(Some spoilers below)
So this book has almost universally good reviews on Audible, and even mentions the famed behavioral FBI unit that was gaining prominence back then. How could this book possibly be bad? About a quarter of the way through the listen, I realized oh how very bad it could be. I kept listening in the hopes that there would be some magical reveal or some of those famed psychological twists.
First off, the writing is completely skewed to the viewpoint of the police and prosecutor. And I’m not saying like, “Oh, you know, they didn’t really portray the defense fairly.” I mean that the author abjectly said the alleged killer was a hippie loser and of course he was a loser, because he was a hippie, and what did he expect from his burn-out hippie lifestyle. I was like, “Wait, I feel sorry for the guy, and he’s the supposed killer.” Also, I say “alleged/supposed killer” not to be cute or technical, but because…the evidence they have on this dude is ridiculously sparse. I googled his name after the book ended because I was outraged. A bunch of “wrongful conviction” suits came up. There was so little evidence. It’s shocking. This was just a good illustration of a small town looking to convict ANYBODY for the murder of a pretty blonde, and just going with the hippie slacker, because…he’s a dirty hippie, after all.
The prosecutor is a flat-out bully. You’ll want to shake him. What is described as manipulative guile by other people is written as canny strategy when the police and prosecutors use it. It’s incredibly, infuriatingly biased. Oh, and of course, the trial is the part written about the most. Why? Because that part is already written-up in the court transcript and requires little research or skill from the writer. Womp womp.
After, I was interested in the non-Audible reviews and was unsurprised how poorly this was supposedly written and edited. The narrator on the Audible version tries to give it some punch and inflection, but it just comes across flat. No one is likable in this, not even the victim, really. Definitely not the narrator. Definitely not the prosecution or police. There’s no meat.
Hard skip for true crime aficionados. Use my pain of sitting through this as warning.