A thoroughly researched, well-told story of a true crime that can never see punishment.
A killing in Australia sheds light on a long history of violence against Aboriginal people.
In a scenario that will be familiar to students of Native American repatriation, Australian historian McKenna opens with the skull of a man killed in 1934, his head consigned to a museum in Adelaide. The skull belonged to Yokununna, a leader of an Aboriginal people who made their homes at Uluru, the place once known as Ayers Rock. “Australian white supremacist culture bears responsibility for this history,” writes the author. “But there was one white man who played a leading role in it.” Bill McKinnon was a police official who cut his teeth murdering untold numbers of New Guineans, then helped continue the tradition of terrorizing Aboriginal people as “millennia-old blackfella sacred sites became whitefella outposts.” In Alice Springs, one such outpost, he oversaw a police force infamous for drunkenness and brutality. Called on to investigate a revenge killing that, while extrajudicial in “whitefella” eyes, was within the bounds of Aboriginal custom, he arrested six men. They escaped, and McKinnon followed and shot one of them—the one who, nearly a century later, would be identified by that skull. McKenna had rare access to the policeman’s extensive archives, and he shows how McKinnon had the habit of keeping photographs and notes that detailed not just crime cases, but also his grocery purchases (“Bought three pineapples and a bunch of bananas…threw one pineapple away”) and other minutiae. Meanwhile, other White Australians who investigated his killing of Yokununna arrived at a different view of the case. One “contemplated the possibility that Yokununna had sacrificed his life so that his friends could flee [and] thought it an act of heroism,” while the great Australian anthropologist and linguist Ted Strehlow gathered Yokonunna’s story as it was remembered by his people, adding it to a vast repository of “stories of violence.”
A thoroughly researched, well-told story of a true crime that can never see punishment.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18577-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Not for the faint of heart, but true-crime aficionados will appreciate this fast-paced, illuminating report.
An intimate investigative account of a notorious serial killer focused on the making of his teenage apprentices.
Acclaimed forensic psychologist Ramsland, author of Confession of a Serial Killer, Beating the Devil’s Game, and dozens of other true-crime books, teams up with investigative journalist and documentarian Ullman to add materially to the 50-year-old story of the “Candy Man” killer, Dean Corll, who was shot and killed in 1973. The authors examine the involvement of David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. as apprentices, performing Corll’s “grunt work,” which consisted of the abduction, torture, murder, and burial of other teenage boys. The authors explore the devious strategies predators employ when choosing their “apprentices” and grooming them. Brooks and Henley were both ready targets for Corll, but Henley, the book’s primary character, is especially noteworthy, both in terms of his vulnerability and willing participation as a primary accomplice to a serial killer. Ramsland and Ullman expand the background to Corll’s reprehensible acts to reveal the work of a larger criminal organization, a widespread network of sex offenders dealing in the trafficking and murder of boys operated by John David Norman, who “had been charged more than two dozen times previously for child sex crimes and had a long rap sheet charted by the FBI.” Norman, Corll, John Wayne Gacy, and thousands of other pedophiles coordinated their heinous acts for years. At the end, the authors provide sobering images from the case, including those taken on the day of Corll’s murder, as well as statements by the teen accomplices upon their arrests. Frighteningly, the authors write, “many of the same grooming techniques that Corll employed are still in use because they’re successful.” Ramsland and Ullman paint a disturbingly vivid portrait of true evil.
Not for the faint of heart, but true-crime aficionados will appreciate this fast-paced, illuminating report.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781613164952
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crime Ink/Penzler
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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