5 comments about Raising Roger's Cross.

1. The 50's weren't all Happy Days, warm fuzzies, poodle skirts, the Cleavers and the Cunninghams. The 50's were also the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, and the killings In Cold Blood of the Clutter family in Kansas chronicled by Capote. Says Father Charles Kunkel, O.S.C., of Onamia, Minnesota: "The fifties are seen sometimes as the `good old days' before all Hell broke loose in the sixties. But sociologists will say that the fifties were more like the dammed up river of social changes generated by the upheavals of World War II. Changes of the sixties were already happening under the surface of the fifties. ... the wounds of hidden change were wreaking havoc." One incident of this havoc happened in the Kitten Club and a contiguous cornfield on the night of October 5 through 6, 1957, down near Long Siding, Minnesota. "Raising Roger's Cross" is Father Kunkel's quest to uncover occurrences in and around the mutilation and death of 17 year old Roger Vaillancourt, officially ruled an accident.
   
   This True Crime book is unflinchingly graphic, deeply disturbing and depressing, and may not be for the faint of heart. But how else to convey the trauma and trenchant horror? Its mission is not to tell the entire story, as it is yet unknown, but rather to Raise Roger's Cross; hopefully, to encourage others to come forth with what they know: their little pieces of the puzzle; and to goad officialdumb out of their almost 50 year old "duck and cover"up mode. Now that Fr. Kunkel has let the KittenClub out of the bag, what are they going to do? For updates, go to his blog @ rogerscross.com. /TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer.



2. I was interested in the book because its where I was raised.What hurt were the fact that he only changed sime names.My Uncle is mentioned many times unflatteringly.He is reffered to as being openly gay,which he wasn't.It was very easy to figure out who all the suspects really were.I will be glad to name them if anyone wants to know.He should have changed all the names or not used just some of the last names.



3. I just completed Raising Roger's cross, and while I found the story interesting because of its nature, I found the writing style of the author disjointed and certainly not what I expected from a book marked Fiction. The book reads as a series of notes, somewhere in a confused neverland between non-fiction and fiction. There are brief histories of the individuals involved, which are restated many times throughout the book. Because of the nature of the death, no conclusions are reached and by the end the reader is even more confused than the Newspaper accounts of the story. This confusion is not simply because of the nature of the unsolved crime, it is a confusion brought on by the focus of the novel and the writer's style. Charles Kunkel moves in and out of preachy narrative to speculative comments about what Old timer's might have thought, or might not have thought, to judgemental comments concerning the town. I found the expression "Foley Youth" completely monotonous as well as the expression "Foley wild group", and I am not even from Foley. In the big picture, just how wild could the Rainbow cafe have been in comparison to other Den's of iniquity in larger cities? The Rainbow was just a small hole in the wall cafe, downtown Foley, where people from all groups gathered to discuss what was happening in Foley. Probably every town within driving distance that had a population between 500 and l,000 people had their own Rainbow, Dew Drop Inn or Main street cafe. It certainly wasn't a place where you would expect anyone to sell Heroin or find a prostitute for the evening! And as for underaged drinking at the cafe, there was probably more drinking openly going on at the local church bazaar. I guess I would really resent the comments if I had been a regular at the cafe or related to the owner.
   I also had no clue about why the author's religious goal is to "raise more stories about the cross" and if he does, I hope he finds a new voice and style before starting another Author House project. If Kunkel wanted to explore small town mentality and how a closed minded,practically one church steeple community often ignored proper police investigative techniques in the 50's, and fabricated data based on what someone might have said to someone else, he would have had a stronger focus. To me, this is a story about a typical small, close minded community in the 50's whose young people had very little to do other than go to dances and drink, which in itself was the tragedy. Raising Roger's Cross reads like a peep show that gives us a small glimpse into the lives of a group of aging teenagers playing telephone. As in most small towns, anything out of the ordinary gets blown completely out of proportion, and a death of a high school student would have brought out all the local gossip even if there was no murder and no "wild group" conspiracy to cover up Mack and Dewey's deeds.
   I have no doubt that something did occur that night. My guess is there was a lot of underaged drinking and a fight. This fight probably involved Mack and Dewey, and the girls in question probably saw parts of it or knew it had occured. What bothers me the most is that the book is too close to non-fiction for comfort. I do not blame reviewers for being upset when some real people's names are mentioned as openly Gay, or characterized as wild or bad people etc. If I were one of the woman characterized in the book, I would certainly not be pleased with local gossip and speculations over my supposed sexual misconduct. I realize the author was attempting to right a wrong, but the book would have been better written as completely Fictional. I'm quite frankly surprised that somebody hasn't complained to a lawyer.



4. While the subject matter interested me, this book was written in such a style that I found it very difficult to stay interested. I felt it was very poorly written. The over-use of certain phrases, the format (what was up with that?)... just everything. I got to the point that I didn't really even know what the point of the book was. I'm very surprised it's rated as highly as it is. It's simply not a good book.



5. I picked up this book because not only am I from MN, I am also interested in true crimes.
   
   This book was poorly written. A lot of information was repeated so much that I found myself skimming a lot of it. There was an overuse of certain terms and generalizations that grew weary quite quickly. This author jumped around so much that the book became very confusing.
   
   One thing that bothered me immensely was how much this priest related everything to sex. While I have no doubt that sex probably was involved, I was frustrated that he seemed fixated on this one aspect, and revolved everything around it. He continuously connected alcohol and sex--and I think that would be an unfair generalization to the average alcoholic or person with depraved sexual issues--even though there can be a connection between the two. Before you think I am bashing Catholic priests, I need to tell you that I am a practicing Catholic, and have just not been exposed to priests this glib regarding sex. I have to admit that I began wondering what the author's real purpose was for writing this book. I would probably discourage him from writing another book. I believe he wants to show the connection of the crosses we all bear, but I don't believe this is the best way to do it. He probably also had some misguided sense of wanting to help the family deal with their loss, as well as to help them find some answers. However, I believe we don't always get our answers here on earth, no matter how badly we want them. I am not certain that the family found the answers they were looking for in this book, anyway.
   
   When reading true crime books (or, honestly, any books), you have some authors giving a lot of graphic detail, and you have other authors who give less graphic details related to the crime, but more details about the solving of the mystery. I could have had a one or two sentence summary of what factually happened, and for those really interested in the true grit, maybe there could have been another sentence giving explicit "damages" (for lack of a better word!) to the body, and then moved on to the solving of the mystery. This guy speculated on what happened, actually explaining emotions of both the victim and the witnesses and perpetrators during the "incident"--something he couldn't possibly have known. It became more biographical fiction than anything.
   
   Overall, the book smelled heavily of a poor conspiracy theory, and somebody who wanted to try his hand at writing.

5 comments about A Father's Story.

1. I loved this book and I love to read and study about Dahmer. This is a great book but after seeing a documentary on tv about it, I am a little concerned about the authenticity of the information that his father is giving in this book. He makes a lot of claims about the state of Jeffrey's mother that she denies..... so that leaves me feeling ..hmmm??
   I have to imagine as a father, this book would be very hard to write, talking about the heinous nature of his son's life before prison. What is his motivation for this? Due to some of his comments, I believe perhaps he is a little bit "off" himself too and able to detach himself and provide mostly truths.
   On a personal note, I'm very disappointed that the prison left him in a situation where he ended up murdered. He could have and should have been studied. Not that the studies of Manson has answered all our questions, but when you get someone like Dahmer, it's got to be studied. He was willing to discuss his crimes and do all he could after his sick, twisted lifestyle came to an end.



2. Lionel Dahmer's memoir is the story of the dark journey of a father who was faced with the grisly reality of one of America's most notorious serial murder, mutilation, rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism cases. Lionel was a father who had to grapple not with losing his son to these unspeakable horrors, but with the fact that his son was the perpetrator. As a father, Lionel was asked if he could forgive his son, but before he could determine that, he had to forgive himself. The book presents Lionel's struggle with guilt, bewilderment, anger, and personal chaos during his son's life and in the aftermath of his arrest.
   
   The memoir stands alone in its straightforward prose, introspection, and complete lack of blame shifting. Lionel provides broads stroke of details of the crimes, focusing more on the individuals than on the headline-grabbing depravity of Jeffrey Dahmer's deviance. Throughout Jeffrey's youth, and during the trial, Lionel grappled with his own responsibility for his son's social maladjustment. He identified with his son's need for control, extreme fear of abandonment, and general solitary nature. Lionel even contrasts Jeffrey's zombie experiments with his own hypnosis-control experiments in childhood. After Jeffrey's arrest, Lionel never wanted him to go free, but he did hope and work for psychiatric treatment for the son he was never able to save.
   
   Lionel, I applaud you condor and introspection. You've written a book that will no doubt provide comfort to many parents of difficult children, and will help frame many of the "why?" questions felt by Americans with regards to your son's crimes.



3. On the heels of many a serial murder's crimes, we often find a different type of terrible person. There are often those who try to cash in on the deeds of something infamous, selling their tales to anyone that will listen, and there are those who try to make others forgive them and tell them they aren't to blame.
   It is an ugly world when this happens and uglier still when these things first march into view.
   
   When I first saw this book I thought it was the culmination of the two of these things, and I accordingly dismissed it for a time because the idea repulsed me and the few sensibilities I try to stay connected with. The thing that changed my mind on reading the book was an interview done with Lionel and his son a year or so before Jeffrey's death, when Jeffrey was setting with his dad and talking about many of the things that had transpired. Amongst many of the questions J.D. was asked, he was asked to tell his dad what he thought about what his father had written. This seemed to catch both of them off-guard a bit, but Dahmer finally responded by saying that the book captured things that even he had forgotten and that he thought the book was worth reading.
   Considering how reviled Dahmer was by what he saw himself as, I wondered what that meant and wanted to look into the topic. And what I found was what the title entailed - it as a father trying to understand how his son had become something that he couldn't come close to comprehending.
   
   Far from the read that True Crime readers might be looking for, this is the story of a father and the son he desperately tried to recall. It accordingly goes into the early aspects of the boy and delves into a few curious aspects that the father remembers, but it really spends a lot of its time trying to see where things "went wrong" instead of focusing on the gruesome details of what had transpired. That isn't to say there aren't references to the events that had transpired because there are, and that isn't to say that there aren't times when it seems like Lionel hopes he is blameless because all fathers would hope they were free of this guilt. The thing is that the point of the book is really to look at the exploration of a father wondering about the horrors his son was capable of and where that came from.
   It did this by exploring everything, even looking into the idea of love and wondering how one could possibly ever atone for something so terrible as what his son had done. It also looked at where the father could have gone wrong, and the ideas were - painful.
   
   I'm not going to go as far as some people and commend Lionel Dahmer for writing this book because I'm not sure anyone deserves a commendation for something like this. I will say that the book looked like a struggle, however, and that this struggle looked like one that seems almost unimaginable.
   I would rarely recommend reading of this type but, in this case, the reviews are merited and then some. Knowing the topic tells you if you are interested in it and, if you are, then this is a prospective normally never acquired.



4. I cried when I read this book, I'm sad for Jeffrey and it would have made WAY MORE sense to have him studied in a hospital to find out if this could be prevented in the future. I did not cry for Jeff, I cried for his Father,,,,,I'm the parent of a son who was troubled in his youth and I could just feel his sadness and grief over his son and I wept for him and his wife and his mother and all of Jeff's victims.



5. Having read this biography by Jeffrey Dahmer's father, I could not help but view it as a courageous book, and not motivated sheerly by profit-making. He had indeed been doing a lot of soul-searching before this book was written, during the investigation and trial, and I believe, probably since the entire story materialized and unfolded. He doesn't dwell on any of the unsavory details but must surely have been repulsed by them. Mr Dahmer's association to the killer and the reaction to him and his book can't have been one courted or desired, but neither is it something Lionel Dahmer appears to have run away from, but rather appears to have been thoroughly considered and faced in circumstances that would be extremely unwelcome and creating a deep sense of aversion in most normal human minds. While I could not wholeheartedly recommend this book simply on the basis for what it is and what it is about, it is unbelievable to me that Mr Lionel could actually find himself in such a position as someone's father with the recognition of his progeny had become such a bizarre,detestable and almost inhuman being..somehow. This question--'how'a person could in reality become such a being driven by such disgusting and perverse obsessions and desires, could never, and will never, be 'fully' answered. All one is left with are the 'facts', the details, of Jeffrey Dahmer.

No comments about A Cop's Gotta Laugh.

No comments about Identity Theft (Studies in Crime and Punishment, Vol. 13).

1 comments about Flowers for Mrs. Luskin (True Crime (Avon Books).).

1. I haven't even finished it yet- but it has been a struggle to get as far as I have. Unless you like keeping track of hundreds of contradictory, speculative and unexciting details, avoid this book.

No comments about Sick to Death: A Manipulative Surgeon and a Healthy System in Crisis-a Disaster Waiting to Happen.

No comments about GANGLAND: THE CONTRACT KILLERS.

4 comments about Death of a Doctor (St. Martin's True Crime Library).

1. Do not waste your money on this one. Very poor research and slow moving. This si not the first time I have been disappointed with this author, but it will be the last time and of this I am sure. I think this book was probably written in about 2 days. This is one of the worst books I have read in along time. I can not understand how this Turkey ever got published. AWFUL!!!!!



2. True crime is tough to write about, but filling page after page after page ... with complicated legal wranglings and accounting practices that no one but an accountant could understand or even care about takes this book from about 10 pages of interesting information about the lives of these people to however many it ended up being. Sorry, I ramble.



3. I wouldn't give the book even one star, if there were a "no stars" category. Reading it is sheer drudgery. I'm a quick reader and very fond of true crime, so plowing through it for two weeks was quite unusual and quite unsatisfying. There are few facts - instead, lots of "if", "maybe", "perhaps", and "might" - the author has built an air castle on his own conjecture. Finally I just checked the back of the book for the verdict (normally verboten) and threw it away. What a total waste of money and time! I'm going to be allergic to the name Carlton Smith from now on. Too bad he shares the first name of a good true-crime writer!



4. Working at this book was sheer drudgery. I'm a quick reader, and I love true crime, so taking two weeks to plow through the first half of the book was most unusual. Most frustrating, too. Finally, I gave up, checked the back of the book for the verdict (normally verboten) and just threw it away. The author built an air castle on conjecture. "If", "maybe", "perhaps", "possibly", are the main words. There's hardly a sentence without one of these, and a notable scarcity of facts and evidence. It was a big waste of money and time, and I'm going to be pretty allergic to the name Carlton Smith from now on! (Too bad he shares a first name with another true crime author who's consistently good!) Yuk.

5 comments about Flesh And Blood (True Crime).

1. This book is rather short and not too complex, but Ms. Springer does get the main points across. What convinced me that Darlie definitely did it, no question, was:
   
   The luminol test after the murders - small bloody handprint and small butt print found on the couch, Darlie's footprints found in kitchen walking back and forth and to kitchen sink. Blood in and around kitchen sink. This was blood that was not visible to the eye. This blood had been wiped up and did not show without the Luminol being sprayed and the lights turned off. Luminol picks up a protein in blood and enables the markings to show up in the dark. What this means is Darlie was busy wiping up blood stains before she called for Daryl. If you were attacked by an intruder and your sons lay dying, would you be busy wiping blood off your couch, IF YOU WERE INNOCENT? No, you wouldn't.
   
   Also, the fact that the "intruder" broke in the house by slashing the garage window screen from the INSIDE (the window sill of which the dust had NOT been disturbed), with a knife that was in a wooden block in the KITCHEN.
   
   To some of the nitpickers, it makes no difference to the story which lawyer made the opening statement, or whether Darlie had an abortion - permission only given by her husband after she agreed to have breast implants. Permission is not required by husbands in Texas, but anyone can see that she has had implants. For Daryl to be bragging about the size of Darlie's breasts to the police when his sons were stabbed to death, shows where his priorities lay.
   
   Past history on Darlie included sexual abuse by a step-father, and narcissistic, histrionic behavior - she could not stand it when she lost the spotlight to Daryl at his graduation party, so she left, then came back hysterical, claiming to have been attacked, in order to get some attention for herself.
   
   Darlie needed help, but never got it. She didn't get what she needed from her dysfunctional family, who also need help. The only way Darlie will ever be free in her own mind is to admit her guilt. She probably never will, because she is afraid of losing the support of her family members.
   
   Daryl has also failed a polygraph, so there is probably more to this story.



2. I have read the four books so far published on the Routier case, and I'll admit, I found this one to be the most biased against Darlie Routier. I still found it to be a good read, although I'm certain she is innocent of the horrible crime of killing her two young sons. I have read too much of the evidence that has been made public to believe anything else. I think Springer is a pretty good true crime author but it is obvious she believes Routier is guilty, as opposed to the other authors, namely, Don Davis, Barbara Davis and Christopher Brown. I don't, however agree with most of the reviewers who want to nail her to a cross. I have had a fascination with this case since I read Davis' "Precious Angels". I don't know how anyone who has seen the crime scene photos could believe she did it. Read "Media Tried, Justice Denied". You'll know what I'm talking about.



3. VERY TALENTED WRITER, YOU REALLY FEEL YOUR AT THE CRIME SCENE, WITH THE GREAT DETAIL. DEALS WITH ALOT OF THE COURT CASE, WHICH I FOUND TO BE VERY INTERESTING. FOUND OUT A FEW THINGS THAT I DIDNT IN OTHER BOOKS. (HUSH LITTLE BABIS). IM STILL CONVINCED SHE DID IT. READ THIS ONE YOU WONT BE DISAPPOINTED. HARD TO FIND HOWEVER, GET A USED COPY, I DID;



4. If you already believe that Darlie Routier is guilty, that her husband is pristinely innocent, and that the state of Texas is never wrong, this is the book for you. The author leaves no doubt that she believes these things. Nevertheless, Springer provides an interesting read, including a compelling account of events on the night of the murders, a well written - albeit obviously biased - explanation of the police investigation, and a blow-by-blow description of the trial itself. The book also contains a few innocuous photographs of investigators, the prosecution team, and some of the marches and protests organized by the pro-Darlie camp.
   
   The book is entertaining, but readers who are searching for a more objective approach to the subject would be better served by reading Don Davis' book, Hush Little Babies.



5. I think Hush Little Babies was better written although I also liked this book as well. Hush Little Babies appeared to be somewhat more objective to the extent that it set forth the State's position and Darlie Routier's position. This book seemed to have little criticism of the State while portraying Darlie's family as a bunch of loose cannon nut jobs with extreme tunnel vision. There were a few typographical errors and some factual errors (Darlie's birthday at least twice was set forth as January 1st, which apparently is Darin Routier's birthday while Darlie's birthdate most often has been given as January 4, 1970). However, I believe both books were worth reading. I don't believe that either book gave any really great insight as to why Darlie killed the two boys although the reader in each instance is left with some intriguing possibilities.

No comments about Mr Untouchable.