American Murder Houses

 

I still can't quite make it through any of my library books but I did manage to finish this book I bought a few years ago, "American Murder Houses" by Steve Lehto, about houses across the country that are notorious for people having been murdered in them. Of course many of them are supposedly haunted, too.

When I was a kid my aunt and uncle bought a house in Monterey Park. It was very cheap because Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, had murdered a husband in the bedroom and nearly killed his wife, too. No one wanted to live in it so my aunt was able to get a good deal and with four kids she needed it. My mother remembers going over there after her sister bought it to help her scrub blood off the wood floors. I never saw or experienced anything weird in the house and neither did any of my cousins, but one Easter before the Night Stalker trial a couple of detectives came by and asked if they could look the house over again before they went to testify in court. Us kids thought it was pretty cool. The adults probably did not. People used to come by and take pictures all the time. 

At any rate, most of the houses in this book are privately owned and can only been seen from the street. I was a little irritated when he talked about the Lizzie Borden house and said that Abby Borden had been killed while napping upstairs in the guest bedroom. Um, no. Lizzie's uncle, John Morse, was staying in the guest room and even though he was out at the time I highly doubt Abby would have just napped on the bed he was using when her own room was down the hall. She was cleaning up the room when the killer struck. I had heard about most of the murders he talked about but the new ones were interesting. It was a quick read. 

Angel in Black

 

I am in such a book slump. Nothing is appealing to me. I froze all my holds at work because books kept coming in and I would check them out and they would sit by my couch for three weeks, untouched, before I would have to bring them back because they have holds. 

I remembered liking the Heller mystery by Collins I read a few months ago, and decided to give another Heller mystery a shot. It was pretty good and I enjoyed it, but it didn't help me finish anything else I've started.

In late 1946, Heller's girlfriend Peggy breaks up with him and runs off to Vegas with Bugsy Siegal. Heller goes on the rebound and starts up a fling with a waitress he meets in Chicago named Beth. Beth disappears from his life but Peggy comes back, wanting to reconcile, and the two elope and go to Hollywood for their honeymoon. Heller has a partnership in a detective agency out there, which is footing the bill for the fancy hotel. 

Heller is in the car with a reporter friend of his when something interesting comes across the police radio: a potentially drunk, passed out woman lying naked in an empty lot. Heller and Fowler are the first on the scene and Heller takes pictures for Fowler. He realizes that he knows this woman: it's Beth from Chicago. And she'd called him at his hotel a few days earlier to tell him she was pregnant with his baby. 

Whoops.

Heller knows he can't let on that he knows the girl, otherwise he'll be Suspect Number One. So Heller plays dumb and gets dragged into what ends up being the biggest unsolved murder in Los Angeles history: the Black Dahlia. Collins did a really excellent job coming up with a theory who killed Beth Short, one I had not heard before in my extensive readings on the case.  

Maniac

I'm a big fan of Schechter, I've been reading his true crime books for decades. One of the things I really like about him is how he covers killers who aren't as well known. "Maniac" is about Andrew Kehoe and the worse school massacre in US history. Kehoe was a disgruntled, childless farmer who deeply resented having to pay so much in taxes to fund a school. Don't get me wrong, I think taxes are outrageously high too, but I also don't go around murdering people in protest. Kehoe got himself elected treasure of the school board and fought tooth and nail against the superintendent, Emery Huyck, who kept asking for money for frivolous things like books and maps. Kehoe used his position to become a general handyman around the school: he had gone to college to study electrical engineering, and as a result was able to fix a lot of things himself and save the school money in repair bills. It also allowed him time to plant explosive devices. Lots and lots of explosive devices.

On May 18, 1927, the last day of final exams, Kehoe denotated his devices, blowing up major portions of the school. Thankfully many of his explosives failed to go off, otherwise not only the school but mostly likely the entire town of Bath, Michigan would have been blown up. Kehoe loaded his pickup truck full of shrapnel, drove to the school, where everyone in town was frantically trying to rescue trapped children from the rubble, and blew up his truck. He, of course, died but so did Huyck and several others as the shrapnel went flying. Forty-five people were killed that day, most of them children, and at least 58 were injured. It was a tiny town, and no one was spared from losing a child, grandchild, or friend. Several families lost two children, one lost three. In addition, Kehoe killed his wife, set her on fire, burned his horses alive, and blew up his farm. It's shocking and heartbreaking. 

So why isn't Kehoe well known? We all know about Columbine and Sandy Hook, but most people don't know about Bath. Schechter theorizes that it was a combination of things. Just a few days after the horror, Charles Lindbergh completed his solo flight across the Atlantic and news of his feat dominated papers around the world, shoving the Bath tragedy off the front pages. There was also a sensational murder in New York known as the Double Indemnity murder, where a wife and her lover murdered her husband and tried to make it look like a burglar had done it. The lewd sensationalism of that case captured the nation's attention, and, let's face it, reading about a bunch of innocent kids being brutally blown up is depressing. So Kehoe has mostly been lost to the annuals of history. Schechter did a great job with this book. I don't want to say I enjoyed it, because of course reading about all those poor kids dying wasn't enjoyable at all, but it was interesting.  
 

The Other Emily

 

I feel like such a slug lately, I haven't been reading at all. It happens every once in awhile. I just hate it. Eventually something will bring me out of my book funk. 

I did manage to finish Dean Koontz's latest, "The Other Emily". It wasn't bad, but the ending was a big WTF? He went back to his hard core SciFi roots with this ending. I wasn't expecting it.

David is a successful writer who spends most of his time in NYC. He comes back to his little cottage in Corona del Mar for a few months every year. It was the home he shared with Emily, who disappeared 10 years earlier. Her body was never found but she's assumed to have been a victim of Ronny Lee Jessup, a serial killer who used to troll the lonely stretch of the 101 where Emily's car broke down the night she vanished. David's been visiting Jessup in prison, trying to tease out of him where his other victims were buried, but Jessup isn't talking. 

David goes out to eat one night after returning to Newport and sees a woman who looks exactly like Emily. He strikes up a conversation with her and discovers the resemblance is really uncanny. She talks like Emily, moves like Emily, has the same gestures and mannerisms. She says her name is Maddison, and she's the age Emily was when she disappeared 10 years earlier. David hires a private investigator to see if he can get to the bottom of this mysterious woman. 

The rest of the story was pretty good, I kept wondering how Koontz was going to explain this. What the heck really happened to Emily?! And then I got to the ending and picture a big balloon deflating. Like, oh. Didn't see it coming, but it wasn't all that good. 

Still, better than "Breathless". 

Balls

 

I just happened across this book while looking for something fun and light to read. It's told entirely through the POV of women surrounding the coaches and players of a fictional Alabama college football team, the Birmingham Black Bears. The main character is Dixie, who is married to Mac Gibbs. Mac starts out as a high school football coach and then lands a job as the offensive coach for the Black Bears. After a few years the head coach, Catfish Bomar, retires and Mac gets the promotion to head coach. Despite a few continuity errors, it was a fun read and I enjoyed it. I thought the fact that she told it entirely from the female perspective was super interesting: while Dixie narrates most of it, we also hear from the players' mothers and girlfriends and the other coaches' wives and Dixie's best friend.