I’ll let you in on a secret; for a guy known as a number cruncher, I think Bill James is an excellent writer. I started reading his stuff back in 1984, when he published his first Baseball Abstract (actually his second, but the first was mimeographed in his basement so his 1984 opus was the first to be published by a real publisher). He has an easy, unmannered style that comes across as conversational; a wry, sarcastic but seldom mean sense of humor; and, unsurprisingly, a clear expositional style that matches his analytic insights. Frankly, if I had to list my literary influences, I hope it wouldn't be pretentious of me to include Bill James on the list.
It was with some shock that I stumbled across his book Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence on Amazon. Shock because I assumed he only wrote about baseball and baseball related topics. I had no idea he had penned a book recounting the vast history of well-known criminal cases in American history. The book was over 20 years in the making, as he wrote it in snippets after reading whatever published materials existed about the various crimes he discusses, then put together in one tome.
So this is third hand analysis, with the police doing the initial search for evidence, then the authors writing about the cases, and now James applying his clear-eyed analysis to the facts as presented. But James couches most of his analysis with caveats and advisories about how detached his insights are from first hand evidence.
One doesn’t really learn about the history of violent crime in school unless one studies criminology, so mostly the information is picked up as something akin to folklore. Thus I was astonished about how much mis-information I had acquired about these cases, if James is to be believed. I had heard that Bruno Hauptmann, the man executed for the Lindbergh Baby murder, had been the victim of anti-German prejudice after WW I; James says he was almost certainly guilty. Like everyone who saw the movie with Tony Curtis, I knew the Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo; James argues persuasively that DeSalvo was a mentally unstable man who liked to confess to crimes, and the police probably decided that if someone wanted to confess to the murders, they’d help him out.
The book is part historical criminology, part sociology, and part media analysis. James recounts the crimes, comments on police procedures (or lack thereof), and tries to identify why some cases caught the public’s attention and others did not, and also looks at how coverage of crime has changed. He notes that until 1980 no police officer would conceive of a murder being committed by someone who was a stranger to the victim; the phrase “serial killer” hadn't entered the lexicon (who knows how many spouses, family members or acquaintances were tried and convicted of murders that were committed by psychopaths ahead of the curve).
To anyone familiar with James’ analysis of baseball, his dissection of the assumptions made about famous murders should come as no surprise. Serial killers who evade arrest for any period of time are often assumed to be “geniuses” (for example, Zodiac), yet when they are captured James notes that they often “have the IQ of a Labrador retriever.” If the pace of serial killings lag, police assume the killer is slowing down when in fact the almost universal rule with serial killers is the pace of killings accelerates; if the pace slows, the killer has simply moved elsewhere.
James has some biases, which he puts on the table. He states that one of his beliefs is that law is too important to be left to lawyers, and criticizes legal principles and the American judicial system for some obvious transgressions. However one of his critiques is that the hearsay rule keeps information from jurors; the rule has a solid basis in policy and is riddled with enough exceptions that if any hearsay is probative, it will probably get to the jury. But one is hard-pressed to defend a legal system that, as James points out, refused to send a criminal to prison because he is crazy, but then refused to keep him in an asylum because they were sane.
James also tries a little too hard to quantify things to support his analysis. He develops a point system for items in the prosecutor’s case against the accused which tries to turn subjective criteria into objective ones. For example, in the Lizzie Borden case, he initially gives the fact that Lizzie disliked her step-mother 15 points, but reduces it to 2 because of circumstances.
Easily the toughest case to crack is that of Lizzie Borden of nursery rhyme fame. It is a rare case where there is a solid timetable for the events that took place. On the one hand, no one but Lizzie could have committed the murder of her father and step-mother, but she was seen within 10 minutes after the second murder and had no blood on her, an impossibility if she were guilty given the savage nature of the murders (they really were beaten repeatedly with something resembling an axe). It is one of the rare instances in the book where James offers no insight into who he suspects was the real killer.
Bill James’ book Popular Crimes is a breezy trip through Damnation Alley, a world populated by psychopaths, pedophiles and mad dog killers. Yet, James’ reliance on reason to understand what happened and why the police succeeded or failed keeps the book from becoming a lurid re-telling of oft told criminal tales. These killers may be crazy, but there is a rationality to their methods, and that’s what Bill James succeeds in sussing out.
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