Wambaugh at his most waspishly funny, on the unlikely subjects of a murdered Pennsylvania family of three, a double murder, some flimflamming Sears robberies, a $750,000 life-insurance seam, shoplifting—and a generally impotent Don Juan sworn to chastity. The Main Line Murder Case began in early summer 1979 and was carried forward by a team of police investigators who worked on it and it alone until early summer 1986—the longest single investigation in the history of American law enforcement. The case lasted so long that Sergeant Joseph VanNort of the Pennsylvania State Police, who masterminded it, died midway through. The mordant hilarity arises at the plot's boxes within boxes within a labyrinth and at the stunning illogicality of people whose minds spring from "an eggbeater held together with Krazy glue." One point of entry to the staggering story is the disintegration of Jay C. Smith and his family. Smith, an Army Reserve colonel with 27 years service, was also principal of Upper Merion Senior High and known among the faculty as the Prince of Darkness. He had fabulously repulsive eyes, containing layer upon layer of depravity, and as the case broadens, he earns every shiver of the reader's full-blown distaste. The despised Smith, some thought, "looked like an obscene phone call." Chemically dependent on something, he loved to switch on the school intercom and wooze out a fogbound fireside chat that might take up two class periods. His druggy daughter accused him of chemically inciting his wife's extremely rapid cancer. Then the daughter and her husband disappeared—maybe into Daddy's acid bath of his trash bags—and have not been seen since. Meanwhile, William Bradfield, an amorous English teacher with a crush on Ezra Pound, had so many women in his life, all of whom he balanced against each other, that his only way out seemed to be to murder one of them for profit. Aided by a miserable crew who revered him as a magnetic polymath, he enlisted Jay Smith as his major accomplice and together they murdered one mistress and her two kids—Bradfield was sole beneficiary of her gigantic insurance policy. Much of the actual dirty deeds are still hidden in mist, with no confessions and four bodies still unrecovered. Wambaugh charges ahead masterfully at 90 miles an hour and even manages to trim the lengthy trial proceedings to a lively pace.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1986
ISBN: 0553269321
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
IN THE NEWS
The Atlanta child murders comprise the starting point for this virtuoso polemic against racism in America. Baldwin writes bluntly: "Others may see American progress in economic, racial and social affairs—I do not." It is this distinctive Baldwinian voice of outrage that powers his penetrating examination of why color still divides America. Baldwin thinks that Wayne Williams, the black man accused of the murders of 28 black children over a 22-month period, was railroaded. No matter that his conviction was presided over by a black judge in a Southern city governed by a black mayor. Williams was prosecuted under intense pressure to close a case that might tarnish Atlanta's reputation as a "city too busy to hate." A black administration's presence, says Baldwin, did not change the fact that the legal system served the commercial interests of a booming Southern city. To consider this only as an issue of class, contends Baldwin, is a denial by blacks and whites alike of America's legacy of slavery. He writes that ". . .this country, in toto, from Atlanta to Boston, to Texas to California, is not so much a vicious racial caldron—many, if not most countries are that—as a paranoid color wheel." By sketching the emergence of the black middle class and its complicity in maintaining the "white" rules, and the white flight from the city to the suburbs—leaving a mostly black, impoverished city. Baldwin describes how the wheel goes round. And its consequence remains: How do you become "white" enough to get up and out of the ghetto? Ironically, it was the rage of the parents of the murdered children that set Atlanta's color wheel spinning. Once they provoked national attention, according to Baldwin, the pressure to solve the crimes began. Until then, no one was ". . .compelled to hear the needs of a captive population."Baldwin delivers his judgment in cranky, idiosyncratic exposition that links the state of race relations with the prosecution of Williams. He details the official maneuvering that brought Williams to trial and the extraordinary legal decision to charge him with the murders of two black men, but permit the accusations and evidence of all the children's murders to be discussed at his trial. Baldwin has penetrated a sensational crime with his considerable novelist's skill for seeing things the rest of us don't. In the process, he's delivered a stinging indictment of racial stagnation.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1985
ISBN: 1568495757
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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