American Predator – A Gripping and Well-Researched True-Crime Narrative

“The Bureau’s top criminal profilers were at a loss. The only thing they could tell the team was that Keyes was one of the most terrifying subjects that they had ever encountered. There was no precedent for a serial killer with this MO: no victim type; no fixed location for hunting, killing, and burying; putting thousands of miles between himself and his victims; caches buried all over the United States.”

Israel Keyes is described as one of the most calculating and terrifying serial-killers you’ve never heard of. The recent TV series Mindhunter (2017--), based on the bone-chilling true story of the man who pioneered the science of profiling serial killers, immersed us into the dark deeds of some of the most twisted minds. From the intimidating and unbelievably self-aware Ed Kemper to the intelligent and well-spoken Wayne Williams, the series introduced us to the deviant minds who have committed the most appalling crimes. Nevertheless, it is the early efforts (in 1970s) of FBI men to understand the serial-killers through methods of psychological profiling (BAU – Behavioral Analysis Unit) that's alleged to have helped identify and solve the serial-murders. Although serial-killing (and names like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy) have strongly captured the public’s imagination, it is stated that less than 1 percent of annual homicides in USA are by serial-killers. And Israel Keyes is one of the truly rare serial-killer whose crimes have mostly gone overlooked – the one percent of the one percent, who if not for sheer luck would have gone undetected until his death.

Israel Keyes is an anomaly even among these darkest minds since his MO has baffled the practitioners of criminal profiling. Keyes (1978-2012) is believed to have spent at least fourteen years traveling in & around America robbing banks, kidnapping, raping, and murdering people. After serving in the US army between 1998 and 2001, Keyes was sought out for his handyman skills, and later started his own construction business in the small town of Anchorage, Alaska. When not working or spending time with his daughter, Keyes meticulously prepared himself for new hunts: studying maps (for the safest getaway routes), caching weapons (buried ‘kill kits’ all over the country), and even read the popular books of forensic specialists and FBI profilers. Keyes didn’t have a victim type. He killed indiscriminately and never chose a victim beforehand (his slaughtered victims only made the ‘mistake’ of being in his kill zone). Even though Keyes claimed, he never touched kids, the investigators have understood enough about him to treat this claim with skepticism (So, why did he do it? “Why Not?” was his answer).

Israel Keyes eventually came under the radar of FBI by making few careless mistakes. But until his death (by suicide) on December 1, 2012 there were lots of unanswered questions about the list of his victims. Keyes has confessed to 11 homicides, but he is hinted to be responsible for many more murders as he is supposed to have committed his first murder when he was only a teenager. Sadly, the incompetence of few officials while keeping him in the custody, and Keyes’ egotistical need to manipulate and control the interrogation never revealed the full monstrosity of his criminal behavior. Nevertheless, all the details unveiled so far about this lesser-known serial-killer are deftly presented in the investigative journalist Maureen Callahan’s true-crime book American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21^st century (published July 2019). Author Maureen Callahan does a fine job of distancing us from the killer, by telling the story backwards, i.e., from the bizarre kidnapping and brutal murder of 18-year-old Samantha Koening of Anchorage, Alaska (Keyes' last kill).

Maureen offers a thorough account of Samantha’s disappearance and the botched police investigation in the earlier phase. Yet group of dedicated professionals banded together, and thanks to few sloppy mistakes made by the suspect, their man was arrested in Texas, more than 3,000 miles from Alaska. In custody, Keyes confessed to the killing of Samantha. Only when he started to confess about the slaying of a middle-aged couple in New England, the investigators came to understand the truly diabolical nature of Keyes. Although details of certain crime scenes, especially the murder of Curriers, are luridly described, Maureen Callahan never commits the mistake of putting us in the killer’s perspective. Moreover, the author reports the peculiarity and deviancy of Keyes from the viewpoint of those closely involved in the case. The conversational tone maintained throughout the book, from digging up into the actual transcripts between Keyes and law enforcement officials, throws a lot of chilling details in a matter-of-fact manner. The abridged version of the transcripts also helps us comprehend the difficulties and challenges faced by the law enforcement officials in handling such smart, incredibly self-aware and ruthless serial-killers.

Overall, American Predator is a compelling account of a relatively unknown serial-killer who smoothly traveled all around post-9/11 America, casting an intricate web of murder and mayhem.

 

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – A Powerful and Gut-Wrenching True-Crime Book

One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk……The doorbell rings…….This is how it ends for you…….“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,” you threatened a victim once. Open the door. Show us your face. Walk into the light.

Journalist and creator of True Crime Diary Michelle Eileen McNamara spent nearly a decade researching for her true-crime book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which focuses on the unsolved crimes of a serial rapist and killer who terrorized Californian suburbs between mid 1970s and mid 1980s. Unfortunately she died in 2016 at age 46 (from the effects of prescription drugs and a heart condition) before completing her book. Michelle’s husband, the actor/comedian Patton Oswalt sought the help of investigative journalist Billy Jensen and researcher Paul Hynes to piece together his wife's manuscript and get it ready for publication. The book was published in February 27 this year and became an instant best-seller. Early in April, there was news that HBO will be producing a documentary series based on the book. And then followed the fascinatingly shocking news: a suspect named Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in link to the serial murder-rape cases (72-year-old DeAngelo was a Navy Veteran and a former police officer). ‘One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’, the caption in the book’s cover now felt evermore perfect.

It was Michelle McNamara who coined the moniker ‘Golden State Killer’, a man responsible for at least 100 burglaries, 50 home-invasion rapes, and 13 murders. He has also gleaned other nicknames during decades of police investigation and reporting: ‘Visalia Ransacker’, ‘East Area Rapist’, ‘Original Night Stalker’, ‘Diamond Knot Killer’, etc. As a dedicated researcher, accomplished armchair sleuth, and author of the website True Crime Diary, McNamara has possessed a long-standing fascination for cold cases (crimes that go unsolved). Earlier in the autobiographical portions of the book, she remarks, “The part of the brain reserved for sports statistics or dessert recipes or Shakespeare quotes is, for me, a gallery of harrowing aftermaths”. She sneaks into her little daughter Alice’s playroom in late nights, noting down penal codes in crayon and jolting notes for her next article. But McNamara terms her obsessive investigation to unmask the identity of Golden State Killer as more of a personal endeavor. She recalls the cold-blooded murder that happened closer to her neighborhood in 1984 (when Michelle was 14; a murder attributed to the serial-killer whom she pursued later in life).

Patton Oswalt and Michelle McNamara

For years, Michelle McNamara has interviewed rape victims, surviving kins of the murder victims, tracked down old police reports, forged a strong working relationship with members of law enforcement in the hopes of seeing the culprit behind the jail bars (“There's a scream lodged permanently in my throat now”, she writes when thinking the killer is still at large). There may have been many disappointments in the path she chose, but at the same time her continuous coverage on the 3 to 4 decade-old crimes of Golden State Killer brought renewed attention to the cases. Most importantly, the vicious nature of these crimes was broadcasted beyond the confines of Californian police reports (I also possess an eerie fascination for serial-killers and true-crime subjects yet I have never heard about Golden State Killer before the release of McNamara’s book).  Nevertheless, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark isn’t a book full of cold facts, as vouched by author Gillian Flynn in the foreword, trying to render an edge-of-the-seat narrative by plowing through the savage acts of an unfathomable killer, while treating his victims as mere ciphers. McNamara’s writing rather flows with nuance and humanity. She is deeply empathetic in narrating the hell the rape victims went through, and without delving much on violence and lurid details she pushes us into those distressing atmosphere. When it comes to portraying killer’s macabre habits at his victims’ homes, McNamara tells things with unbearable clarity, but in a way that blocks one’s unnecessary curiosity in the killer’s perverted indulgence.

While the first part of the book concentrates on the crimes, killer’s M.O., and the trauma of the victims, the second part follows array of cops from different counties, most of whom has retired after chasing dead ends throughout their career. The 2^nd part of the book also contains the author’s various theories (including the ones shared by her equally obsessive online patrons), and in-depth researches made by studying maps of crime scenes (geographic-profiling). Many of the chapters are pieced through from McNamara’s notes and the book’s third part, entirely written by Billy Jensen and Paul Hynes conveys the depth of her involvement in the case and the avenues she was about to chose to identify the killer. One of those things is that she wanted run the killer’s DNA through public databases like Ancestry.com, which was what the investigators eventually did to nab James DeAngelo.

The alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo

Of course, the book’s incomplete nature shows through. Despite McNamara’s deeply evocative writing I felt the book’s structure makes the narration disjointed and repetitive (an unavoidable consequence after the author’s sad demise). There are chapters that can’t really compensate the absence of McNamara’s voice. Had she lived to finish the work, the final product would have been a masterpiece of true-crime literature.  In the ensuing months and years, debates would go on about whether McNamara’s book truly led to the capture of the serial-killer (already some articles have hailed her as prophetic and condemned certain police counties for not acknowledging McNamara’s book). But shoving aside these sentences that start with ‘if’ and look at the book’s merit, one could still find an enlivening and diligent work. Michelle McNamara robustly conveys the 70s American suburban life, where a rapist and murderer lurked in between the rifts of alienation and isolation that pervaded these communities (where people failed to look out for each other). She has also impeccably captured what it meant for her and the people of her generation to shine light upon this deranged killer (the “Letter to an Old Man” chapter would definitely be hailed as wondrous piece in the history of true-crime writing). Eventually, the devastating image of Golden State Killer turning the Californian dream into nightmare reminded me of the opening shot of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), when the camera zooms inside a well-manicured lawn to find squalid things that wholly contrasts with the idyllic space of American serenity and domesticity.

 
Patton Oswalt on his late wife's book

 

Killers of the Flower Moon – A Profoundly Disturbing Account of Greed and Racial Injustice

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset

New York reporter and author David Grann’s debut non-fiction book ‘The Lost City of Z’ (turned into a spectacular Hollywood movie by James Gray in 2016), a critically acclaimed best-seller, dealt with the obscure and fascinating real story of a Victorian British explorer (Percival Fawcett), whose calamitous journey through the Amazonian Jungle (in 1925) in search of a lost city was full of chilling details. It’s a sensational historical mystery, riffing on the themes of obsession, perseverance, death, and madness. Grann’s follow up book Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (published April 2017) retells one of the most unknown and terrifying chapters in American history. The true-crime non-fiction delves deep into string of unsolved murders that occurred in the Osage Indian Nation of Oklahoma in the 1920s. David Grann has spent little more than five years for the book, profoundly focusing on yet another monstrous crime committed by the American whites against the Native Americans.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a tale of murder, greed, bigotry, betrayal, valor, and persecution which unearths crimes that has long been exorcised from history. Like most of the Native American tribes, the Osage were forced from their native lands in the late 19^th century to northeastern Oklahoma (in the 1870s). The migration and other tyrannical processes set forth by the federal government nearly wiped-out two-thirds of the Native American population, in a span of 70 years. However, the Osage people were blessed with well-reasoned, perceptive leaders, who unlike other tribes firmly settled on their new land, and also secured mining rights. Although the vast stretches of lands in Oklahoma were initially considered ‘worthless’, by the tail-end of 19^th century the Osages had discovered black gold. By the early 1920s, oil leases and mineral rights generated millions of dollars for the Osage (a total of $30 million in 1923 alone which Grann says is equal to at least $400 million today). Around this time the Osage people were considered the wealthiest in the United States (per-capita). A single well on Osage land is said to have pumped out 680 barrels in a day.  Soon, the lavish lifestyle of the Osage attracted unsavory reports from biased, racist reporters (words like ‘rich redskins’ are thrown out). 

The Osage of the 1920s were wealthy beyond most rich American whites. They bought huge mansions, luxurious cars, and even hired white servants. But the tribe’s wealth pulled in army of financiers, outlaws, opportunists, and other loathsome fortune-seekers. In an attempt to legally fleece the tribe members, the federal government appointed ‘prominent’ white citizens (lawyers, judges, real estate magnates, bankers, etc) as legal guardians to many Osages who were deemed ‘incompetent’ to handle their money. The guardianship allowed them to steal liberally, while strictly restricting the tribes’ ability to spend. But still the most invaluable aspect of ever-growing oil money is the ‘head rights’, which couldn’t be bought off by white-skinned outsiders. That’s when the killings began.

In May 1921, two badly decomposed bodies were discovered by chance in different locations within the Indian reservation. Charles Whitehorn (age 30) and Anna Brown (age 34), both the deceased were members of the tribe and had been shot dead. In the next four years, at least 24 people were poisoned, blown up, hit by cars, and shot for their money and oil rights (including some local whites who apparently helped their Osage neighbors). Known as ‘Reign of Terror’, these baffling series of murder posed heavy challenges to the local and state authorities; partly because they were corrupted to the bone and partly due to their utter lack of deductive skills. These were frontier men, who often uprooted crime through shoot-outs and hangings. Meanwhile, the murders caught the attention of an ambitious, authoritative young bureaucrat named J.Edgar Hoover, who considered the cases as a perfect opportunity to prove the worth of his newly formed bureau of investigations (later known as FBI). Hoover sent in Special Agent Tom White, a former Texas Ranger and a man of action. White formed a team of undercover agents, who took over different roles in the Osage community: from cattleman to insurance salesman. Soon, the team zeroed-in on a kingpin behind this bloody conspiracy. David Grann meticulously recreates the stunning breakthroughs and tense interplay between criminals and lawmen, which eventually led to the capture of a master criminal. Contrary to the records of FBI, however, the tale doesn’t end there. He further delves into yellowing archival records, old newspapers, and fading memories (of Osage descendants) to come to a shocking conclusion. As Grann has said in an interview (to Rolling Stone), “When I began the story I was thinking, 'It's a whodunit kind of thing, right?' And by the end, it was like, 'Who didn't do it?'”

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a success in two ways: he deftly constructs the details of the murder and its investigation so as to turn it into a compelling puzzle; he never forgets to chronicle the human impact of the brutal murders in the Osage community, then and now. In the opening passages, we get the feel of Erik Larson’s ‘Devil in the White City’, a well-documented non-fiction book on 1893 Chicago fair and serial killings by H. H. Holmes. However, ‘Flower Moon’ is much darker, eschewing the idea of a singular villain figure, and shockingly ambiguous than Larson’s book. What the Osage confronted in the 1920s is not a great criminal mastermind, but a highly ingrained culture of killing. There is more to the story, mentioned in the annals of FBI investigations. The last section of the book, which unfurls the harsh truth behind the hundreds of murders and suspicious deaths of the Osage, tells a lot about the darkest ideals of American society. Beneath its boasting of transformation towards modernity and economic ascension lie unimaginable violence, naked greed, and indelible racist notions. The FBI narrative that pinned the ‘Reign of Terror’ on a single individual also tells a lot about the universal conception of evil: that the law would come in and remove that particular evil to once again ‘normalize’ the society. But the truth is far more frightening, as we avoid acknowledging the society’s depth of complicity pertaining to a crime.    

 

Martin Scorsese is possibly developing a film adaptation of the book with Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert de Niro

“History can often provide at least some final accounting”, Grann writes. Nevertheless, the author’s powerful writing style does more than that. It is true that it’s too late to identify those who violently preyed upon the Osages, let alone punish them. Yet Killers of the Flower Moon would make sure that these diabolical acts in American history aren’t easily forgotten. When all is said and done, the legacy of sadness and persecution encompassing the Osage and other native tribes still remains. So will the stain of blood that saturates their history. It’s a truly devastating and fury-inducing read, showcasing where the real horrors of history rests: in what we don’t know and in what we fail to acknowledge.