Crime Books and Films

Dec. 5, 2011

by Claudette Walker & Matrix Filia

Permission granted for use of the following experts from the book to Crime Magazine by Abacus Books, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Abacus Books, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

With Postscript  by Laura Schultz, MFT

Excerpt from Chapter 1

WHY?

No other single word is less relevant or more relevant in the death of Caylee Anthony. A lovely child, she was allowed only 34 months to dance on this earth.

Caylee Anthony, not quite three years old, had been missing for 31 days before a police report was filed. That, we believe, is what brought worldwide media attention to this case. Since that day, the media has brought every detail they could find to the attention of the public, including the arrest of the child’s mother, who will be tried for first-degree murder over the next month.

The media has provided us with everything from pictures of the beautiful child to pictures of the mother out dancing during the 31 days she did not report her child missing. We have heard the 911 calls and seen thousands of pages of discovery documents filed in the court by the prosecution and defense for the upcoming criminal case. All which are available online in a click, from the media. TV coverage from the Discovery Channel, 48 Hours, Geraldo Rivera, True TV, and Nancy Grace has played week after week during the three years the criminal charges have been pending. Some of that coverage has been because of the peculiarities of the case, some of it because the defendant is a pretty young white woman, and some of it because of Florida’s position among the top five states in both death row population and the imposition of executions.

The mother, Casey Anthony, has been tried in the media and presumed guilty by most who have heard the massive media coverage. Now the questions are what of this information will be admissible and what other evidence yet unknown will make the courtroom? Who will judge her on that evidence and what will the result be under the judicial system of the United States of America? 

Lawyers have debated this case on national TV. The defense team’s lawyers have granted interviews for pretrial publicly. To us, that is simply stunning – their job is not to aggrandize themselves but to defend their client, and most of the media interviews seem to be the former and not the latter. Casey has a legal dream team that has been paid in part by her parents, in part by her sale of photos of her child, in part by taxpayers, and in part pro bono (without pay) except for the massive media advertising the lawyers are receiving for free. And the people of the State of Florida are paying for all other costs: investigators, costs of prosecution, discovery documents, hearings, judges, bailiffs, and so forth. The list is unending, and the dollars spent are said to be in the millions.

Nov. 7, 2011

True-crime books make great cold-weather reading – and great holiday gifts – because they make us feel safe. Reading these accounts of crazed psychopaths who went on rampages and seemingly normal suburbanites with lethal secrets, we shiver and think: At least I'm not trapped in a Cape Cod kitchen with a knife-wielding murderer. At least I'm not on a beach with Joran Van Der Sloot. Wherever we are suddenly feels like a blissful refuge – for a little while, at least. But the further you get into almost any true-crime book, the more you realize that the madness and mayhem leaping from its pages could easily happen to you. A Harvard-educated professor goes postal with a Ruger. A child vanishes from a bus stop. The respected commander of Canada’s largest military base prowls and murders at night. Safety is a relative thing.

by Anneli Rufus

Oct. 31, 2011 

Special to Crime Magazine:  An excerpt from David A. Gibb’s book, Camouflaged Killer: The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams.  By day Williams commanded the largest military base in Canada; by night he stalked single women in their bedrooms.  What began as a fetish to steal women’s undergarments grew into a compulsion to rape and murder. 

by David A. Gibb

Chapter Ten

Enemy under Fire

With true military precision, Colonel Russell Williams arrived at the Ottawa police headquarters at 3 p.m. and reported for his scheduled interview.

He was introduced to Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, a forty-something, slightly bookish, unassuming officer in a dark suit and tie. Mild-mannered in his approach and soft-spoken by nature, Smyth was not the type of fellow one would suspect of being a police officer. In fact, much like TV’s Columbo, he probably owed much of his success to people’s innate tendencies to underestimate his talents and resolve. At six feet two, Williams’s tall and lean build dominated the smaller-framed officer.

Smyth, who had started his policing career in 1988, was one of only a half-dozen certified criminal profilers in Canada. His success as a profiler and polygraph operator for the OPP’s Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Services unit had been well documented.[1] As far as cops went, he seemed to have the proverbial Midas touch, the kind of cop most case investigators would want holding their ladder.

Oct. 10, 2011 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Scott Bartz’s recently published book, The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson, available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com.

by Scott Bartz

Introduction

On September 29, 1982, seven people in Chicago died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Authorities immediately blamed the poisonings on an anonymous madman who had supposedly put the poisoned capsules into Tylenol bottles in several local retail stores. The evidence, however, refutes this madman-in-the-retail-stores hypothesis, and points instead to a culprit who planted the lethal capsules at a warehouse in the Tylenol distribution system - a system the police did not understand and the media did not investigate.

Sept. 12, 2011

A Predatory Priest by David Margolick is available as a Kindle Single on Amazon.com

by David Margolick

Hard by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the outskirts of Belen, New Mexico, on a rutted gravel driveway flanked by scrubby brush and lonely cottonwoods, Tommy Deary’s three youngest brothers walked side by side. They’d traveled a long way from Putnam, Connecticut, the small New England mill town where they’d grown up, the last three sons in a succession of 13 children, but no farther than the man they’d come to see, the man they believed to be in the house barely visible in the distance. That man had grown up only a few miles from them, but had spent the last 30 years in a strange ecclesiastical exile. Thirty years earlier, in fact, at St. Mary’s Church in Putnam, to which the Dearys, like so many Catholic families in town had flocked every Sunday, he’d briefly been one of the priests. Very briefly, it turned out, though for longer than long enough.

July 18, 2011

An excerpt from Peter Manso’s recently published book Reasonable Doubt: The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen.

by Peter Manso

Introduction

The American murder trial as a metaphor for the nation as a whole has become, in recent years, almost a cliché. Our best writers have seized upon it as a vehicle of self-expression. Academics argue over its myths and realities. The producers of TV series capitalize on its imagery, earning the networks heady profits second only to those raked in by Oprah. At some point or another, almost every American, rich or poor, white or black, has confronted the American justice system and its complexities—with pride, skepticism, awe, revulsion, or a combination of all these.

I began this project with the assumption that the Christa Worthington murder would be the basis for my “trial book” (every journalist wants to do a trial book), that it would take only 18 months to complete, and that my involvement as the author would be no different from my involvement in the half-dozen other books I’ve written, even though I’d known Christa Worthington, my neighbor in the town of Truro on the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for more than a dozen years.

Like so many assumptions, these proved false, largely because of what I found while digging into the crime, its investigation by the Massachusetts State Police, and the trial I’d planned to cover in the style of the late Dominick Dunne, notebook in hand, memorializing courtroom events in a so-called objective manner. Instead, I wound up lending assistance to the defense team and soon found myself in a great deal of trouble—specifically (not to say surreally), hauled into court, where I was indicted on a series of felonies after voicing my belief, both in print and as a guest commentator on Court TV, that the Cape and Islands district attorney in charge of the case (and also the case against me) was an ambitious, racially insensitive politico who’d cut corners in the courtroom and during the three and a half years he’d supervised the police investigation. My run-in with the lawman, however, is a story for another time.

July 6, 2011 Special to Crime Magazine 

This is an excerpt from the book, Straight from the Hood: Amazing but True Gangster Tales, by Ron Chepesiuk and Scott Wilson. The book is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com) and is available from the web site, Amazon.com and other publishing outlets.

by Ron Chepesiuk and Scott Wilson

 Al “Scarface” Capone—Impresario to Chicago’s Black Musicians  

The Federal Government closed Storyville down in 1917 during World War I over the objections of New Orleans’s city hall, claiming that the district was a threat to national security. In reality, many Americans of the early 20th century were not comfortable with what they heard about Storyville. For them, it was an integrated den of sin, which, as one New Orleans guidebook explained; “held out the allure of sex across color lines, even though segregation legislation was passed in New Orleans in 1894.”

With Storyville’s closure, New Orleans’ jazz musicians had to find work, so many of them joined the flood of black migrants from the south and ended up in Chicago, the Windy City, making the metropolis America’s jazz capitol and one of the country’s most exciting cities of the 1920s. The nightlife came with gambling, alcohol and prostitution. Gangsters often owned the clubs and nightclubs in the Black Belt, and as Walter Reckless, the author of Vice in Chicago, noted: “They were important links in the chain of beer running operations conducted by different gangs.”