Anneli Rufus

November 29, 2010

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

Have history's best-known true-crime cases become "classics," their real-life supervillains now elevated to "legend" status? It's hard to choose the right words for actions that are so very, very wrong. Several volumes in this latest column revisit killers and cases that have received so much press over the years — Ed Gein, the Washington D.C. sniper, Roman Polanski, John Wilkes Booth — that, in any other realm or genre, they would be defined as landmarks, milestones, or classics. Maybe we could say "milestones in misery." I'd be okay with that.

by Anneli Rufus

 June 8, 2010

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

When international playboy Joran van der Sloot was arrested in Peru and confessed within days to the brutal slaying of Stephany Flores, the first thing that popped into countless crimewatchers' minds was that Flores wasn't the first woman he had killed — nor, had he remained free, would she be the last. The wheels of justice are as yet to reveal more about this story, but our grim thoughts spring from what might be the first and foremost fact of crime, which is this: History repeats itself. The same criminals commit the same types of crimes again and again, doing the same thing to the same type of victim in the same type of scene. I suspect that this is what we'll learn about van der Sloot. But, as the books reviewed in this column reveal, history also repeats itself in the sense that some types of crime seem intrinsic to human character, impervious to cultural evolution, raised consciousness, or anything else. Sex-killers and drug dealers and kidnappers made headlines in our great-grandparents' era and are still doing so today; all that has changed are the styles of the jackets and shoes they wear.

by Anneli Rufus

April 12, 2009

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

Caught up in the immediacy of modern-day crime, which we can follow in all its horror millisecond-by-millisecond via the Internet, we shudder in real time over the spring 2009 mass shootings around America and over the trial of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian rapist who imprisoned his own daughter for 24 years and fathered her seven children. (Read more about this harrowing case in John Glatt's Secrets in the Cellar, covered in this column.) Current crimes have a way of eclipsing older crimes, which fade into history and feel, in retrospect, almost quaint. Well, they shouldn't — because life and death meant then what it still means now, and writers of other eras were just as skilled at invoking shock and horror as their modern counterparts. Another of the books in this column, True Crime: An American Anthology, proves this conclusively with gripping accounts of now virtually forgotten murders by some of the finest writers this country has ever produced, from Mark Twain to James Thurber and beyond.

by Anneli Rufus