Tom Wales, Federal Prosecutor, Murdered 2001, In His Own Home (No Arrests)

Self is doing this because she knew his ex-wife, Elizabeth Wales.

Perhaps because of his line of work, he was cautious. His home was equipped with motion sensors connected to floodlights.

30 days after 9/11, Tom Wales was shot multiple times through a basement window of his home office in Seattle, by a killer who surely had been observing him for a while, who knew that Wales worked late into the night, sitting at his desk, his back to the window.

The weapon was a Makarov 9mm semi-automatic handgun . . .  believed to have been threaded for a silencer (and yet, neighbors, one of whom was the acting District Attorney, heard the shots)

Public FBI reports state that Soviet Bloc countries manufactured the Makarov through approximately 1968 . . .

More in The New Yorker, a piece by Jeffrey Toobin, 6 August 2007, and The Atlantic, a piece by James Fallows, 10 October 2014.

Stay tuned.

Woman to Her Attacker At His Sentencing

It took me this long to read the letter to Brock Turner at his sentencing:

How old are you? How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day? Well what did you have for dinner? Did you drink with dinner? No? Not even water? When did you drink? How much did you drink? What container did you drink out of? Who gave you the drink? How much do you usually drink? Who dropped you off at this party? At what time? But where exactly? What were you wearing? Why were you going to this party? What did you do when you got there? Are you sure you did that? But what time did you do that? What does this text mean? Who were you texting? When did you urinate? Where did you urinate?

When Turner was released from the San Jose city jail, he asked to be allowed to exit from the back of the building, where his lawyer was waiting.

His request was denied. He had to go out through the front, where all the reporters were. They made him face them. And he had to do it alone.

Thank God they didn’t let him get away with the coward’s response to duck and run.

Sentence of the Day: THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

Self really does not like the title of this novel.

Maybe because it turns something ugly into something lyrical.

There’s not even the faintest bit of lyricism or poetry in murder. Self thinks Truman Capote skirted a very fine line in In Cold Blood. But, by God, he did it.

In The Executioner’s Song, despite heroic efforts by Norman Mailer to turn Gary Gilmore, murderer and misogynist and also self-pitying whiner into a kind of American anti-hero (Why even bother), self reaches p. 366 (not even halfway; this is a 1,000-page book) and Gary Gilmore is still nothing more than a murderer/misogynist/self-pitying whiner.

Nevertheless!

Here she is. This sentence is not half-bad. In fact, it’s pretty funny:

If you were asleep, and the alarm went off, and you were under such tension you thought it was a fire siren, and saw imaginary flames and leaped out of a high window into eternity, well, it hardly mattered then whether your normal label had been psychopathic, manic, melancholic, or obsessive-compulsive, you could be sure to be called psychotic as you went through the window.

Mailer speaks truth.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

2016: Books That Rocked Self’s World

• March 2016 (read in Mendocino & Fort Bragg): The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
• May 2016 (read in London): Watch Me, by Anjelica Huston
• June 2016 (read in California, various stops on the central coast): The Girl On the Train, by Paula Hawkins
• August 2016 (read in San Francisco): The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Basho
• December 2016 (read in San Francisco): In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

Emily Doe: Changing the Conversation

You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today . . .  Future reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can speak an entire sentence.

— Emily Doe to her rapist, Brock Turner, quoted in Glamour, December 2016

From Emily Doe:

I had forensic evidence, sober unbiased witnesses, a slurred voice mail, police at the scene. I had everything, and I was still told it was not a slam dunk. I thought, if this is what having it good looks like, what other hells are survivors living? I’m barely getting through this but I am being told I’m the lucky one, some sort of VIP. It was like being checked into a hotel room for a year with stained sheets, rancid water, and a bucket with an attendant saying, No, this is great! Most rooms don’t even have a bucket.

After the trial I was relieved, thinking the hardest part was over, and all that was left was the sentencing. I was excited to finally be given a chance to read my statement and declare, I am here. I am not that floppy thing you found behind the garbage, speaking melted words. I am here, I can stand upright, I can speak clearly, I’ve been listening and am painfully aware of all the hurt you’ve been trying to justify.

I yelled half of my statement. So when it was quickly announced that he’d be receiving six months, I was struck silent.

After Turner was convicted of rape last spring, a judge “sentenced him to just six months, saying anything more would have a severe impact on him.” — Cindi Leive, in Glamour magazine

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Lures You In Just Like a Multi-Chapter Fan Fiction

The murders unfold. P. 237.

Even though self swore — swore — when beginning In Cold Blood, that when she got to an account of the murders, she would stop reading, the more she read, the more complacent she became, the more she became invested in the characters. Especially in the character of the lead detective, Alvin Dewey.

Just when Hickok and Perry have been caught, it’s at that point when (just when self is patting herself on the back for having finished reading In Cold Blood without once flinching), what do you know: we do after all get the blow-by-blow. But by this time, self has already read 236 pages. How can she stop now? She does the only logical thing: she keeps reading.

It would have been less gruesome if told clinically. But unfortunately, that little perv Perry, the short one, the one who likes it whenever Detective Dewey has to light a cigarette and put it between his lips, he feels emotional connection to the victims (even as he destroys them), so he describes their looks of shock etc etc etc.

And. Still. Self. Just. Cannot. Stop. Reading.

Because she is already so fully invested in the story.

She is reminded of fan fiction, how it lures you in, chapter by chapter (Fan fiction is ALL about serialization). You live with the characters a while (In the case of Mejhiren’s stories, for years), you get to know them, you are completely at the mercy of the author.

Just like what’s happening to self now.

Capote. So sly. If the murders had been recounted any earlier than p. 150, self probably could have closed the book without a second thought.

It’s when poor Mr. Clutter offers to write the murderers a check in exchange for his life that they really go ape-shit on him.

There is so much horror in this story. Readers, self is sparing you much anguish. This is your trigger warning. P. 237. SKIP SKIP SKIP

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

IN COLD BLOOD, pp. 232 – 233

It’s the day after Christmas, for heavens sake, George Michael has died, and self is barreling through In Cold Blood.

It’s a great book. The characters — the two murderers and the four detectives whose seven weeks of patient chasing down of all manner of clues finally led to the arrest of Dick Hickok and Perry Smith for the murder of the Clutter family — are like players in a Greek tragedy (The fact that they arrested the right men: what a piece of luck! Seven weeks is not a long period of time, especially since Hickok and Smith had traveled over eight-hundred miles in the twenty-four hours immediately following the murders, and had no personal connection to either the victims or the town of Holcomb, Kansas, where the murders took place).

Self wants very badly to be able to picture these men, and is disappointed by the absence of any photographs. Isn’t this book nonfiction? Wouldn’t the inclusion of photographs have helped the book’s authenticity?

Instead she has to go googling on the web. She finds a New York Times obituary for Alvin Dewey, lead detective of the case. There is no photograph. Self decided not to google the faces of the two murderers.

Dick Hickok struck the detectives as intelligent and attractive (a Ted Bundy type?), well spoken.

His partner, Perry Smith, was so short that when sitting his feet didn’t touch the floor. And his feet were delicate, the size of a child’s. Yet this is the man who Dick Hickok claimed committed all four murders.

The two men are handcuffed but Perry Smith is a chainsmoker so, during the ride to Kansas, when Smith wants a smoke, Detective Alvin Dewey ends up lighting it for him and placing “it between his lips, a task that the detective found ‘repellent,’ for” it seemed “such an intimate action — the kind of thing” Dewey had done “while he was courting his wife.” (p. 233)

But Good Lord, the two detectives had to ride in the same car as these murderers, all the way back to Kansas. And at no point did they behave in a way that could be described as “unprofessional.” There’s will power for you.

The only reason self quotes the passage here is because, a page later, Perry Smith says to Dewey, catching him off guard: “You hate handing me a butt.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

IN COLD BLOOD, p. 150

Self is full speed ahead on this book.

The excerpt below is about Alvin Dewey, lead detective on the Clutter murders.

He’s stepped into a coffee shop and gets heckled:

“I got a houseful of women who won’t go to the bathroom alone.”

Dewey had become accustomed to this brand of abuse; it was a routine part of his existence. He swallowed the second cup of coffee, smiled.

“Hell, I’m not cracking jokes. I mean it. Why don’t you arrest somebody? That’s what you ‘re paid for.”

“Hush your meanness,” said Mrs. Hartman. “We’re all in the same boat. Alvin’s doing as good as he can.”

The ranch hand waited until his quarry had reached the door, then fired a farewell volley: “If you ever run for sheriff again, just forget my vote, because you ain’t gonna get it.”

Self teaches memoir writing. The trickiest part of it is that remembered dialogue is far from accurate.

But, in this case, the “remembered dialogue” is by a third party who wasn’t even there.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

IN COLD BLOOD: Bobby Rupp

The boyfriend of Nancy Clutter, Bobby Rupp, became the first suspect.

p. 73:

Bobby walked to the Teacherage, the boarding house where Susan Kidwell, who had discovered the bodies, was staying. Susan was looking out her window when she saw “a wobbly figure headed her way. She went out on the porch to meet him. She said, I wanted so much to tell you. Bobby began to cry.”

Bobby’s younger brother, Larry, had shadowed Bobby all the way to the Teacherage. Now “Larry lingered at the edge of the . . . yard, hunched against a tree. He couldn’t ever remember seeing Bobby cry, and he didn’t want to, so he lowered his eyes.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

IN COLD BLOOD: Discovery

Capote shows us the events leading to the murders, and then the aftermath of the murders, but not the deed itself (which is just fine with self, which is the only reason she has gotten this far).

About the discovery:

• Two girls enter the house, find Nancy first; the one girl starts screaming, the other insists Nancy only has “a nosebleed.”
• The first adult to call the police speaks thus: “There is something radically wrong at the Clutter place.” Since this is rural Kansas, in 1959, self is impressed by the use of such an elegant word as radically.
• The sheriff finds two dead bodies and all he can say is: Where the devil can Herb be? As if Herb ought to present himself willingly, not make them look for him. Or maybe Herb was hiding.
• A neighbor sees a collie that belonged to the youngest child, Kenyon. The dog stands right in the middle of the lane, scared. Has its tail between its legs. Doesn’t bark or move. It’s the sight of the dog that rouses the neighbor from his state of dazed shock.  As the neighbor puts it: “Seeing the dog made me feel again.” He could “feel the full viciousness of the crime . . .  You had to believe it, because it was true.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.