Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Those who think about criminal justice in political terms have arrived at a stalemate, and this stalemate has lasted for about 30 years at this point. It is to the credit of the constitutional concept that our system of justice has continued to evolve and continued to make progress on many issues despite the political stalemate—yet it is also true that on many issues we have not made progress.

  I believe in a future with much less crime. I believe in a future of unlocked doors, where bicycles and backpacks may be left unattended because people do not steal them. We’re really not that far away from that future. We just need to take a few small, practical steps to get there. Let go of your politics, I am asking, and let us move forward.

  XXXIV

  I outlined in Chapter X a system of categorizing crime stories by their size and the types of elements that they contain. The murder of JonBenet would be IQBX 9—an innocent-victim story (I), and a mystery (Q for Question Mark) with bizarre overtones (B) and sexual violence (X), very big (9). Despite its popularity with the tabloids, the Ramsey story is not a “tabloid” story in the sense that I intended that phrase, which is a crime story growing out of events in which people take a prurient interest. With the obvious exception of 9/11, no crime since then has been as big a story as that one. There have, however, been many contenders. Let’s do a quick survey of some of the biggest crime stories of the last ten years.

  Super Bowl XXXIV was played in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta on January 30, 2000. The Baltimore Ravens were not involved in the contest, but late that night a fight developed outside a nightclub between the friends and supporters of Ray Lewis, a superstar linebacker for the Ravens, and the entourage of a rapper named Chino Nino. OK, called Chino Nino; his name actually is Jeff Gwen.

  Anyway, two people were stabbed to death in the fight, and the Atlanta authorities rushed to the conclusion that Ray Lewis had been in the middle of it, kickin’ and stabbin’ people. In point of fact he had not been. After Ray Lewis was charged with murder all of the people who alleged that they saw Lewis in the melee were exposed as an overexcitable lot who didn’t actually know Ray Lewis from Adam. Chino Nino’s narrative of the incident was that Lewis 1) had attempted to act as a peacemaker, early on, before the brawl got serious, and 2) had been nowhere around at the time that the violence turned to mayhem. All of the witnesses against Lewis eventually recanted their stories, leaving Atlanta prosecutors with no option but to plead out the case against Lewis as a misdemeanor. Two people were later put on trial for the crime, but no one was convicted.

  It is the view of the author that Ray Lewis is a good man who was unjustly accused of crimes of which he was quite clearly not guilty. He was guilty of two things. He was running with a bad crowd, or more accurately, he was allowing a bad crowd to run with him. This was poor judgment, and when it spun out of control he did attempt to orchestrate a cover-up, before he realized that two people had actually been killed in the fracas. But the Atlanta authorities’ effort to pin him with a murder rap was unreasonable and irresponsible. We could categorize the event as a CV 6—a celebrity story about a sudden outbreak of violence.

  On or about May 1, 2001, Chandra Levy was murdered in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. Levy, aged 24, had had (or was having) an affair with Gary Condit, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing the northern San Joaquin Valley in California. She had interned in his office, and then later, at the time of her death, was an intern in the Bureau of Prisons.

  Seeking to draw attention to Levy’s disappearance, her family trumpeted the allegations of an affair with Condit. Condit was slow to come clean on the issue and did a poor job of conveying sympathy for the family, and the public grew to suspect that Condit might be involved in Levy’s disappearance, although there was never any evidence of that. The disappearance drew little media attention in its first six weeks, but became a major news story in June, 2001, and remained so until buried by the events of September 11. Condit’s career was destroyed by the scandal.

  We would categorize the story as TPQ 7, a tabloid/political mystery story that was very big for a period of a little less than three months. On November 23, 2010, Ingmar Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted of murdering Levy. The break in this case came from a reporter, Amy Keller of Roll Call magazine. When Levy’s body was discovered in Rock Creek Park, it occurred to Keller that everybody else might possibly be barking up the wrong tree in hounding Condit, so she went through police reports looking for other attacks on women which had occurred in Rock Creek Park, and encountered the name of Guandique, who had attacked at least two other women in Rock Creek Park in the weeks after the murder of Levy. When she first wrote about that, people simply thought that she was trying to spin the story away from Condit. It took years for the police to realize that he actually had fingered the right suspect.

  On May 4, 2001—three days after the disappearance of Chandra Levy—the wife of actor Robert Blake was shot and killed while sitting in a parked car outside an Italian restaurant in Studio City (LA). Blake was arrested in April, 2002, and went on trial for the crime in early 2005. He was acquitted on March 16, 2005, although later found liable for her death in a civil trial. A pure celebrity story; C 6.

  In Houston on June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub. Originally convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison, Yates’ conviction was overturned on appeal, and she was found Not Guilty by reason of insanity in July, 2006.

  Yates, born in 1964, was the valedictorian of her high school class. Her husband, Rusty Yates, was a computer programmer for NASA. The couple announced at their wedding in 1993 that, as a consequence of their newfound religious beliefs, they would have as many children as they could have. Rusty Yates, however, did little to help with the child rearing, and the burden that this placed on Andrea was more than she could carry. In 1999 she had a nervous breakdown, and twice attempted suicide. Discharged from a mental hospital in January, 2000, she immediately got pregnant once again, and had a serious relapse after suffering post-partum depression in March, 2001, three months before the murders. Despite doctors’ clear warnings that Andrea Yates needed round-the-clock supervision and was not to be left alone, she was left not merely alone but in charge of five young children day after day. I would categorize the story as BI 7—a bizarre story involving the deaths of innocents.

  On September 18, 2001—a week after the 9/11 attacks—an unknown person mailed envelopes containing anthrax to several prominent and several less prominent members of the media. Three weeks later there was another round of similar letters mailed to political leaders.

  The story of the anthrax investigation is extraordinarily complicated. Anthrax is so deadly that it would be very, very difficult to put it in an envelope and mail it to someone without killing yourself. If you or I were to get our hands on some anthrax and start to mess around with it, it is extremely likely that we would die a horrible death within the next few weeks. The number of people who have the technical expertise to use anthrax as a murder weapon is very limited, and anthrax itself is extremely difficult to obtain. Only a very limited number of people have any access to it.

  So the FBI started the anthrax investigation, so to speak, in field goal range, if not actually in the red zone. On Day One of the investigation they could draw up a list of 60 or 70 names, and feel reasonably confident that the name of the offender was on the list. The FBI, then, started going up and down the list, looking for people who had a widget loose.

  After several years the FBI investigation had succeeded in ruining the lives of numerous people by publicly linking them to the investigation. The investigation kept running into state secrets. Any information that anybody has about how to “weaponize” anthrax is, for good reasons, closely guarded. At one point the FBI alienated Congress by telling them that they couldn’t give them a complete report on what they were doing to investigate the case, because it involved state secrets. Then, too, early on in the
case, persons at the highest levels of the American government wanted the FBI to conclude that the anthrax letters had to have been mailed by someone from Iraq, working in the service of Saddam Hussein. That wasn’t true, but persons inside the government leaked bogus secret information suggesting that it was true, anyway, and much of the media was convinced for years—and some people still believe today—that sinister Middle Eastern agents were behind the attacks.

  Five people died as a result of the anthrax attacks, and believe me, anthrax is not the way to go. In addition, the costs of cleaning up the buildings and other places that were contaminated by the attacks is estimated to have exceeded $1 billion. The cost of cleaning up and decontaminating the Brentwood mail facility in Washington, DC, where one of the envelopes tore open and killed two employees, was $130 million ($3 million actual cleanup cost; $127 million government waste). The business of the United States Senate was disrupted at a critical moment in history. The anthrax attacks played a significant role in sustaining the paranoia of the post-9/11 era. The investigation into the crime may well be the most expensive criminal investigation in history.

  A peculiarity of the case is that whereas ordinarily the forensic scientists are seen as geniuses in white coats, in this case it was extremely difficult to drag the level of the forensic scientists up to the level of the scientists being investigated. One of the first people that the FBI turned to for help in the case was Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins, who was senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland (known as USAMRIID); in fact, it may well have been Dr. Ivins who generated and then leaked the secret information suggesting that Iraq was behind the attacks. There were people in the FBI as early as 2002 who suspected that Dr. Ivins might not be on the right side of the issue, but the focus in 2002 and for years thereafter was on other scientists. FBI Director Robert Mueller changed the leadership of the team investigating the case in 2006, however, and the new leadership reviewed the candidates and decided to focus on Dr. Ivins. In mid-July, 2008, Dr. Ivins was informed that he was about to be prosecuted as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, and on July 27 Dr. Ivins ingested a large quantity of painkillers, putting him in a coma. He died on July 29.

  Federal prosecutors and the FBI, days later, announced that Dr. Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, and laid out their case against him. However—and this very rarely happens—the community of persons interested in the case by and large has rejected the FBI’s arguments against Dr. Ivins, and the debate about his culpability continues. Some experts claim that Dr. Ivins did not have the technical expertise to have committed the crime. The FBI’s case against Ivins certainly contains a lot of eyewash. We could categorize the story as QP 8—a mystery story about political issues.

  In 2002 Michael Skakel was convicted of the October 30, 1975, murder of Martha Moxley. Martha Moxley was a distant cousin of my wife; her grandfather was my mother-in-law’s first cousin. Of more general interest, Michael Skakel was a cousin of the Kennedys, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of RFK. Martha Moxley was an extremely attractive fifteen-year-old girl, while Michael Skakel was (in 1975) a nerdy and depressed fifteen-year-old boy, and they were neighbors in a wealthy gated community in Greenwich, Connecticut. October 30 is “mischief night” or “Hacker night” on the East Coast, and Martha Moxley and some friends were out spraying cars with shaving cream and wrapping trees with toilet paper and stuff. Martha stopped by the Skakel house to see Michael and his much cooler older brother, Tommy. Tommy had had some beers and had gotten into his father’s scotch, and Martha was last seen by her friends making out with Tommy outside the Skakel house a little after 9:30 PM. She was within sight of her own home, had it been daylight.

  Her body was found about noon the next day, on the tree line of her own property. She had been bludgeoned with a golf club and stabbed with the broken shaft of the club. The club, it was learned, was part of a set that had belonged to Michael and Tommy Skakel’s mother, who had died three years earlier. The golf club, however, may have been left lying in the yard before the murder, a weapon of convenience for whoever happened by.

  The Greenwich police had the same problems as the Boulder police. They had never actually investigated a homicide before, and they really didn’t have much of an idea what they were doing, but they didn’t want to admit that and ask for help. They were behind the curve of current best police practices. In the mid- to late 1960s it had become standard police practice to make notes about every interview, to document everything that was said to an investigator as soon as it was said. (For the sake of clarity, Scotland Yard had begun doing this before 1900.) By the mid-1970s many cops still did not do this. The body was not photographed exactly as it was first discovered, and little was done to process the crime scene for evidence.

  There were three front-row suspects in the crime: Tommy Skakel, Michael Skakel, and a man who had been employed to tutor and help supervise the Skakel children, and who had moved into the Skakel house on that day, October 30. As little evidence could be developed against anyone, suspicion moved around the neighborhood, eventually visiting a wide variety of people. The investigation stalled.

  As did Michael Skakel. A poor student due to severe dyslexia, he had been traumatized by the death of his mother just after his twelfth birthday, and had been poorly parented following her death. His father, who had inherited an immense fortune, was an alcoholic who was off on a hunting trip at the time of the murder, leaving a houseful of unsupervised teenagers. Michael became an alcoholic and drug user with marginal job skills who drifted in and out of rehab.

  In the late 1990s Mark Fuhrman wrote a book about the Moxley case. I like Mark Fuhrman; I haven’t read the book, but I think Fuhrman has been beaten up enough for his mistakes, and he does good work. Furhman’s book re-ignited interest in the Moxley case. Over time, the degeneration of Michael Skakel’s life had left him the most vulnerable of the original suspects. It was alleged that he had once confessed to the crime in a group therapy session at a rehab center, and by taking this thing that he had said in 1991 and that remark that he had made in 1984, one could stitch together a case against him.

  Not a very good case, but it worked; Skakel was indicted for the murder in January, 2000, and convicted in 2002. We could describe the crime story, I believe, as Q$ 6—a mystery about people with money.

  We could describe the case, as well, as being uncannily similar to the murder of Robin Gilbert. I could tell the story of Robin Gilbert, but it’s the same story I just told. Gilbert was a 14-year-old girl, living in a safe, well-off New England neighborhood, this one in Reading, Massachusetts. On July 2, 1975—less than four months before the murder of Martha Moxley, and less than 170 miles away—Gilbert went for a late-night stroll around the neighborhood. Her body was found the next day, buried under leaves and debris on a golf course near her house. She had probably sneaked out of the house to meet a boy. Inexplicably, the medical examiner ruled that she had died of natural causes—14-year-old girl, her clothes torn open, buried under leaves and debris after 100 feet of drag marks, and the M.E. ruled it was natural causes.

  The small-town detectives, as in the Moxley case, talked to everybody but didn’t take any notes—plus they were fighting the medical examiner’s finding that the girl had died of natural causes. As in the case of Martha Moxley the investigation went nowhere, and the case lay dormant for more than 20 years.

  In 1996 the mother of a man named David Allen Jones died of cancer. Before she died she confided to a relative that she had always been afraid that her son was involved in the death of Robin Gilbert. Jones was 16 years old in 1975, and, like Michael Skakel, he had not done well in life. Living in Atlanta and working as a short-order cook, he was arrested in 1997, fought extradition back to Massachusetts, was returned to Massachusetts in 2000 and stood trial in 2004. And … here’s a little twist for you. On October 26, 2004, a man named David Allen Jones was legally exonerat
ed in California after spending 12 years in custody for a murder he did not commit. On October 28, 2004, a man named David Allen Jones was convicted of manslaughter in Massachusetts for a crime committed 29 years earlier.

  Let’s face it; the case against Michael Skakel sucks, but I don’t understand at all how they convicted David Jones. There’s no confession, no physical evidence, no eyewitness to the murder or anything approaching the murder, and the man was not even suspected of the crime at the time that it occurred. A sister of Robin Gilbert claimed that Jones had called the house and talked to Robin on the evening of her disappearance—an unremarkable fact, in that Jones was Gilbert’s brother’s best friend. Under pressure from police, he “acknowledged” (and later denied) that he had met Robin Gilbert after she snuck out of the house, and they had been making out on the golf course. Combining this with “here’s a bad thing he did in 1977—and look, here’s another bad thing he did in 1994,” prosecutors were able to convince a jury that Jones had strangled Gilbert.

  There should be some way to estimate mathematically the probability that two crimes are linked. We have here two young girls of essentially the same age, living in safe neighborhoods, who died under extremely similar circumstances, separated by neither time nor distance of any meaning. Both girls’ clothes were torn open, but they were not raped, suggesting an attacker who might be impotent. Is this enough to suggest that the crimes are linked? I don’t know. From prison, both Skakel and Jones continue to deny that they had any involvement in the respective crimes.

  For three weeks in October, 2002, two men known as the Beltway Snipers cruised around Washington, DC, and neighboring cities, murdering people at random with a high-powered rifle. The older of the two, a man named John Muhammad, apparently organized the attacks either as a religious jihad or as a cover for a planned attack against his ex-wife, which would have appeared to be another random shooting. We could categorize the story as KQN 7—a Killer-on-the-Loose Mystery story with a large number of victims, very big for a short period of time.