Anneli Rufus

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

June 20, 2011

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

At their best, true-crime books are character studies — getting languorously, even microscopically up close and personal with criminals, victims, witnesses, law-enforcement personnel, and whomever else gets swept up into the orbit of a crime. Page by page, we follow these people's paths as they race forward, double back, mark time, loop the loop and intersect. This is one of true crime's secret pleasures: Through reading these books and "meeting" these individuals — many of whom are very unlucky indeed — we marvel at how ordinary they appear to the outside world. As revealed in two of the books detailed this month, savage killers can also be suburban housewives, shuttling their kids to playdates and school. How well do we really know what's going on right now, next door?

by Anneli Rufus

May 30, 2011

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

Identity is a tricky thing. That name, that birthdate, and all those other details allegedly marking you as whom you claim to be are recorded on documents, in files, on cards, and in the archives of every institution from your bank to the church where you were baptized. But we live in a highly mobile society, amid dazzlingly adept technology. In an era when any image can be Photoshopped and even a world leader's birth certificate can be called into question by a large sector of the population, identity becomes a matter of trust. Who are you? Who am I? Why should we believe each other? When it comes to crime, the issue of identity looms large. Countless criminals strive to elude justice under false identities. The subject of one of this column's books, a small-town scammer who passed himself off as a Rockefeller, shifted identities for 30 years before running out of false names and false faces. The killers detailed in another of these books learned hard lessons about identity as their own effluent, left on their victims decades ago, reached out of the past to scream: It was him. It was him.

March 19, 2011

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

The first two books this time around share a common modus operandi: A young and much-loved son, whose parents had always given him everything, brings about the vicious murders of those very parents in the would-be comfort of their own suburban home. It's an MO so dark, so outrageous, so ironic, such a precise perversion of all that humanity holds sacred as to be almost Shakespearean. Taking the lives of those who gave you life: Murder is murder, but could any other kind of murder be crueler? The coldhearted calculations of Andrew Wamsley and David Legg led to four deaths, but destroyed many more lives than that.

 by 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