by Bill James
83) Blind Eye, James B. Stewart, 1999 (****). A scary story about the medical establishment’s twenty-plus years of covering up for a murderous doctor.
84) Final Verdict, Adela Rogers St. Johns, 1962 (*****).
85) The Cuckoo’s Egg, Cliff Stoll, 1989 (**).
86) Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, written about 115 AD (****). In terms of violent behavior by crazy people, the Roman emperors were hard to top. Whereas the other notable Roman historians like to write about the wars and proclamations of the emperors, Suetonius, who was a bit of a gossip (while still a very legitimate historian), likes to write about who they slept with and who they murdered and why. Extremely entertaining.
87) The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale, 2009 (***).
88) Race Riot, William M. Tuttle Jr., 1970 (***).
89) Something Terrible Has Happened, Peter Van Slingerland, 1966 (**).
90) Kidnap, George Waller, 1961 (**). Overlong.
91) Tears of Rage, John Walsh with Susan Schindehette, 1997 (**).
92) The Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry, 1987 (*). Serious research, seriously flawed writing.
93) Murder at Harvard, Helen Thomson, 1971 (**).
94) Jury, Victor Villaseñor, 1977 (***).
95) The Onion Field, Joseph Wambaugh, 1973 (****).
96) Betrayal, Tim Weiner, David Johnston, and Neil A. Lewis, 1995 (**). The story of the CIA mole Aldrich Ames.
97) American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps, Philip Weiss, 2005 (***).
98) Bad Company, Steve Wick, 1991 (**). A serviceable account of a quite remarkable story, the murder of Hollywood producer Roy Radin.
99) The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles, Donald H. Wolfe, 2005 (***).
100) The Newgate Calendar, original author unknown (****). The Newgate Calendar was published repeatedly (in various forms) through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and was one of the most widely read books in the English language for about 200 years, perhaps second only to the Bible, or third behind Pilgrim’s Progress. Newgate was a large prison in London, where criminals were executed. The Newgate Calendar was a collection of short accounts of the lives of famous and terrible criminals. The book was used for generations to teach children about the wages of sin, although it has what we might consider an ambiguous moral tone. Though certainly not reliable, the book is easy to peruse online, and is well worth the investment of a little bit of your time.
While I am in the recommending business here I will also recommend that you explore the website http://law.umc.edu/faculty/projects, which is a treasure trove of factual information about famous crime cases (Lizzie Borden, the Salem Witchcraft Misunderstanding, Sacco and that other Italian guy, the Sam Sheppard case, etc.). Great admiration for their work.
OK, I had some three other crime stories that I wanted to share with you; these are out of sequence with the narrative, for which I apologize.
On April 10, 1836, a New York City woman working under the name of Helen Jewett was murdered in her brothel. A 19-year-old man named Richard Robinson was arrested and charged with the crime, and was tried but acquitted.
The murder of Helen Jewett occurred at the birth of the modern newspaper industry—a moment very like 1990, the birth of the internet. For a few years newspapers sprouted like dandelions. In a climate of many competing newspapers with small audiences and extraordinarily lax editorial practices, the story of the murder of Helen Jewett emerged as one of the most famous crimes in American history. Patricia Cline Cohen wrote a 1998 book about this case, The Murder of Helen Jewett, published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Helen Jewett was a prostitute, yes, but in saying this I am as much misinforming you as the opposite. She was a prostitute, but Robinson and Jewett had an intense, passionate relationship which had been going on for a year before her murder. They wrote one another love letters, dozens or probably hundreds of them. They bought one another gifts; they went to the theater together. They teased one another and fought petty battles that seemed to both of them larger than life. They shared secrets. They carried small, hand-drawn pictures of one another. She sewed on his buttons, and mended his shirts. When Robinson had dalliances with other women, she was furious with him, and he had to work his way back into her good graces.
She was, then, more of a surrogate wife or a surrogate girlfriend than she was simply a sex worker, as we think of a prostitute in the 21st century. What is unclear, even having read the book, is to what extent this was unusual in 19th century New York. Jewett had and had had similar relationships with other men, although certainly less intense than her relationship with Robinson.
Ms. Cohen’s research is quite remarkable, and the story she tells is twice that remarkable, at least. Helen Jewett’s name at the time of her birth was Dorcas Doyen. For several years as a young girl Dorcas worked as a live-in domestic servant with the family of Judge Nathan Weston, in Maine. It’s a distinguished family; Judge Weston’s grandson became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In the 1820s there was a woman named Mrs. Anne Royall, who travelled around the United States visiting towns and staying with people and recording her experiences in self-published travelogues that were often petty and vindictive. Ms. Royall visited the Weston house, met Dorcas Doyen briefly, was very much charmed by her, and wrote a couple of very flattering paragraphs about her in one of her nasty little books. No one at the time made any connection between this unnamed servant girl and the woman who, nine years later, became the infamous Helen Jewett, but Ms. Cohen nonetheless finds the passage and uses it effectively to help re-construct Ms. Jewett’s early life.
That’s remarkable research. There are many such discoveries in her book. Nathaniel Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College at the same time as a nephew or cousin or something of Judge Weston, and visited this same small town in Maine for several weeks one summer when he was in college, flirting with a servant girl who worked in his friend’s house. Hawthorne wrote about this, and wrote about the family and the little town in letters or journals that still survive, and Ms. Cohen finds these and uses them to re-construct the time and place. The wallpaper in one room of another cousin’s house still survives, in an off-the-beaten-track museum somewhere, and Ms. Cohen finds this wallpaper and writes about it. Ms. Jewett, as a prostitute, had several other small run-ins with the police, and was on one occasion profiled in a newspaper by a sympathetic reporter (who was also a client), and Ms. Cohen has found this profile and used it to help re-construct her life—as well as the court records of all of these other little dustups.
She finds letters from one family member to another, discussing social events at which Dorcas Doyen would have worked, and, as Doyen/Jewett was an avid reader and a great lover of books, she finds advertisements in small-town newspapers for books that Doyen might have read and probably read, and she finds articles that appeared in local newspapers that describe events or stories that Doyen would have known about or participated in. She finds descriptions of people that Doyen would have known. She finds court records and census records that make passing reference to Doyen’s grandfather or her great-grandmother or her next-door neighbor’s dog. She finds the addresses at which Jewett lived in New York, and she finds out who was living next-door and what they did for a living, and who lived in all the houses up and down the street and what the nearby businesses were.
It would be ungracious of me not to mention that, having read countless crime books, I have never before encountered anything remotely like this level of research. By “research” I do not mean hitting Google and Wikipedia. I mean living for weeks in old libraries and dusty courthouses, trying to recognize a name in a stack of 200-year-old property transaction records, and then moving on to the next old library, the next old courthouse or the next university archive or the next small-town museum or the next stack of census reports. I’m a pretty good researcher; I couldn’t begin to do this.
It would also be gutless of me not to call this what it is. It�
��s academic showboating. In 1804 Jacob Doyen, who was Helen Jewett’s grandfather, filed a small-claims court action in Hallowell, Maine, against a man named Stephen Smith, having to do with a $12 debt, and then failed to appear in court when the case was heard. Ms. Cohen finds the record of this action and infers actively from it, but it doesn’t actually have a damned thing to do with the story of Helen Jewett; it’s just showing off Ms. Cohen’s research skills. As much as we might admire her research, it does become tiresome. But I understand; 99.99% of book researchers would never find a record like that, and almost all of us, if we did, are damned well going to find some way to get it into the book.
It is showboating and it is tiresome, but it is also this that I most admire about crime books in general: that they preserve an image of the lives that are lost. It is the saving grace of crime stories that details become tremendously important. The controversy of the death, like a cosmic flashbulb, illuminates every crevice of the victim’s life and the lives entwined with it, and preserves that record for posterity. Never more than here; Ms. Cohen’s over-the-top research preserves snapshots of life in Maine and life in New York that are more vivid than a hundred sober histories of dear and respected citizens. The best source, of course, is their own letters; these star-doomed lovers bounced letters off of one another like tennis balls, often demanding that a same-day response be returned by a private porter. It would be an understatement to say that these were literate people. Here are a few quotes from the letters and journals of Richard Robinson.
Nell, how pleasant it is to dream, be where you will and as hungry as you will, how supremely happy one is in a little world of our own creation. At best we live but one little hour, strut at our own conceit and die … Come will ye embark?—then on we go, gaily, hand in hand, scorning all petty and trivial troubles, eagerly gazing on our rising sun, till the warmth of its beams (i.e. love) causes our sparkling blood to o-erflow and mingle in holy delight.
From another letter:
I know my letters cannot be very interesting to you, Nell; they are full of oh! how I love you and a piece of other nonsense, exactly what they all write you. They all call you dearest Nelly, so do I. I suppose you think us all alike.
From a journal:
This is the last day of the races; the day on which they run out all the dregs and draw off the equestrian settlings, the spavined, the ring-boned, the stifled, the blind, lame and halt. Friend P. advises me not to bet; he gives me so much advice that, in fact, it would require more wisdom to profit by it than to live without it; his system of morals is like J. R.’s patent dog churn, which was a most excellent machine only it required three hands to tend it.
From another journal:
It is good policy, in carrying a point against an obstinate adversary, to seem to yield, for by this means he is generally disarmed. To convince an obstinate and conceited man, it is sometimes necessary to throw arguments around him and within his reach, which, though he may not observe it, really go to sustain the opinions you wish him to embrace.
These are the words of a 19-year-old store clerk accused of a brutal murder! Actually, when he wrote the journal entries he was 16 or 17, and there are letters he wrote when he was 15 that are equally striking.
Men of letters in the early 19th century wrote overwrought, self-conscious prose that is today almost unreadable. Thomas Carlyle wrote an 1837 history of the French Revolution (written 1834–1837) which is brilliant and entertaining if you want to work hard enough to decipher it, but so convoluted with rhetorical flourishes as to be largely unintelligible to a modern reader. Robinson wrote in that vein, or, if you prefer, vain. Jewett did not; Jewett responded in clean, clear, unpretentious prose that is as lucid and graceful today as the day she wrote it:
My Dear Frank—You have passed your promise by two nights, and yet you have not thought proper to send me a single line, even in the shape of an excuse. Do you think I will endure this. Shall I who have rejected abundance for you sake, sit contented under treatment which seems invented for my mortification.
From another letter:
The day, as you know was extremely cold, so much ice in the Delaware as to render it impossible for any boat to take the passengers, therefore, we had to make the journey all the way on the railroad, and then had to cross from Camden in a small ferry boat, without any cabin or fire, and when we arrived, we were nearly perished from the cold, and but for the kindness and attention of a gentleman whom I met in the car, I never should have got along.
From another letter:
Mr. R. P. Robinson: If you think it requisite that I should remain longer in this most painful suspense, you must pardon me for saying that I think differently. If you were placed in my situation (with all your independence) you would ere this have demanded an explanation … I do not ask you to fix upon any time, nor do I ask you to come here if disagreeable to you. But I certainly do ask a note before this night from you, in which you will mention a time and place when I may see you, and you will find me punctual.
From another:
I wish you could have seen me an hour after you left my room. His Grace the Duke, the Captain, Louisa and myself cracked nearly a dozen bottles of champagne; however, this must be uninteresting to you, and having little time to say the much I would say—sum it up in four words, may God bless you.
These letters go on for pages. Her punctuation is at times a little nonstandard, but the message is always crystal clear. These are the words of a destitute shoemaker’s daughter, dropped off at age twelve to grow up as a domestic servant to a wealthy family, and given a few months of schooling by her generous masters. I venture to say that, if you took the letters of a murdered 21st century prostitute, you would not be likely to find such eloquence.
In fact, there is a great deal in this story that calls into question the notion of progress. The life of Helen Jewett, apart from its terrible finish at the business end of a small hatchet, seems infinitely better than the life of a modern prostitute, as best I understand that from the images on my television. She did not service a hundred clients a week; more likely five to fifteen. She lived in a large house with beautiful furniture, where sumptuous meals were served as an inducement to the clientele. Paintings hung on the walls that today hang in museums and are well known to art historians. She drank champagne, and she spent her days reading novels and writing letters and making a daily promenade to the post office. She wore beautiful dresses. She went to the theater several times a week. Some of the theaters had special seating areas for the prostitutes. They valued their patronage, because the presence of the glamorous ladies drew out-of-town businessmen into the theater.
She did not have a pimp, or a drug habit. There was a madam who ran the brothel, but the madam worked for the prostitutes as much as the other way around; there was a business arrangement between them, in which the ladies drew in the men who ate the expensive meals and bought the no-doubt-overpriced champagne, and the women paid something more than the standard rent on their rooms, but Helen Jewett was free to leave and go to some other house anytime she was unhappy with the accommodations—and, in fact, she had moved several times in the previous three years. There were ruffians who liked to break out the windows of brothels and frighten the women, and I am not suggesting that it was an idyllic lifestyle; merely that it seems quite a bit better than working for a 21st century escort service.
She was, of course, a top-end prostitute; there were also streetwalkers, and there were women working out of houses that were not nearly as clean and comfortable. Helen Jewett was quite attractive, and more than that she was very gracious. She was handy with a needle, a central domestic art of the period, and she could play the piano. (Piano-playing marked a woman as “refined,” in that era, because only rich people had pianos.)
It is thus surprising that Robinson, who was living in a rooming house where he shared a bed with another young man and who was working as a clerk in a large dry goods store where he was paid virtually nothing, was a
ble to afford the services of such a lady. In part this may have been because Jewett, who was emotionally involved with Robinson, charged him only what he could afford to pay, and in part it was certainly because Robinson was pilfering from his employer. “Pilfering” is probably not the right word; he appears to have been embezzling at a pretty good pace. His wallet, at the time of his arrest, was found to be stuffed with a thick wad of third-party checks addressed to his employer, and his letters to Jewett allude frequently to clandestine activities of an unknown nature. He may have been selling stuff out the back door; the store where he worked was apparently a pretty big operation.
Robinson, then, was a brilliant young man—and a very capable thief. And handsome; apparently he was stunningly handsome; Jewett’s beauty may well have been overstated by the press to sell papers, but there is strong evidence for Robinson’s. What is unclear in Ms. Cohen’s very detailed re-creation of these remarkable people is exactly to what extent they were remarkable, even in their own time, and to what extent they merely seem remarkable to the modern reader, who expects a prostitute and her accused murderer to be grunting savages whose idea of a great day is grabbing three cases of Budweiser and tearing through the backcountry on three-wheeled scooters with mud tires. Ms. Cohen seems to assume that these people were as remarkable in their own time as they would be now, but because she assumes this she never demonstrates that this is true, or even says that it is true; it is merely implied. She thinks (and says often) that Robinson was arrogant, which was no doubt true, but he was also a child of the romantic era; all men of substance in that era spoke and wrote and dressed and acted in a way that would seem very unnatural now. To what extent did the young men that Robinson worked with (and lived with—many of the clerks that he worked with also lived in the same rooming house and, now that you mention it, consorted with the same prostitutes) … to what extent did these other young men also write and think with the boldness and sophistication of Richard Robinson? We simply don’t know; we don’t get any clue to that from this book.