Several years ago, I tried to read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It’s the granddaddy of the New Journalism/ficitionalize non-fiction killer book. I hated it.
Capote obviously had a crush on one of the killers. Maybe not a sexual crush but he was fascinated. The victims were virtually ignored. It’s understandable in a movie where you have ninety minutes to scare people but in a novel you can at least make the dead human. So half way through, I stopped reading that book. I rarely read many murder-y books.
But I did listen to the audiobook of The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe. There was no reason except it was recommended to me and I was tired of podcasts and I needed something I could drop in and out of.
Rowe’s book hooked me. The woman can write. She’s a bit flowery by today’s standards but today’s standards are flat as drywall. Read her slowly and, if not listening to the audio book, maybe read some of the passages aloud. They’re nice, they’re poetic.
Rowe does not ignore the victims of the serial killer. You know the names. You know their mothers and how they ended up where they did. You learn about their rust belt blue collar town and how it influenced them and nudged them into the hands of their killer. Yet, she doesn’t excuse them either. The victims were prostitutes. Rowe knows that there are some people that can’t be helped, no matter what their mother or sister or father does. No matter how many times they are arrested or what the kindly cop or social worker does. Rowe knows this because she sees the same instincts in herself. She writes about this without turning the book into a confessional, she touches on her own problems without drawing the reader’s attention away from the true victims, the eight women who were strangled by Kendall Francois.
As far as Francois is concerned, she treats him as human but, unlike Capote, she never forgets what he is. She retraces his life from childhood, investigating and describing his abusive childhood but noting that other children had it just as bad and never turn to beating and killing hookers. She looks for answers with the cops who knew him, with teachers, friends and family members. But like all serial killers, there are no answers.