Murder Most Foul (True Accounts) by Yeo Suan Futt

Paperback:  Strangled, stabbed, drowned, bludgeoned, poisoned and dismembered - variously killed, but not by chance.  This volume presents the chilling true accounts of some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in Singapore's short history, crimes of a most personal, most irrevocable kind:  murder.

Why do people commit murder?  It's a question as old as the crime itself, and even if we had the answer under our very noses, it's likely one we cannot universally accept.

Still, Singapore is among the safest places on earth to live as far as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is concerned:  along with Japan, Singapore has around 0.5 cases of "intentional homicide" per 100 000 population.

Malaysia and Thailand stand at 2.3 and 5.3 respectively;  the UK and Australia each have 1.2;  while the most murderous state, Honduras, tops the list with 82.

About the author:  Yeo Suan Futt is a Singaporean magazine journalist with experience in a broad range of subject matter, from automobiles, technology, and timepieces to electronic gaming and cuisine.  Murder Most Foul is his first book published in May 2013.  His latest book, Wild Women Do:  Female killers, tricksters, and crooks in Singapore was published a month later, in June 2013.

Happy first weekend in August

Shadow Play by Barbara Ismail

Shadow Play (2012) is the first in the series of "Kain Songket* Mysteries", introducing a female amateur sleuth Mak Cik* Maryam from Malaysia's northeast corner, Kelantan (the "Land of Lightning"), during the 1970s.

Paperback:  Mak Cik Maryam, a smart and take-charge kain songket trader in Kota Bharu Central Market, discovers a murder in her own backyard, shattering the bucolic village world she thought surrounded her.

While the new Chief of Police, a pleasant young man from Ipoh whose mother's admonitions about the wiles of Kelantanese girls* still ring in his ears, wrestles with the bewildering local dialect, Maryam steps up to solve the mystery herself.

Her investigation brings her into the closed world of the wayang kulit Shadow Play theater and the lives of its performers - a world riven by rivalries and black magic.

Trapped in a tangle of jealousy, Maryam struggles to make sense of the crime in spite of the spells sent to keep her from secrets long buried and lies woven to shield the guilty.

About the author:  Barbara Ismail spent several years in Kelantan in the 1970s and '80s, living in Kampong Dusun and Pengkalan Cepa, studying Wayang Siam* and the Kelantanese dialect.  She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, and is originally from Brooklyn, New York.  She intended Shadow Play to be about Kelantan's finest:  market women with enormous sense, courage and confidence as well as to give a sense of Kelantan and its people.

Shadow Play is Barbara's first book in the Kain Songket Mysteries to be followed by Princess Play, Songbird, Moon Kite, Western Chanting and Little Axe.  Shadow Play is available to buy in most English bookstores like Waterstones, Blackwell's, Heffers, W H Smith (out of stock), online on Amazon (the UK and USA) and of course in Malaysian bookstores.

Glossary (taken from Shadow Play):
*Kain Songket:  The queen of Kelantan's textiles made of silk with gold or silver geometric patterns woven into it.

*Mak Cik:  Auntie, a polite form of address for an older woman

*Wayang Siam:  The Kelantan shadow play, performed with incised leather puppets, which throw shadows on a screen.

*Kelantanese girls:  Kelantanese women are famous for their looks and their proclivity for magic, a reputation jealously stoked by those less spirited, less assertive, less active in business than Kelantan's daughters.

Rating:  5/5

Never Enough (True Crime) by Joe McGinniss

Paperback:  Nancy Kissel had it all:  glamour, beauty and the royal lifestyle of the expatriate wife.

She had three children and what a friend described as 'the best marriage in the universe' to Robert Kissel, a successful investment banker.

But that marriage ended abruptly one November night in 2003 when Nancy was alleged to have incapacitated Robert by serving him a strawberry milkshake full of sedatives before bludgeoning him to death.  This case, since then, was known as the 'milkshake murder'.

Prosecutors, who charged Nancy with murder, said she wanted to inherit Robert's millions and start a new life with her lover, Michael Del Priore.

She said she had killed in self-defence while fighting for her life against a brutal, cocaine-addicted husband.

Her trial captured attention worldwide, and less than a year after the verdict in 2006, Robert's brother Andrew, a real estate tycoon facing prison for fraud and embezzlement was also found dead - tied up and stabbed in the basement of his home.

Never Enough (2007) is the true story of two brothers who wanted to own the world but instead wound up murdered half a world apart; and of Nancy Kissel, for whom having it all might not have been enough.  Basically, it is a sad but true story of avarice, hate and murder.

About the author:  Joe McGinniss is an American author of non-fiction novels and true crime.  He gained familiarity with journalism for the first time at the College of Holy Cross where he wrote for the school newspaper as well as the Chester Port Daily Item in the summer breaks.  After his graduation, he worked for Worcester Telegram as a general assignment reporter.  After a year, he became a sportswriter at the Philadelphia Bulletin and a year later, started working for its rival, Philadelphia Inquirer, as a columnist.

In 1986, McGinniss found the opportunity to write his first novel, The Selling of the President, which received a huge amount of positive feedback, such that it was in New York Times bestseller list overnight.  Following his huge success with The Selling of the President, he decided to concentrate on writing books and subsequently quit his job at the Philadelphia Inquirer.  His second and third books did not make waves compared to his first book.  In 1980, however, he regained his popularity with his fourth book, Going To Extremes, where he wrote about his adventures in Alaska.

In 1979, McGinniss became recognized nationwide after he met with Jeffrey MacDonald, a former doctor in the US army who was accused of killing his wife and children in 1970.  He worked on MacDonald's case for more than three years and published his first true crime book entitled Fatal Vision in 1983.

According to his biography, whether McGinniss is writing about a politician or a sociopath or even a soccer team, he feels compelled to search for the truth, no matter how elusive, behind the people and events he chronicles.  His approach to his subject matters is always original and his books are never less than compulsively readable.

More information of the author and his works can be found on his website.

Don't Quote Me

The Happy Face Killer (True Crime) by Jack Olsen

Paperback:  In February 1990, police arrested John Sosnovske and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of 23-year-old Taunja Bennett.  Pavlinac had come forth and confessed, implicating her boyfriend and producing physical evidence that linked them to the crime.  Authorities closed the case.  There was just one problem.  They were not the killers.  They were innocent.  The police had the wrong people.

Keith Hunter Jesperson was a long haul truck driver and the murderer of eight women, including Taunja Bennett.  He began a twisted one-man campaign to win the release of Sosnovske and Pavlinac.

To the editors of newspapers and on the walls of bus stops, Jesperson scribbled out a series of taunting confessions.  At the end of each, he drew a happy face, earning for himself the grisly nickname 'The Happy Face Killer'.

Based on access to interviews, diaries, court records, and the criminal himself, this is Jesperson's horrific, repelling and chilling story.  It chronicles his evolution from angry child to sociopathic murderer, from tormentor of animals to torturer of women.  Jack Olsen lets the killer tell his story in his own words, offering unprecedented insight into the twisted thought process of a self-admitted serial/degenerate murderer.

The Happy Face Killer started three consecutive life (without parole) sentences in 1996 as inmate number 11620304 at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.  He would become eligible for parole on 1 March 2063, a month before his 108th birthday.  He never explained why he had allowed Sosnovske and Pavlinac to serve four years for his crimes.

In 2001, Keith Hunter Jesperson wrote to a friend:  Ever since I was arrested in Arizona in 1995, I've been denying responsibility for what I did.  I blamed everybody else.  Now I'm beginning to realize I had choices, and I chose wrong.  Me: not others.  I guess I'm where I belong.

The Happy Face Killer aka "I":  The Creation of Serial Killer was first published in 2002 and is one of the most significant piece of crime reporting ever published.

About the author:  Jack Olsen (1925-2002) is the author of thirty-three books published in fifteen countries and eleven languages, including the highly acclaimed Predator:  Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle (1991) which won the American Mystery Award for Best True Crime and his most notable work, "Son":  A Psychopath and His Victims (1983), which won a Special Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.  Most of Olsen's books investigated the life histories of violent career criminals including studies of serial rapists.

A former bureau chief for Time, Olsen has won the National Headliners Award, citations for excellence from Indiana and Columbia universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award, among others, and was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1967.  He was named to the Mystery Writers of America's fact-crime committee in 1996 and appointed chair in 1997.

The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure", the Washington Post described him as "the dean of true crime authors" and the New York Daily News lauded him as "the master of true crime".  His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited  in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike".

A nationally respected expert on the psychology of criminals, Olsen appeared on Good Morning America, Sally Jessy Raphael, Donahue, Geraldo, Larry King Live, and other network interview shows.  He was the father of eight, a native of Philadelphia, a fishing fanatic and lived on an island in Puget Sound, Washington, where he passed away at the age of seventy-seven on 16 July 2002.

Evil Beside Her (True Crime) by Kathryn Casey

Evil Beside Her formerly The Rapist's Wife (1995) is a journalistic account of the 1992 investigation and conviction of James Edward Bergstrom on five counts of rape in Houston, Texas, as well as the true story of a Texas woman's marriage to a dangerous psychopath.

Paperback:  At first, Linda Bergstrom's marriage to her husband James was idyllic.  They were young and in love;  he was about to enter the Navy and she was eager to start a family.  But it wasn't long before the dream exploded.

James became abusive and violent, prone to sudden bursts of anger, long silences, and unexplained disappearances.  But Linda vowed to hold on, despite the pain and fear, and her disturbing suspicions about her husband's secret life.

Then, not long after their move to Houston, Texas, she made a terrifying discovery:  James's hidden cache containing duct tape, a ski mask, and handcuffs.  No longer could Linda Bergstrom deny the hideous truth, that the man she lived with, the man she married for love and had a daughter with, was a dangerous psychopath.

And there was no escape and nowhere to run.  Because no one - not her friends, the Navy, or the police - would believe her.

About the author:  Kathryn Casey is an award-winning journalist and author, who has written for Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Reader's Digest, Texas Monthly and many other publications.  She's the author of six previous true crime books - writing about real cases, real people and real murders - and the creator of the highly acclaimed Sarah Armstrong mystery series.  Casey has appeared on Oprah, Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen, Biography, Nancy Grace, E!, truTV, Investigation Discovery, the Travel Channel, and A&E.  Casey is based in Houston, where she lives with her husband and their dog, Nelson.

Updates:  At his trial in 1992, James Bergstrom was charged with burglary and was given a ten-year sentence in the Texas prison system.  He was also charged with four counts of aggravated sexual assault and given four ninety-nine year sentences by the jury.  So far, James Bergstrom was denied parole twice, in 2007 and 2010.  His latest parole date was last month, June 2013, and the outcome is a positive one - his parole has been denied again.  However, he will become eligible for parole in three years' time and every three years from that point on.  

According to Kathryn Casey (the author), James Bergstrom is a danger to society, especially women.  If released, he will, without a doubt, victimize more women.  In the two years he lived in Houston, he attacked thirty-five women, raping five of them, and threatened to kill the last victim, a high school cheerleader.  We will have to be vigilant and continue the fight to keep James Bergstrom behind bars.

You don't have to be a Texan to file a protest.  All you have to do is write a letter or send an email saying you believe James Bergstrom should not be set free on parole, that he continues to be a danger to society, and that he deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.  In your letter, please include the following information:

Name:  James Edward Bergstrom

TDCJ Number:  00659297

SID Number:  04408281

Birth Date:  4 June 1963

Your protest can be submitted via email to victim.svc@tdcj.state.tx.us

Or fax it to 512-452-0825

Or snail mail to TDCJ Victims Services, 8712 Shoal Creek Boulevard, Suite 265, Austin, TX 78757

Thank you.

Predator: Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle (True Crime) by Jack Olsen

Predator (1991) by the late Jack Olsen is a true story about serial rapist Edward Lee King, but in his book, Olsen used the fictitious name "McDonald J Smith" for the predator.  The explanation he gave for the alias was that it was "in the interests of a larger truth."

Paperback:  The rapist had no conscience and no pity.  But Seattle had no justice.  Psychopath Mac Smith had been hunting women in a blue car.

Steve Titus was building a fine career and planning his wedding.  He, too, drove a blue car.

When the police arrested him, Steve Titus thought it was a joke or a terrible mistake.  He was wrong.  It was a nightmare.

Jack Olsen re-creates the gripping story of an innocent man destroyed by a legal system bent on vengeance and a courageous reporter, Paul Henderson III, who finally did what no one else would do:  catch the real criminal - a cruelly indifferent, twisted predator who preyed on the innocent and nearly got away with his vicious crimes.

On 17 April 1986, at McDonald Smith's probation hearing, after serving out a three-year Sex Offender Program at Western State Hospital in Washington, Judge Gerard M Shellan said, "Having reviewed all the files in this case, I do not believe that Mr Smith will ever comprehend, even in his wildest dreams or during his most reflective moments, the damage, the harm, the hurt, the trauma, humiliation, and the scars that have been permanently inflicted on all of these victims over these years, including the person who was also unjustly accused and tried for a crime Mr Smith had committed.  To have committed that, in the Court's opinion, probably is the greatest mortal sin that any person can commit."

He reminded the defendant that he was lucky he'd been tried for his crimes in an enlightened society instead of one "which undoubtedly would probably order execution or castration of a person who committed fifty or fifty-five rapes."  At last, Judge Shellan declared, "Probation, therefore, is revoked and the defendant is committed to the penitentiary."

Today, Edward Lee King remains incarcerated at the Airway Heights Correction Center near Spokane, Washington, serving out his forty-year sentence.  The end of this book listed his release date as 2006 but for unknown reasons, his possible date for release is now 2042.  He will be eighty-nine years old if he is still alive then.

About the author:  Jack Olsen (1925-2002) is the author of thirty-three books published in fifteen countries and eleven languages, including the highly acclaimed Predator:  Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle (1991) which won the American Mystery Award for Best True Crime and his most notable work, "Son":  A Psychopath and His Victims (1983), which won a Special Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.  Most of Olsen's books investigated the life histories of violent career criminals including studies of serial rapists.

A former bureau chief for Time, Olsen has won the National Headliners Award, citations for excellence from Indiana and Columbia universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award, among others, and was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1967.  He was named to the Mystery Writers of America's fact-crime committee in 1996 and appointed chair in 1997.

The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure", the Washington Post described him as "the dean of true crime authors" and the New York Daily News lauded him as "the master of true crime".  His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited  in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike".

A nationally respected expert on the psychology of criminals, Olsen appeared on Good Morning America, Sally Jessy Raphael, Donahue, Geraldo, Larry King Live, and other network interview shows.  He was the father of eight, a native of Philadelphia, a fishing fanatic and lived on an island in Puget Sound, Washington, where he passed away at the age of seventy-seven on 16 July 2002.

Free Fire by (The Joe Pickett Novels) C J Box

Deftly plotted and full of intrigue, Free Fire (2007) is the seventh book in the A-list Joe Pickett series set in Wyoming.

From C J Box's website:  Joe Pickett, recently fired from his job as a Wyoming game warden, is working on his father-in-law's ranch when he receives a visit from the governor.  Governor Rulon - a devious but down-home politico - has a special request, one Joe knows he can't refuse.  For weeks, the headlines have been abuzz with the story of Clay McCann, a lawyer who slaughtered four campers in a far-off corner of Yellowstone National Park.

After the murders, McCann immediately turned himself in at the nearest ranger station.  Seemed like a slam-dunk case for law enforcement - except that the crimes were committed in a thin sliver of land with zero residents and overlapping jurisdiction, the so called free-fire zone.  McCann has taken advantage of an obscure loophole in the law:  neither state nor the federal government can try him for his crime.  The worst mass murderer in Wyoming history walks out of jail a free man.

Governor Rulon, sensitive to the rising tide of public outrage, wants his own investigation into the murders and will reinstate Joe as a game warden if he will go to Yellowstone "without portfolio" to investigate.  Joe, happy to get his badge back, even under these circumstances, agrees.

It quickly becomes clear to Joe that McCann is deeply involved in some illegal activity taking place in the park - something tremendously lucrative and unusually dangerous.  As Joe and his partner Nate Romanowski search for the key to the murders, they discover that it may be hidden in the rugged terrain of the park itself.

About the author:  C J Box is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award and the Edgar Award and is also an Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.  His novels are US bestsellers and have been translated into 21 languages.  Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Visit his website at www.cjbox.net

Rating:  5/5

Philosophies Of Life

A Library

The Stranger Beside Me (True Crime - revised and udpated edition, 2013) by Ann Rule

Excerpts from the Preface by Ann Rule, 29 January 1980: 

This book began in 1974 as an entirely different work.  It was to have been a crime reporter's chronicling of a series of inexplicable murders of beautiful young women.  By its very nature, it was to have been detached, the result of extensive research.  My life, certainly, would be no part of it.  It has evolved instead into an intensely personal book, the story of a unique friendship that has somehow transcended the facts that my research produced.  As the years passed, I learned that the stranger at the very vortex of an ever-spreading police probe was not a stranger at all;  he was my friend.

...My contract to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases.  My book would not be about a faceless name in a newspaper, about one unknown out of the over one million people who live in the Seattle area;  it would be about my friend, Ted Bundy.

...And so Ted Bundy was my friend, through all the good times and the bad times.  I stuck by him for many years, hoping that none of the innuendo was true.  There are few who will understand my decision.  I'm sure that it will anger many.  And, with it all, Ted Bundy's story must be told, and it must be told in its entirety if any good can evolve from the terrible years:  1974-1980.

...Ted has been described as the perfect son, the perfect student, the Boy Scout grown to adulthood, a genius, as handsome as a movie idol, a bright light in the future of the Republican Party, a sensitive psychiatric social worker, a budding lawyer, a trusted friend, a young man for whom the future could surely hold only success.

He is all of these things, and none of them.

Ted Bundy fits no pattern at all;  you could not look at his record and say:  "See, it was inevitable that he would turn out like this."  

In fact, it was incomprehensible.

On 24 January 1989, Ted Bundy was executed for the murders of three young women;  he also confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more women from coast to coast.  This is his story - the story of his magnetic power, his unholy compulsion, his demonic double life and his string of helpless victims.  It was written by a woman who thought she knew Ted Bundy, until she began to put all the evidence together, and the whole terrifying picture emerged.

About the author:  Ann Rule is a former Seattle policewoman and the author of over thirty-three bestselling books, including If You Really Loved Me (1991), Everything She Ever Wanted (1993), Dead By Sunset (1995), A Rose For Her Grave (1993), You Belong To Me (1994), A Fever In The Heart (1996), In The Name Of Love (1998), The End Of The Dream (1998), A Rage To Kill (1999), and Empty Promises (1999), as well as 1400 articles, mostly on criminal cases.  She is regarded by many as the foremost true crime writer in America and the author responsible for the genre as it exists today.  She has been a full-time writer since 1969.  When she is not attending trials and researching new books, Ann Rule lives near Seattle, Washington.  More information and updates can be found on her website.  The Stranger Beside Me was first published in 1980.

Summertime No 3

Definition: Bibliognost