gerald's father, Gerald Albert Gallego, was a convicted murderer of two lawmen and sentenced to death. In 1955, he became the first man to die in Mississippi's new gas chamber. As Gerald Gallego and his father were both killers, a few criminologists have used a bad seed theory to explain Gerald's homicidal tendencies.

This theory suggests that some people are biologically predisposed to acts of homicidal violence--or born killers. While some research supports a correlation between heredity and criminality, I believe that most criminality is learned behavior through criminal contacts.

In Gerald's case, he certainly was a rotten apple from a bad tree, but he used his free will to decide to become a cold blooded killer. The same is true of Charlene. She came from a privileged background where everything was handed to her, but still chose to give it all up for a life of substance abuse, kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder with Gerald.

She pretty much debunks most theories that posit violent criminals are typically a product of abusive or violent homes or other victimization that stacks the deck against them in leading a normal life as law acing citizens.

Q: Do you read a lot of true crime stories?

A: As very busy author, I have little time to read much these days. When I do read books, I tend to prefer good mystery or thriller novels, favoring fictional material over real life crime stories. That said, I have read some great true crime books over the years, which leads right to the next question.

Q: Who are your favorite authors / titles?

A: My favorite true crime books/authors are:

IN COLD BLOOD -- Truman Capote

HELTER SKELTER -- Vincent Bugliosi

FATAL VISION -- Joe McGinniss

JACK THE RIPPER: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY -- Paul Begg

As a mystery novelist also (STATE'S EVIDENCE, JUSTICE SERVED) , some of my favorite mystery writers are Agatha Christie, Robert Ludlum, Nelson Demille, James Patterson, and Catherine Coulter.

Q: Anything new coming out?

A: I have two books coming out this fall that examine facts, figures, and theories behind female and adolescent criminal behavior: FEMALE CRIME, CRIMINALS AND CELLMATES (McFarland, 20008) and THE ADOLESCENT CRIMINAL (McFarland, 2008).

In the summer of 2009, my criminology book, CAMPUS CRIME, will be released from McFarland.

I am also researching a couple of new true crime projects.

***

For more, visit the author's websites at:

http://www.rbarriflowers.com

 http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/RBarri

http://www.myspace.com/crimewriter_rbarriflowers

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Matthew Randazzo V

Author Matthew Randazzo V took on a challenge when he decided to write a biography of professional wrestler turned family annihilator Chris Benoit. Phoenix Books recently published the result. It's Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit and the Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry [Amazon; B&N], in which the author connects the wrestling industry's widespread use of steroids, painkillers, drugs, and booze to the double murder-suicide that shocked wrestling fans last summer.

The book garnered strong reaction from several quarters, though most reviews have been positive, and the author is credited with bringing some ugly facts into the light of day and writing a "must-have" for fans of wrestling. The publisher dubs it a "shocking exposé" that "delves deep into the scandals and cover-ups of the global wrestling industry -- where drug addictions, sociopathic superstars, and broken families are the norm and situations like Benoit's are all-too-often ignored."

CLEWS recently had a chance to ask a few questions of the author, who was kind enough to provide these replies. Here's our Q&A.

Q. This is a tough, tough case, a terrible act of the ultimate domestic violence, and the death of Chris Benoit's wife and son was such a tragedy, and yet a foreseeable one. Did you have trouble wrestling with the horrific nature of this crime? How did you handle it in the book?

A. There is no easy way to write about an act as terrifying and grotesque as a husband murdering his wife and small child. Personally, I felt my handling this crime was actually made easier when I saw how insensitive, dishonest, and inaccurate some of the media coverage was; for example, when some cable news hosts blamed the victim, Nancy Benoit, or tried to blame Benoit's actions on his steroid abuse, it motivated me and made me feel like it was my duty to write the honest and ugly truth about what transpired.

As a writer, it's my policy that no story is so tragic or gruesome that it would be better to cover up or euphemize the truth; in Ring of Hell, I simply set out to discover and reveal the truth about Chris Benoit's life, the industry which conspired with his poor decision-making to lead to his mental and physical downfall, and the crimes he committed. 

Q.  I understand that his book comes down hard on the pro wrestling industry. Do you think your book tells fans of wrestling something they didn't know about it?

A. In Ring of Hell, I definitively show that pro wrestling is an extremely unsafe, unhealthy, and physically and mentally destructive industry. While many wrestling fans are aware of this and some of the stories in Ring of Hell, I personally conducted dozens of exclusive interviews with major wrestling industry names and have broken countless stories in Ring of Hell that have never been published anywhere else.

I have had hardcore fans, World Wrestling Entertainment employees, and even a few wrestling legends tell me that they learned something from Ring of Hell, so most wrestling fans and certainly all casual readers will find a great deal of illuminating information about the pro wrestling business in Ring of Hell.

Q. Are you a fan of true crime? Who are your favorite authors? Favorite titles?

I am a fan of true crime books; in American organized crime, my area of expertise, I'd choose Nick Pileggi and Ovid Demaris as my favorite. I obtain my primary inspiration as a writer when writing true crime from the crime fiction of writers such as James Ellroy (whose American Underworld Trilogy is incredible) and Elmore Leonard.

Q.Are you working on another book? Will it be in the same theme?

I have recently come to an agreement with Phoenix Books to release my next two books, which are memoirs I've co-written with major American mafiosi.

The first to be released in Spring of 2009, Breakshot, is the story of Japanese-American gangster Kenny "Kenji" Gallo, whose incredible underworld career began as a teenage cocaine smuggler in Pablo Escobar's empire and ended as a major construction racketeer in New York's Colombo Mafia Family.

In Summer of 2009 will come Mr. New Orleans, the first book to ever break the code of secrecy in the New Orleans Mafia Family.  Mr. New Orleans is the story of Frenchy Brouillette, a top political fixer, convicted labor racketeer, and the operator of the South's preeminent call-girl for over three decades.

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For more, visit the author's website at http://www.matthewrandazzo.com or the publisher's page,  visit http://www.phoenixbooksandaudio.com/books/bks_prodcuts/ringofhell.htm.

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author James Peinkofer

"Shaken baby syndrome." Well all know now what that awful phrase means because of the case of Virginia Jaspers.

In the 1950s, a New England woman confessed to the police that she was a serial killer - of infants. Her case is now the subject of a new book from author James Peinkofer, a licensed clinical social worker and expert on shaken baby syndrome. His book is Lilacs in the Rain: The Shocking Story of Connecticut's Shaken-Baby Serial Killer [Amazon; B&N]. The reviews so far are quite flattering.

Curious about the story of how this form of child abuse first came to light decades ago, CLEWS recently had the chance to ask the author some questions, and he kindly replied. Here is our Q&A.

Q. Who was this woman?

Virginia Jaspers was 33 years old at the time of her arrest in late August 1956 for the death of 12-day-old Abbe Kapsinow. She was the daughter of an ex Connecticut state senator ( who had many political ties in the New Haven area). The Jaspers lived in East Haven, CT. After graduating from high school, Virginia attended an 18-month in-home baby nurse program at the St. Agnes Home in West Hartford, CT. St. Agnes was run by the Sisters of Mercy and taught participants how to care for babies in people's homes.

Virginia was quite a sight to many of her clients. She stood 6-feet tall and weighed well over 200 lbs. She was not attractive and was teased repeatedly as a child. She had the gift of gab and was child-like in her laughter and joviality. All her life, she liked caring for younger children, so it's ironic that she abused (and killed) her charges.

Many years after her arrest, the Jaspers case served as the foundation for the first medical journal article to detail Shaken Baby Syndrome as we know it today.

Q. What did she do, and how on earth did she get away with it?

Three-week-old Cynthia Hubbard, the first to die (1948), was thought to have been born with a congenital brain condition, though some of the doctors believed there was more to the story of her death than they could prove.

Three-month-old Jennifer Malkan, the second to die (1950), was believed to have choked on cerealed formula (though the fact that death could occur this way is skeptical). Many people believed that poor Virginia was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jennifer's mother was Joan Brainerd (still living) - a famed concert soloist at the time. Eyebrows were really raised (by doctors) when two-month-old Bruce Schaefer's leg was broken (1955). The case was investigated - but went nowhere. Bruce's father Marvin (still living) teamed with Dr. Salinger (a well-respected New Haven pediatrician) to push for an investigation into Jaspers' background - but, again, it went nowhere.

Finally, after 12-day-old Abbe was brought into the hospital in a coma (later dying) in 1956, that is when the doctors got the attention of the medical examiner and police chief. Four days later, during police interrogation, Jaspers broke and confessed to the deaths. She was also a suspect in 15 cases of physical abuse.

It was different times in the 1940s and 50s. People didn't openly talk about child abuse until the 1960s. Especially medical providers. They were often worried about their reputation and liability issues - even sometimes if abuse was suspected. Jaspers' father was also very influential in the community, which didn't help.

Finally, child abuse injuries were not as fine-tuned as they are today. For decades, it was believed that an infant or child could die from a bed fall (we know today that the likelihood of this is 1:1,000,000).

Q. Do you think it is possible for such a woman to get away with such a series of crimes today?

It is unlikely that a woman could get away with a SERIES of such crimes today. Beating the legal system in single events happens all the time - unfortunately. Also, parents suspect more and talk more about the potential for abuse - i.e. nanny cams.

Q. Do you ever encounter a sense of disbelief among the mental health professionals (or jurors, for that matter) in the cases that you have worked on? 

 I've had problems with medical providers that I have worked with. Several years ago, a physical therapist, that I had once worked with, shook her infant son and hospitalized him. She was a good-looking middle class woman with a husband and two sons. The boy's pediatrician said that his injuries were from birth trauma (subdural hematoma and severe retinal hemorrhaging). The boy was 4 or 5 months old.

Police investigators consulted with me and I was shocked - initially believing that this mother never could have done such a thing - she was nice, I had worked with her, etc. But, once I read the medical reports and the events of the case, I said it was a slam-dunk case of Shaken Baby Syndrome. An outside neurosurgeon was consulted and he agreed with me (without a doubt). But, the boy's pediatrician was steadfast in her belief that it was NOT abuse. The case never went anywhere.

(Photo - author James Peinkofer)

Q. By the by, are you a true crime fan?

You bet!

Q. Do you have any favorite authors or titles?

I have enjoyed a variety of authors - esp. ex-FBI profilers's works (Ressler, McCrary, Hazelwood). I read a lot of child killer true crime books, since that is my interest. I am currently working on a book that highlights the 50 most notorious child murders in history.

Q. Can you remember how old you were when you read your first true crime story, and what was it?

I was always a Hardy Boys fan (crime fiction) and even thought of becoming a detective when I was young. As far as true crime goes, I think my first book was Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song.I was in my teens. I also really liked Bugliosi's Helter Skelter - which haunted me for days after I finished it.

Ah - both books are on my top ten list.

***

For more about the author and his new book, check out the official website for Lilacs in the Rain.

CLEWS Interviews True Crime Author Brendan Koerner

Now the Hell Will Start is the latest historic true crime title from Penguin Press. The story it details sounds like a Joseph Conrad plot or a chapter from Apocalypse Now: It's the non-fiction account of an American G.I. by the name of Herman Perry who murdered his commanding officer, then ran off into the Indo-Burmese wilderness and married into a tribe of headhunters, inspiring a massive manhunt and an extraordinary criminal case.

CLEWS managed to lay hands on a copy of the book. The full title is Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II [Amazon; B&N]. Besides the great title, a sneak peek at the contents reveals that the quality of the prose may well defy my powers of description. The writing is, in a word, excellent.

The author is Brendan I. Koerner, who has several years of journalism experience, including stints at several national magazines and the New York Times (though we must all promise not to hold that against him, as much as the Times irritates the true crime fan). Curious about a story that I have never heard of before, I asked the author if he would elaborate, and he was kind enough to reply. Here is our Q&A.

Q. I'd love to know how you heard of this story -- and how you researched it.

A. I first came across Herman Perry's name while researching a Slate column back in '03. I spent a lot of time digging through various archives--particularly at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Penn.--as well as writing FOIA requests to the U.S. Army Judiciary. But I also tracked down various players in the drama, including the man who prosecuted Perry, Perry's sister, and the only man known to have met Perry's half-Naga son.

Q. What was the subject of this column that led to the book?

A. I used to write the Explainer column for Slate. Every morning, my editor and I would comb through the morning papers, in search of items that seemed to require further exploration. On September 24, 2003, we came across an article about an Air Force translator who'd been arrested on suspicion of spying for Syria. The article mentioned that the man could be executed if found guilty.

That got us thinking: When was the last time the American armed forces had put one of its own to death? And what crimes made a soldier or sailor eligible for the death penalty?

In the course of my reporting that day, I came across a bibliography from the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Penn. While perusing the 12-page document, I came across this fragmentary aside: "Pvt. Herman Perry, murderer who long evaded capture by living with Burmese tribe, 1944-1945."

I remember being floored by this tidbit--it sounded so very Kurtz (of Heart of Darkness fame). Could it possibly be true? I resolved to find out, and jotted "Herman Perry?" in my Palm Pilot.

Nearly five years and 26,000 miles' worth of travel later, Now the Hell Will Start is finally here.

Q. I am really impressed that you (a) even thought to ask the question about prior cases and (b) actually tracked down the answer. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I have seen the US national media flippantly remark that some case or other has no precedent. This happens all the time! Have you noticed this as well? Why does this happen?

A. Particularly in recent years, journalists have gotten a bad rap for not doing their homework. There's a certain mindset in the media that favors speed over diligence, and so reporters are often tempted to go for the easy answer--the one that is revealed after a five-minute Google search, or a single call to a spokesman. I've long been lucky to work editors at Wired, Slate, and elsewhere who don't subscribe to this philosophy, and always demand that great effort be expended on each and every aspect of reporting.

But beyond that, I'll admit to being an extremely curious bloke who's never been content to settle for easy answers. That's partly because I honestly enjoy the gumshoeing required to unearth long-buried facts--the reporting journey is its own reward, I guess you could say. When researching Now the Hell Will Start, some of my best moments came while holed up in musty archives, in search of primary-source documents that likely hadn't seen the light of day in decades. Good times!

Yes, I guess that makes me something of a nerd.

Q. In my book it makes you something of a professional! Anyway - are you a true crime fan too? Do you have any favorite authors or titles?

A. I am a big true-crime fan, though my tastes are pretty mainstream. I distinctly remember reading Fatal Vision while in high school--inspired, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit, by the fact that it had been made into a TV mini-series.

I grew up in Los Angeles, so I've always been intrigued by true-crime stories that take place amidst the surf and mountains. I've probably read Helter Skelter about a dozen times, and I love Philip Carlo's The Night Stalker. I distinctly remember the summer of Richard Ramirez's rampage; it was one of the hottest on record, but my dad wouldn't let us sleep with the windows open.

Q. Do you have another book in mind? Will it be in the theme?

A. I'm toying with two very different ideas for my next book--one is a more classic true-crimer, the other definitely not. I'm hoping to plow through some research this summer, but it's tough sledding--my wife and I are dealing with an infant, and he makes concentration tricky!

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For more about the book and author, see the supporting website for the book, which includes photos and much more.