Books Set in North America; United States

Deliberate Cruelty: Trumann Capote, The Millionaire's Wife and the Murder of the Century, by Roseanne Montillo (2022)

 

Deliberate Cruelty is about the rise and fall of Ann Woodward and Truman Capote, two prominent figures in New York society.  Their paths occasionally crossed, and Capote was “deliberately cruel” in his writings of Ann.

 

Ann Woodward (née Evangeline Lucille Crowell; 1915 – 1975) grew up in poverty in Kansas, but she had big dreams.  She changed her name and set off for New York, where she became a model, actress and nightclub dancer.  It was as a nightclub dancer that she met William Woodward, Sr.  They likely carried on an affair until the father introduced her to William Woodward, Jr.  The son was smitten, possibly as an act of rebellion against his tight-laced and monied family.

 

When Ann and William, Jr., married, Ann became the socialite she had dreamed of becoming.  Life was not all she expected, however.  Soon William, Jr., tired of her and the two began having very public fights.  One night in 1955, Ann shot and killed her husband, thinking that he was the prowler who had been breaking into homes in their posh neighborhood.  Although Ann was ultimately not convicted of her husband’s killing (a cover-up by her in-laws to avoid a worse scandal?), she was shunned from her former society life.

 

Truman Capote (1924 – 1984), was also born into poverty and came from a dysfunctional family.  He, too, had dreams of making it big.  With the publication of In Cold Blood, he became a household name and a fixture in New York society.  Capote became the confident of all the high society socialites, or swans as he called them. They spilled all their secrets to him.  Capote imagined his next book, which would be called Answered Prayers, to be a fictionalized account of all the tales that his swans had revealed.  The sordid scandal of the Woodward killing was red meat to Capote.  He took to calling Ann Woodward Mrs. Bang Bang.

 

Capote’s downfall came with the publication and article entitled La Côte Basque, 1965, which was published in Esquire magazine.  The story was a chapter from his incomplete novel Answered Prayers.  La Côte Basque, 1965, was a thinly veiled portrayal of his swans.  Once the story was published he was instantly cut off from high society, that had been so meaningful to him.

 

This was a fast and fun read.

 

Read: March 13, 2023

 

4 Stars

 

Books Set in North America: United States, Washington, D.C.

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: The Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (2016)

In 2000, an informant provided the FBI with a package that contained a sample of confidential documents and pages of codes that, once deciphered, indicated that the writer was offering to sell United States top secret documents.  A clue as to the identity of the letter’s writer was the fact that many words were misspelled.  After an exhaustive search, the FBI identified the writer as Brian P. Regan, a disgruntled security specialist with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), who, realizing that he wasn’t getting a promotion, decided to supplement his income by selling classified intelligence to foreign countries.  His first target was Libya, before moving on to Iraq and China.

The author explored Regan’s childhood.  He was from a working-class family and was a bit of an odd duck.  In school, he was often the butt of jokes.  He learned early on that cheating helped him move on with his life.  By cheating on the entrance exams, he enlisted in the military as a non-commissioned officer.  He had a talent for cracking codes, which landed him a job with the NRO.

After marrying and beginning a family, he soon found himself heavily in debt.  Hence, his scheme to sell America’s secrets to foreign powers.  For this amateur, this proved to be more difficult than he imagined.  He copied numerous top secret and confidential papers and buried them throughout federal properties.  He encrypted the location of these papers with a complex code.  These buried documents were to provide him with insurance in the event that he was ever caught.

Regan sent numerous coded letters to foreign powers with the offer to sell secrets, but none of his contact took his bait.

The author provided a brief history on code and encryption, dating back thousands of years.

This was a fascinating book and a true-life thriller.

Read:  January 13, 2023

4 Stars

Books Set in Europe; Italy

Murder in Matera, by Helene Stapinski (2017)

 

Journalist Helene Stapinski grew up with the family lore of her great-great-grandmother Vita.  Vita had immigrated to the United States in the 1890s with her two teenage son, leaving her husband behind.  Vita was a murderess.  She had killed someone and left Italy to escape punishment.  She was also said to be a loose woman.  Why did she leave her husband behind?  She certainly paid the ultimate price for her crime when she, herself, was killed by a blow to the head at age 64.

 

Once in America, one of Vita’s sons went into a life of crime, as did the author’s grandfather.  Now the author ponders whether there really is a criminal gene, and would it be passed on to her children?

 

This thought haunts her, so she decides to venture back to the family’s ancestral home in Bernalda, Italy ~ the instep of Italy’s boot to learn her family’s history.  With little knowledge of her family background, with limited ability to speak Italian, and with two small children in tow, the author arrived in Bernalda and began asking questions.  She comes up empty.

 

Ten years later, the author ventured back to Italy, this time armed with two capable researchers who assist her as she pores over public birth, death, marriage records, and court murder transcripts.  What she finds astonishes her.

 

In the course of uncovering her family history, the author describes what life would have been like for the average peasant living hand-to-mouth in this rugged part of Italy.  The wealthy landowners were still expected to sleep with a young bride of his peasant worker.  The author envisions that this is what happened to Vita.  Her telling of Vita’s life is largely fiction, but is a plausible snapshot of how people lived in Bernalda in the latter half of the 1800s.

 

Spoiler Alert:  The trial transcript does, indeed, describe a murder.  The murderer is not, however, Vita, but instead, her husband Francesco.  The peasants are starving and do anything to get food for their families.  In the dead of night, Francesco and two of his friends were out taking pears from their landowner’s property.  They were confronted by whom they thought was the landowner.  The landowner had a shotgun and shot at the three men, slightly injuring one.  The other two men confronted the gunman, knocked him to the ground and badly beat him.  The injured man died a few days later.  Only later to they learn that the injured man was a young teenager, probably out to protect his family’s fruit orchard.  Francesco is found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison.

 

A close look at the birth certificates of Vita’s children reveals that Vita is the wife of Francesco, but that he is “far from town” at the time of the births.  This leads the author to surmise that, with her husband in prison, Vita “gave” herself to the landowner in exchange for food.  The author also realized that if there is a murderous gene, it was not in Vita’s side of the family afterall.

 

This was a fast-paced read.  Much of what the author writes about her “murderous” great-great-grandmother is speculation, but does provide a glimpse of the harsh life of a peasant living in southern Italy in the later 1800s.

 

Read:  April 16, 2022

 

4 Stars

 

 

Books Set in North America: United States

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933 ~ 1934, by Bryan Burrough (2004)

In the late 1980s, the files on the activities of the early years of the FBI were released.  The author, while watching a documentary on the Barker Gang, became intrigued by the first spate of criminals deemed Public Enemies.  This book is the result of his interest.  He poured over FBI files and wrote this comprehensive look at the FBI’s pursuit of four groupings of criminal gangs that were active in the early 1930s ~ Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and the Barker Gang.

Although the FBI had been in existence since 1908 (as the Bureau of Investigation), in the early years, the agents were forbidden to carry weapons.  The philosophy was that they were an investigative branch ~ the arrests were to be accomplished by the local jurisdictions.

This changed in the 1930s.  The Great Depression brought with it a new kind of criminal ~ bank robbers.  It was the deadly Kansas City massacre of a number of law men that changed the face of the FBI.  In June 1933, a criminal gang led by Vernon Miller set out to free fellow criminal, Frank Nash, who was in Federal custody and was being transported in Missouri.  Miller’s gang ambushed and opened fire on law officers, killing four.  Nash was killed in the ensuing gunfire.  This massacre got the attention of the J. Edgar Hoover. It has been speculated that Pretty Boy Floyd was involved in the massacre, but this has not definitively been proven.

The FBI had few trained agents, and none with any really experience with weapons and very limited jurisdiction.  At the time, robbing banks was not under the jurisdiction of the Feds.  The FBI had to work with local law enforcement officers, some of which were also ill-equip to handle major crimes, or were not willing to work with the federal officers.

This book shows the growing pains of the early years of the FBI.  Homer Cummings, the United States Attorney General, had to convince Congress to expand the power and authority of the FBI.  Soon after the Kansas City massacre, the FBI was training its agents to use weapons.  Some of their interrogation procedures, however, left much to be desired.

The book delves into the activities of Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barker Gang.

Dillinger came from a middle-class background.  He was good looking and was known to jump over bank railings when he robbed banks.  He was exceedingly polite.  He captured the public’s attention and was seen as a Robin-Hood figure in robbing banks. It was not his aim to hurt anyone during his crime sprees.  When he was ultimately betrayed and killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, he had achieved near national folk hero status.

During this same period of history, Bonnie and Clyde were ruthlessly crossing the country, leaving a bloody path in their wake.  During their lifetime, they were largely unknown, except for the locales of their robbing and killing.  The FBI sought the couple, but bungled their investigative efforts.  In the end, it was a posse of local law officers who ambushed the two criminals.

The author also followed the exploits of the Barker Gang.  Although Hoover publicized that the “brains” behind the Barker Gang was the criminal’s mother, Kate “Ma” Barker, the FBI files showed that she was actually more concerned with jigsaw puzzles and had little before-the-fact knowledge of the gang’s criminal activity.

The FBI had a tip that Dillinger and his gang were holed up in an inn called Little Bohemia in northern Wisconsin.  The FBI agents, still without expertize in weaponry, badly misjudged the situation. In the dark of night, in a raid lead by Melvin Purvis, came upon the inn.  The FBI, mistaking local patrons leaving the inn for the Dillinger gang, began a shootout, killing the innocent patrons.  One federal agent was also killed, but Dillinger slipped through their fingers.

Baby Face Nelson was one of the most brutal criminals during this era.  He seemed to delight in terrorizing and killing victims during his robberies.  Agents trailed him all across the country before he was finally killed in another shoot-out in Illinois.

By the end of the 1934, the FBI had gained its footing and overcome the fumbles of its earlier year and was well on its way to the power and prestige is has today.

A fascinating and very readable book.

Read: August 2, 2019

5 Stars

Books Set in North America: New England

True Crime Addict, by James Renner (2016)

In the evening of February 9, 2004, U Mass student Maura Murray simply disappeared after a minor car crash on Route 112 in Woodsville, New Hampshire.  A passing motorist (who lived within sight of the accident) stopped to offer assistance.  Maura declined his help.  The motorist then went home and called the police to report the accident. By the time police arrived, the car was still at the scene, but Maura was gone.

Enter the author, James Renner.  Renner is an investigative journalist, with a special interest in crime.  After having been fired from his job at a newspaper (for unspecified reasons), he became obsessed with Maura Murray’s disappearance. He decided to investigate the disappearance.

On the surface, Maura seemed to live a charmed life.  She had been a Cadet at West Point, until she decided to change universities and enroll as a nursing student at the University of Massachusetts. She was engaged to be married to Billy, who was the All-American boy.  Sadly, behind the façade, thing couldn’t be more different.

Shortly before Maura left the University on February 9, she told her colleagues that she needed to attend a family emergency.  This proved to be false.  There was no family emergency, nor was there any perceivable reason for her to be in New Hampshire on that evening.

Renner follows the threads of Maura’s life.  Because this is still an “open investigation”, law enforcement officials could give Renner very little information.  Still, Renner dogged Maura’s friends and family in hopes of uncovering the truth of her disappearance.  Interestingly, Maura’s family virtually shut down all communication channels and her closest friends were also unwilling to open up to the author.

In the process, Renner describes his own life in a remarkable candid fashion to explain his obsession with crime and criminal investigations.  He also is very candid about his own use of drugs, some prescribed and other not, his history with his family’s skeletons, and his trouble child, and his self-destructive behavior.

Renner pursued this case for years, even setting up a blog inviting others to provide him with clues as to Maura’s whereabouts.  This book, part crime story, part memoir, recounts Renners research efforts and he offers a possible solution to the disappearance of Maura Murray.

The author has a skill with words.  This book was very readable and enjoyable despite the sad subject of a possible abduction of a young woman with a full life ahead of her.

Read: December 2, 2018

4.5 Stars 

Books Set in the United States: New York City

Queen of Thieves, by J. North Conway (2014)

Queen of Thieves is ostensibly the story of Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, a German-Jewish immigrant who became one of the most notorious fences in organized crime during New York’s Gilded Age.  The book spends a lot of time discussing the politically corrupt environment of New York City during the latter part of the 1800s.

Fredericka and her husband, Wolf, immigrated to America in the 1850s.  Like many other immigrants, they became peddlers.  Fredericka soon learned, however, that it was far more lucrative to peddle in stolen goods.  Bribes went a long way in her new profession.  For over twenty-five years, she was the reigning “Queen” of fencing stolen property.  She ruled over a network of gangs who aided in the illicit business.  In the process, she became incredibly wealthy.  By 1880, she had a personal wealth of over $1M.

Her empire came to an end when she was arrested by a Pinkerton detective.  The ensuing court battle was more of a fight between the court system and the police department, however, with each side accusing the other of corruption.  Ultimately, Fredericka made her escape and fled to Canada, which at the time had no extradition agreement with the United States.  She lived quietly in Canada until her death.  Her body was returned to New York where she is buried.  People flocked to her funeral.  In keeping with the nature of her work, many people who attended her funeral found their pockets were picked!

The book was interesting.  The best parts were the chapters describing the court scenes of her trial with the arguments between her attorneys and the judge.

Read:  March 23, 2018

3.5 Stars

Books Set in the United States: Arizona and Oregon

Small Sacrifices: A True Story of Passion and Murder, by Ann Rule (1987)

In 1983, Elizabeth Diane Downs, who went by Diane, drove her car to the emergency room at a hospital in Oregon with her three bloodied children.  She claimed that a shaggy-haired would-be carjacker had shot her children when she stopped to offer the stranger assistance.  Seven-year-old Cheryl was dead and the other children, 8-year old Christie and 3-year old Danny, were seriously injured.  Miraculously, the two injured children survived.

Police initially searched for the carjacker, but the evidence didn't match up and soon led them to believe that Diane had shot her children.  As they probed into her background, they discovered that she had married young and had a disastrous marriage.  She had a string of affairs, and was particularly "in love" with Lew, a fellow postal worker.  Lew had indicated that he didn't want children, which may have provide the motive for Diane to eliminate her children.

The book goes into much detail about how the police and prosecutor put together their case.  The author used actual transcripts from the trial, which is riveting.

Read:  January 24, 2018

4 Stars

Books Set in the United States: New England

Mystery on the Isles of Shoals, by J. Dennis Robinson (2014)

I picked up this book for two reasons: First, it is about the Isles of Shoals, the mysterious islands off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, where I spent my childhood. Second, because it reminded me of my late mother. My mother first told me about the ax murders that had taken place in the 1870s on Smuttynose Island. This book isn't really a mystery, per se, as we known from the start that the murderer was captured, tried, convicted and executed. The "mystery" is the legend that surrounds the murders.

Almost as soon as the murder of two Norwegian immigrant women were murdered on Smuttynose Island, their deaths became local legend. The author of this book attempts to dispel the legend and compile the evidence that supported the trial of Louis Wagner and show that justice was served.

The two women, Karen Christensen and her sister-in-law, Anethe Matae Christensen, were brutally murdered on the night of March 6, 1873. The women, along with Maren Hontvet, were alone on the island that evening and, with their husbands, were the sole residents of the island. On that night, the women were all together in the house owned by the Hontvet's, Anethe and Maven's husbands were on the mainland preparing their nets for a fishing expedition. John Hontvet, Maren's husband, was a successful fisherman and was believed to have some money hidden in his house.

Enter Louis Wagner. He was a Prussian immigrant down on his luck. He stole a dory and oared out the 10 or so miles to the island in the dark of the night with plans to seal John Hontvet's stash of money. He knew the men of the house were on the mainland (in fact, he was going to assist them in preparing their nets), so thought he could easily enter the house, grab the money and return to the mainland with no one being the wiser. His planned robbery, however, went terribly wrong, when, upon entering the dark house on Smuttynose, he awakened Karen, who was an unexpected visitor in the house.

He picked up an ax and began bludgeoning the women. Maren was able to escape, but Karen and Anethe were not so lucky. After stealing approximately $16, Wagner rowed back to the mainland and set off for Boston, where he spent to stolen money on a haircut and new clothing.

Wagner quickly became the main murder suspect and was caught. He never actually confessed and offered numerous theories and stories explaining his sudden departure for Boston, not of which made any sense. Despite this, many people questioned whether or not he was the actual murderer, and in the a trial that went on for days, many technician theories were raised. He was ultimately found guilty and hanged.

Many books have been written about the Smuttynose ax murders, including Anita Shreve's novel, The Weight of Water. Her book takes a fictional spin on the murders and depicts Wagner in a more sympathetic light than the fact show.

I found this book an interesting read. As I noted, it is not so much of a mystery as it is a compilation of facts the support a finding that Louis Wagner had the means and opportunity to commit this horrendous crime. The author also provides an interesting history into life in the New England fishing villages and thoughts on capital punishment at this period in time.

3 Stars

Books Set in the United States: Oklahoma

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann (2017)

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann recounts the calculated murders of members of the Osage tribe in the 1920s solely for their oil rights in Oklahoma.  By the 1890s, the Osage had been relegated to a rocky area in Oklahoma, basically deemed uninhabitable for the white families moving and settling west.  In the early 1890s, oil was discovered and, because the Osage owned the land, they quickly became very, very rich.  The United States Government determines that the Osage need white guardians to protect them and their money.  Many of the “guardians” however, actual use their status to deprive the Osage from their wealth.

By the 1920s, the Osage begin to die under mysterious circumstances.  The book focuses on Mollie Burkhard, a young Osage woman married to Ernest Burkhart, a white.  In 1921, Mollie’s sister, Anna, was found shot and killed and left in a ravine.  She was the second of Millie’s sister to die.  The first sister died of a “wasting” disease shortly before Anna’s death.  Then, Mollie mother died.  Within a year or two, Mollie’s remaining sister and husband were killed when their house was bombed.

Within 4 years, over 20 Osage were known to have been killed or died unnatural deaths.  There was no single method of the killings.  Local law enforcement was corrupt and offered little hope to the Osage.  Finally, the killings reach the attention of the United States government and the matter is handed over to the nascent agency that would later be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by a young J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover desperately wanted a win, so he handed the case over to former Texas Ranger Tom White.  The book describes how Tom and his team laboriously searched through records and documents looking for clues.  What he finds was a truly cold and calculated scheme to steal the wealth from the Osage.

The author also provides insight into an era of US history that was not taught in my school growing up.

The book is a real page-turner.

Read:  May 28, 2017

5 Stars