A slight skew from the topic but well worth the read: Sir Syney Smith’s Mostly Murder.
“Depraved: The Definitive True Story oh H.H. Holmes.”
I agree with this. Charles Sobhraj isn’t just a killer. He’s like a real-life supervillain.
I think Bugliosi was afraid Manson would get out of the death penalty since he never actually killed anyone. So he played up the mystical race war aspect of the motive because he didn’t have anyone in the family other than Kasabian, who had not been there long, to learn about the other aspect of the race war angle. Now that all of the participants have spoken about what happened we can see that Bugliosi missed most of the actual motive.
Where is this alternative explanation presented/discussed?
I voted for The Onion Field but agree with the poster above that it was criminal to omit David Simon’s Homicide.
A shout out also for the grandfather of true crime books, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts by Thomas De Quincey. His description of the Ratcliff Highway murders is absolutely chilling. The maid returning from an errand for her master at home with his wife, young baby and apprentice. Her knocking at the door to be let in. The absolute stillness of the house, a deathly silence, no cheerful conversation, no sounds from the mother and baby. And then hearing the cautious steps coming down the stairs, walking down the hall towards the door. The dreadful unease of the maid as she and whoever was within stood inches from each other with the door between. Then the arrival of a neighbour, the hasty retreat of the footsteps and the subsequent discovery of master, apprentice, wife, and baby all butchered within.
It really is one of the greatest pieces of writing on murder in literary history and should be read by all fans of the genre.
BTW I’m a sucker for true crime. I used to love Crime Library on the net until it was taken over by some big media group and completely ruined. I shall definitely seek out some of the books on this poll that I haven’t read.
Correction: just checked. Misremembered an apprentice, it was only the master, wife and baby inside the house.
I never heard of this story until I found the book in a used bookstore.
The woman whose untimely death kicked off this very complicated story was probably not poisoned by her soon-to-be-estranged husband as her multimillionaire father believed; it’s now believed that she actually had toxic shock syndrome, a disease that had not yet been identified at the time.
Anyone who thinks school violence is a new thing ought to read this.
And this story is as much about the fate of the ransom money, a fascinating story in itself, as it is about the kidnapping and murder of a little boy.
Bugliosi’s And the Sea Will Tell was quite good as well. Wish I could rewatch the TV miniseries based on it
I like my fiction po-mo and my non-fiction meta, so I’ll nominate Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, about Jeffrey MacDonald suing Joe McGinnis over Fatal Vision. (I still need to check out Errol Morris’s recent book about the book about the book.)
Susan Atkins discussed it in her book. The Myth of Helter Skelter. An excerpt can be read at the bottom of this page.
The jist of it was that the motive behind the Tate/Labianca murders was not an attempt to start a race war but an attempt to free Bobby Beausoleil who was being held for murdering Gary Hinman who Manson was trying to steal money from so they could leave the area. He wanted to leave the area because he had shot a drug dealer who claimed to be in with the Black Panthers. He thought he had killed the dealer and the Panthers were coming after him. The ironic thing was that the dealer did not die from the gun shot, was not really connected with the Black Panthers,and nobody was coming after the family.
Interesting, thanks. I’ll have to pick up her book.
Not that it really matters. Family members killed a bunch of people, gruesomely and to no real point, because Manson told them to. The details of his delusions and mistakes are just that… details. If a more coherent but less accurate portrait of the motive was what convicted them - none inappropriately, it seems - then so be it. Motive is the weakest of the three pillars and many crimes have been committed for no definable motive at all.
I left a true crime classic off the list: Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966).
Great writing about the lunacy and panic that accompanied the crimes in the Boston area, and the strange characters that came under suspicion.
Does it conclude that DeSalvo was probably innocent?
And the Band Played On
Thats not a true crime book.
Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Worth reading for his description of how the media altered the facts to create a sellable story.
From the list, Helter Skelter.
No. It was first published when DeSalvo was still alive, and considered him guilty of all charges.
Have you read it? It absolutely is.
I’ve read both the books you mention (having first read the McGinniss book, of course). Errol Morris’s book was a major disappointment for me. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Morris, having made his career as an anti-authoritarian (not that there’s anything wrong with that), opposes the government’s case against MacDonald. The problem is that he has to resort to obvious distortions of the evidence in order to do so, chiefly (and I’ll spoiler this in case you don’t want to know in advance):
Morris leaves out of his book completely the evidence of the blood. As you’ll recall, the four family members each had a different blood type–an unusual circumstance, which allowed investigators to essentially re-create the crime. (If Victim A’s blood was underneath Victim B’s blood then Victim B bled there after Victim A did, and so on.) MacDonald’s story failed to match the evidence of the blood in major respects. And Morris never deals with that, instead doubling down on his “authority figures are liars” theme.