"In January 1957," Michael Newton writes, "Glatman had a brainstorm. He was moving to Los Angeles." What immediately follows -- a history of Los Angeles -- typifies the author's approach throughout this book, which includes many other mini-histories, like that of the prisons in which Glatman was incarcerated and a primer on Jews in America (just because Harvey and his parents happened to be Jewish, never mind that they were non-practicing Jews). Some of Newton's information is interesting in itself, much of it is merely distracting, and all of it is completely irrelevant. Most surprising, however, is that Newton even manages to make his own commentary on Glatman's crimes somewhat suspect and redundant, for Glatman, with an almost admirable air of wholeness and truthfulness, confessed everything, and Newton provides that confession verbatim in a later chapter. We may thank him for that -- it's the most interesting part of the book -- but it tends to undermine the entire concept of Rope, for Glatman comes off as a guy who, as serial killers go, oughtn't to rate anything more than a long article. Intuitively that seems wrong -- here's a guy who raped, bound, and photographed three women (using a tripod, no less) before murdering them, but the fact is, sad little Harvey really just wanted to screw. Neither Glatman, the available record, nor Newton is able to penetrate much deeper than that. Included in the bloat, toward the end, is an intriguing anti-profiling section that cuts against the grain of contemporary thought (or myth, as Newton would have it).
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"In January 1957," Michael Newton writes, "Glatman had a brainstorm. He was moving to Los Angeles." What immediately follows -- a history of Los Angeles -- typifies the author's approach throughout this book, which includes many other mini-histories, like that of the prisons in which Glatman was incarcerated and a primer on Jews in America (just because Harvey and his parents happened to be Jewish, never mind that they were non-practicing Jews). Some of Newton's information is interesting in itself, much of it is merely distracting, and all of it is completely irrelevant. Most surprising, however, is that Newton even manages to make his own commentary on Glatman's crimes somewhat suspect and redundant, for Glatman, with an almost admirable air of wholeness and truthfulness, confessed everything, and Newton provides that confession verbatim in a later chapter. We may thank him for that -- it's the most interesting part of the book -- but it tends to undermine the entire concept of Rope, for Glatman comes off as a guy who, as serial killers go, oughtn't to rate anything more than a long article. Intuitively that seems wrong -- here's a guy who raped, bound, and photographed three women (using a tripod, no less) before murdering them, but the fact is, sad little Harvey really just wanted to screw. Neither Glatman, the available record, nor Newton is able to penetrate much deeper than that. Included in the bloat, toward the end, is an intriguing anti-profiling section that cuts against the grain of contemporary thought (or myth, as Newton would have it).
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**** Olsen's riveting account of how Dean Corll killed at least 28 boys between the ages of 13 and 19 from 1970-1973, aided and abetted by two teenaged accomplices and the city of Houston, Texas. While it's possible that later works on the case provide more detail (Olsen doesn't appear to have bothered to wait for the trials of Corll's accomplices, one of whom killed Corll before he could dispatch his latest victim), it's unlikely any are informed by the same passion. And it is Olsen's passion, though myopic and arguably elitist, that gives this work its driving force. It's about a hellhole called Houston that is inhabited by worn out, uneducated hicks and policed by overworked cops who have coined their own category of homicide, "misdemeanor murder," so as to be able to focus on the really important crimes -- or to take the weekend off. One gets the sense that Olsen wouldn't have minded much if Houston itself were wiped off the map, instead of just a relatively few children. Not that he doesn't appreciate the children; more that he cannot abide the idea that Houstonians themselves seem to care so little about them. The whole thing would be offensive if it weren't in some respects quite true. The case itself is fascinating in its scope and diabolical incestousness (so many of the victims were located, along with the killers, in the same small area of Houston, and interacted with each other), and even Olsen's recounting of Corll's history late in the book makes for interesting reading (which is not often the case). Unbiased? No. But forcefully written. ** Originally published in 1966 and written by a reporter who covered the case, this book deals with the crime and subsequent trial of Gertrude Baniszewski, her three oldest children (aged 12, 15, and 17), and two teenage neighbor boys who beat, tortured, and abused a 16-year-old female boarder in the woman's home for several months in 1965 until the girl succumbed at last to her injuries and died. Because so many of the eyewitnesses to the crime were involved in it and since the others were children themselves with their own individual loyalties, Dean is forced to reconstruct the events leading to the girl's death from often unreliable and contradictory testimony. Though this was unavoidable, it makes for a convoluted and confusing summary, the power of which isn't in the details but rather the accumulated weight of so much cruelty. The larger trial portion of the book (the judge ruled against separate trials for the defendants, though these were later granted on appeal), is much more straightforward, but also much less interesting, and adds neither insight to the trial procedure itself nor anything of substance to the earlier reconstruction. (It does, however, contain one memorable line of testimony. When asked whether he'd ever seen the victim doing anything "unusual" in the woman's house, a neighbor boy replied, "I seen her studying a few times.") A truly tragic case, but as for this book it isn't entirly immaterial to its quality to mention (as Dean does himself in a new preface for the 2008 edition) that it was commissioned by Bee-Line, a publisher of pornographic novels, in an attempt to go mainstream.
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