Decidedly Grim

I just finished reading this book – which has formed the basis of a few morbid facts already, and will be the basis of quite a few more before I’m done with it! Here’s my review – as always, if you make purchases through my links I receive a percentage of the sale and use that money to purchase more books for the MFDJ:

The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty
by Ivan Solotaroff

Also available on Kindle!
The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

This is a very interesting book about the modern death penalty in America – mostly discussing its history from the 1976 lift of the Supreme Court ban on executions through the 80′s when the criminally dull lethal injection method gradually replaced the far more morbidly interesting gas chamber and electric chair. It goes into graphic detail on some of the most infamous bungled gas and electricity executions of the era and gives insight into why some of the men who carried out the executions later became staunch anti-death penalty activists. The book gets a bit dull about half-way through when it starts to focus on the life story of an unpleasant man named Donald Hocutt who was the Mississippi executioner for several years. (That’s his ugly mug on the cover.) Honestly, I could not possibly care less about the guy or his practical joking daredevil macho past. However, when the book isn’t indulging in Hocutt’s meager accomplishments, it’s an excellent morbid read. (4/5)

More books about Execution & Torture can be found by perusing The Library Eclectica‘s Excruciating Execution & Terrible Torture aisle!

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For those of you who embrace newfangled technology, I put together a list of recommended morbid eBooks on my Amazon aStore. (I receive a percentage of sales of items bought through the aStore in credit and use it to buy books to support the MFDJ. Any assistance is always appreciated.) Enjoy – and if you have any recommendations, feel free to send them my way!

The Library Eclectica’s Evil eBooks Aisle

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A Wretched Recommendation

Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
by Harold Schechter

Harold Schechter is my favorite historic true crime writer. He seeks out the most interesting cases, researches them thoroughly, and then pens fascinating tomes that accomplish that rare goal of keeping me interested from the first page to the last. Fatal is about “Jolly” Jane Tappan, a spinster nurse who poisoned at least 31 people – probably more – between 1891 and 1901, becoming one of America’s most prolific serial killers in the process.

Jane is a fascinating character. Her mother died when she was young, leaving her and her sister to be raised by their neglectful and abusive drunken father who turned them over to an orphanage. Back in those days, orphanages lent out their charges to be indentured servants to the families who housed and fed them. Jane grew up as an outwardly smiling, joking, and “jolly” girl – while internally seething in bitter jealousy at her foster sister who had everything that Jane wanted: a well-off family who cared for her, a boyfriend, a high social standing.

In her early 20′s, she embarked to nursing school, where her dysfunctional upbringing began to express itself in a desire to make other people sick so that she could care for them and then bring them back from the brink of death, thus making herself feel powerful and needed. Or sometimes she might just let them die… a process that she found even more exhilarating (as she later admitted, even sexually so). And so her career of murder – first in hospitals and later in private houses – began.

Luckily for Jane, medical science in the late 19th century was still in the Dark Ages, so a series of doctors failed to recognize that her victims had been poisoned, and ascribed laughably inaccurate causes of death ranging from “cerebral hemorrhage” to “fever”. It wasn’t until her mania to kill grew so great that she was taking out entire families in a matter of weeks that suspicion began to fester and autopsies were finally performed on her victims… and then her true monstrous nature was revealed for all to see.

Unlike the average morbid book (which peters out after the crime spree or tragedy has ended), I found the last few chapters of Fatal even more fascinating than the earlier ones. Jane’s jailhouse confession (given to the court appointed alienist who analyzed her) is jaw-dropping for its frankness. (I mean what woman in 1901 would admit to experiencing sexual satisfaction through laying in bed with a dying woman?) And the final couple of chapters depicting the final few years of her life in an asylum I found the most interesting of all. Throughout the book I found myself feeling both sympathy and derision for this complex, confounding woman. Highly recommended. (5/5)

More books about bad, bad people like Jane Tappan can be found in the Maniacal Monsters aisle of The Library Eclectica.

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Today’s Photographic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Thousands of black men and women were lynched in America in the early 20th century. Varying only in degrees of torture and brutality, these execution rituals were acted out in every part of the South. Sometimes in small groups, sometimes in massive numbers, whites combined the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Newspaper reporters dutifully reported the events under such lurid headlines as “COLORED MAN ROASTED ALIVE,” describing in graphic detail the slow and methodical agony and death of the victim and devising a vocabulary that would befit the occasion. The public burning of a Negro would soon be known as a “Negro Barbeque,” reinforcing the perception of blacks as less than human. The use of the camera to memorialize lynchings testified to their openness and to the self-righteousness that animated the participants. Not only did photographers capture the execution itself, but also the carnival-like atmosphere and the expectant mood of the crowd, as in the lynching of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tennessee, in 1915:

Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope… Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.

During a lynching at Durant, Oklahoma, in 1911, the exuberant and proud lynchers bound their victim to some planks and posed around him while photographers recorded the scene. A black-owned newspaper in Topeka, Kansas, in printing the photograph, wanted every black newspaper to do likewise, so that “the world may see and know what semi-barbarous America is doing.” Many photographs of lynchings and burnings would reappear as popular picture postcards.

Culled From: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

The Without Sanctuary website has a collection of some of the grim photographs from the book, which is one of my favorite ghastly photographic collections. Here’s the review I wrote on the book back in the day:

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America
By Geoffrey Abbott
Headline Book Pub Ltd
“Without Sanctuary” is an amazing, but very upsetting, collection of lynching photographs and some of the stories that go with them. Although the images of the beaten, burned, mutilated, and hung victims are horrible enough on their own, the thing that truly disturbs me about these photographs are the spectators – men, women, and children – smiling, goofing off, and proudly posing in front of the corpses, just as if they were at a Fourth of July picnic or something. It’s really frightening to think how cruel and vicious “good god-fearing citizens” behaved not so very long ago (the majority of the pictures date from the 1890′s-1930′s, though the most recent comes from 1960). I think this book is performing a great service by refusing to allow this country to forget its own barbarities of the not-so-distant past.

Also recommended by Einstein Shrugged:
“I picked up a copy of this one night in a fit of drunken Amazon shopping so when it turned up it was a bit of a surprise but morbid surprises are always the best kind. There’s not much in the way of text (though what they have is pretty intense) and it mostly lets the photography speak for itself. I’ve had it for a little over a week and have already read and looked through it twice. The lynchings are bad enough, but the crowd shots of happy, smiling people make it one of the most disturbing books I’ve read in a long time.”

***** – Upsetting But Essential!

Facts, Library

The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study
by J. Paul De River

A 1949 vintage criminology textbook written by infamous Los Angeles County criminal psychiatrist J. Paul De River that is jam-packed with all the sexism and homophobia common to its era. Among many fascinations, I learned that a women who enjoys being orally pleasured is a masochist, a man who likes to orally pleasure women is a pervert, and homosexuals are psychopaths who need to be given shock therapy. Apart from those revelations, there are a number of case studies from a variety of sex crimes – from the truly shocking (a man who strangled three children because he wanted to have sex with them but couldn’t do it when they were alive because he “didn’t want to hurt them”) to the merely amusing (the sadist who had a violent orgy with himself in the muddy field at night). Some of the case studies have rather graphic photographs (including the most violent murderer, who cut his victims into pieces after killing them), so the book is definitely not for the squeamish, but it is a fascinating historical document.  (4/5)

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Today, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, I thought I would repost a summary of the event originally posted in two Morbid Facts on April 2/3, 2000. Er, enjoy!

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died.

William G. Shepherd was an eyewitness to the atrocity:

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window–four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. ‘Call the firemen,’ they screamed… One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces. The firemen… took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl’s body flashed through it.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward–the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud–dead, thud–dead–together they went into eternity.

A police officer stands with bodies of victims who leaped to their death. Click on the photo to access a great gallery of fire photos at the Cornell University website.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking–flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire. The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls… The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

Culled from: The Triangle Factory Fire
Generously submitted by: Fearless Freya

Here is my original review of a book chronicling the tragedy.  I should re-read it because I might find the second half more interesting these days:

The Triangle Fire
By Leon Stein
Cornell University Press
The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 young women, mostly immigrant girls, in one of the worst factory fire disasters in American history. (Of course, as the book points out, this sort of thing still occurs all the time, it just happens in Thailand, China, Korea, Hong Kong, etc. and we don’t care about it.) Anyway, this book was okay… The first part, about the actual fire itself and how the design of the building (with exit doors that pushed inward, locked exits, one inferior fire escape, and narrow stairways) created a firetrap that resulted in numerous women (and some men too) plunging to their deaths onto the New York sidewalk below, is a compelling read. However, I just couldn’t get in to the second section of the book at all, which deals with the prosecution of the company owner’s for contributing to the deaths through their negligence, the protests and unions that formed in the aftermath, and the new laws that were enacted to protect others. That part had me yawning nearly non-stop. But that’s just me… Perhaps you might find all that very interesting as well.

*** – Half-Baked

Facts, Library

So, I’m continuing to read the 1949 criminology textbook “The Sexual Criminal” as my bedtime reading. (And if I seem a little strange, well, that’s because I am.) It’s extremely fascinating/disturbing… but also very enlightening as to the kind of sexist and homophobic rationale that passed as scholarly thinking back in those days.

For example:
Last night’s chapter was entitled “Sadistic Bestiality”. I was bracing myself for the worst… but it wasn’t particularly graphic, thank goodness. There were only two cases discussed and I found the difference between them quite enlightening.

The first case was a man who liked to screw chickens while wringing their necks. (Which brought back memories of the comic book Jonah Hex.) He also tortured and killed other animals while having sex with them. Truly a despicable human being whom I would love to impale with a huge screw myself.

The second case was a woman who let her dog screw her. That’s it. She didn’t beat the dog, she didn’t stab it to death, she didn’t torture it. She just passively allowed it to do what it wanted to do to her. (And she was embarrassed and humiliated that she did this.)

So I gather from this chapter that a woman simply has to engage in an act and it automatically becomes “sadistic”? Whereas a man really has to work to earn that title? Kind of like how a woman who enjoys being orally pleasured is automatically branded a “masochist”. Whereas a man has to enjoy having needles stuck in his penis to earn the same title?

It’s a very strange world that this J. Paul De River inhabited.

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I’m currently reading a 1949 criminology textbook called The Sexual Criminal by J. Paul de River. As with any old sexuality textbook, this one is loaded with hysterical homophobic and sexist sentiments common to its era. I thought I’d share some choice snippets as I stumble upon them. For example, were you aware of this?

The woman who derives a supreme thrill from being manhandled by a lover of the caveman type or who acquires the acme of pleasure from some abnormal act such as cunnilingus rather than indulging in the normal intercourse is a true type of masochist.

Note: This is talking about women who take pleasure in cunnilingus rather than missionary style sex from a man. This isn’t talking about cunnilingus administered by another woman. That, my friends, is criminal. More about that to come…

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A Wretched Book Review!

First, Do No Harm
by Lisa Belkin

This book was accidentally sent to my castlemate instead of another book she had purchased and she was going to send it back but I said, “No – it sounds interesting.  I’ll read it.”  I was expecting one of those action-packed “Life in the E.R.” type books, but this is actually a book about medical ethics and it uses a handful of case studies to analyze the ethical dilemmas that doctors/hospitals face on a regular basis.  At first I was disappointed that it wasn’t filled with ghastly stories of tragedy and mayhem, but in the end I found this book much more thought-provoking and illuminating than your average work of medical non-fiction.

 Here are some examples of the dilemmas this book explores:

1.  Is it a good idea to try to keep extremely premature babies alive?  Not the month or two preemies that have a good chance to survive, but the severely premature babies born at 5-6 months gestation.  In some countries, such as Sweden, they don’t bother with trying to ventilate and coax survival from babies born this premature.  They just let nature take its course and let them die.  Which sounds cruel… but is it crueler than forcing oxygen into lungs that are not developed enough to work on their own, thereby causing extensive damage and scarring that will result in either death or severe pulmonary disease for the rest of the infant’s life?  And will most likely cause a chain reaction of organ failures, from kidneys to liver, etc., that will result in severe illness, possibly multiple resuscitations, prolonged suffering, and lifelong debility?  And the kid will probably die eventually at some point in the months it spends in the hospital.  And it’s going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process – which, sadly, is a consideration that has to be made in American hospitals.  And if you’re uninsured, should the hospital have to eat those costs, and thereby be forced to pass on the expense to other patients in the form of higher fees for services? 

 2.  What should happen to illegal immigrants who suffer debilitating injuries, such as the Mexican man in this book who is shot in the neck, resulting in paralysis so severe he can’t even hold his head up, and must be strapped to an expensive rotating bed (to prevent bedsores), attached to a ventilator, and receive several thousands of dollars worth of care per day, from medications to suctioning of his lung secretions?  Do you send them back to Mexico and let them worry about it (as a Chicago hospital recently did), or do you just turn them over to their families and let the families worry about what to do if the power goes out and they can’t run the ventilator that keeps their loved one alive?  And again, who picks up the tab?

3.  At what point do you decide that enough treatment has been done and it’s time to simply allow a patient to die instead of continuing lifesaving procedures that may only prolong death for a matter of weeks and may cause great suffering to the patient?  The case study in this book is the most poignant of them all: a 16-year-old boy named Patrick who was born with an intestinal disease that resulted in most of his intestinal tract being removed at a young age.  He was given intravenous nourishment most of his life, which resulted in constant fungal infections in his body, which in turn required constant application of anti-fungal drugs (which made him ill), and caused his veins to deteriorate to the point where he had to have an IV surgically inserted directly into his heart.  And now this poor kid, who had spent much of his life in the hospital and is beloved by the nurses and doctors there, finds out that the IV line into his heart is plugged and his only chance for survival is another surgery to implant another IV… and he probably won’t survive it… and the doctors think it’s pretty much hopeless.  But if you do nothing, he can no longer receive adequate nutrients through his fragile veins, so you’re subjecting him to a death by slow starvation… because our stupid culture doesn’t believe in Euthanasia for humans, only animals.  What do you do?  And who makes that decision?  At what age is someone able to make their own decisions instead of allowing their parents or doctors to do so for them?

So, yeah, lots of interesting thought-provoking dilemmas in here, and no clear cut answers.  I was thinking to myself as I read it, see, this is life as it is really lived.  Life is not clear-cut like Republicans want you to think it is.  There are no “right” or “wrong” answers in situations like these.  Is it the responsibility of a doctor to save a life, regardless of the suffering that may result?  Is it “wrong” to allow a premature baby born with severe spina bifida to die from infection, rather than perform surgery that may extend his life… even if he may have limited brain function, and will never be able to walk or even sit up?  And who makes the judgment of what a “life worth living” is, anyway?  I may think a life as someone paralyzed from the chin down is not worth living… but the man who suffered that injury said that his life after the injury was far more enjoyable than his life beforehand because he was closer to his family and he appreciated his life so much more.  

I’ll be thinking about this one for awhile yet.  4/5

(Incidentally, I only gave it a 4 star because there were some slow parts in it – mainly discussing the Ethics Committee that meets at the hospital to discuss the cases.) 

More medical books can be perused at The Library Eclectica’s  Monstrous Medicine aisle.

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As promised, here’s my review of…

All God’s Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families
by Rene Denfeld
Fascinating book about Street Families living in Portland. Street Families are basically gangs formed by homeless and disaffected youth that center around a male and female leader (known as the “street father” and “street mother”). Most of the kids are homeless youth, but some of them are kids who have homes to go back to, but who decide to live on the streets because it’s much more exciting than living at home. These kids live for The Dramas – basically, hunting down and punishing kids who disobey any of the rules and regulations of the families. Sometimes the kids don’t even have to disobey the rules to be a target: if someone doesn’t like them for whatever reason they can just say that they broke a rule and that’s enough to get the bored family members fired up for retaliation. And to call these kids merciless is an understatement. Torture, murder, relentless cruelty, whatever it takes to earn “street cred” is fine by them. By the end of this book, I was longing for the simplier days of runaway teenage junkie prostitutes like Christiane F. And I don’t think I’ll ever view Portland the same again… or, actually, any street kids at all. (4/5)

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