That image you have in your mind of 17th-century pirates? Tattooed, gold-earringed guys swaggering about in thigh-hugging leather boots, clutching cutlasses between their teeth, glowering at the captives they send down the plank? Turns out it isn’t quite right. Though they did carry cutlasses — albeit not in their teeth — “none of them, it should be noted, wore boots — ever,” Keith Thomson tells us in BORN TO BE HANGED: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune (Little, Brown, 371 pp., $15.99).
This is the larger-than-life tale of a raffish group of over 300 pirates, or buccaneers — most of them Englishmen — hired by an Indigenous leader in Panama in 1680 to rescue his granddaughter, who had been kidnapped by Spanish soldiers and was being held at their nearby garrison. The payment was the garrison’s gold, between 18,000 and 20,000 pounds of it, enough to set up each buccaneer for life. The buccaneers mulled it over (pirate crews, Thomson tells us, “were democracies ahead of their time, with egalitarian practices born both of their disdain for classism and their prior experiences at sea with whip-happy captains on exceedingly hierarchical European naval and merchant ships”) and took the job. It went so swimmingly that from there they went on to sack Panama City and then, for the next two years, thieved and murdered their way down the South American coast, loading up on gold, silver and gems while they coped with scurvy and skirmished with Spanish warships. They excelled at piracy but were inept in most other regards; primed by alcohol, dice games and a great deal of petty bickering, they almost did themselves in on more than one occasion.
Thomson does a fine job mining the historical record for all this swash and buckle. No fewer than seven of the buccaneers kept journals, from which he quotes liberally. What makes the book work, though, isn’t the research; it’s that it reads, quite literally, like a pirate novel.
In May 1996, Julie Williams and Lollie Winans — a young couple with considerable backwoods experience — loaded their packs, left Julie’s car at the Stony Man Overlook parking area at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and began to bushwhack down an overgrown and unmarked trail. During the summer, Shenandoah can seem like a crowded park, with cars lining up for miles to enjoy the vistas from Skyline Drive. But as Kathryn Miles notes in TRAILED: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders (Algonquin, 295 pp., $27.95), “get a mile beyond the drive … and the park can seem as wild as any remote Western landscape.”
The women, reported missing a few days later, were eventually found dead at their campsite. In her painstaking reconstruction of the day, Miles speculates that they must have been followed from the minute they left the parking lot. The rushing of a nearby stream would have muffled their killer’s footsteps. “He came prepared,” Miles writes. “He brought with him gloves, along with duct tape and at least one weapon. … He killed both women with a single, unhesitating knife stroke to their throats.”
Miles, who first heard about the murders when she began teaching at Unity College in Maine, where Lollie had been a student, found herself unable to shake the story. She began to actively investigate it in 2016, interviewing F.B.I. agents and park employees, reading transcripts and poring through case files. She was so obsessed with the women’s deaths that she let a bone-in pork roast go bad in her backyard in order to study decomposition. Two things gradually became clear to her: The man long suspected of the crimes probably had nothing to do with it, and the real perpetrator was likely to be a known serial killer.
“Trailed” isn’t just the story of a single botched investigation. It’s also an exposé of what Miles calls “the systemic underreporting in our wild places” of violent crime. Some of that may be due to parks’ chronic understaffing, or the confusing thicket of state, local and federal authorities who oversee these jurisdictions. But Miles cites multiple studies that show that the Department of the Interior’s oversight has been lax at best. One found that at least 28 national parks reported no crime data at all. The superintendent of another national park “told inspectors that he disregarded the crime statistics for his park, saying he did not believe they were a ‘true measure of risk assessment.’ Instead, he said he favored using customer service surveys.” Even the data that does exist can be sketchy. “Although the F.B.I. does not keep statistics on gender and backcountry crime, my own archival research finds that the majority of reported murder and rape victims in our national wilderness areas are female, despite both the fact that we still constitute the minority of backcountry users and that national murder rates are skewed overwhelmingly toward male victims,” Miles writes.
Hers are important questions that need to be asked, and answered: Are women safer in a city than on a bucolic stretch of, say, the Appalachian Trail? Why aren’t violent crimes like assault taken more seriously in national parks? And, most important: Who gets to enjoy nature?
In 2004, Vince Gilmer — the founder of the Cane Creek Family Health Center in rural western North Carolina — strangled his father and hacked off his fingers with a pair of pruning shears. A few years later, after he went to prison, a doctor named Benjamin Gilmer — no relation — was hired to fill his position at Cane Creek. He quickly discovered that most of the patients there had loved the first Dr. Gilmer; they talked about his kindness, his empathy, his skills as a physician. Most of them did, anyway. “The other Dr. Gilmer knows about you,” a 73-year-old patient told Benjamin Gilmer one day. “He’s getting out. And when he does, he’s gonna want to take back what’s his.” THE OTHER DR. GILMER: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice (Ballantine, 292 pp., $28) is the mesmerizing story of what happened next.
After months of understandably freaking out — obsessively watching his home security surveillance videos, contemplating the purchase of a gun — Benjamin Gilmer agreed to talk to a reporter from “This American Life” who had heard about the two Dr. Gilmers and hoped to answer the question, once and for all, of whether Vince Gilmer was “a kindly country doctor” or a coldblooded killer.
Not long after that, on a visit to the Wallens Ridge State Prison, Benjamin Gilmer took one look at the shaking, almost incoherent man sitting across from him and realized something was terribly wrong. “I let my physician instincts take over,” he writes. He began to investigate, reading court transcripts, talking to the other doctor’s friends and colleagues and even watching old TV news stories about the murder. (In one clip, Vince Gilmer says, “My mind is not working right. I need help!”)
That Vince Gilmer had killed his father was never in question. But it turns out he was not, as the local prosecutors believed, “a lying, manipulative sociopath who had planned, executed, and then tried to cover up the murder of his father.” The discovery of what actually happened makes for a wrenching, maddening, compelling book.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when substances like arsenic, strychnine and cyanide were readily available, murderers frequently turned to poison. Just leaf through the archives of The New York Times and look at some of the headlines: “A Breakfast of Poisoned Cake.” “Poisoned by Tea Buns.” “The Pumpkin Pie Murder Case.” “He Poisoned His Wife: Boiling a Snake’s Head in a Pot of Coffee.” “Confessions of a Murderess: How a Young and Beautiful Woman Poisoned Her Husband.” “Teacher’s Poisoned Orange.”
These stories, though, are about the killers (or would-be killers) who got caught. One of the main appeals of poisons — especially before they could be detected post-mortem — was that they made it easy to get away with murder. For example, doctors often mistook the gastrointestinal symptoms of arsenic poisoning for illnesses like cholera and influenza. In fact, as Neil Bradbury points out in A TASTE FOR POISON: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them (St. Martin’s, 291 pp., $27.99), arsenic was so widely used in 17th-century France “in disposing of wealthy relatives who had the temerity to remain alive” that it was nicknamed poudre de succession, or “inheritance powder.”
Insulin, ricin, atropine and cyanide all make appearances as Bradbury takes the reader on a lively spin through the histories of 11 of the most commonly used poisons and toxins, using real cases — famous and otherwise — to explain how each works in the body. A professor of physiology and biophysics, Bradbury is an engaging, cheerful tour guide who seems to enjoy the topic with hand-rubbing glee. He doesn’t just examine old cases; recent ones also make appearances. In the chapter on atropine, he includes an informative section on the 2018 poisonings in Britain of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. They weren’t killed by atropine but saved by it — in tiny doses, it is an antidote for the nerve agent that they had unwittingly absorbed through their skin. Bradbury explains, “Sometimes what makes things toxic is exactly what allows them to be used for good.”
What’s the point, you may ask, of reading such a detailed poison primer? Well, for one thing, you’ll be able to crack a great deal of crime fiction — especially Agatha Christie mysteries, since poison was often her characters’ murder weapon of choice.
WHEN WOMEN KILL: Four Crimes Retold (Coffee House, 229 pp., illustrated, paper, $16.95), written by Alia Trabucco Zerán and translated by Sophie Hughes, examines murders committed by four Chilean women. “Their crimes, while disturbing, are a privileged window from which to observe how the very meaning of womanhood has changed over time,” Trabucco Zerán writes. “Remembering ‘bad’ women is also a task of feminism.”
Using court records, newspaper articles and museum exhibits — which she punctuates with her own whip-smart diary entries — Trabucco Zerán reconstructs each crime scene, backdrop and all. She starts with Corina Rojas, an upper-middle-class housewife who hired a hit man to murder her husband in 1916. “It was a loveless marriage,” Trabucco Zerán explains. “Rojas felt alone and unhappy, the victim of a miserly and unfaithful husband. Her economic dependency on him and the illegality of divorce at the time had kept her trapped.” In Chile, adultery was illegal — but the law punished women for cheating much more harshly than men, and Rojas admitted that she had been having an affair.
Seven years later, Rosa Faúndez, a news vendor, strangled her abusive husband, dismembered him and bundled up various pieces of his body like so much laundry, leaving parcels all around Santiago. Despite the fact that she confessed, and in great detail, no one believed her capable of the murder at first. “The nature of the crime and the skill shown in the dissection make it virtually impossible to reasonably deduce that it was committed by just one person, let alone a woman,” one journalist said. The very idea that a wife could butcher her husband in his own home — well, if that were possible, then men all over Chile would need to worry! In order to win a conviction, prosecutors seized on Faúndez’s lack of femininity: her physical strength, her penchant for wearing men’s clothing, her utter lack of remorse.
By 1955, when the writer María Carolina Geel shot her lover dead during afternoon tea at Santiago’s Hotel Crillón, society was changing. Women had won the right to vote and were entering the work force in increasing numbers. Newspapers played Geel up as a femme fatale, “the living embodiment of the male fear of unchecked female sexuality.” When it emerged that she was possibly a lesbian, judges in the case, citing her “social failings as a woman and a writer,” sentenced her to only three years and one day in jail.
Finally, Trabucco Zerán studies the case of María Teresa Alfaro, a maid who, in 1963, poisoned her employer’s three children and mother, violating the sacrosanct image of family in Chile. What’s more, “never before had a domestic worker committed such crimes.” Despite the fact that capital punishment was legal in Chile at the time, Alfaro, like the other three women, was not given the death penalty. To do so, Trabucco Zerán argues, “would have undermined a gender model that persistently insists that women are passive, prudent, self-sacrificing, loving, and, above all, harmless.”
“Something is happening to me lately,” Paul Holes says at the beginning of UNMASKED: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases (Celadon, 277 pp., $28.99), which was written with Robin Gaby Fisher. “My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I’ve looked at a woman, and rather than seeing the beauty of a female body, I dissected it, layer by layer, as if she were on the autopsy table.” Uh, OK.
Once you get a little further in the book, it’s easy to see why Holes might be having these issues (and to appreciate how open he is about them). It’s simply impossible not to be affected by 27 years of working as a forensic investigator, often at truly horrific crime scenes. At one point, he’s at the site of a suspected murder when the sniffer dogs find “a toe sticking out from the dirt.” Holes is helping to lift the decomposing body from the makeshift grave when “decomposition fluid ran out of the plastic wrapping onto the ground, forming a puddle. One of the dead women’s legs dropped down into the pool of foul liquid, splashing it up on my face.”
The book’s best scenes are far less grisly. Holes walks readers through dozens of cases, some that he circled for years before cracking. He pores over cold-case files, reinterviews people and keeps up with the ways changing technology might help him solve a decades-old murder. He’s very good at his job, and he knows it. (“There was a single moment when I realized that I had a gift,” he writes at one point.) Despite these occasional flashes of self-aggrandizement, “Unmasked” works. It’s a mark of the highest honor when I say it’s even more riveting than an episode of “Dateline.”
Tina Jordan is the deputy editor of the Book Review.
