laurajames.typepad.comCLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

By Crime Historian Laura James, Esquire (c) 2005-18 WELCOME to my study of historic true crime, a literary blog where the chairs rest at the intersection of history, journalism, law, and murder, and the shelves are filled with the finest true crime literature. STEAL FROM THIS LIBRARY AND IT’S PISTOLS AT DAWN. Home Archives Profile Subscribe Subscribe to this blog’s feed Laura James Recent Posts True Crime Author Corey Mitchell, 1967 - 2014, R.I.P. An Ode to The Borowitz Collection True Crime Author Curt Gentry, 1931-2014, R.I.P. 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Pearson Exoneration Stories Family Annihilators Father Gerald Robinson’s case Google Books - Classic Historic Crime Books Free Historical True Crime Stories Journalism Legends of True Crime Reporting Links Lizzie Borden Michigan stories Movies New York Times Polls Rants Serial Killers Television The Love Pirate and the Bandit’s Son The True Crime Genre TV Villisca Axe Murders Wicked Women Wild West Witches, Wizards, and Charlatans See More Laura’s Favorite Stories The 10 Best True Crime Books of All Time An Unwritten Law Mad as Ophelia An Old, Bloody Postcard from Detroit The Tuxedo Murder Case The Barest of Defenses My Queer Books The Lost Art of Writing Crime Headlines Two Women and a Razor, or the Trials of Jessie Morrison The Sort of Thing That Happens When Fifty Marries Twenty The Death-Cheater The Famous Black-McKaig Trial The Very Nutty Professor On the Sometimes Fatal Consequences of Entering Into Madame Steinheil’s Bedchamber About Your email address: Powered by FeedBlitz True Crime Author Corey Mitchell, 1967 - 2014, R.I.P. True crime author Corey Mitchell,47, passed away suddenly in late October. News accounts say he died of a heart attack. Mitchell studied law but did not practice; instead, he wrote seven true crime books, and a few years ago he was the editor of a well regarded if short-lived and now sadly defunct online true crime collaborative. (Read my initial piece on In Cold Blog here ) . Mitchell’s titles are Evil Eyes, Pure Murder, Dead and Buried, Murdered Innocents, Strangler, and Savage Son, along with his first and, he told me, most successful book, 2001’s Hollywood Death Scenes. News of his death had me re-reading his old blog ; some of the comments he left on Clews ( here , here , here , and here ); notes we exchanged about the true crime genre, including my favorite posted here ; his Facebook page; and an interview I found online . Lately his interests had turned toward his other favorite subjects in music and horror. I will always remember him for one book in particular that I was not alone in being glad he wrote. The book Evil Eyes concerned prolific serial killer Coral Eugene Watts. Evil Eyes is the only book written about Watts, who is, to my beloved Detroit, what Ted Bundy is to Seattle (still much discussed here ). True crime fans will remember him for these seven contributions to the genre, gratefully received by those of us who shared and appreciated his interests. November 24, 2014 in The True Crime Genre | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Reblog (0) | | Digg This | Save to del.icio.us | An Ode to The Borowitz Collection (The Borowitz Collection is the greatest private true crime library ever amassed. This year the current owner, Kent State University, geared up to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the donation of the entire ensemble. In addition to all kinds of special events , the university put together a catalogue for a special exhibit of the gems of the collection. They asked me to write an introduction for the catalogue, which pleased me to no end, so this is what I came up with to introduce Albert Borowitz and his books.) * * * Thanks to the lawmakers and the industry of our criminal courts and mass printers, more or less careful records of murder and mayhem and their aftermath have been kept for ages. But true crime publications tend to be as short-lived as their subjects. Recognizing their value, Albert Borowitz, one of the great true crime historians and connoisseurs of this age, spent decades of his life amassing the largest known private library in the theme, a collection of true crime books exceeding ten thousand volumes, some going back to the 1600s. In doing so, the multilingual American lawyer managed to save generations of stories from several continents, rescuing many books and hundreds of old crime broadsides from extinction, with no other copies left in existence. Now ensconced at Kent State University , it is an awesome trove for researchers and a gift to true crime mavens. One must envy the energy and passion of anyone who can collect ten thousand of anything, let alone these stories. True crime certainly has its critics. Everyone has personal preferences. And there are fads and poor examples in every genre. But what elevates this particular ensemble is Borowitz’s impeccable taste. There’s not a lot on the professional criminal class (the Mafia, for example) because their motives are simple, brutish, and uninteresting. There’s not all that much on modern serial killers, either (compared to the prodigious output of such stories in the last few decades). Borowitz thinks serial sex killers are boring.” Now that we have them figured out, we know their motives and patterns of conduct; there is no mystery to examine, no unanswered question left, and Borowitz tells us our time is better spent elsewhere. The Borowitz collection is also exceptional for its depth of legal scholarship. For it is in essence a law library, part of a long tradition among attorneys and judges of collecting case studies (and handsome books). As thankful members of an organized and lawful society, attorneys in particular are compelled by principles of stare decisis to know the past, which forms our common law. In that sense, studying criminal cases is for some of us a moral and legal imperative. That it can also be an enjoyable process should go without saying. These true crime stories do more, though. They also feed a common hunger for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This ancient oath has been taken over this or that holy book for more than two thousand years. Today, the oath (or affirmation, for secularists) still carries a threat of imprisonment, because the truth is so valuable. Truth means reliability, certainty. And when we get to the truth, we can answer hard questions. Criminal law teems with characters who have been captured, as in amber, by sworn testimony. For the psychologists and sociologists (armchair and otherwise), true cases are rife with answers to the riddles of human conduct and questions of responding to it. Some of us purists even snub fiction and all the figments of crime novelists. Made-up characters and fancied circumstances contrived by a single mind cannot begin to rival the complexity of human conduct. Truth is indeed stranger. It is often when an elusive truth should be knowablewhen the evidence is...