Dangerous Women and Erased

Reviewed by Barbara Kate Repa

Dangerous Women: Why Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters
Become Stalkers, Molesters, and Murderers
By Larry A. Morris
Prometheus Books, 310 pages, $25.98, hardcover

and

Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives
By Marilee Strong
Jossey-Bass, 352 pages, $27.95, hardcover

There is a certain type of reader, especially prevalent among lawyers, who clamors for real life crime stories. This is the type who rushed to read the biographies, courtroom accounts, and even joke books churned out after O. J. Simpson's trial--the first one. In defense, some of these readers claim that these books help hone their legal acumen. But the more honest readers will admit there's something else at work: The prurient details fulfill some cheaper need for titillation, much like a legal version of Us Weekly.

These readers--and you know who you are-are in luck of late, as during the past year two tomes hit the shelves that put new twists on the hows and whys of murderous men and women.

Ladies First
In Dangerous Women, seasoned clinical and forensic psychologist Larry A. Morris introduces his thesis that violent crimes of all types by women of all ages have increased precipitously in the past few years. He then purports to "reveal the answers" to a number of questions, including:

- Why does a young mother drown all her children?

- Why do women murder strangers?

- Why does a woman put a bullet in the back of her partner's head?

- Why do nuns molest children and each other?

For that certain type of reader who ponders such questions, Morris has them at the first "Why?"

Turns out, the answers begin with Britney Spears, according to the author, who kicks off his book by ambitiously chronicling Brit's bad behavior, then labeling her dangerous because "she has two children who will look to her for good parenting and will probably not find it." (See Us Weekly parallel, supra.) There is also some mention of Lindsay and Paris in the "Growing Up Dangerous" chapter, but they are held out as less menacing, perhaps because of their child-free status.

The author then romps through profiles of dozens of female killers, roughly organizing them into categories such as Women Who Kill Their Partners, Murderous Mothers, and Girls Who Molest and Murder. Some subjects are well-known, such as convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos, memorably depicted by Charlize Theron in Monster, for which Theron won a 2004 Best Actress Academy Award. And Susan Smith, who famously loaded her two young sons into the backseat of the family Mazda before pushing the car off a cliff, later claiming that a stranger had abducted them. A jury sentenced her to life for the double murder.

But most accounts are of more obscure cases and convictions--many of them involving women Morris has evaluated and testified about as a forensic expert. With literary bravado, he admits to being on the losing side of many of their cases.

Not surprisingly, it is where the author has had personal involvement that his descriptions and analysis shine most brightly, with details of the defendants' families and medical histories that may give clues to their compulsions to kill.

While there are occasional lapses into the overly clinical--diagnostic guesses about who has a dependent personality disorder (DPD) and who has a borderline personality disorder (BPD), for example-the time-pressed reader can skip over the acronyms and still come away from the book wowed by its collection of crimes and punishments.

Still Mad at Scott
Marilee Strong, author of Erased, does not have the courtroom creds or forensic experience of Morris to opine about the psychosis of crime, but she does have passion in her favor. She's published previously in the true crime genre: A Bright Red Scream (Penguin, 1999), detailing the lingering effects of childhood abuse. And as an interested journalist, she attended every day of the trial of Scott Peterson, the Modesto fertilizer salesman found guilty in 2005 of murdering his pregnant and media-sympathetic wife, Laci.

Strong proposes that an increasing number of men are getting away with a particular form of murder in which their victims simply "disappear": Their bodies are never found, or their histories are wiped out. Strong says that such "eraser" killers, most of them pathological liars lacking empathy, who work hard to cover their tracks, also share some common traits: glibness, superficial charm, and a grandiose sense of self-worth.

But as the various descriptions unfold, Strong's concept becomes muzzier and feels more forced. In fact, discerning crime readers might intuit that Strong is fixated on Peterson, and that this book might have been about him alone if so many other writers hadn't beat her to the publishing punch--including several jurors from Peterson's trial and his own sister, Anne Bird, who penned a j'accuse: Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother Scott Peterson Is Guilty (Harper Paperbacks, 2006).

In fairness, Strong does take on and describe nearly 50 other "eraser" murderers of the past century-and does it with graceful prose.

Still, Strong's ire for Peterson permeates the book, evidenced by the specious connections in the narratives: Another philandering fellow named Scott was also convicted of murdering his wife, for example. Yet another killer also graduated from Peterson's alma mater, Cal Poly. And an account of another fellow ties the two clumsily together by noting: "unlike Scott Peterson, he was an outstanding salesman."

Strong's attacks often get personal, even though she and her main subject never spoke. "I don't believe Scott Peterson ever loved Amber Frey," she writes, of his much-publicized paramour. "I doubt that he is capable of truly loving anyone."

Strong also seems out of her element in a final segment that summarizes what's gone haywire with the legal system and proposes specific reforms about death investigations and such; the book would have been stronger without it.

Despite these flaws, Strong possesses some redeeming strengths. Similar to Morris's nose for including the clinical details that make a psychotic killer appear psychotic, she has a reporter's eye for what makes a crime quirky: a defendant tripped up by an Internet order of a how-to murder guide, another who attempted to obliterate his humble roots by listening to vocabulary tapes during his morning commute.

What Makes Them Must-Reads
If the logic about who gets included in these two tomes sometimes seems a bit tough to follow (see B. Spears, supra) and the texts often seem to cartwheel from defendant to defendant, the effort to stick with the books is worth it: Reading them just might make you a better lawyer.

And those readers who love this stuff will willingly overlook the loftier goal of legal education and accept them for what they are: a fine substitute for Us Weekly.

Barbara Kate Repa is a lawyer, writer, and editor living in San Francisco. She has read and reviewed all the books written about Orenthal James Simpson's first trial.

---