Tag: true crime

Day 534: And the Sea Will Tell

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Cover for And the Sea Will TellYears ago, I was living in a house with a bunch of other students. It was then that I read Helter Skelter, the book by Vincent Bugliosi about the Manson murders. Bugliosi was, of course, the prosecutor on that famous case.

I am the type of person who is much more scared by books and movies about things that could or did happen than things that could not. I watched countless horror movies (the classics of the 40’s and 50’s) as a kid without being scared (Saturday night with my older brother, all lights off for the Christopher Coffin show), but I was terrified at the same age by The Three Faces of Eve. After I read Helter Skelter, I realized for the first time that because my bedroom was the former living room of the old farmhouse and right next to the door, it would be the first stop for anyone who broke in during the night. I was creeped out!

image of Christoper Coffin
Christopher Coffin in his coffin

This newer Bugliosi book is about a crime that occurred in the 1970’s but was not tried until the 1990’s. It involves two couples who arrived coincidentally at what was supposed to be a deserted island far south of Hawaii, Palmyra.

One couple, the Grahams, was wealthy, with a beautiful boat, fully stocked. Their plan was to stay on the island a year, although Muff Graham was there only because Mac wanted to be. Buck Walker was a fugitive from a drug-selling charge. He and his girlfriend Jennifer Jenkins arrived on a leaky, battered old boat with few stores, planning to stay there indefinitely.

In late August of 1974, after staying on the island a couple of months, Buck and Jennifer were preparing their boat for a tough sail to Fanning Island to buy more supplies. They were tired of living mostly on fish and coconuts. A couple months later, the couple sailed into Ala Wai harbor in Hawaii in a beautiful boat, clearly the one that belonged to the Grahams.

Although Walker and Jenkins were prosecuted for the theft of the boat, visits to Palmyra turned up no evidence of what happened to the Grahams. Jenkins’ story was that they found the Grahams’ overturned Zodiac on the beach after Mac and Muff told Buck they were going fishing. Walker and Jenkins claimed to have searched for the couple, but said they could find no sign of them and thought they drowned or were killed by sharks. Nevertheless, they had not reported the incident to the authorities because they had stolen the Grahams’ boat.

Seven years later, a visitor to Palmyra discovered a human skull, a wrist watch, and other bones on the beach. They appeared to have fallen out of a metal box that had been fastened shut with wires and had drifted ashore. The skull was identified as that of Muff Graham.

Buck Walker was convicted of the murder. Bugliosi’s book is about Jennifer’s trial.

First, I was surprised to find Bugliosi had changed from prosecution and defended Jenkins. He makes a major point that he only defends people he thinks are innocent of the crime they’re charged with. I was not as sure as he was about Jennifer.

This book is well written and for the most part moves along nicely. It has a few flaws, though.

For one thing, it is extremely long at more than 700 pages. In my opinion, it does not  need to be that lengthy. The crime itself occupies less than 200 pages. The rest is about the investigation and the trial. Although most of the material is interesting, at times it seems as though Bugliosi is confusing his role of storyteller with that of a litigation instructor. He spends a lot of time explaining legal procedure and concepts, some of which are very basic. For example, within the same 20 or so pages, he spends four pages explaining the difference between the verdict of not guilty and actual innocence and another four pages on the importance of the summation. He also constantly gives his opinion of the job the prosecution was doing. I sensed a lot of ego here.

Approaching the end of the book, I was astonished to find nearly 100 pages devoted to Bugliosi’s summation, which is quoted almost verbatim. Although he makes some important points not raised elsewhere, he covers a lot of ground already discussed during the trial. He could have hit the highlights.

A lot of dialogue is quoted throughout the book. Although this technique makes the book move along, it seems impossible to me that so much conversation could be accurately recounted almost 20 years (by the time of the trial) after some of the events. This approach to nonfiction makes me uncomfortable.

If you like true crime, you’ll probably find this book interesting enough to stick with it. Like me, you may find yourself skipping over pages of material. While I was reading, I often imagined Henderson, Bugliosi’s ghostwriter, arguing with him that some things should be left out.

Day 518: The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America

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Cover for The Fall of the House of WalworthJust a quick note before I get started about the Classics Club Spin #6. The spin selected #1, so I’ll be reading Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gillman!

The Fall of the House of Walworth begins in the 1950’s with Clara Walworth living in a crumbling mansion in Saratoga Springs. She obsessively goes through the possessions of her once-eminent family, not realizing that its members have hidden from her a shocking truth. Her father was once imprisoned for the murder of his own father.

The book then returns to trace the history of the Walworths, a family of prominent figures who became New York state aristocracy. In particular, it looks at the career of Reuben Hyde Walworth, the last Chancellor of New York. It was his younger son Mansfield Walworth who was murdered in a New York City hotel room by Mansfield’s own son Frank, then only 19 years old.

The book relates the story of the marriage of Mansfield and Ellen Hardin. Ellen was Mansfield’s step-sister after the marriage of his father to her mother, Sarah. As a young girl, Ellen was apparently carried away by Mansfield’s streak of romanticism. But she did not realize he had already gained a reputation as a wastrel and a bully. O’Brien theorizes that the family may have hoped the love of a good woman would help him to reform.

The book examines the history of Mansfield and Ellen’s marriage and the reasons the situation reached such heights of drama, including a strain of mental instability in the family. Mansfield was an author of overblown romantic novels, who saw himself as a misunderstood genius. O’Brien’s comments about his dreadful writing and excerpts from his novels show us how deluded Mansfield was about his own talents, even in a sentimental age. They also provide a hint of amusement to the book.

Cultural historian O’Brien has written an interesting true story of an unusual crime that shocked the country. Frank Walworth’s trial provided the test case for the new concept in law of second degree murder. The book also provides insight into the views and treatment of epilepsy, at the time considered a mental illness.

Day 392: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

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Cover for The Invention of MurderJudith Flanders, a British journalist and history writer specializing in Victorian times, has written an entertaining and exhaustive book showing how the Victorian fascination with murder grew and forced improvements in policing. In addition, it resulted in the evolution of the detective novel. Flanders begins this discussion with the interest in a few major crimes from before the Victorian era, explaining how public response changed during the Victorian age.

One theme of the book is class. Flanders effectively shows that the public interest in murder was for crimes that involved the middle or upper classes, with a tendency of the newspapers and popular songs and legends to elevate in class the murderers who were from the lower classes. Newspapers flagrantly made up “facts” about accused murderers that sensationalized their backgrounds or their crimes, including changing their social class. Even as late as the Jack the Ripper murders, interest was probably only taken by the public (since the victims were lower-class prostitutes) because of the number and viciousness of the crimes.

Flanders tells us about a series of panics that took place as a result of a growing audience for this kind of subject matter. Once a tax was removed from newspapers in 1855 that had kept the price high enough to restrict their circulation to the middle and upper classes (although the poor shared newspapers or picked them up in coffee houses), circulation greatly expanded and the papers found a new audience for sensationalism.

Even though there had only ever been a very few cases of murder by poisoning, in the early and mid-nineteenth century a poisoning panic resulted from a highly publicized murder case. In the ensuing rash of accusations, people were brought to “justice” when there was no actual proof that anyone had been poisoned let alone any proof that the accused was guilty of any wrongdoing. Unqualified persons were allowed to testify on the “scientific” evidence, including one Alfred Swaine Taylor, who for years testified to the presence of arsenic using a test that actually introduced arsenic into the sample through copper gauze. Even worse, the lower class “poisoners,” who usually had little or no legal representation, were invariably hanged, while the middle and upper class accused often got off completely or with lighter punishment, even if there was more real evidence against them.

Eventually, with improvements in the science of criminology and the rise of public indignation about some obvious miscarriages of justice, the police force was compelled to become more professional and the law to pass more stringent rules of evidence.

Frankly, our lurid interest in crime hasn’t changed, as shown by the prevalence of true crime shows on TV. A large part of the fascination and entertainment value of this history has to do with the details of the crimes as well as the plots of the many plays, novels, and penny dreadfuls that derived from them. Flanders has written an entertaining and lively history for anyone interested in true crime, the evolution of the mystery novel, or the history of advancements in criminology.

Day 102: Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery

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Cover to Who Murdered ChaucerIt is an accepted interpretation of history that Richard II was a weak, dissolute ruler who was hated by the English people. But Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery makes a plausible case for the truth having been rewritten by the victors after Richard was deposed.

The version of events that has been accepted for centuries is that Henry IV saved the English kingdom by overthrowing the corrupt Richard II at the urging of the populace. Authors Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Alan Fletcher, Juliette Dor, and Terry Dolan provide plausible evidence that Richard was neither unpopular nor weak, but that he was a relatively enlightened monarch–a patron of the arts and an advocate for the new fashion of authors writing in their own languages instead of in Latin–and that he permitted criticism of the church.

However, his rule was periodically threatened by several of the more conservative members of nobility and the church, including especially Thomas Arundel, the younger brother of the Earl of Arundel. Richard eventually had to banish some of them, including Arundel, and others were killed. The end of Richard II’s reign actually came later when he felt secure enough to travel to Ireland.

As the result of a proposed duel, Richard also banished Henry of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt. Henry was considered the consumate knight and was admired throughout the kingdom. Richard seemed to be fond of him and probably considered him his heir. Henry’s dispute with Thomas de Mowbray resulted in charges of treason, and they were both banished. Henry was banished for 10 years, but Jones et al. find plausible indications that Richard had an agreement to allow Henry back early. One was that Richard initially did not take Henry’s property, as was usual.

But Henry met with Arundel on his European travels, despite strict injunctions not to have dealings with him. The two plotted to overthrow Richard, attacking England when he was away in Ireland with his army. Henry won and became Henry IV, treating Richard shamefully. No one was sure what happened to him, except that he was dead. (Henry’s own son, after he became Henry V, had Richard’s bones brought to Westminster to be buried.)

The book shows that Henry relentlessly rooted out records that were approving of Richard, even implicitly, or that were negative to himself. He assiduously promoted propaganda alleging that Richard was hated, weak, and dissolute. He gave Arundel free reign, as Archbishop of Canterbury, to burn heretics for the first time in England and to set his own criteria for judging heretics. In short, he instituted a reign of terror.

What does this have to do with Chaucer? This shift in power left him very vulnerable. His works under Richard II had criticized the very things about the church that Arundel considered to be heresy. Chaucer disappears from the historical record right around 1400, about a year after Richard was deposed.

The book makes a shakier case that Arundel either caused Chaucer’s death, possibly in imprisonment, or paid to have him killed. There is no evidence of this, of course; the authors’ conclusions are drawn from things that happened to other writers, from some vague accounting records, and from hazy interpretations of some of Chaucer’s work. Although I feel that they have certainly pointed toward some possibilities, even they admit that it is unlikely anyone will know the truth.

The book is easy to follow and amusing at times. It is beautifully illustrated with pictures from illuminated manuscripts. The political and historical theories about Richard’s and Henry’s reigns are very interesting. However, I believe the book falls off a bit at the end when it settles down to examining the story of Chaucer’s end, especially when it resorts to interpreting Chaucer’s poetry.