2.22 Crime Club

A fascination for murder and the case of the disappearing poet,.

I often feel a little guilty about my fascination for murder. How I enjoy watching a true crime documentary in the same way as I enjoy watching a football match. I see it as a bit of a spectacle, a break from the stresses and strains of everyday life, a bit of harmless escapism. I know that I am not alone in feeling that way. I have written before about the appeal of bad men (and women) and the success of publications such as The Illustrated Police News, The News of the World, and Murder Casebook. We might pretend that we read those publications as some kind of educational exercise, so that we might be more aware of what evils there are in the world, and somehow guard against such things affecting us or our loved ones, but it truth, most of us just enjoy the thrills, the vicarious pleasure, if not of imagining ourselves as actual muderers, at least of being a detective set to solve a heinous crime, or even wondering what it might feel like to be a victim, or at least someone who comes into contact with criminals and murderers.

And when fact is too heady a brew to bear, there is always fiction. The detectives unmasking murderers, in books, film and television, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple or Lieutenant Columbo, upholding the values of good over evil. We celebrate their successes but for me at least there is always a dark thought. Could I outwit them? I like to put myself in the shoes of the felon. Would I make the same mistakes, or could I do it better? Could I dispose of the inconvenient other, the tiresome relative, the overbearing bully, the person standing in the way of success, wealth or true love? Of course I would never do such a thing. I am not that type of person. But what a thrill to imagine that I am. I very much doubt that I am the only one who enjoys his crime fiction (or fact) in that way. And isn’t it one of the fascinating things about a large percentage of real life murderers that the people who actually knew them say that they never suspected that they were that type of person. So who knows? I might just be that type of person after all.

For most of us there is a great comfort in the fact that the detective is always the victor. It affirms the supremacy of goodness and sets a cap on our dark fantasies. It shows the world as a relatively safe place. Yes, there is darkness out there, but one’s misdeeds will always come to light, the wrongdoer can never relax, his crimes will always catch up with him. Especially in this modern world of DNA and cold case files, when the march of science yields clues and evidence that a murderer could not have even imagined in the past.

The 2018 arrest of the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DiAngelo, marked the end of a spectacular American real life cold case. Di Angelo had been a prolific rapist and serial killer throughout the 1970s and 80s. For some reason he had retired from his life of crime in 1986, and lived, free and comfortable for the next 32 years. His DNA was not even on police files, but he was caught when police began to look for people with close DNA matches to the samples that they had collected from crime scenes amongst those registered on family history websites, such as Ancestry.Com and MyHeritage. Once they knew people who were members of the same family, it wasn’t too hard to track him down. Eventually they went to his house and collected a used tissue from the bin to get the sample that was used to link him to the crimes. He could never have anticipated that development.

I watched a television documentary series about him over a few evenings a year or so back, and was thrilled enough to end up reading the book about the investigation - I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. Michelle was a true crime podcaster, who had become increasingly obsessed with the unsolved case of the Golden State Killer. She brought the case back into the public eye and eventually, due to her dogged online investigations and the piecing together of information from various sources, she was able to provide the police with a wealth of evidence linking him to other unsolved series of crimes, committed by figures known as The Visalia Ransacker, The East Area Rapist, and The Night Stalker.

Unfortunately Michelle didn’t live to see DiAngelo arrested, having died two years previously after overdosing on prescription medication. Her book was completed by her husband working alongside some of her fellow true crime enthusiasts, and included details of the climax of the case and DiAngelo’s subsequent trial and imprisonment.

I would like to think that it was Michelle who chose the poem at which is used in the opening pages of the book. Crime Club was written by Weldon Kees, a poet who has been described as both the best American poet that you have never heard of and the Philip Larkin of Denver, Colorado¹

Kees wrote a fair amount of poetry without ever achieving the level of recognition that he felt he deserved. He wanted to be considered alongside TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and his lack of success relative to this lofty ideal was a possible cause of his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.

He wrote Crime Club in 1943. It is a dark delight. It describes a crime scene, with a corpse, quite dead and surrounded by both commonplace items and strange clues, which don’t seem to point to any satisfactory theory regarding any motive for the crime, let alone any perpetrator. One wonders how famous fictional detectives might have responded to it. In the final stanza, Kees tells us that the sleuth assigned to the case, Le Roux, is now incurably insane, screaming that the world is mad and that nothing can be solved. It leaves the reader with the exact opposite feeling to the one that usually results from watching or reading a traditional crime documentary or work of fiction. There is no satisfying resolution. Good does not triumph over evil. We are left unsettled, and perhaps a little depressed.

Just over a decade after writing the poem, Kees left his car parked close to the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco Bay and was never seen again. He was 49 years old. The fact of his disappearance lends an added thrill to the poem. It puts him into a category separate to other poets. Perhaps because his story ends so strangely, the disquiet of his poem can be put down to a tortured mind. We can comfort ourselves that we are not like him. I would never do such a thing as kill myself, or engineer my own disappearance, - I am not that type of person. I like my crime to be packaged as entertaining, cozy and solvable².

But then again…

Crime Club - by Weldon Kees

No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scattered with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: "To be killed this way is quite all right with me."

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.

1. Kees didn’t really have a lot in common with Philip Larkin, apart from the fact that he wrote poetry, appreciated Jazz music, and once worked in a library. Perhaps that Is rather a lot actually, I suppose that they would have had some things to talk about had they ever met, but they didn’t ever meet, so we’ll never know how they would have got on.

2. I realise that unsolved crimes have their fascination. The Case of Jack the ripper springs to mind. But I feel that the joy and entertainment that people from that case is the thrill of believing that the solution is very close. You can read an account and come to your own conclusions. The comfort of the case comes from the great distance in time meaning that everyone concerned with it is long dead, and the fact that a modern Jack the Ripper would be caught relatively easily.

Strides in DNA evidence and computer databasing systems since the 1970s mean that there can surely be no repeat of cases such as that of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who was at liberty for six years after committing his first murder in 1975, during which time he killed a further twelve women.