KILLERS AMIDST KILLERS

Powerful investigation into how the social vulnerabilities crystallized by the opioid epidemic have spawned a new kind of murder.

Jensen writes clearly and confidently, part of the new class of true-crime author–turned–amateur sleuth. He has helped solve multiple homicides and missing persons cases. This book began with the author’s investigation, for the TV show Crime Watch Daily, into the unsolved murders of two working-class women from Columbus, Ohio, who’d drifted into pill addiction and then prostitution. “Something about two best friends being murdered got to me,” writes the author, who acknowledges that today’s popular true-crime TV elides uncomfortable truths, especially regarding sex work and the drug epidemic in economically struggling communities. “The mainstream media,” writes Jensen, “believes that viewers will tune out as soon as they hear the victims are sex workers.” Using new analytical tactics developed by the Murder Accountability Project, the author pinpointed three homicide “clusters” in Ohio: “Fourteen missing or murdered women in a 120-mile area. And no task force. No headlines. No communication.” Working off his conversations with family and friends, Jensen paints affecting portraits of marginalized women tumbling into addiction, with plenty of enablers, including predatory men, apathetic or corrupt police, and the opioid epidemic’s corporate entities. “If you rank your serial killers based on body counts,” he writes, “the collective serial killers of the pill industry blow Gacy, Dahmer, and Bundy away.” Jensen followed up with suspects (despite increasing resistance from police), including one imprisoned killer whose duplicitous misogyny leads to the disturbing conclusion that most of the killers are nothing more than “fucked-up little narcissistic men-children.” Though the well-organized, angry narrative offers a chilling indictment of the criminal justice system, unfortunately, the murders at the core of the book ended in cold cases, with no named suspects. “These women were working for medicine,” writes Jensen. “These women put themselves in danger not to be sick. They were killing themselves to live.”

Worthwhile and often gripping journey through the misery underlying contemporary addiction.