#ann rule

my favorite nonfiction books of 2021 (as of september)

After reading Small Sacrifices, which mentioned Downs and Woodfield maintained a correspondence, I've had this on my reading list. It's crazy all the things Woodfield managed to do without getting caught, the number of assaults and robberies and murders. Thankfully, law enforcement did finally apprehend him. The majority of the book covers his crimes and his eventual capture, while his court cases only take up the last few chapters. It's scary how easily he misled so many women. This type of thing should put us in our guard.

I also found the observation that our justice system tends to allow a lot of crime for a small cost on the part of the criminal. After the first few convictions the rest of the courts in three states elected not to charge Woodfield. It was too expensive and they feared that one slip up would have him back on the streets. I get that, but that means he never faced prosecution for those crimes. For good or ill, that's how it works.

One mental exercise I'm putting myself through--while I'm stuck inside with nothing to exercise but my mental meat--is, reading texts written by, or on behalf of people who are now historically known to have lied. (Or who a headshrinker could more generously describe as functionally delusional) I'm starting with the three earliest books on the Amityville Horror. Before I dove into Jay Anson's elaboration on the folklore created by George and Kathleen Lutz, and the probably-incredibly-sleazy coattail riding book by quack psychic Hans Holzer (on which the fabulously disgusting AMITYVILLE 2 is based), I thought I should read the book about the DeFeo murders perpetuated at the iconic Ocean Avenue home before it was haunted by the "horror". High Hopes was written by prosecutor Gerard Sullivan, and though I expected this to be the truest of the "true" stories, it presents its own evidence of extreme bias.

Let me say first that I'm a bit of a crime buff, and that means I have to be hypervigilant about copaganda. For instance, I'm gaga for Ann Rule, who was not only an ex-cop--I thought I read that she was the first female officer in Seattle?--but she described the cops that figured into her reportage with a kind of intensely seductive poetry, transforming them into something like heroes of the old west. It's incredibly convincing, and I have to remind myself that Rule was from a whole family of cops with a very particular perspective, one that many people would find troublesome--including myself.

Most of what I read tends to be fairly light. There's enough real going on that I don't need it as reading material. However, a good portion of my tv watching can be nicely summed up by this comic by Sarah Andersen:

I watch a lot of stuff like FBI Files and Cold Case Files. I don't often read true crime, but every now and again, the mood strikes, or there is a case I want to learn more about.

This time, the mood struck and Ann Rule has been a good bet in the past.

This book follows the major players in the case of  Sheila Bellush who was murdered by someone hired by her obsessive Ex-husband.

I didn't like this one as much as I have other Ann Rule books. More time seemed to be spent on the main conspiritor, Allen Blackthorne, than the victim. I mean, there is usually narritive split between the murderer(s) and how they ended up as warped as they are and the victims, but in this one it seemed like we spent a lot of time looking at Allen and his dickhead father. There was a time I actually lost track of Sheila entirely in the line of women that Allen's father married and left and Allen abused. Not that those women do not deserve a voice, it's just that at times, it felt like just a list of names and Sheila was buried a little.