3 comments about Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling.

1. I found Canter's book to be very useful. This is decidedly the best popular book currently available on the topic of geographic profiling and as such I highly recommend it for students of forensic psychology. The book provides enough research to keep the professional interested, yet it is written clearly so that the student can appreciate it as well. I found this book to be both good reading and a good review of the literature on this topic, and the latter is something almost always lacking in popular books on profiling. Highly recommended.



2. Mapping Murder is a fascinating, inspiring read. Professor Canter is the world's foremost academic authority on psychological offender profiling so this was always going to be rather different from many other books in this area.

   Mapping Murder is that rare phenomenon-a highly intellecutal read that deals with real life-here, horrific murder cases subjected to the sort of detailed professional psychological analysis that just hasn't been attempted before.

   Canter does what he always does-tells you things that you know are right as soon as he says them, they just click.

   Throughout the insights keep coming at a rapid pace. What you get from this book is limited only by your own mental faculties!!




3. In this offering David Canter, one of the leading theorists in geographic profiling and how environmental psychology relates to crime, offers a detailed look at how space and time relate to criminal activity.
   
   As with his previous works, I was fascinated by his observations which, when you think about them all make remarkable sense. Yet just like most common sense, his work is anything but common. This book is much better than "Criminal Shadows." He has improved his writing, added more detail and description, and fleshed out some of the principle and practice of mapping crime. He also does an admirable job of avoiding the self-aggrandizing tone of so many of the true crime books written by profilers.
   
   While I would recommend this book, I will mention that it seems unbalanced, as if someone else wrote some of the chapters. The tone, the writing style, even the content seem to shift back and forth leaving the reader confused on which voice, which part of the work, is really Dr. Canter's. All that said, anyone interested in the emerging field of geographic profiling will enjoy and benefit from this book.

5 comments about Death Sentence: The True Story of Velma Barfield's Life, Crimes, and Punishment.

1. My favorite read is true crime and it's a genre filled with a lot of trashy novels posing as non fiction. This is well written and factual but...it's boring. This book is all about a drug addicted mother who overdoses on a regular basis and poisons family and friends. Sound interesting? I thought so too but I ended up skimming through half the book. The story glosses over how Velma's children deal with their mother over the years until she was convicted. The daughter is not so forgiving and the author focuses on the son's staunch support of his mother. It's not hard to figure that the author's slant on the story came from the son but the book would have been much more interesting if the daughter had been as revealing....



2. Another winner for Jerry Bledsoe. This man is an author extradordinaire! With highly acclaimed books like "Bitter Blood" and "Blood Games" under his belt, Bledsoe strikes another homerun with the story of Velma Barfield.

   If you like true crime, buy this book, as well as Bledsoe's other books.... Before he wakes, Blood games (my personal favorite) and Bitter Blood (this book will blow your mind away!).




3. I have this little sign that reads:

   "There's so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly behooves us to talk about the rest of us."

   Once upon a time not so long ago, there was a time when a slim and healthy, young man who had grown up with both poverty and big dreams was just starting out in the entertainment business and causing the girls to scream and swoon.

   About that same time, a young woman who had come from an abusive home was putting her heart into building a happy home for her husband and two small children.

   As the years passed, the young entertainer became more and more popular--and so did the homemaker.I knew the story of Velma Barfield well, so I knew how the story was going to end--yet, the writer had a way of making me live each step with Velma and her family, just as if I didn't know the ending.

   A friend went to see Titanic, and he told me that the movie was done so well that he never gave up hope that both Jack and Rose would survive, even though he knew that Jack wouldn't.

   This is the way I felt while reading this book.

   When a sympathetic character such as Velma Barfield ends up on death row, it makes a lot of people rethink their views on capital punishment, because it brings it so close to home.

   The "bad" people aren't some sort of cardboard characters anymore. They're your sons, daughters, Mommies, Daddies, and grandparents. And that's when we come to realize, through the masterful telling of their stories through books such as this one, that there really ARE no totally "bad" people, placing value on the lives of ALL people involved!




4. I'm sorry, but I did not see Velma Barfield as a "sympathetic" character. 99% of us have had less than perfect childhoods, but we don't use prescription drugs to hide from the world or poison people we perceive as being in our way.

   I don't care how "redeemed" a killer on death row becomes. It doesn't bring back the people they murdered. And I think it's ridiculous how convicted murderers can delay their punishment for years with appeals and stays, things that their victims never got.

   No, the book did not make me "re-think" my pro-death penalty stance. If you play, you must pay,,,whether you're Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy...or a grandmother from North Carolina.




5. Bledsoe is a true crime master who exemplifies the best of the genre. Original research, fluid storytelling and an eye for the telling detail. You can't do much better than this in the genre. But make no mistake, this is a sad, depressing story that you may wish you hadn't read. Whether you support the death penalty or not, it's hard to argue that death sentences weren't meant for multiple, intentional murderers like Velma Barfield. Barfield was clearly a drug addict with all the most unpleasant behaviors associated with addiction. When she was in a controlled, low-stress environment Barfield not only functioned, she flourished. When she was stressed or, less generously perhaps, not getting her way, look out. Velma had a nasty streak and didn't mind taking it out on 2 husbands, a fiancee, two elderly patients and her own mother. Not to mention an attempt on her daughter and son-in-law. The list of her crimes - murder, arson, DUI, theft, insurance fraud, forgery and others - is shocking.
   
   It's also hard to reconcile with the image of the "death row grandmother", the born-again Christian who helped other prisoners. Except, of course, that prison is another controlled and (in Velma's case) a low-stress environment. One that kept the spotlight locked on Velma, a spotlight she loved. I felt compassion for Velma and her deprived childhood and troubled marriage but I'm still not convinced I buy her stories of being sexually abused by multiple relatives. Velma always seemed to deliver to the listener what they wanted to hear. Was this just another case of that? I honestly don't know. I do know that Velma was guilty of at least 6 murders and had she not gone to jail would have committed more.
   
   Among the victims are Velma's children who showed a superhuman love and forgiveness for their mother. She lied to them, manipulated them, in one case poisoned them, used them, etc and they still loved her. I find it intriguing that Velma's spiraling out of control began not just with her husband joining the Jaycees and her hysterectomy but with her children entering their late teens. They were less dependent on her, less under her control. Sadly, Velma continued to manipulate them to the very end never fully taking responsibility for her crimes and thus leaving them feeling guilty that they "should have stopped her." Broken marriages, broken lives, they are Velma Barfield's last victims and Bledsoe tells their story with a compassion their mother was sadly incapable of.

5 comments about Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City.

1. Both as a "what-made-her-do-it?" investigation and as a searing cultural and family study of 3 generations of Detroit-area auto engineering people, Maynard relentlessly digs for truth and understanding of murderous rage that destroyed a prosperous family. I stayed up all night two nights in a row to finish it and was sad to see it end, but the book forced me to think hard about the catastrophic violence waiting to explode in so many feuding families -- and what causes the explosions to occur, as well as the consequences for the survivors. Regardless of how tranquil your world, you will be shaken by the story of what may have caused an award-winning 4th grade teacher to take a hatchet to her husband's head. The author's intermittent reflections on her own fascination with the story add extra poignancy and mirrored many of the questions I was asking myself about this fascinating case study of a seeming typical American upper middle class family. A real treasure.



2. What do you do when you set out to write a true crime book, but the perp won't talk, even though you've invested a lot of time and money in the faith that she will? Well, this book shows how to get around that major problem. You pad it. Pad it with observations about everything you did while waiting around for the key interview that won't ever happen. You attend the funeral of a Four Tops singer. What's that got to do with Nancy Seaman? Nada. You hang out at the lake house of the local courthouse reporter and pad a few chapters about that. You decide you'll draw parallels with your own failed marriage and divorce. That's good for maybe 25 percent of the required pages to make your book contract. Hmm. Let's see, now? What else can you pad with? Oh, I know. Make some big socioeconomic generalizations about the haves and have nots who populate both sides of the tracks in your setting, in this case, Detroit's 8 Mile Road. Even so, this book is still pretty interesting and Maynard is a world-class writer. So you should read it, even though it's deeply flawed. The case in question is a real beaut.



3. Author Joyce Maynard does a terrific job of recreating this fascinating true-crime story: of an award-winning school teacher, Nancy Seaman, who butchered her husband, tried to hide his body and then tried to use the battered wife syndrome as her defense. The killer comes across as arrogant, cold, manipulative and repulsive. Instead of her being the battered wife, it appears her husband was the actual battered victim. The way the killer tries to adopt the personae of a battered woman is repulsive and enrages the reader. One of her sons, Greg, appears pathologically incapable of seeing his mother as a vicious killer, while his brother, Jeff, sees her as a cold-blooded murderess whose attempts to persuade him and her friends at school that she was the victim of a heartless wife beater are hysterical. Whenever she bruised herself, she would go around touting the bruise as just one piece of evidence that she is being beaten. Where I had problems with the book is when the author heavily interweaves her own life of marital problems into the mix, as if trying to justify her fascination with this case. She spends much too much time describing her failure to attain interviews with Greg and his killer Mom and other friends and enemies of the Seaman family. Jeff comes across as a boor who continuously stands up the author for scheduled interviews. Sometimes an author can step into the story and enhance it, if it adds another dimension to it--much like what Jim Schutze did in his fascinating study of judicial lynching in BY TWO BY TWO. This is when twin sisters were accused of murdering the dentist husband of one and the charges of a psychopathic, alcoholic drug addict were used to railroad one sister into prison for life, while the other one was acquitted. But in INTERNAL COMBUSTION, the author's personal intrusion into a fascinating study of evil dampens the effect of the story. I'd like to see what Ann Rule or Jim Schutze would have done with this true life tragedy.



4. First part of the book is interesting until the trial is over.
   Then the after the trial the rest of the book is tedious and somewhat boring.



5. I purchased this book after hearing the author on Fresh Air. It appealed to me because I used to live in Farmington, Michigan, which is next to the city where Nancy and Bob Seaman lived. I also wondered not only why Nancy Seaman murdered her husband but why she did it so violently.
   
   The book is a page turner. I'm usually a slow reader but I finished it quickly. The short chapters help to maintain momentum. Maynard's style also keeps the tempo going. Some of her interviews and observations do give a flavor of the people and places of the story and the Detroit area.
   
   However, the book has fatal flaws (pardon the pun). The worst of these is Maynard's decision to insinuate herself into the story. The book becomes almost as much of an exercise in therapeutic self-exploration as a true crime story.
   
   Maynard clearly takes sides in this story. She writes of the people she likes, such as Lisa Ortleib (now Gorcyca) and Detective Al Patterson, with near reverence. Those she doesn't like seem like cartoon characters. The same facile approach that makes the book easy to read also gives it a television-like tendency to oversimplify.
   
   Maynard also makes abundant mistakes of fact (saying that Telegraph Road runs through Grosse Pointe, calling Dodge Magnums Plymouths, misspelling Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell's name, etc.). This made me wonder whether her sloppiness extended to pertinent parts of the story, too.
   
   In the end, I was disappointed. This was a story that deserved to be told in all its complexity. Maynard captured some of it. However, she could have told it better if she had kept herself off of the pages and abstained from quick and easy generalization.

No comments about In Search of Sarah Ware: Reinvestigating Murder and Conspiracy in a Maine Village.

No comments about Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused (Critical Issues in Crime and Society).

No comments about The Encyclopedia of the Fbi's Ten Most Wanted List: 1950 To Present.

2 comments about And Never See Her Again (Pinnacle True Crime).

1. Patricia Springer brings to us the tale of Opal Jennings, a 7-year-old (book states that she is only 6, but doing the math will tell you otherwise) abducted from her Saginaw, Texas yard allegedly by Richard (Ricky) Franks; a convicted sex offender on probation at the time of Opal's disappearance.
   
   I found the book to be a bit redundant as it tends to repeat the testimony of witnesses over and over. When Franks' first trial for Aggravating Kidnapping results in a hung jury and he is retried, readers are subjected to the testimony for a second time with only a couple of new things thrown in.
   
   This book also leaves much information to be desired. Such as, how is Opal's last name "Jennings" but her father's name is Randy Crawford and mother's name is Leola Sanderford? In addition, I came to see Audrey Sanderford not as the doting step-grandmother Springer wants us to see but an overbearing stepmother to Leola, who essentially takes away from Opal's biological mother and the grief she was undoubtedly feeling about her daughter's disappearance.
   
   This is a heartbreaking tale. Although the information can be redundant, I would still recommend reading it.



2. Patricia Springer writes a decent true crime book about the abduction and murder of a six year old Texas girl named Opal Jo Jennings. She was murdered by a pedophile who is obviously lying to the police from the very start. I had trouble with that part of the book. I didn't believe the killer's lies and bull stories about him dropping her off at the store. He was obviously the kidnapper and killer but failed to find her remains until five years later. The story begins with Opal and two year old cousin Spencer who witnesses the abduction and her cries for help. Saginaw, Texas is the last place that you would expect something like this happen in broad daylight but it did. It can happen anywhere. Opal was living with her grandmother while her mother strived to make a living in North Dakota. She had allowed her own mother to gain custody of Opal for a better upbringing. The life on the street is never the same again.

4 comments about The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes.

1. In light of the recent trend on televison and in movies to whet our appetite for crime scene investigation methods, I found "The Dollhouse Murders" to be just what the M.E. ordered. I discovered there's still much to be learned, and the dollhouse scenarios, so cleverly contrived, are full of details which the other mediums of delivery simply don't have time to explore. Mr. Mauriello and Miss Darby have wedded their talents admirably and with seamless success.

   A great read!




2. The epidemic of doll-on-doll crime is a fading memory, as real in America's collective memory as the crack epidemic and the O.J. Simpson trials, and all that's left is for the books to come out, letting us look back at those terrible tragedies that riveted the nation. Books like Ann Rule's "The Vinyl-Coated Killer" and Joe McGinnis' "How, Now, Mistress Doll" were excellent contributions to the genre. Now, "The Dollhouse Murders" adds a different perspective by telling the story of six deaths through the eyes of the investigators.

   Author Thomas P. Mauriello has taken pains to disguise the names and locations of these crimes, to the point of changing the detective's name to "the Detective." But no matter, these stories retain their dark edge of madness and tragedy, and the plethora of crime-scene photos adds a visceral kick in the gut to even the most jaded true-crime aficionado.

   Doll-on-doll crime may occur on a smaller scale, but that doesn't make them any less horrific. There's the attempted robbery at the family store. Amid the cash register and grocery shelves, two men lay dead. We follow the detective as he works the scene, attempting to deduce the chain of events that led to the tragedy: a cracked pane in the pastry case; the pattern of money thrown from the till; the splatter of blood-like paint by the corpses. These are the red threads that must be knitted together to create a satisfying narrative.

   Readers interested in learning step-by-step how a scene is "processed" will see that there is no one right method of working, and explains why some crimes don't get solved, how guilt cannot be proven. Clues are gathered using observation, intuition and an intimate knowledge of forensics, such as the way blood gathers where the body meets the floor, or what the size of the entry wound implies. Miss a clue, and the narrative will still be created, but it won't be accurate. Fail to look around at the right time, or fail to keep an open mind as to suspects, and you have another JonBenet Ramsey case on your hand.

   Murder freezes a moment in time and the detective is its archivist. "The Dollhouse Murders" opens a window into the lives of dolls, seeing them at work and at home, in places we never see. By placing their deaths in the context of their lives, Mauriello is also issuing a plea for empathy and tolerance, in effect, putting a human face on the vinyl victims. But even more, these are taut, grim tales of violence and death, told with an eye for observation and an ear for detail that recall the best of Joseph Waumbaugh, Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard. These stories pack a punch. And Judy.




3. Did you ever buy a book that absolutely exceeded your expectations? Well, you won't get that feeling from this book.

   Although the introductory material was quite interesting (i.e., how the dollhouse-crime scene technique is used in training forensic science students), the remainder of the book is slow-paced dribble with scant references to actual photos of the dollhouse crime scenes. I just expected so much more; the introductory page to each of the scenarios shows the actual dollhouse scene that accompanies the vignette, but they are too amateurish, and anyone who has ever watched a complete 60-minute episode of any prime-time cop and/or court show would be able to describe the scene and investigation, perhaps with even more vivid detail and creativity than the author of these drab tales. C+ at best.




4. The photos in this book are wonderful sharp. Each murder scene has a full photo of the room in which the murder took place with plenty of photos of clues. The format for each model contains a "story line" and goes into detail re the clues & evidence with accompanying details. I enjoy the story lines as they make the scenes more real - kind of like CSI but without finding out who-dun-it. The dioramas were made by the author as a teaching device for crime lab students. Because the aim of these dioramas is help his students "peel" a crime scene, the stories do not contain the answers to the mysteries.

1 comments about Bad Blood: The Shocking True Story Behind the Menendez Killings (St. Martin's True Crime Library).

1. I would recommend this, if you are looking f/ a great history of the Menendez family. As in the Court details, this is a little sketchy.
   Grab, the Blood Brothers w/it. It has a great detail on the court transcripts (at times you may feel like your reading a script).

5 comments about Triangle.

1. This is a very well-written book, and it made Irene Pence one of my new favorite authors. I have read all of her books since. She does an outstanding job of allowing the reader to really get to know all of the characters. Although some of the people in the book make choices that most of us would not (hopefully), by the time those choices are made, the reader understands why the person is the way he/she is. You feel the fear and frustration, and it made me incredibly angry to see that the murderer used innocent children to force his girl friend to do what he wanted her to do. It is a very sad story. I recommend this book to any true crime fan, and I strongly recommend any book written by Irene Pence.



2. Irene Pence is a fine True Crime investigator and writer. This reviewer thinks she's even better than Ann What's-Her-Name. Pence doesn't drool on an on about every interviewee being so "beautiful" "handsome" and "intelligent." Ms. Pence is so good at what she does that the reader forgets the writer's there - none of the over-written stuff that pulls the reader out of the story to focus on the raconteur - she artfully lets the Tale do the talking and her words don't get in the way.

   This is a True Texas Tale about old Miles Bondurant, his vulnerable and gullible young quasi wife, and her true friend - a twisted lover's triangle in the Lone Star State. Reviewed by Tundra Vision




3. Pence's book, recalling the 1994 murder of Warren Bondurant's girlfriends best friend, was a good read but not up to the caliber of the author's other fine true crime books. While the story is full of many details, which obviously shows that Ms. Pence thoroughly researches the cases she writes about, this book seemed to be written fully in the view of Sandra Underhill who was Bondurant's want-ad lover. As stated in the book Underhill provided many hours of interviews with the author as the basis for the book and I think this is why it seems so "one-sided". (I could not get over the feeling that Underhill really told some half-truths and sometimes not the truth at all) However it is an entertaining read nevertheless. UPDATE: as of the writing of my review Warren Miles Bondurant still sets in a Texas prison at the age of 71. He is eligible for a parole hearing in 2021, at the age of 86.



4. Warren Miles Bondurant was a well-established business man. A pillar of his Fort Worth, Texas community, he placed an ad in a newspaper looking for a good looking woman for whom he would finance a college education, all expenses paid. Sandra Underhill was a good looking woman for whom this ad was just the ticket she was looking for. She was an inmate in a Texas prison from which she was soon to be released, when she responded to the ad, and, to her complete surprise, Warren Miles Bondurant wrote back to her. This was to chart a course for these two troubled people that they would both live to regret.
   
   Sandra was a drug addict, under-educated, gullible, and totally amoral. Warren was some one used to getting his own way, a total control freak, who was also an ugly drunk. Together they would have a volatile relationship. While in drug rehab, Sandra met Carri Coppinger, a young woman who was kind, caring, and looked after Sandra who was pregnant with Warren's child. Initially friends who became lovers, they eventually settled into being just best friends. When Sandra returned to Warren, as she inevitably did, this time she took Carri with her, and this threesome proved to be combustible under the same roof, with Carri paying the ultimate price.
   
   This is definitely not the author's best work. Although somewhat entertaining, the quality of the writing is not up to the author's usual standard. The book reads as if it were written in a hurry, even though it is evident that the author did quite a bit of research. Moreover, neither Sandra Underhill nor Warren Miles Bondurant are particular sympathetic or likeable. It is only the unfortunate Carri who seems to be the only one to have had a shred of humanity in her makeup, leaving the reader wishing that it had been Sandra, rather than Carri, who had paid the ultimate price at the hands of Warren Miles Bondurant.



5. THIS TRUE CRIME BOOK WAS ONE OF THE BEST TRUE CRIME STORIES I HAVE READ FOR AWHILE. IF YOU PLAN ON READING THIS BOOK MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE TIME BECAUSE IT IS VERY HARD TO PUT DOWN.