I have a misfortune of being addicted to true crime therefore I read a genre written by barely literate people who populate their pages with stick figure depictions of humanity just so I can get a certain voyeuristic fix. Olsen is different and he is not just a great true crime writer; Jack Olsen is a great nonfiction writer.
His strength is his ability to describe a psychopath. Their mask of normalcy, the face that peaks from underneath it and the crimes that occurs when it slips off completely.
Most writers document their crimes, throw in a few biographical details, call them a monster and call it a day. Their obvious moral judgment is supposed to suffice for their total inability to paint the landscape of a hollow soul.
And that is exactly what you walk away with after Olsen spends pages documenting this person- hollowness. A jumble of lust, ambitions, self-regard and cold angst all lacking a core that in most of us filled by a wingspan of the ability to feel empathy for others. Olsen had a unique genius for sketching out the outlines of this ravenous egotism without a human self.
This book therefore feels incomplete because the sadist was killed before he could be examined. The descriptions left were from two self serving imbeciles who assisted him in his crimes and those who saw him as an agreeable man because his mask was firmly on.
What emerged instead was a picture of a city that allowed for dozens of boys and young men to be tortured and killed without even bothering to hear the pleas of their parents and realize anything was happening. A city valued the lives of the missing as much as their psychopathic killer.