true crime

Wednesday, June 12, 2019 @ the Hueytown Public Library to discuss true crime:

Attendance:

Holley W., Emmet O’Neal Library

Mary Anne E., BPL Southern History

Jenn P., Five Points West Library

Michelle H., Irondale Library

A great big shout out to the fine folks at the Hueytown Public Library for hosting us AND for the yummy snacks!  We appreciate your hospitality!

The next RART meeting will be Wednesday, August 14th at 9am at the Trussville Public Library. I hope you’ve marked your calendars for the JCPLA Staff Development Day on Friday, August 16th at the Homewood Public Library.  There are so many great sessions that you’ll have trouble whittling down the list of what you’d like to learn!

Here’s a list of what we discussed:

The Infamous Birmingham Axe Murders: Prohibition Gangsters & Vigilante Justice by Jeremy W. Gray

(amazon.com) A reign of terror swept the streets of Birmingham in the 1920s. Criminals armed with small axes attacked immigrant merchants and interracial couples, leaving dozens dead or injured over the course of four years. Desperate for answers, police accepted clues from a Ouija board, while citizens clamored for gun permits for protection. The city's Italian immigrants formed their own association as protection against the Black Hand, an organized band of brutal criminals. Eventually, the police turned to a dangerous and untested truth serum to elicit confessions. Four black men and a teenage girl were charged and tried, while copycat killers emerged from the woodwork. Journalist Jeremy Gray tackles one of the most curious and violent cases in Magic City history.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes,and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin

(amazon.com) On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon. 

The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade. 
Or did she?

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

(amazon.com) For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

(I argue that this is a true crime of secrecy!) (amazon.com) Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

(amazon.com) Erik Larson—author of #1 bestseller In the Garden of Beasts—intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

(amazon.com) Drawing on extensive interviews and correspondence with many of Tann's surviving victims, Barbara Raymond shows how Tann not only popularised adoption - which until then had been feared and discouraged - but also commercialised and corrupted it. She tells how Tann abducted babies or coerced women to leave their children in her care and then sold them. To cover her kidnapping crimes she falsified birth certificates, a practice that was approved by legislators who believed it would spare adoptees the taint of illegitimacy - an one that still holds today in the form of 'amended' birth certificates and closed adoption records. 

Uncovering many life-shattering stories along the way, Raymond recounts how Tann openly sold more that 5,000 children, and killed so many through neglect that Memphis's infant mortality rate soared to the highest in the country. She explores how Tann's operation was able to thrive in a Tennessee governed by 'Boss' Ed Crump and the political network that allowed her to operate with impunity. And she portrays the lack of options available to women, affecting not only the birth mothers she robbed, but also Tann herself, who turned to social work after having been barred for a 'masculine profession' - the law. 

Written by an adoptive mother, The Baby Thief is part social history, part detective story, and part expose. It is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate in the modern era, when baby sellers operate overseas. It is particularly relevant at this time in the UK, amidst heated national debate over the controversial adoption targets that seem to provide a perverse incentive to remove babies from birth parents.

Michelle, Irondale Library

A Tale of Two Murders: Guilt, Innocence, and the Execution of Edith Thompson by Laura Thompson

(amazon.com) The death penalty is never without its ethical conflicts or moral questions. Never more so than when the person being led to the gallows may very well be innocent of the actual crime, if not innocent according social concepts of femininity.

A Tale of Two Murders is an engrossing examination of the Ilford murder, which became a legal cause ce´le`bre in the 1920s, and led to the hanging of Edith Thompson and her lover, Freddy Bywaters. On the night of October 3, 1922, as Edith and her husband, Percy, were walking home from the theatre, a man sprang out of the darkness and stabbed Percy to death. The assailant was none other than Bywaters.

When the police discovered his relationship with Edith, she―who had denied knowledge of the attack―was arrested as his accomplice. Her passionate love letters to Bywaters, read out at the ensuing trial, sealed her fate, even though Bywaters insisted Edith had no part in planning the murder. They were both hanged. Freddy was demonstrably guilty; but was Edith truly so?

In shattering detail and with masterful emotional insight, Laura Thompson charts the course of a liaison with thrice-fatal consequences, and investigates what a troubling case tells us about perceptions of women, innocence, and guilt.

Jenn, Five Points West Library

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

(amazon.com) We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem.

In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths―that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

Jenn, Five Points West Library

Unsolved Murders: True Crime Cases Uncovered by Amber Hunt

(amazon.com) This true crime book lets you judge for yourself, investigating some of the most infamous unsolved cases of the 20th and 21st centuries. It presents crime scenes, crucial evidence, witnesses, and persons of interest along with essential details and clues.

Unsolved Murders also profiles the psychology of the killer, discusses the background and life of the unfortunate victim (or victims), and explores how these horrific crimes impacted the victim's family and friends. Spanning domestic tragedies to serial killers with a love for the macabre, this book will have you up all night. Unsolved Murders: True Crime Cases Uncovered is like having your favorite true crime podcast or documentary at your fingertips every day.

Jenn, Five Points West Library

Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

(amazon.com) The highly anticipated first book by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, the voices behind the #1 hit podcast My Favorite Murder!

Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation.

In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness.
Jon, Avondale Library 

Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan

(amazon.com) Norco ’80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men―led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian―attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco ’80 transports the reader back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

In this riveting true story, a group of landscapers transformed into a murderous gang of bank robbers armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons. Their desperate getaway turned the surrounding towns into war zones. When it was over, three were dead and close to twenty wounded; a police helicopter was forced down from the sky, and thirty-two police vehicles were destroyed by thousands of rounds of ammo. The resulting trial shook the community to the core, raising many issues that continue to plague society today: from the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder within law enforcement to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces.
Jon, Avondale Library

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes on Netflix

(netflix.com) Present-day interviews, archival footage, and audio recordings made on death row form a searing portrait of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

Abducted in Plain Sight on Netflix

(netflix.com) In this true crime documentary, a family falls prey to the manipulative charms of a neighbor, who abducts their adolescent daughter. Twice.

A few other Erik Larson books:

Thunderstruck

(amazon.com) In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect murder.

With his unparalleled narrative skills, Erik Larson guides us through a relentlessly suspenseful chase over the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

(amazon.com) The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels.

But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beastslends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

(amazon.com) On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitaniawas one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wakebrings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.

PODCASTS OF INTEREST

In the Dark

Produced by American Public Media Reports, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and hosted by the series’ lead reporter, Madeleine Baran, In the Dark devotes a newsroom’s worth of time, energy, and resources to asking hard questions about justice in the United States.

Hidden Brain (not strictly true crime focused, but some episodes do explore the psychology behind various criminalities)

Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.

Accused: The Unsolved Murder of Elizabeth Andes

When Elizabeth Andes was found murdered in her Ohio apartment in 1978, police and prosecutors decided within hours it was an open-and-shut case. Two juries disagreed. The Cincinnati Enquirer investigates: Was the right guy charged, or did a killer walk free?

Aftermath

Reporters Amber Hunt from The Enquirer and Elizabeth Van Brocklin from The Trace travel the country talking to people whose lives changed in the blink of an eye. Their backgrounds, environments and stories all vary, but they share one defining truth: They’ve survived a gunshot.

Chernobyl

Peter Sagal and Craig Mazin discuss the episodes of HBO’s dramatic mini-series, Chernobyl. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) risk their lives and reputations to expose the truth about Chernobyl. Sagal and Mazin talk about what’s happened since Chernobyl, and what they’ve taken away from this series.

S-Town

John despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.

Breakdown

The AJC's Breakdown podcast is just that — the breakdown of the truth about American justice systems. The largest newsroom in the southeast delivers investigations and true crime cases that you cannot find anywhere else.

Atlanta Monster

Hysteria hits as kids disappear from their own Atlanta, Georgia neighborhoods.

My Favorite Murder

My Favorite Murder is the hit true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Since its inception in early 2016, the show has broken download records and sparked an enthusiastic, interactive “Murderino” fan base who come out in droves for their sold-out worldwide tours.

The Black Tapes

The Black Tapes is a serialized docudrama about one journalist's search for truth, her enigmatic subject's mysterious past, and the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt them both. 

Tanis

Tanis is a serialized docudrama about a fascinating and surprising mystery: the myth of Tanis. Tanis is an exploration of the nature of truth, conspiracy, and information. Tanis is what happens when the lines of science and fiction start to blur...

Here are a few best-of lists if you just can't get enough!

gamesradar's "The 10 Best True Crime Podcasts to Kill Your Free Time"

The Oprah Magazine's "12 True Crime Podcasts That Will Give You Goosebumps"

Discover Pod's "The 20 Best True Crime Podcasts (Beyond Serial and S-Town)"

Resonate Recording's "Best True Crime Podcasts 2019"