Americans can’t seem to get enough of true crime. Books, podcasts and documentaries abound, and TV shows — even entire channels — are dedicated to accounts of crimes and court trials, and they’re more popular than ever. The books often make the nonfiction bestseller list.
“London Falling” by Patrick Radden Keefe is one of today’s bestsellers. In 2019, a 19-year-old man jumped into the Thames River in London, in an apparent suicide. Images of the event were picked up by London’s ubiquitous cameras. Why would this young man, Zac, commit suicide? Or was something more sinister at play here? Zac’s parents wanted answers, but they weren’t getting many from the police. The information surrounding Zac’s death came out in layers, revealing “a darker side of London” — a seedy and dangerous world of billionaires, drug lords, Russian gangsters, and violent criminals.
His family soon learned that Zac had posed as the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch. Did he know he was playing with fire? His mother said, “There is so much we are discovering about Zac — in his death — that was not true.” It was like trying to “piece together a jigsaw in the dark.” She said there was “this whole world we did not know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep.” The people around Zac were involved in scandals, shoddy business deals, financial crimes, outright theft, and murder.
Zac’s father noted that “There had not been a single mention of Zac’s death in the papers,” which led him to wonder “if perhaps there might be some other, more exotic explanation, some deeper intrigue playing out behind the scenes.” Were the police merely incompetent, or were they hiding something? Why was the lead detective “maddeningly incurious”? One family member pointed out the obvious: “We’re all witnesses. Something very wrong happened here.” After doing his own preliminary investigations, the author admitted, “They were not wrong to feel the investigation had been mishandled.”
The book is an interesting combination of true crime, history, culture, biography and thriller.
“Catch the Devil” by Pamela Colloff covers decades in the lives of several men, focusing mainly on one particularly nasty con man and petty criminal. Paul Skalnik was a liar. He lied often — about his name, his past, his professions. He married nine women, sometimes not bothering to divorce the previous one. But all that was nothing compared to this: Once in jail, he lied about other prisoners. He would swear under oath that they had confessed their crimes to him, when they had not. Why? Because he was rewarded with time off or even freedom. And once his testimony at trial was on the record, it was nearly impossible to negate. He was a prosecutor’s best friend, because he could come up with exactly what they needed for a conviction, which is all they cared about. The truth exposes a corrupt legal system still in place in many places today.
Skalnik got away with most of his grifting because “Victims of fraud rarely turn to law enforcement for help. Many are too embarrassed or ashamed,” the author explains. “His ruthless opportunism, unbound by principle or empathy, allowed him to manipulate people and situations so deftly that he rarely had to pay the price others would. This proved to be Skalnik’s gift: a preternatural ability to avoid consequences.”
One case involved an almost-certainly innocent man, sent to death row based on Skalnik’s testimony. That murder case is covered here in detail.
“Murder in the Mountains: True Stories of Crime and Violence in Appalachia” by R.M. Cochran is a catalog of at least 18 crimes in and around the Appalachians. “True crime isn’t just entertainment — it’s social history,” writes the author. Here he mixes fact and folklore, including some unsolved mysteries and even ghost stories, in cases ranging from the Civil War (In 1863 in North Carolina, a Confederate officer and about 50 of his men tortured, beat, and killed men, women and children in a community suspected of aiding the North) to 2016 and the mass execution of eight members of the Rhoden family in Southern Ohio. Often crimes went unpunished because “The mountain code of keeping family business private and not talking to outsiders — even law enforcement outsiders — had apparently extended to protect whoever had committed” the crimes. Family loyalty, clan loyalty and distrust of authority closed the door to investigations. There were “situations where everyone knew who committed a crime, but no one would testify.”
Some of the cases recounted here include the Poison Widow of Kentucky, who “turned her kitchen into a laboratory of death”; the Hatfield-McCoy feud; several cases of the coal companies vs. miners who tried to unionize; a woman bitten during a church’s snake-handling ritual whose husband refused to get her medical treatment; and the Giggling Granny, who killed at least 11 people, including her own children, saying “Sometimes a mother has to make hard choices.”
The writing could be very pleasant, as when in January 1899 in West Virginia, “miners and their families huddled around coal stoves, trying to keep warm while the wind howled through the mountains like the voice of some ancient spirit warning of violence to come.” But I have to say, the author was very repetitive throughout — annoyingly so.
“Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood” by William J. Mann recalls what was probably the most famous unsolved murder in Hollywood history, the 1947 death of Elizabeth Short, 22. “Her nude, severed body, drained of blood, was discovered in a vacant lot in south central Los Angeles.” The author follows her footsteps during her final months, discovering what kind of person she was, the many people she interacted with, and who may have killed her. “Beth could be a bit of a con artist,” writes the author. She was very friendly and used her looks to manipulate men. “She’d become proficient at having meals bought for her,” and she never seemed to pay bills or the rent.
“The LAPD records and reports indicate some stupidity and carelessness on the part of some of the inexperienced officers who were working on the case,” Mann writes, and “Most of the records of the investigation remain sealed by the Los Angeles Police Department.” Why? Because the case went unsolved, conspiracy theories grew, aided by sensationalist newspaper stories that often printed misinformation, sometimes invented to sell newspapers, such as the nickname “Black Dahlia,” which was never attached to Short when she was alive.
We’ll probably never know the killer’s name. The author presents his theories, corrects much of the misinformation, and eliminates several suspects. He also provides general historic information and images of what life was like after the war. Warning: There are explicit details regarding the bodily remains and the autopsy report.
“Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks” by Benjamin Hale begins in the Arkansas Ozarks in 2001, when a 6-year-old girl named Haley went missing for three days. After a huge search and rescue mission, she was found, claiming she’d been helped by a friend she met in the woods, another little girl who was her “imaginary friend” Alecia, who guided her to safety. Was she a ghost? If so, she could have been another little girl who was murdered in those mountains years earlier. That murder is covered in detail, with a long biographical look at a crime family that turned into a religious cult.
The book is a bizarre mix of crime reporting, local history, religious criticism, cultural references, memoir, and personal opinion. Part reads like a “Dateline” TV narrative, part like a cultural critique. The author interjects his personal notes and expounds on his theories of religion, politics and even Rembrandt’s paintings! He often uses obscure words, seemingly to show off his vocabulary. (I think he made up a couple of these words, as I couldn’t find them in the dictionary!) But some of the writing is interesting, as when he describes an old, forgotten church: “It’s halfway fallen into desuetude: sagging plywood ceiling with slanting diamonds of dishwater light falling on dust-furred pews.”
Happy reading!