INTRODUCTION
What constitutes a crime has often been a matter of time and place, as the histories of marijuana and gambling make clear. In 1901, The New York Times reported with alarm on the “long, deathlike sleep” that marijuana was thought to induce. In 1926, though, the newspaper suggested the still-illicit drug might actually be “safe,” a perspective now held by many voters in the seven states that recently legalized its recreational use. The article from 1926 is reprinted in this book, one of the many included here that demonstrate how The Times has worked since 1851 to track the shifting discussion about crime, to study the people who commit it and to analyze the ground from which those criminals grew.
This book is organized into chapters that focus on particular types of crime, and within each chapter the articles unroll chronologically. Some stretch back to depict criminals who went on to eternal fame, such as Jesse James, whose penchant for relieving trains of their valuables in the era after the Civil War made his a household name. Others recount little remembered “crimes of the century,” a phrase now weary from overuse. One such report comes from 1906, when the world was transfixed by the strange story of Henry Kendall Thaw, a rich man who murdered Stanford White, a leading American architect, by shooting White to death in public to avenge the honor of his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, America’s first supermodel.
For 166 years, The Times has been a rich resource for novelists, nonfiction writers and filmmakers. Erik Larson, in his brilliant best seller The Devil in the White City, credits many sources, including The Times, for helping him unveil the mysteries of Henry Howard Holmes, a serial killer from a time before the term had even been coined. Holmes, despite a medical degree from the University of Michigan, demonstrated little interest in the healing arts. He chose instead to open the World’s Fair Hotel in Chicago near the fairgrounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, advertise for guests and then murder some in rooms he had specially constructed to conceal their screams.
A Times article about him, published on July 26, 1895, began almost jocularly: “It is regarded as a rather uneventful day in police circles when the name of H. H. Holmes is not connected with the mysterious disappearance of one or more persons who were last seen in his company.” Holmes, who was born Herman Mudgett and whose death is recounted in these pages, ultimately confessed to more than two dozen murders. In several cases, he had made an extra buck by selling the skeletons of his victims to medical schools.
A Times report from 2005 spurred the filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos to explore the story of Steven Avery, who would become the subject of their Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer. The precipitating article by Monica Davey, reprinted in this book, recounts how Avery, a Wisconsin man just freed from prison after serving 18 years for a rape he did not commit—a person who had become the poster child for wrongful prosecution—became implicated in the murder of another young woman. Avery would end up being convicted, but the documentary challenged the investigation, the prosecution and the verdict of his case. More than 500,000 people have signed a petition seeking a presidential pardon for Avery, though that is impossible since Avery was tried in a state, not a federal, court. He still remains in prison, though efforts to free him continue.
The Times has long shown admirable restraint in depicting the most squalid of criminal settings, but crime reporting has always appealed to the voyeur in all of us. Readers are stirred by their visceral response to the possibility that, but for fate, they too might have suffered. For all our genuine repulsion at violence, crime, it seems, makes rubberneckers of us all.
And reading about it is, unquestionably, a guilty pleasure.
“Simply put, we are compelled to understand why serial killers do such horrible things to (generally) complete strangers,” Scott Bonn, a professor of criminology at Drew University, wrote in a 2011 article on the blog Criminology on the Streets. Such understanding does not come easy, though. Spend some time in chapter 8 reading about John Wayne Gacy and see if you think you could have detected that this seemingly community-spirited man who served as a Democratic precinct captain, shook hands with a president’s wife and entertained children as Pogo the Clown was capable of murdering nearly three dozen young men and boys.
It’s not enough for crime reporters to just examine individual atrocities and predators. The best of them have always tried to take a deeper look for underlying explanations, but the answers they arrive at are not always uniformly embraced. What sent crime plummeting in the 1990s: effective policing, or the waning of what had been epidemic use of crack cocaine? But still, crime reporting does provide some basis upon which to shape public policy. Governments, after all, are often judged by their ability to control crime and the attending fear, social disorder and economic decline it fosters. However systemic the root causes, unabated crime is a trapdoor for any elected leader. Several of the articles included here, primarily in the chapter on prison, undertake that broader analysis, whether the review is about rising incarceration rates or the surprising attraction of capital punishment to some inmates facing a lifetime behind bars.
The constraints of space, though, prevented us from delving into perhaps the most complicated of crime topics: policing. I worked as the police bureau chief for The Times in New York City between 1998 and 2002, a time, if it’s possible to imagine, when the debate over how law enforcement conceived and performed its mission was even more contentious than it is today. New York enjoyed record-setting declines in crime in those years, which sparked the economy and created the calm of an earlier era on the streets. Some New York Police Department enforcement strategies, most notably Compstat—the use of data to map crime and distribute resources—were widely applauded and copied. Others, such as stop-and-frisk—the practice of confronting someone based on the suspicion they were carrying a concealed weapon—were criticized as excessive. And a series of police missteps and abuses—the torture of Abner Louima, the reckless shooting of Amadou Diallo, to name but two—tarnished the department’s success, sowed mistrust in minority neighborhoods and foreshadowed the sort of police-community tensions so prevalent today. In New York, the debate over these issues was muted by the events of 9/11, but it was not resolved. So today, not unlike the issue of gun control, the matter of proper policing—what works, what doesn’t and at what cost—remains a matter of robust disagreement. It is simply too complicated and important a topic to be dealt with in a single chapter of this book.
Similarly excluded are the topics of terrorism and political corruption, again for the reason that each is worthy of a more extended discussion. The rest of our selections could similarly be matters of debate. Susan Beachy, the researcher for this book, and I spent many hours reading through Times articles to pick material that was both consequential and well written, but one could fill five more books with the articles we passed on: Bernie Goetz, the subway vigilante. The kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. The mob assassination of Paul Castellano outside a popular New York City steakhouse. The murders that inspired Truman Capote to author In Cold Blood. Even the articles we did pick sometimes had to be condensed for space.
In our reading we encountered articles by many of the great reporters who have covered crime for The Times like Gay Talese and David Halberstam, both of whom did time at New York City police headquarters in the press room known as the Shack. Tossed from headquarters in 1875, the cop reporters for several newspapers ended up occupying a tenement across the street, thus the nickname. The journalists were let back into headquarters years later, though the press room in the building continued to be called the Shack, a fitting name for the congested rabbit’s warren of offices I once occupied. (I’m told the offices have since moved across the floor without gaining any space or losing any of their grimy charm.)
Crime reporting at The Times has, in more recent days, been graced by the participation of fine successors to the Taleses and the Halberstams, such as Robert McFadden, Selwyn Raab, Al Baker, William Rashbaum and Michael Wilson, some of whose work you’ll find within these pages. The focus of these journalists was largely pointed toward crime that affected New York and its surroundings, but the breadth of Times resources is particularly evident in dispatches you will see filed from far afield:. From the city in Italy where a young student, Amanda Knox, was charged with murder. From a parade route in Egypt where Anwar Sadat was gunned down. From the killing fields in Norway where a mass murderer made clear that xenophobia was an international concern. Their work in these and other settings can never heal the injured or mitigate the grief. But it does help to address the questions that any society must confront if it wants to thrive: How can we stop the people who do bad things? And how can we be sure, when we punish them, that we have gotten it right?