Popular Crime

by Bill James

  The book about the case, from which the quotation above was taken, is The Riverside Killer, by Christine Keers and Dennis St. Pierre (Pinnacle Books, 1997). Christine Keers was a detective assigned to the case; St. Pierre was the co-author. The first 50 or 100 pages of the book are so bad that I thought I was going to have to put it aside as unreadable. I think this may be St. Pierre’s first book, and by the time he’s 200 pages into the effort he has a better idea what he is doing. While I can’t recommend the book, if you routinely read books about serial murderers, I’ll list it as one that you can read. Their research is good, and their interpretation of the events is generally solid.

  On September 25, 1973, Suff beat his two-month-old baby daughter to death. He was convicted of murder by the state of Texas, as was his wife, who probably had nothing to do with the little girl’s death, and both were given seventy-year sentences for the crime. He was paroled less than ten years later as part of a court-ordered effort to reduce prison overcrowding. The parole system lost track of him almost immediately. By the time he was identified and arrested in California he had a new wife and a new baby daughter. He was already facing prosecution by Riverside authorities, for beating the new baby nearly to death.

  One of the books that I thought I might write, at one time, was a book entitled How Serial Murderers Are Caught. We are all interested in how to catch serial murderers, how to catch them quicker. Might it be that one way to learn something about that subject would be to study how previous serial murderers have, in fact, been caught? Why not do a systematic review of the subject? Find as many details as I could about the capture of, let’s say, 300 serial murderers, then try to organize that information. What happened, to bring them to the light? And also, knowing what we know about the murderer now, after he has been caught, how could he have been caught earlier? If we had tried this, would it have worked?

  I still think that this would be a worthwhile project. There are three reasons why I decided not to write that book:

  1. The narrowness of the subject provides few opportunities to examine the issues that make crime cases compelling.

  2. The question of how, in retrospect, the criminal might have been caught earlier is a question which is difficult for an amateur to ask in reviewing the work of professionals. By posing this question one is taking license to critique the work of the cops who investigated the case. I have no credentials to critique the work of homicide cops. My intention, of course, is quite innocent—to learn something that might help a cop out next time, not to criticize the way it was done last time. It wouldn’t come out that way. It would come out as criticism, and many readers would resent that, and would reject whatever I had to say, because they would say “Who is he to say what the cops should have done?”

  3. When you start reviewing cases, it quickly becomes apparent that the answer is almost always the same: PVE. Potential Victim Escapes. That is how serial murderers are caught, in fact—a potential victim escapes from the assassin, and alerts the police. That’s how police caught Dahmer, that’s how they caught Bundy (among other things), that’s how they caught Bob Berdella, Gerald Stano, Bob Hansen, Bill Suff, Ray Copeland, and most other serial murderers.

  Again, this is less true now than it was years ago, when I was thinking of writing that book. The police now have a better understanding of how to catch a serial murderer without waiting for a break, and a better understanding of how to recognize and capitalize on a break when they catch one. But still, most serial murderers are caught when somebody they are attempting to murder gets loose.

  The one other insight that I had about serial killers, when I was doing the rudimentary research for How Serial Murderers Are Caught, is this. Do you know how many serial killers are the sons of prostitutes?

  All of them.

  OK, it’s not all of them, and I won’t speculate on the exact percentage. It’s a huge number of them. I’ve read probably two to three hundred books about serial murderers. I have never seen anyone make this point, none of the experts on serial murderers—but when you read the books, it seems obvious. It becomes something you expect to see … his mother was arrested six times for prostitution; of course she was. It becomes so obvious that it seems puzzling that no one ever comments on it, and I wonder if it is being not mentioned as a form of political correctness.

  Let us ask, then, “Why is this true?” It could be as simple as “Prostitutes have exceptionally poor parenting skills.” Their children are dramatically more likely to be abused and neglected than are the children, perhaps, of any other population group. It could be, in a certain sense, cognitive: that being the son of a prostitute imbues a child with deep, deep cynicism in a way that nothing else will.

  And it could be that some prostitutes—maybe most prostitutes, I don’t know—are involved in violent and destructive relationships with men who abuse them. Probably the child witnesses abuse at a young age, when his primary identification is with his mother. As an abused child very often grows up to be an abuser, a child who witnesses his mother being abused at a young age sometimes grows up to take the role of the abuser. I think that this is the most credible explanation for this phenomenon.

  I am done with serial murderers. No more of them, I promise.

  XXX

  In late summer, 1986, an astronomer/computer wizard named Clifford Stoll started a job as systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. His first assignment was to reconcile a set of mismatched books. Seventy-five cents’ worth of computer time had been used but not paid for, but no one knew exactly how the discrepancy arose. He was to figure out what had happened.

  Stoll realized that someone had broken into his computer, not once but several times. Curious about what the intruder was up to, Stoll set up a system to monitor what the guy was doing when he broke in, creating a permanent record of every keystroke the intruder made on his system, but in such a way that it was invisible to the hacker.

  The hacker, he discovered quickly, was using his computer, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab computer, to break into other computers—military computers, specifically. The guy was collecting information about missiles, weapons, aircraft … anything military and cutting-edge.

  Well, thought Stoll, we’d better stop this. Stoll called the FBI. The FBI, he was astonished to discover, could care less. What’s the crime, asked the FBI? He stole 75 cents?

  Stoll could have stopped the hacker from breaking into his computer any time he wanted to, but, leftist radical that he was, it still bothered him to think that some spook was wandering around breaking into military computers. His boss had instructed him, early on in the battle, to notify anybody whose computer was broken into on down the line. Stoll did, but some of them didn’t seem to care, either. Even after being informed that their computers had been broken into, often they did little to secure them.

  As Stoll watched the hacker out of his computer, he began to backtrack, trying to find out who he was and where he came from. Was he local? Apparently not … he didn’t use the local computer lingo. Was he coming from the south? From computers in the American South, sometimes, but where did he enter the system?

  It took almost a year to find out. From a computer in Hannover, Germany, the hacker was breaking into a computer at the University of Bremen. From there, he was breaking into the German Datex-P Network, using their lines to cross the Atlantic and break into Tymnet, the American phone carrier for computer networks. From Tymnet, he was breaking into the files of a defense contractor in McLean, Virginia, and from there, into Milnet, the computer network of the American military establishment.

  Trained as an astronomer, Stoll had the astronomer’s habit of keeping detailed notes of his work. These notes form the basis of The Cuckoo’s Egg, Stoll’s account of his year-long war of wits with an anonymous hacker, who turned out to be a working spy (Pocket Books, 1990). In a book that has more in common with The Hobbit than with In Cold Blood, Stoll has encounters with a long series of CIA and FBI
agents, military systems managers, librarians, roommates, software salesmen, phone service technicians, bosses, scientists, geniuses, bureaucrats and prosecutors, almost all of whom want to see blood or money before they will take any interest in the matter. Stoll is a fine writer, and I recommend the book quite highly.

  In the 1990s Stoll became infamous for predicting the failure of the internet, and the complete failure of all forms of e-commerce. Now 59 years old, Stoll is a stay-at-home dad who sells blown glass on the internet. Oh, well …

  Brenda Schaefer and Mel Ignatow could almost have been considered yuppies. They were bright, attractive, professional people who earned good incomes, living and working near Louisville, Kentucky. Their marriages had failed, and so, at an age when those of us blessed with children are trying to figure out how to coach a kids’ basketball team, they were still living with their parents and dating.

  Beneath the veneer of a happy couple, Mel was abusive, or so she said, and Brenda was frigid, or so he said. On Sunday morning, September 25, 1988, Brenda Schaefer failed to return from a Saturday night date with Mel Ignatow. She had gone to break up with him, but then, she had done that before. Her car was found on a lonely highway, a nail in the tire and the windows smashed.

  It would become the most sensational case in the history of Louisville. Everybody pretty much assumed that Ignatow had killed her, but the evidence was hard to harvest. The police were sure that he was lying to them, but as long as his lies were consistent and couldn’t be traced, what could they do? They couldn’t disprove the lies because they had no clear idea what had happened.

  Police suspected that Ignatow had pressured or co-opted an ex-girlfriend, Mary Ann Shore, to help engineer the disappearance. They leaned hard on Ms. Shore. After sixteen months, she broke. Shore said that she and Ignatow had dug Brenda’s grave a month before she disappeared. Ignatow had brought Ms. Schaefer to Shore’s apartment, where he had tortured her for several hours before her death, while Shore took hundreds of pictures. She had cooperated, she said, because she was terrified of Mel Ignatow.

  Shore led investigators to Schaefer’s body, and agreed to wear a wire to a hastily arranged meeting with the murderer. Police recorded some vaguely incriminating statements, and arrested Ignatow.

  He was acquitted of the crime. Shore was a poor witness, telling an incredible story with little corroborating evidence. Although Ignatow’s house was searched twice, his cars were searched, a storage unit he rented was searched, the photographs Shore had claimed she took could not be found. Police, prosecutors and the Louisville public were shocked by the acquittal, as was the trial judge, who had no doubt about Ignatow’s culpability.

  Of course, the prohibition against double jeopardy would not permit Ignatow to be put on trial a second time. But the prosecution, led by the FBI, rallied to go after him on perjury charges—which were, essentially, that Ignatow had lied to the FBI, lied to a grand jury, and lied to a federal prosecutor in saying that he had no knowledge of the events leading to Schaefer’s death.

  On October 1, 1992, as the perjury trial was set to begin, the missing photographs and Brenda Schaefer’s jewelry were found in the house that Ignatow had owned at the time of the crime. It was a complete fluke that the photographs were found. To protect his assets in the event of a damage suit, Ignatow had deeded his house to his mother and his children while he was in custody awaiting trial. His mother died, and his children sold the house to pay his legal bills. The new owners decided to change the carpet in the great room, and the carpet layers discovered a secret cache which two police searches had failed to locate.

  Ignatow pled guilty to the perjury charges the next day, supplying the information that he had, in fact, murdered Brenda Schaefer. He would serve five years in a federal prison.

  The book about the case, Double Jeopardy, was written by Bob Hill, a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. It’s a strong effort, well researched and well organized. Sometimes he tells you more than you really want to know, and he has an unflagging admiration for the police and prosecutors who screwed the case twelve ways from Sunday. The book is recommended.

  On August 20, 1989, Jose and Kitty Menendez were shot to death in their Beverly Hills mansion by their sons, Lyle and Erik.

  Jose Menendez was a Cuban immigrant who had made a fortune estimated at $14 to $15 million, working somewhere in the back rooms of the entertainment industry. He was a hard-driving, aggressive man who lectured his sons on the virtues of ruthlessness. He may also have sexually abused them, if you believe the testimony of his sons.

  The sons, aged 19 and 21, pretended to know nothing of the crimes. They had been to a movie, they said; they returned home to find this awful scene. They knew how to spend the money. They bought a Porsche, Rolex watches, took tennis lessons from the best tennis teachers in the country. In late October, 1989, Erik Menendez confessed to his therapist. The therapist, concerned for his own safety, talked to his girlfriend, and arranged for her to listen in on a therapy session. Menendez talked about the crime—and threatened to kill the therapist if he told anyone. The girlfriend went to the police. Despite the second-hand nature of the evidence, she was able to lead police to where the guns had been purchased. The Menendez sons were arrested in March, 1990.

  It was with the Menendez case that America entered the second golden age of yellow journalism. The first golden age ran roughly from 1880 to 1925. In that era almost every American city had multiple morning newspapers and multiple evening papers, and these newspapers competed for market share by nakedly exploiting the local violence. As newspapers consolidated, the more successful ones buying out the less, that gradually reduced competition within the industry. The last big event for the first epoch of yellow journalism was the Lindbergh case.

  American journalism began to seek dignity and respect, rather than simply more sales. I say the words “dignity” and “respect” with a noticeable sneer, but in truth I miss them. The morbid spectacle of the Lindbergh case embarrassed the press, which had become self-aware. They never stopped reporting on crime stories, but they were no longer panting audibly between the lines.

  Everything changed in the structure of the media between 1925 and 1990. Newspapers continued to be taken over by other newspapers. Television began and then cable television. The role of radio adapted to the opportunities of the moment, although for some reason radio was never a major player in the coverage of crime stories. The internet began. Magazines came and went. The market was never inert.

  Yet throughout that era, the American press was largely controlled by a limited number of very rich persons, who by and large did not want to be embarrassed by their ink-stained employees. This was true even in the first fifteen years of successful cable television, 1975 to 1990.

  This era ended about 1990, in my view, not because of the internet, not because of the proliferation of cable networks, but simply because the accumulated alterations in the structure of the media reached a critical mass. The tacit agreements made by the media in the wake of the Lindbergh case were no longer relevant. The two biggest Popular Crime cases of the 20th century—Lindbergh and O. J. Simpson—are the bookends of that era.

  Anyway, back to the Menendez twerps. They had a criminal history. They had been burglarizing the apartments of their parents’ wealthy friends, a series of crimes for which they would have gone to jail, had not their father protected them. Now the father was dead, and Erik had told his therapist why. Police demanded the therapists’ notes, which the therapist refused to turn over or at least pretended to, and which courts, once they had the notes, were reluctant to admit into evidence. A long court battle followed over the admissibility of the therapist’ notes. Eventually, the California Supreme Court ruled that the notes were not protected by privilege, and could be used as evidence. The boys went on trial in July, 1993.

  Their first trial was open to television cameras, and was shown nationally on cable TV. The boys, despite the absence of an immediate threat to their well-
being, pleaded self-defense. They had been so traumatized by years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, they argued, that they lived in constant fear for their lives. They killed their parents, they argued, because they were afraid their father was about to kill them. To prevent them from talking about the sexual abuse, you see.

  The first trial ended in a hung jury—actually, since two separate juries were trying the two young men, in two hung juries. This outcome was widely criticized by judges, lawyers, politicians and commentators, and widely mocked by comedians. The defense theory of the case is hard to explain to a layman. Let’s see, you carefully established an alibi, shot your mother in the back of the head while she was watching television, shot her five times, went to another room, re-loaded and shot her again because you were afraid that your father might harm you sometime? This is self-defense?

  In the second trial, the judge

  a) turned off the cameras,

  b) imposed a gag order on the attorneys,

  c) seated a single jury, rather than separate juries, and

  d) refused to allow the Menendez defense team to argue that the crimes were committed in self-defense.

  On March 20, 1996, six and a half years after the crimes, Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  On May 1, 1990, Gregg Smart was shot to death in his townhouse in Derry, New Hampshire.

  Gregg Smart met Pam Wojas at a New Year’s Eve party on the last day of 1986. Until they were married, they got along great. He moved to Florida to be with her while she finished her degree. After graduation she moved back to New Hampshire to be with him. They got married, had affairs, and argued most of the time. They had been married less than a year at the time of his murder.