Bedeviled by Wenzell Brown

Bedeviled
by Wenzell Brown
1961, Monarch

Part true crime, part psychological case studies, all clearly made up from whole cloth. These five cases center around the concept of the death wish: people seeking to be punished to satisfy their guilt over sexual impulses. For Brown, this means that the victims were quire literally asking for it.

A starlet forces a migrant worker to tie her up and whip her. Things go to far and she is strangled to death. For Brown, not only is the woman responsible, she is responsible for her murderers execution. Couldn't find any real cases of a young Hollywood star married to a famous producer being tied down and murdered, figured that would have shown up on Mysteries and Scandals.

An American working in Cuba cross-dresses as a woman to lure men, with the explicit purpose of being beating up by them, before being murdered by an African sect.

A lesbian, feeling guilty about it, taunts a gang hoodlum and is gang raped, cause serious injury and brain damage that left her nearly blind. She's later run over by a drunk driver who flees the scene, who is the last victim of her death wish rampage. Brown complains that the jury in his trial was not made aware that the victim was a lesbian, which was somehow a mitigating factor.

A teacher with an incredibly specific kink. She slowly seduces her students, takes them to a NYC hotel on New Year's Eve, taunts them into raping her (again, according to Brown), then yells at them to leave her alone. She is eventually murdered, the poor man.

A woman has sex with her son and is murdered by him. You know this is fake because it's an adopted son, the same cop out that lives on in dryers across the internet. He ends this section complaining that Americans are too uptight when it comes to incest.

Modern readers will get whiplash with this one. The vibe is very much that of a progressive,  sociological, compassionate look at the roots of behavior, then spits out victim blaming homophobia that would make Anita Bryant blush.

Included in Wildside's True Crime Megapack, from Amazon

The Enforcer: The Story of "Happy Jack" Burbridge

The Enforcer: The Story of "Happy Jack" Burbridge
By Jack Burbridge as told to Victoria Chandler
1980, Acclaimed Books

Grabbed this on the strength of the cover in the Men's Adventure section and was surprised to find it was inspirational fiction. Jack Burbridge was a remorseless psychopathic petty criminal who, after a religious conversion in prison, became a remorseless psychopathic public speaker.

Jack went from stealing hubcaps as a kid, graduated to pimping and black marketeering in the Army, moved on to protection and pimping in rural Indiana, before being busted for bank robbery and going to prison, where he became born again, got early release, and started a prison and biker ministry.

Works surprisingly well as a true crime memoir outlining the life of a mob connected minor dirtbag in 1960s Indiana. And if you're worried he gets too preachy at the end, he's far too focused on talking about himself to get around to God much.

Taken at face value (and if you can't trust a pimp turned religious zealot, who can you trust), he at least stopped the assaults, killings, and sexual slavery after he got out. But his account is completely consistent with someone playing up his religious redemption to get out of prison early and stuck with it as a career - he even jokes about how he never had to get a real job.

Happy Jack's story checks almost every box for what those in the biz call Criminal Attitudes. Nothing was his fault, he was the real victim, the corrupt system is out to get him, he wasn't really that bad of a guy, and it's not fair that he faced any consequences at all. Clearly still proud at what a tough guy he was, says that he was a compassionate pimp and only beat women if they acted like a man, whatever that's supposed to mean. Minimizes the harm he did, even to the point of passive voice admitting to a self-defense killing - the other guy "got shot down".

He's not too heavy on the excuses because he's completely devoid of remorse. Mentions that one time, once, for a few minutes, he felt bad about the things he did, but then remembered that he was born again, so he didn't actually do those things, it was the other guy, get off my back, man. An ounce of recognition that he hurt his wife, but even with his kids he's more worried about his self image as a good dad.

The thing that really burned my hide is when a couple times somebody dies instead of him, it was because his mama was praying for him. The other poor schmuck, including someone he kills while driving under the influence, were just out of luck. Maybe their mamas should have been praying.

 Available at https://archive.org/details/enforcerstory000burb - don't keep it in your locker!

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3YPMbI5

Multiple Murderers II by Max Haines

Multiple Murderers II
by Max Haines
1995 Toronto Sun

Presumably taken from Haines' column Crime Flashback, shorter than true crime magazine features. A few bigger name serial killers and spree killers, but mostly more low key multiple murderers - the better for me to not hear about Dahmer or Bundy for the millionth time. Haines' writing style clicked with me weird - the first page of each entry was almost unreadable padding that became normal by page two, like he had to go back and fill out word count. He also felt compelled to report on the attractiveness levels of every person in the story.

Nothing remarkable, my favorite was a white trash noir of a woman who arranged a hit on her husband with two dirtbags in exchange for sex, which they exploited for months with no intention of carrying out the assignment, and how they're implicated when the target ends up dead.

From Amazon

Unsolved Mysteries ed Rose G. Mandelsberg

Unsolved Mysteries
ed Rose G. Mandelsberg
From the Files of True Detective Magazine

1992, Pinnacle

Twenty five articles from True Detective and associated true crime magazines. Ranges from well know serial killers like the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Green River Killer to local cases. One of the traits of the unsolved reports is that they spend more time on dead end leads and the messy nature of investigation, while solved cases tend to report more of a straight line.

Mostly solid, though it slips briefly into tabloid territory - one British article refers to urban myths of widespread sex trafficking from Europe to the Middle East as well as child snuff film rackets. Another has an undercover vice detective navigating the Portland lesbian scene.

A handful have been solved in the subsequent thirty years, notably the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway and serial killer Patrick Baxter. The Green River article has an anonymous psychic who claims to have directly discovered skeletal remains in the woods, but I couldn't readily find another claim for this outside the book.

Available from Amazon

Fantasy Tales vs Startling Detective - First Fall

At the End of the Road by Patrick Connolly
Fantasy Tales Vol 2 No 3 Summer 1978

A young woman and her subtextual predatory lesbian roommate leave the small town behind to broaden their horizons in London. She hooks up with the landlady's son who ends up being dead and the landlady's dead and that means everybody's dead, me, you, everyone died already.

The Phantom in the House of Oesterreich by Don Nachaidh
Startling Detective Adventures Vol 5 No 26, July 1930

This one's wild. Years after a rich man was murdered while his wife was locked in a closet, it's revealed that she had been keeping her young lover as a sex slave in the attic, slipping him food and publishing the pulp fiction he wrote by candlelight (I looked and couldn't find what he published). The lover killed the husband after the couple argued, then later faked amnesia and started a new life. The wife's multiple affairs eventually uncovered the plot, though neither were ever convicted. This was made into three films, including one with Neal Patrick Harris.

An absolute squash. One of the most intriguing true crime stories against... well let's just say this was Raven/Canyon on Villano IV all over again.

The Arbor House Treasury of True Crime by John Dunning

The Arbor House Treasury of True Crime
by John Dunning
Arbor House, 1981

Heavy proof stuff here.  This unassuming tome is a huge omnibus of reprinted true crime stories, mostly from Germany and France.  It is also perhaps the most f'ed up book I have ever read.  Murder, incest, rape, incest, serial killing, incest, and incest.  All written in a flat reporting style, with some narrative conceits from the investigators.  The twisted lives people led outside of their crimes were even more disturbing.

Interestingly, it describes a fetal abduction in Bosnia from 1970, which is four years earlier than the first listed in Wikipedia.

I had this book sometime in my youth - it must have been high school, since I knew Colin Wilson from the Outsider and I wasn't that pretentious until at least sophomore year.

Get used from Amazon

The Badge by Jack Webb

The Badge: true and terrifying crime stories that could not be presented on TV, from the creator and star of Dragnet

by Jack Webb

2005 Thunder's Mouth Press

Originally The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America's Great Police Departments; Prentice-Hall 1958

The Badge reads like notes from unpublished Dragnet scripts filled out with LAPD press releases.  The former is great - quick summaries of crime and investigation lasting a couple pages each, the proper length for the genre.  I like True Crime, but even the most complicated cases can be outlined in a few pages.  Instead of endless padding, Webb gives us his square/beat patter.

The latter is dull at best and infuriating at worst.  Webb has always been an LAPD apologist, and it doesn't age too well.  This was written when the LAPD had cleaned up in regards to payoffs and bribery and had to deal with racial profiling and civil rights violations (or refuse to deal with, more often).

James Ellroy wrote an introduction about how he bites Webb's style.  I swear Ellroy has a macro on Word that spits out a full paragraph on his dead mother at a keyboard shortcut - even the wording has become repetitive.

Available on Kindle for Amazon.

Click here to read a sample.