True Crime Titles Put Readers in the Jury Box

“Everybody is guilty of something,” says award-winning crime writer Walter Mosley. “True crime stories, murder mysteries, up-to-the-minute online news reports, and innuendo grab our attention faster than any call for justice, human rights, or ceasefires.” His remarks come from a recent special edition of Newsweek magazine, dedicated to America’s exploding obsession with crime and the books that chronicle it.

Theories on the reasons for this growing trend vary: is it because of our general sense of vulnerability; the search for someone to blame; or the chance to experience violence at a safe distance inside the pages of a book? Regardless, there seems to be a bit of the armchair detective in many, if not all of us.

Take the case of “The Norfolk Four,” the handle given to the four Navy sailors convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of a young Navy wife. Faulty police work and prosecutorial politics are thoroughly detailed in The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Con-fessions, and the Norfolk Four by Tom Wells and Richard A. Leo (The New Press, 978-1-59558-401-4). Despite an eventual DNA match to the real perpetrator, and his arrest and conviction, three of the four in the book’s title are still in prison awaiting clemency. The authors show in excruciating detail exactly how a book can come to the truth, even when the police and the courts do not. This is fascinating for readers, though no doubt only of small comfort to the three desperate men still awaiting justice.

Most cases like the one above could benefit from a thorough understanding of that true crime topic of the moment, forensic science. And here is where books triumph over the small screen. Forget what you thought you learned from CSI, because most of it is highly embellished or just plain fabricated—two basic and non-negotiable no-no’s of true crime.

Turn instead to Irrefutable Evidence: Adventures in the History of Forensic Science by Michael Kurland (Ivan R. Dee, 978-1-56663-803-6), A Question of Murder: Compelling Cases From a Famed Forensic Pathologist by Cyril H. Wecht, M.D. (Prometheus, 978-1-59102-661-7), or the now classic, Forensics: A Guide for Writers by D.P. Lyle, M.D. (Writers Digest Books, 978-1-58297-474-3). The latter, despite its subtitle, functions well as an introduction not just for writers but for anyone in-terested in understanding this advancing science.

Witnesses may lie or forget, police may provide selective evidence to the prosecutor, and the prosecution’s very job is to slant the story of the crime. Science, however, holds truth within its cells, smears, and swabs, despite the fact that it has become, as author Kurland says in his introduction, “a national spectator sport.” He shows in Irrefutable Evidence that the topic of criminal science has been of keen interest to investigators and lay people alike at least since the days of ancient China. That country, he says, used an early form of forensic identification—branding—on released prisoners. One would imagine repeat offenders were few. And so, our interest today only mirrors that of those who lived in times gone by, if with much additional shorthand—DNA, ME, CODIS, and so on.

Now as far as we know, ancient China had no one like Anna Nicole Smith. Today, forensic science is most visible in high pro-file cases such as hers. These celebrity crimes are just the purview of forensic pathologist and author, Dr. Cyril Wecht. In A Question of Murder, he details a few of the more compelling ones, including the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and her son Daniel, the nine nursing home patients who died mysteriously after hurricane Katrina, and the tragic stabbing of seven-year-old Danielle van Dam. The latter case netted a death sentence for her neighbor, David Westerfield, courtesy of forensic science developed in part by Wecht. Orange blanket fibers found in just the wrong place, to be specific, were key to solving the case.

Despite the evidence, Westerfield maintains his innocence, and has many supporters; the details in Wecht’s latest book, however, give readers the facts behind the court case, as well as Westerfield’s protestations, and lets them decide for themselves. One reason celebrity crime books like this continue to captivate readers: there is always more to know.

Far from the tarnish of criminal celebrity, death also awaited criminal unknown Billy Wayne Sinclair. A convenience store stick-up man turned jailhouse lawyer, Sinclair is now author, with his wife, Jodie Sinclair, of Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor (Arcade, 978-1-55970-899-9). The Sinclairs say they wrote the book not to prove Billy Wayne’s innocence but rather to condemn the death penalty. It’s not the most heinous who die by the state’s hand, say the Sinclairs, it’s the most powerless. Billy Wayne’s story was compelling enough to capture the attention of Sister Helen Prejean, author of the best-seller-turned-movie-blockbuster, Dead Man Walking. Sister Helen wrote in the book’s foreword, “Billy Wayne personifies the humanity of the condemned and their capacity to change. Clearly redemption is not limited to souls without sin.”

Justice came too late, however, to save the life of cultural martyr Sam Hose, as detailed in Edwin T. Arnold’s What Virtue There is in Fire (University of Georgia Press, 978-0-8203-2891-1). Whether or not he was a “soul without sin” is still up for grabs more than a century and several books later. The circa 1899 case examined by Arnold is the probable inspiration behind Erskine Caldwell’s controversial Trouble in July, and though eighty years separate their efforts, the two share a publisher. There is speculation that Margaret Mitchell and William Faulker were also moved by the case.
Depending upon whom you believe, Sam Hose was either a family-destroying killer or the innocent victim of a skewed and Southern brand of bad justice. That he was tracked, captured, hung, and dismembered is not in dispute. Author Arnold compiles prodigious research from both sides and chooses to let the reader decide, while still not letting history off the hook.

“For a long time Hose was lost to history, as were so many victims of lynching,” Arnold writes. “This shameful period became an embarrassment, and several generations of Americans developed collective amnesia.”

To read both present-day and historic true crime books such as these is to examine the shame from inside the investigation, the jail, the lab, and the courtroom, and to remember.