Secrets Can Be Murder : What America's Most Sensational Crimes Tell Us about Ourselves

by Jane Velez-Mitchell; Nancy Grace

• ISBN13: 9780743299367
• ISBN10: 0743299361
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-05
• Publisher: Touchstone

Summary

Respected television news journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell asks a probing, disturbing question: Are killers like Scott Peterson and Andrea Yates all that different from the rest of us? What kind of monster would do this? When journalists break the story of a child who's been kidnapped, a young woman who's been brutally raped, or a family who's been slaughtered, that's the question most of us ask.Secrets Can Be Murderexposes the hidden motivations behind the most sinister acts of recent times, with a behind-closed-doors look at these sensational crimes that will astound you. After weighing in on high-profile cases for CNN, Fox News, Court TV, and MSNBC, author Jane Velez-Mitchell helps us understand these infamous crimes by unmasking the deceptions that turned toxic, exploding in rage and violence. People lie every day to protect secrets, big and small. From desperate Hollywood personalities covering up their eccentric lifestyles to Bible Belt mothers who take the lives of their own children,Secrets Can Be Murderprobes twenty-one separate cases. Each illustrates how leading a double life can land you in prison, and how failing to spot liars can get you killed. Secrets Can Be Murderoffers the inside story on each horrific case, unlocking the jaw-dropping secrets of the accused and revealing the common, innocent mistakes of the victims. After all, many of us have gone out alone late at night like Imette St. Guillen, or partied while on vacation like George Smith and Natalee Holloway. From Dan Horowitz, the high-profile lawyer whose wife was brutally murdered by a teenage neighbor while Horowitz was defending a housewife accused of murder, to Neil Entwistle, the British husband who ran out of funds for an extravagant American lifestyle, Velez-Mitchell shows how each of these crimes has its own secrets to spill. Many of us possess the same trusting nature as victims and carry around the same secrets as criminals -- whether it's debt, infidelity, or fetishes. With fascinating new insights from investigators and psychologists plus the friends and family of both the victims and the perpetrators, Secrets Can Be Murder illustrates just how little separates our so-called normal lives from that of a sociopath -- and how you can stay out of harm's way.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Introduction	p. xi
Women as Prey	p. 1
Desperate Hollywood	p. 21
The Texas Children Massacre	p. 41
Expensive Secrets	p. 60
Savage Suburb	p. 83
The Blood-Spatter Boys	p. 108
Mothers Without Borders	p. 134
Rawhide	p. 165
Dirty Tricks	p. 188
Teenacide	p. 217
Angels of Justice	p. 235
Sex Education	p. 264
The Point of No Return	p. 287
Author's Note	p. 315
Victim's Rights Websites	p. 317
Bibliography and Source List	p. 319
Acknowledgments	p. 331
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One: Women as Prey The murders of Imette St. Guillen and Teresa Halbach are so obscene, so disgusting, it's terrifying even to think about them. These cases produced allegations of grotesque sexual torture. The details are pornographic in the extreme. The sadistic nature of the crimes makes it almost impossible to delve into them without feeling like you're victimizing these women again just by telling the story of how they died. Each sad saga has left a huge controversy in its wake, one about the rights of the falsely accused, the other about the rights of women. Each case reveals the secrets of the men accused, secrets that are remarkably similar to those of millions of law-abiding American men. Imette St. Guillen was a slim, smiling beauty who was on the dean's list at Manhattan's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. About to turn twenty-five, she was popular and set to graduate with a master's degree in criminal justice. Imette was on a fast track to career achievement and she had plenty to celebrate when, one Friday night in February 2006, she decided to go out on the town with a friend. As the evening became early morning, she and her friend split up. The friend went home. Imette decided to stay out. Imette was last seen at a trendy bar in lower Manhattan, where she was drinking alone at about 4 a.m. It was closing time and the bouncer, a muscular forty-one-year-old ex-con, escorted her out. He has been charged with her murder. The accused, Darryl Littlejohn, said publicly that police simply got the wrong man. Prosecutors say they have a wide array of forensic evidence against him, including a DNA match with blood found at the crime scene. Seventeen hours after Imette St. Guillen left that bar, her naked body was found in Brooklyn, where it had been dumped in a ditch on the side of an isolated service road. A white athletic sock was stuffed down her throat. Some of her long dark hair had been chopped off, her hands had been bound with heavy-duty plastic ties behind her back. Her feet were bound. Her body was battered and bruised and had cuts and scrapes. She was wrapped in a colorful king-sized comforter. Authorities said she had been sexually assaulted. Part Object To me, the most unnerving detail was this: Imette's head wascompletely wrapped in opaque packing tape,in effect mummifying her. The killer "tried to dehumanize her completely," says Dr. Stephanie Stolinsky, a Los Angeles forensic psychologist who specializes in sexual issues. "Whenever you hide someone's face, it means that you don't want to see them as a human being. You want to pretend that they're just an object." In fact, says the doctor, the psychoanalytic term for viewing a person this way is aspart object."You only see a part of them. And it's a grand extension of what some people have as a fetish." Secret Sickness We've all heard of foot fetishes and the like -- but shoving a sock into her mouth, wrapping her head in packing tape, and torturing her until she suffocates? That goes way beyond fetish to freakish. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be asphyxiation. Why would any human being get a sexual thrill out of dehumanizing another human being? To better understand, we have to delve deeply into the mind of the killer and uncover the secrets, the dark fantasies and sadistic desires, that lurk there. But how do we do that? How can we ever possibly know what goes on in someone else's head? The unpleasant truth is that the answer lies in our own heads, in our own dark secrets, in our own disturbing fantasies, the ones we think about but never reveal, not even to the person who shares our bed. The unspoken reality is this: The person who killed Imette St. Guillen did not have unique fantasies. Human beings tend to obsess about a handful of sexual themes th