American Serial Killers · Former MLB Players · Vehicular Forensics
Plus Young Dolph and Charles Cullen
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
High-profile serial murders of the second half of the twentieth century.
The story
Certain topics make recommendations almost irrelevant. I could say that about a lot of stereotypical black-cover-red-writing true-crime books, now that I think about it, in the sense that a mass-market genre book is seldom going to distinguish itself as a piece of writing, and if it does, it’s probably not going to do so in a positive way. Not to pile on any specific regrettably terrible crimoirs here; my point is that, often, a review of the book qua book is immaterial. If the reader is interested in the case a given book covers, or a given subgenre of crimes, the prose seldom factors in.
In other words, if Peter Vronsky’s American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 sounds like something you want to read — if your interest is piqued by serial-murder cases; if you’d like to see how an author experienced in the topic field draws connections and comparisons among major cases in a relatively elevated fashion; if you have become inured to graphic descriptions of “postmortem disbursement” and can tolerate yet another granular exploration of Jeffrey Dahmer — then I recommend it. If it doesn’t, then I don’t.
But if you find yourself somewhere in the middle, like I did, not super-interested but not fatigued or grossed out right off the top, or it shows up off your “sure, why not” library-hold list and you don’t know if you should bother? That’s tougher. I…wouldn’t, and it’s not because it’s badly done. I listened to it, often at bedtime (I do not recommend this; the number of times Dan, scrolling through socials, and I, trying to doze off, grumbled “…really?” in unison to yet another dispassionate but still disgusting description of necrophilia was not all that low, and finally we gave up and switched it out for a book on the monarchy in medieval Britain), and René Ruiz does an appropriately composed and low-key job with truly gnarly material.
But said material, and the granular detail Vronsky goes into on certain cases (the Dahmer section in particular seems to go on for days), is at times a trial, and its completism doesn’t seem to serve any larger or more instructive purpose. I wouldn’t say it fetishizes the crimes or their perpetrators; Vronsky was likely at pains to do the opposite, and it probably lands different in text versus audio. But this pitiless level of thoroughness outside an academic case-study context is perhaps excessive.
Vronsky’s unifying theory of the titular epidemic also may have read differently in print, but aurally, it feels thinly corroborated. I think the idea — that post-Depression and -World War II PTSD combined with the availability and normalizing of graphic crime mags and comics like True Detective and Crime & Punishment to light a match near the gas cans of already disordered personalities — is worth considering.
I think Vronsky’s assertion that another epidemic, worse than the one he’s explicating here, is coming thanks to the 2009 downturn and COVID-19 (and internet porn) is one we should check back on in ten years. But I don’t think the correlation is proven as strongly as the writing asserts (and again, I may have missed something; it’s a different set of synapses with audiobooks). And the book jumps between specific murderers/investigations and more meta ideas about the crucible that forged them, which occasionally provides a much-needed breather but more often feels like alternating for the sake of alternating.
I gave ASK:TEY three stars on Goodreads, which was the awkward splitting of the difference between how much I enjoyed it (not really applicable when Ed Gein is involved) and how well it did what it set out to (quite, IMO). That still feels like a cop out, as does my telling you that if you think you’ll like it OR dislike it, you’re right — but it is what it is. — SDB
And if what it is is “not for you,” I’ve got a few other longreads that might suit. A few live behind paywalls, I’m sorry to say, but with print mags going the way of the dodo, if you consistently enjoy a publication’s work in the genre, you might consider a subscription.
A publication like…ours, for instance.
Seriously, thanks for considering it! The economy’s not missing either of us with its bullshit, so we really appreciate your subscriptions. And if a paid sub isn’t in the budget right now, sharing is also caring.
…Okay, let’s start with Popular Mechanics, which has really rewarded my subscription dollar with on-point content the last couple months. Not a sentence I would have thought I’d ever type back when I was majoring in poetry, but the divide between art and science is actually at the foreground of this piece, “Did Faulty Crime-Scene Reconstruction Send the Wrong Man to Prison for Life?”
I won’t spoil John H. Tucker’s conclusions, but Tucker does an expert job mirroring the ways a forensics discipline’s argot can make it sound authoritative, then puncturing the bubble with a the-human-element pin:
Reconstructionists also investigate criminal cases to determine, for example, if a driver charged with vehicular manslaughter is in fact guilty. Courtroom fights erupt over vehicle mass and dimensions, skid marks, street gouges, crush damage, paint transfers, road surface textures, inertia, and coefficients of friction.
But despite its Newtonian principles, accident reconstruction is hardly a perfect science. Data can be omitted or misapplied. Reconstructionists might lack training, make math errors, or use improper analyses. Human bias, and even greed—telling an attorney what they want, just to get hired—can mar a work product. Against this vulnerable backdrop, a worst-case scenario looms: What if a defendant, charged with vehicular homicide, is sent to prison based on a faulty accident reconstruction?
It’s a good piece, so I hesitate to pick this nit, but longform editors absolutely must do a better job of catching the word “grizzly” in true-crime writing. This is almost never what is intended. Your writer meant “grisly.” Just search and replace everything that crosses your desk, for safety’s sake.
Next up, the AP on former MLB player Yasiel Puig, who’s expected to plead guilty after lying to the feds about his involvement in an illegal gambling concern. My esteemed colleague Calcs has more on Twitter as part of a longer thread…
It’s the AP, so this isn’t necessarily worthwhile reading per se (head to Cup of Coffee for a deeper dive), but I’ve mentioned it for two reasons: 1) it’s interesting how the culture sees/covers addiction struggles when the addiction is to gambling and not a substance (and by “interesting,” I mean “troubling,” especially when it comes to coverage of athletes of color generally, and this one specifically); and 2) this needs to become a 30 For 30 from Brett Morgen (“June 17, 1994”) or Randy Wilkins (The Captain; The Blotter Presents) (…hee). Or maybe it’s a limited series on the gambling felons of MLB from Chapman Way (The Battered Bastards of Baseball)?
Over to Rolling Stone’s most recent print issue (I’m old, shut up) for Nancy Dillon’s “The Generous Life and Tragic Death of Young Dolph,” which tries not entirely successfully to foreground the life of a high-profile murder victim.
The writing is good, I got a sense of the man — but as I’ve said so many times before, sometimes trying to shove the manner of a public figure’s death out of the spotlight just makes it more determined to get to center stage.
Maybe it’s just me, but I sense a reluctance on Dillon’s part to engage with the larger conversation around hip-hop and racial justice, and I absolutely get not wanting that to take over the conversation here, but burying the facts of the investigation in the “turn to page” portion of the profile…one of the stronger parts of the Vronsky book I reviewed earlier is the one in which he’s talking about victims who, by virtue of their “imperfection” (sex workers; not white/blonde girls), are seen as “less dead.”
It feels to me like RS and/or Dillon don’t want to stumble over some kind of rap/violence third rail, thereby implying that Young Dolph is “less dead” and undermining their intent, which is to celebrate and mourn his life? I don’t know if that makes sense, or what I’d do differently. The profile just strikes me as too careful.
(In that same issue, though I can’t seem to chase it down in online form, is a harrowing piece on members of a notorious Bosnian death squad who never faced trial for their alleged involvement in war crimes — and one of them is even a renowned DJ.) — SDB
The crime
Charles Cullen, convicted in 2006 of “mercy”-killing 29 patients, is thought to have murdered as many as 400 in his capacity as a registered nurse. He is not eligible for parole for hundreds of years.
The story
Netflix’s Capturing The Killer Nurse does a handful of affecting things, but not enough, and not for long enough, to make the 95-minute doc worth your time even at 1.25x. If you haven’t read Charles Graeber’s book, seen The Good Nurse’s scripted take on said book, or read any contemporary coverage of the case, Capturing will get that information-download work done for you — but its pace is so stodgy and its filmmaking grammar so dense with cliché (the minor-chord credits version of “You Are My Sunshine”; soft-focus shots of bouquets of dead flowers) that it’s no doubt faster to read a handful of book reviews from 2013.
Graeber is in Capturing, along with key case figures like Amy Loughren and Detectives Braun and Baldwin, and their talking-head spots, in which they’re still very emotional about the swath of grief Cullen cut, have an un-glib authenticity that’s a bit surprising in documentary ground this well-trodden. But because these aren’t experienced commentators, their delivery is frequently ponderous, and should have been edited more tightly — just generally, Capturing should have lost 15-20 minutes. (All the self-serious slo-mo re-enactments starring the interviewees as themselves can go, just for starters.)
And the ground that isn’t as well-trodden is, as usual, whooshed over in the end chyrons, leaving a bunch of meat on the bone. Cullen is thought to have killed more than ten times as many patients as his convictions punished; why does law enforcement “think” that? Spend 5-10 minutes on that. The liability of the hospitals and health-care systems that kept kicking his can down the road for 15 years is repeatedly grumbled about; that is a documentary, all on its own, that and the passage of the Cullen Law.
Everyone involved in projects about this case loves to make grand pronouncements about how the real villain is for-profit healthcare and the system that allows Cullens to blah blah blah and I absolutely concur, but if you’re going to come at this subject here in late 2022, you need to commit to those references in your narrative. Explain what you mean. Press a risk manager to defend her people. The victim-impact statements at the end, and Cullen’s resting-dickface non-response in court, do pack some punch; make those your centerpiece, and let ’em run.
Cullen’s reign of terror, abetted by middle management, is a crazy story, but in this timeline, that won’t carry doc narrative on its own — especially not by-numbers material like Capturing that seems somewhat cynically designed to pack the Netflix algorithm. Skip it. — SDB
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