by Bill James
One can see that, if the police knew that DeSalvo had not really committed the crimes but wanted to take credit for them, then they might allow him to take “credit” for the murders in the public’s eye, but never charge him in connection with them. That way, if and when the real murderer was discovered, there would be no impediment to prosecution. If the police had actually charged DeSalvo with the murders,
a) they would have had to present some sort of corroborative evidence, which they did not have, and
b) they would have been in a difficult position if the series of murders resumed and the murderer was caught.
The way it worked out was good for the police—in fact, it was great for the police. The police had an excuse to call off the time-consuming, frustrating and fantastically expensive investigation, they got the public to believe that they had solved the crimes—but all of their options were still on the table if the real murderer re-surfaced.
The Belmont murder—Sebastian Junger’s case—was never officially associated with the Strangler crimes. Junger, clinging to the belief that DeSalvo may have been guilty, works this into a theory (pp. 258–59) of why DeSalvo, confessing to the crimes, never confessed to that one while he was in the process of coming clean. The logic is tortured and unconvincing. But if one assumes the opposite tack, that DeSalvo was being fed information by the police to clean up the crimes so that they could move on, then it becomes very obvious why DeSalvo didn’t confess to that crime: the police didn’t want him to. They had already hung that one on somebody else.
These arguments present as coherent and logical the outcomes of a judicial process that was, in reality, chaotic and confused. “The police” and “the prosecutors” included people who had opinions all over the map. Some wanted to prosecute DeSalvo for the Stranglings, some wanted to investigate further, some thought he had nothing to do with the case, and some wanted to disbar Bailey for the way he had represented DeSalvo.
My opinion. F. Lee Bailey was a publicity-hungry young attorney who was building a name for himself by getting involved in high-profile crimes, and the Boston police played him. Albert DeSalvo wanted to confess to these crimes, and some of the police went along with it for their own reasons. Bailey was then able to present himself to the public as the clever lawyer who had cut a deal to end the Boston Strangler case, keeping his client off the streets but out of jail.
Everybody got what they wanted out of the deal. The police got rid of an unsolvable case that was draining money and blocking careers. DeSalvo, although he grew unhappy with the deal, got to be a famous important criminal rather than the anonymous lowlife that he really was. Bailey, who was already somewhat famous because of the Sam Sheppard and Carl Coppolino cases, became a lot more famous; he wound up with his own TV show.
The only thing was, no one got to the truth.
XX
F. Lee Bailey was involved in four of the most famous cases of the 20th century, and other very famous crimes as well, but four of the twenty most famous cases of the century. While many other lawyers had multiple associations with famous crimes, only one other lawyer—Darrow—is equally prominent in the most famous cases.
Looking back on it, it is my belief that Bailey helped to cause the system of justice to fail in all four cases. In the case of Sam Sheppard, Bailey cleared the name of a man who probably was involved in his wife’s murder. In the case of the Boston strangler, Bailey sold the entire nation on the story that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, which he probably was not.
Patty Hearst was a young woman who was dragged violently from her room in the middle of the night, raped and terrorized into joining her captors in their further misadventures. Bailey’s defense of her allowed her to be convicted in 1976 and sentenced to 35 years in prison, a miscarriage of justice later limited by Jimmy Carter, who commuted her sentence, and Bill Clinton, who pardoned her. And in the case of O. J. Simpson it was Bailey, not Johnnie Cochran, who set the N-word trap that turned the trial of O. J. Simpson into a trial of Mark Fuhrman, thus helping a murderer to walk free.
If you were to evaluate our justice system based on how well it performs in high-profile cases—popular crime cases—you would conclude that our system was a disaster. The system failed in these four cases; it has failed, at least so far, in the JonBenet Ramsey case, it failed in the assassination of President Kennedy—allowing the accused to be murdered—it failed in the case of the Black Dahlia. In cases like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, the system “succeeded” only after many people were dead. In the cases that the tabloids live for, the system of justice fails a huge percentage of the time. Why is that?
Which way does the cause and effect work? Does the system of justice fail, in these cases, because there is something about the types of crimes that become most famous that makes them difficult for the criminal justice system? Or is it the fact that these cases are so famous that causes the system to fail?
It’s both. Sometimes it’s one; sometimes it’s the other; sometimes it’s both. In the O. J. Simpson murder case, the system failed in substantial measure because of the attention given to the case. In the JonBenet case, I think the same is true: that had the press never gotten interested in the case, it is more likely that the investigation would have been handled properly.
If that were generally true, it would be an important indictment of the popular crime phenomenon. But more often, I think, it works the other way: that these cases become famous because they are hard cases. And in some cases, crimes are solved only because of the attention given to the case by the media.
I’m not a Pollyanna. I am not suggesting that the phenomenon of popular crime does no harm. It does do harm. It gums up the machinery of justice. It coarsens the culture. It creates pressures in the justice system that cause distorted allocations of resources. Worse, in some cases it promotes the spread of crime.
The phenomenon of “spree killers,” who kill as many random people as they can in a single outburst of rage, has now killed hundreds of Americans. This phenomenon was launched in 1966 with the nearly simultaneous stories of Richard Speck and Charles Whitman. On July 14, 1966, Speck killed eight student nurses in Chicago. Less than three weeks later (August 1, 1966), Whitman—who, like Speck, had been born in 1941—shot fourteen people from a tower in Austin, Texas.
There was little precedent for such crimes in America before 1966. It is the view of the author that people have a ubiquitous tendency to imitate the actions of others, and that this is true without regard to whether those actions are condemned or condoned by society. When these two incidents were given great publicity, other people—not sane people, but people who were troubled—began to imitate these actions, and a wave of random killings was launched. It is my view that, had we somehow been able to suppress publicity about the first incidents, some of the later incidents most likely would never have occurred, and hundreds of lives might have been saved.
But in the case of Andrei Chikatilo, the Russian serial murderer of the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet police, for the most part, kept his crimes out of the newspapers. The authorities thought that publicizing his crimes made them look bad. This enabled Chikatilo to keep going back to the same places over and over, and grabbing more victims. He was convicted of murdering 52 people. It seems extremely unlikely that he could have killed so many without the implicit cooperation of the police, who covered up his crimes.
I am not suggesting that we say, “Oh well, in a free society these things happen; when we decide to have a free press, we take the costs with the benefits.” That’s a sloppy way to think about it. Free societies regulate and control all sorts of things; we can damned well regulate and control some elements of the coverage of crime stories without invading our basic freedoms, if we choose to do that. But let me ask you this: Have you ever seen it happen that, in the case of an unsolved crime, the family of the victim will reach out to the media, and try to generate media interest in the case?
Of course you have;
it happens all the time. But think about what it means. Does this not suggest that the attention of the media is sometimes a benefit to the victims of the crime? If it is not a benefit, then why do people pursue it?
On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. This crime—and this is relatively unique in American history—became a huge popular crime story, largely because an organized group of people was prepared to jump on it and make it a huge crime story. Southerners had been lynching blacks (and sometimes whites) from time out of memory. One of the tools of the civil rights movement was to focus attention on these crimes, so as to induce sympathy, bring about justice, and deter such crimes in the future. Murders such as those of Emmett Till in 1955 and Willie Edwards in 1957 (and others) were publicized by civil rights advocates as a part of a strategy to end lynching.
The murdered civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner—were involved in a project to register black voters in the South, under the title of “Freedom Summer.” The organizers of Freedom Summer anticipated that their workers would be the targets of violence, and were prepared to call as much attention as possible, as quickly as possible, to any attacks on their volunteers.
In my view, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were among the greatest of American heroes. They were courageous young men who lost their lives fighting for a better America—as were our soldiers, but the civil rights workers did so without the solace and support of an organized military. They fought monsters with their bare hands. In any case, news of the disappearance of the three young men spread nationwide, and reached to high levels of the government, before the men were even dead.
This is relatively unique, this manufacturing of public interest in a crime for the purpose of creating a shield, but it re-enforces the fact that publicity about a crime does contribute to the safety net that surrounds us all.
In 2009 there was a Liam Neeson movie, Taken, the premise of which was that beautiful young American girls were being kidnapped in Paris and sold into prostitution. While young Americans are sometimes forced into prostitution overseas, the premise of the movie is absurd, and impossible. Remember the Natalee Holloway story? How many beautiful young American girls do you think can be kidnapped in Paris without creating an international incident?
Well, the answer is: none. The phenomenon of Popular Crime makes these events impossible—and thus serves to protect us all. Sometimes black Americans complain that this is a racist phenomenon, that crimes against black Americans go unreported and un-cared about. Yes, of course this is true, and yes, of course it is wrong.
What I am trying to get to is this: that the phenomenon of Popular Crime does not have to be a wild animal roaming the streets. It can be caged; it can be used for good purposes. The actions of over-aggressive journalists, intruding into the private lives of crime victims, can perfectly well be regulated, should we choose to do that. And, on the other end, the attention of the media does not need to be focused relentlessly on missing little girls; it can perfectly well be focused, by deliberate actions, on drive-by shootings or other crimes that plague the inner cities. There is a toxin in it that can be controlled; there is good in it that can be used. We tend to do neither.
In a movie based on the Boston Strangler, there is a wildly fictionalized scene in which John S. Bottomly—who in the movie was Henry Fonda, but in real life was a wimp—leaps across a table to slap the out-of-control serial murderer back in his place. Nothing remotely like that ever happened.
In a movie based on the murders of the three civil rights workers, there is a fictionalized scene in which the heroic FBI agent, who in the movie is Gene Hackman but who in real life didn’t exist, reaches the end of his patience with the local rednecks, and begins to slap one of them around. Neither of these is a particularly good movie; they’re both moderately skilled, competent emotional manipulations. But the question I would pose is, what does this tell us about True Crime, as opposed to fictional crime, that, in order to make True Crime sexier, the movies feel the need to inject phony police violence?
Which then is worse for the soul: True Crime, which exploits horrific events for popular amusement, but which also tells real human stories, or Fictional Crime, which creates imaginary horrific events for popular amusement? I don’t know the answer to that, but the worst parts of the True Crime movies are the fictionalized parts.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Obviously it is beyond the scope of this little book to sort out the facts of the Kennedy assassination. If you were to read one book a month about the Kennedy assassination, you could read them all in about twenty years—you could, at least, if the assassination buffs would stop writing them. The two books that I would recommend to you—not having read them all, obviously—are Case Closed, by Gerald Posner (Anchor Books, 1993) and Mortal Error, by Howard Donahue and Bonar Menninger (St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
Posner’s book is a systematic rebuttal of the specious material which forms the bulk of the other 200-plus books. His main points:
1. Lee Harvey Oswald was a hyper-political lunatic. Oswald’s behavior over the previous years was absolutely consistent with that of an assassin. He was moody, abusive, erratic, and didn’t get along with anybody. He promoted his incomprehensible politics night and day. He had earlier attempted to assassinate another national figure, General Edwin Walker. He was everything that you would expect an assassin to be.
2. The specific, legal evidence against Oswald, on that particular day, is overwhelming. He was seen going into the book depository, by people who knew him. He was seen coming out of the book depository. He was seen in the book depository, in the window where the shots came from. The gunshots and the bolt action of the weapon were clearly heard by three men only a few feet away, looking out the window below him. An eyewitness to the shooting, across the street, flagged down a policeman and gave a description of Oswald. He was seen fleeing the scene.
He was seen carrying a long package, which he claimed was curtain rods, into the building before the shooting. His rifle was found hidden in the building after the shooting. Repeated ballistics tests have proven that this weapon fired at least one of the shots which struck the President. His fingerprints were on the weapon. His palm print was on the box which was used to steady the weapon.
His behavior before and after the event was strange, even for him. He left almost all of his worldly money out on the TV at his wife’s place, and left her a kind of good-bye note. When a policeman stopped him an hour later, he murdered the policeman. What more evidence could you possibly want?
3. Jack Ruby was an unstable man prone to acts of violence.
4. There is no credible evidence of a conspiracy. Any event which is prominent in the news will tend to draw the attention of imbalanced people. Whenever there is a highly publicized murder, hundreds if not thousands of people will push forward, wanting to get involved, to be witnesses or participants or psychics or pretend journalists or pretend detectives.
The Kennedy assassination, the biggest news story of the decade, inevitably attracted an unusual number of these people. Given this attention, given these many thousands of persons who actually were involved in the case in some peripheral way or who desperately wanted to be, it is inevitably possible to find “evidence” of limitless plots and counter-plots, if one loosens the standards of what is evidence.
New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison was willing to do that. An intelligent man with a responsible public position, Garrison was as desperate as anyone to be a part of the story—and observed no ethical restraints as to how he would pursue that goal. He manufactured a sort of case. Though a jury laughed at it, it had its hour in the sun.
And then, paranoia swept the neighborhood. As we lost confidence in our government, we began to suspect that any politician might be Richard Nixon with a better shave. The publishing industry discovered a market for paranoid books about the Kennedy assassination. But using real standards of eviden
ce—what do we actually know that we could prove to a skeptic—what evidence is there of a conspiracy?
None.
Ruby did not know Oswald.
There is no credible evidence that anyone conspired with Oswald to commit the crime.
5. The conspiracy theorists have abused the truth in the most horrible ways. Each of the first four points, in my opinion, Gerald Posner establishes very clearly. In establishing that Oswald was a walking time-bomb, I would score his material at 10 on a scale of 10. On analyzing the details of the fateful day, I should give him at least a nine. On the background of Jack Ruby, I might give him a seven; on the weakness of the conspiracy evidence, another “10” seems warranted.
But if these are solid hits, it is in pointing out the abuses of the conspiracy experts that Posner goes over the top. Taking the list of supposed “mysterious deaths” connected to the Kennedy case, Posner reviews them one by one, and demonstrates how ludicrous it is to suppose that these “mysteries” are a key to some sinister conspiracy. Will Griffin was one of dozens of FBI agents assigned to take witness statements for the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964. He died of cancer in 1982, and the conspiracy theorists added him to the list of 100+ “suspicious deaths” supposedly connected to the Kennedy assassination.
I think it’s a wonderful book, and I feel that Gerald Posner has accomplished a public service in putting it together, granting that in my case he is preaching to the choir. But although I have the highest regard for Case Closed, and a genuine appreciation for Posner’s effort in writing it, that book ultimately does not win the contest to convince me. It finishes a strong second. The winner is Mortal Error, by Bonar Menninger, which is based on the work of Howard Donahue.