Popular Crime

by Bill James

  In January, 2003, Andrew Luster was on trial in Ventura, California, facing 87 felony charges connected with a series of date rapes. Luster was an heir to the multi-million-dollar fortune of Max Factor, and, as he had videotaped several of the rapes, he was certain to be convicted.

  Luster bolted in mid-trial, and was nowhere to be found. Convicted of the crimes in absentia, Luster remained a fugitive until June, 2003. At that point the bounty hunter Duane (Dog) Chapman entered the case, boasting that he was going to find Andrew Luster and haul his sorry ass back to Ventura to face the music. And he did. Very quickly.

  Unfortunately, Luster had been hiding out in Mexico, and bounty hunting is not legal in Mexico. Chapman was charged in Mexico with deprivation of liberty, in the unlawful arrest of Andrew Luster. While Luster has been in jail since 2003 and probably will be for the rest of his life, the battle of Chapman versus Mexico dragged on for almost four years. The Mexican government was determined to prosecute Chapman, and the American State Department was fully willing to cooperate in that prosecution. Large numbers of American politicians, however, were appalled at the idea of prosecuting Dog for interfering with the liberty of a scumbag. A battle raged over the issue until the Mexican statute of limitations expired.

  This is not a celebrity story because Duane Chapman was not famous before his capture of Andrew Luster. His pursuit and arrest of Andrew Luster was one of the key events that propelled him to fame. The story could be classified as J$P 7—a story about the criminal justice system, centering on money and politics.

  On February 3, 2003, the struggling actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in the Los Angeles mansion of legendary record producer Phil Spector. Spector, a fantastically successful producer in the 1960s, had become a recluse following a car accident in 1974. That doesn’t quite say it; he was an amazingly creepy recluse, albeit an amazingly creepy recluse with a ton of money. He was Dracula with a drug habit. He was Sunset Boulevard come to life with amphetamines and painkillers. Spector was convicted of Clarkson’s murder in 2009, and is serving 18 years to life. CBT 5; C for Celebrity, B for Bizarre, T for Tabloid.

  In 2000 Gavin Arvizo, suffering from cancer, visited Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch as a part of a “wishes for sick kids” program. Jackson paid for Arvizo’s chemotherapy, and became friendly with Arvizo and his family. In 2002 and 2003 Arvizo often stayed at Neverland Ranch, and sometimes slept in Jackson’s bed with him. At the time Arvizo and his family insisted there was nothing inappropriate about the relationship, but in subsequent years, following disagreements between the Jackson camp and the Arvizos, their thinking about the relationship changed. Jackson—long suspected of being a pedophile—gave interviews acknowledging that he often shared his bed with young boys, and arguing that this was not inappropriate. As the rumors about Jackson’s sexual contact with children mushroomed, Santa Barbara County authorities became increasingly concerned, and eventually Jackson was arrested and charged with molesting Arvizo and related crimes such as holding Arvizo’s family at Neverland Ranch against their will.

  Jackson stood trial for these charges from January through June, 2005, and was found not guilty of all charges on June 13, 2005—just weeks after the acquittal of Robert Blake. Jackson claimed that he was the victim of a fraud and extortion attempt by the Arvizo family, a claim which, in the view of the author, is almost certainly true. I would classify the story as C F$X 6—a Celebrity story involving Fraud, Money and seX, big but not all that big outside of LA. The construction C F$X rather than CF$X is intended to indicate the dominance of celebrity as the driving element of the story.

  I am not getting into the issue of whether Michael Jackson was a pedophile. I don’t know. At the time of the trial reporters would routinely describe Jackson as “the most famous man in the world,” a description that beggars the imagination. Michael Jackson was never at any point in his life one of the 100 most famous people in the world. He was one of the 100 most famous people in the Los Angeles celebrity world, which occasionally confuses itself with the real world.

  On July 19, 2004, Lori Hacking disappeared from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. This was a big story for a few days until it became fairly clear that her husband, Mark Hacking, was responsible for the disappearance. Mark Hacking confessed to her murder in April, 2005, and will be eligible to apply for parole in 2034. M 5.

  On February 24, 2005, a nine-year-old girl named Jessica Lunsford was abducted from her bedroom in Homosassa, Florida. A 47-year-old career criminal and convicted sex offender, John Couey, lived in a trailer near Lunsford. Couey was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death in 2007. He died in prison of natural causes in 2009. The story could be categorized as MIX 6, a missing person story (M) about sexual violence done to an Innocent victim, or perhaps as MIXJ 6, on the theory that the Justice system’s failure to deal effectively with John Couey at an earlier date is a central element of the story.

  On May 30, 2005, Natalee Holloway disappeared during a visit to Aruba. Holloway had graduated from high school in Alabama less than a week earlier; she was on a trip with 100+ classmates to celebrate the graduation. Drinking heavily throughout the trip, she was seen after midnight on May 29 (early hours of May 30) in a car with three locals, who later claimed that they had dropped her off at her hotel.

  A prime suspect in the case, although not the only one, was Joran van der Sloot. Exactly five years later (May 30, 2010), van der Sloot murdered a girl in Peru, or at least has confessed to so doing. That finally ended the mystery of what had happened to Natalee, albeit not a legal or satisfactory ending. It’s AMQ 8, an adventure/mystery story about a missing girl.

  The Duke Lacrosse non-rape story began on March 13, 2006. Before I say that the lacrosse players were entirely innocent, I should say that they’re not too innocent. The Duke Lacrosse team on that day had arranged to have a raunchy, drunken party at a private house, and they had hired two strippers to perform at the party. They had requested white strippers, but the women who showed up were black. At least a couple of people made racist remarks, and suggestions were made to the women of such a lewd nature that they caused the performance to be cancelled after a short time.

  One of the dancers had been using drugs throughout the evening, and after they left the party the two dancers began to quarrel. The more sober dancer tried to get the stoned one out of her car, and this led to a dispute between the two that was serious enough to result in a 911 call.

  Taken into custody for the purposes of getting medical assistance, the inebriated dancer now began to say that she had been raped at the party. This was unmistakably untrue. There was abundant evidence to show that it was untrue. Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, however, chose to believe that the allegation was true.

  Fair enough—on the first day. People make mistakes; we don’t always know who is telling the truth. The story, however, exploded onto the national stage. Durham County is 44% black. Nifong, running for re-election, wanted the black community in Durham to know that he stood solidly with them, which meant that he stood with the dancer making the allegations, rather than with the overprivileged white people who were accused of the crime.

  The rapid influx of the media into the story, however, caused more facts to emerge at an unusually fast pace. Over the next two weeks more and more and more information emerged—taxi cab logs, ATM transaction records, time-stamped photographs, cell phone records, DNA tests, medical reports, eyewitness reports from disinterested parties, computer usage records and electronic key signatures, and interviews with the other dancer. These bits of information very quickly made it clear that Nifong was prosecuting people who were not at the house at the time in question for a crime that had never occurred. Nifong illegally suppressed exculpatory evidence, and lied to the court repeatedly in an effort to sustain the prosecution of people who he quite certainly should have known could not have committed the crime.

  For his actions in the case, Mike Nifong was removed from office, and was disbarred
by the state of North Carolina on June 16, 2007. It was an unusual case, in that the real crime—the unlawful prosecution of innocent people—took place in full view of the public, and after the crime story was already underway. I would categorize the crime as JDP 7—J for “Justice System,” in that this was a story about the operation of the Justice System, D for “Dreyfus,” in that innocent people were prosecuted, and P for “Politics,” in that politics were central to the story.

  On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people (33 including himself) on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. The story could be classified as N 8, a mass-shooting story.

  On October 28, 2007, Stacy Peterson was reported missing by her sister, Cassandra Cales. Stacy Peterson had been the fourth wife of Drew Peterson, who was a cop in Bolingbrook, Illinois, which is a west-side suburb of Chicago.

  Peterson had been a cop for 29 years. The disappearance of Stacy Peterson exploded as a news story on its own, as such disappearances occasionally do for no apparent reason, and then the story flipped up to another level when it was learned that Peterson’s previous wife, Kathleen Savio, had died under questionable circumstances in 2004. Although Savio’s death had been ruled an accidental drowning, she had been found in a dry bathtub.

  What really made the story, however, was that Drew Peterson didn’t do what everybody else does in those circumstances. He didn’t try to hide from the investigation, or from the publicity surrounding it. He hired a publicist. He met with reporters, made jokes about his situation, waved cheerfully sometimes to the people who were staking out his house and sometimes threatened them, and said repeatedly that his wife had left him for another man, and he was sure she would turn up soon. He went on Larry King to talk about the case.

  On May 7, 2009, after eighteen months of speculation and investigation, Drew Peterson was indicted and charged with the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Stacy Peterson is still missing, and Drew Peterson is in jail awaiting trial at this writing. I would classify the case as TMJ 7, a tabloid/missing-persons case involving the integrity of the justice system.

  In June, 2008, an adorable two-year-old girl named Caylee Anthony disappeared from her home in Orlando, Florida. Her mother, Casey Anthony, did not report Caylee missing until … well, ever; eventually Caylee’s grandmother called 911, but by that time Caylee had been missing for a month.

  Casey Anthony was arrested in October, 2008, went on trial in May, 2011, and was acquitted of the major charges against her (convicted of minor charges) in July, 2011 (I’m guessing you might have heard). It is the view of the author that the Casey Anthony jury did what they had to do. One cannot prove that Caylee Anthony was in fact murdered (rather than that she died in an accident), and, if you can’t prove she was murdered, you can’t convict somebody of murdering her. The case could be categorized as MIT-9—M for Missing, I for Innocent Victim, T for Tabloid, and 9 to indicate that it was a very, very bit story.

  On December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested for securities fraud. Madoff was a well-respected Wall Street insider, at one time Chairman of the Board of NASDAQ. He had founded his own investment firm in 1960. At some point early in its history this firm became a Ponzi scheme, an investment operation that claimed large non-existent profits and re-paid investors with the money taken in from new investors. Such schemes normally burn out in a year or two, but Madoff was so consistently successful at pulling in new money that he was able to sustain his fraud for almost half a century, eventually defrauding investors of somewhere between $13 billion and $65 billion. The financial panic of late 2008 caused the well of potential investors to dry up, thus exposing the fraud. F$ 7.

  On June 25, 2009, pop star Michael Jackson died at his home in Los Angeles, apparently as a result of the careless administration of narcotics intended as sleeping aids. It’s a Celebrity/Tabloid story, the size of which is yet to be determined at this writing. Jackson’s doctor, Dr. Conrad Murray, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter for giving Michael Jackson access to more drugs than anybody needs.

  Before I wrap up the book there is an argument I needed to make, having to do with false confessions. I thought I would work this in somewhere in a false-confession story, but I never exactly hit one at the right angle.

  In the discussion of a crime story, it is often treated as an extraordinary concept that a person might confess to a murder that he did not commit. It is not uncommon to see otherwise intelligent people debate whether there really are false confessions, in anything other than extraordinary conditions.

  In my view, 70 to 90% of confessions to murder are false confessions. The confusion has to do with false confessions that the police believe to be genuine. Think about it. When the police are investigating a murder, do they share with the public all of the information that they have?

  Almost every crime book includes the tidbit that certain information was withheld from the public. Information is withheld from the public, always, in virtually 100% of criminal investigations, precisely in order to help the police distinguish true from false confessions.

  The police know that in almost every high-profile murder case, they will at some point have a confession. If it’s a really high-profile murder case, they will have a dozen confessions. The police, with very few exceptions, do not wish to prosecute innocent people. They hold back information precisely to see that this does not happen. A woman is found murdered in her bathroom with a blue windbreaker tied around her neck. The police will tell the public that the woman was murdered in her bedroom with a red necktie. When somebody comes forward and claims that he murdered the woman in her bedroom with a red necktie, they tell him to go home and stop wasting their time. When somebody tells them that he strangled the woman in her bathroom with a blue windbreaker, they prosecute.

  This doesn’t happen once in a while. It happens all the time. It happens all the time because the police know perfectly well how to make people confess to something. That’s the normal practice. You drag confessions out of people, and then you ignore them if the confessor doesn’t come up with the right details. If you include those false confessions, that the police have thrown out without action, it becomes obvious that false confessions to murder easily outnumber genuine confessions to murder.

  The reason police sometimes turn off the video cameras when they are near a confession is not that they’re beating confessions out of people. It is that they don’t want a record of a false confession. When the real murderer is eventually identified, they don’t want the defense to be able to show a videotape of somebody else confessing to the crime. That’s normal practice.

  The debate focuses on those few cases in which the normal practice fails. Normally, the nut case who confesses to 22 murders a year because he likes attention can be ignored because he doesn’t know the facts. Once in a while, like Henry Lee Lucas, the nut case is canny enough to con the police out of the facts without their realizing they have given them up. Once in a while the false confessor guesses right about something, and the police don’t realize it has happened. Once in a while you may get a policeman who

  a) is under great pressure to solve a crime, and

  b) is convinced that his suspect in fact committed the crime.

  The police officer may then accidentally or even intentionally let the suspect have the facts that have been withheld from the public, creating a confession which prosecutors incorrectly believe to be valid. The illusion that false confessions are rare comes from focusing on these small number of false confessions that slip through the internal protections of the police investigation.

  But debating whether or not there are false confessions to murder is like debating whether there are pigeons in Central Park. The only difference is, there are a lot more false confessions to murder than there are pigeons in Central Park.

  To this point, I have not reached a conclusion on perhaps the central issue of the book: Is the phenomenon of Popular Crime a destructive thing that should be disda
ined and discouraged, or is it a constructive process that merely has more ugly facets than Mike Tyson?

  Those who are critical of the prominence of Popular Crime stories in our culture make, I believe, about ten arguments:

  1) Crime stories breed cynicism, by engendering in many people a distorted view of the world in which crime is more common than it really is.

  2) Crime stories encourage the intervention of the press in the operation of the system of justice.

  3) Popular Crime stories coarsen our culture by making entertainment out of the pain and suffering of others.

  4) Crime stories enflame the public’s emotions about irrelevant and trivial issues.

  5) Crime stories feed misinformation to the public about police operations and the criminal justice system.

  6) Crime stories violate principles of fair play by leading to the public conviction of people who have not been put on trial.

  7) Crime stories are a sort of “near pornography” which excite base emotions by enabling those who take an excessive interest in crimes to wallow in the salacious details of events that are outside the experiences of normal and decent people.

  8) Publicity about crimes encourages criminals and creates copycat crimes.

  9) An undue focus on horrific events interferes with the development of a sense of inhabiting a secure society.

  10) Crime stories detract our attention from more serious issues.

  I’ll deal with the last item first, as I discussed that briefly in Chapter XVI, in re Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I question whether anyone understands the world well enough to say reliably what is a serious issue (which will not stop me from doing so in a few minutes).