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[kate_nepveu]

Ask me a question. Tell me my daemon. Ask me to ask you a question. Make up a memory of us. Ask me about my icons. Tell me something you think I should know. Start a conversation in icons or lyrics. Ask me to do some other meme.

I don't promise to do the same thing in response-I suck at people's daemons, for instance-but I'll do something.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

1. How did you keep the tone of your memoir so non-judgmental? I found that really striking, especially since my reactions were . . . not so much.

2. I saw it, but hadn't dug into it until now. Fun!

So, about the reliability of the tests, first. I saw the suggestions that the tested grandnieces might not actually have been biological relatives.

The sound clip "geneology" linked on this page says that the relatives who were tested were descendants of Cora's youngest sister, and that was the line that was brought forward. Three grandnieces were tested, but I haven't seen anything that says whether they were all children of the same niece. So there are at least two places for an unacknowledged adoption: Cora's youngest sister, or her daughter (add more if the grandnieces are from different daughters). That's a pretty short chain, but other than that I can't really evaluate the probability of any link in the chain being broken, in terms of genetic descent.

(The other question, of course, is chain of custody of the trial evidence, which again I can't evaluate.)

This article said, "Researchers found other evidence to suggest the body could only have made its way to Crippen's house when he and his wife were living there," and the enormous PDF casebook linked from the MSU page [*] says that's based on the shirt the remains were wrapped in.

[*] Which is undated but must date from sometime after 1988 (see page 315), and the tone of which strikes me as a lot earlier, especially in its comments about Cora.

I can think of two reasons for Cora to voluntarily leave the way she reportedly did, because even taking the descriptions of her personality with a grain of salt, she doesn't sound like the type to chuck her friends and activities for a silent overnight departure for America, letting her despised husband do all the notifying.

1) She committed the murder and fled in a panic. Which would be stupid, but murderers often are.

2) She was deliberately trying to frame him for her murder--either for a murder he committed (in which case it would seem simpler just to turn him in for it), or one she or someone she knew did (in which case it seems like a lousy frame, to hope that her friends would kick up a fuss and get the police to search the house).

I don't think I'd convict Hawley on this evidence, but I don't think the DNA evidence is perfectly exculpatory, either.

[rachelmanija]

2. Great Crippen analysis. Someone else suggested maybe the body was of a woman who had died of a botched abortion he performed; however, I don't know if there was any evidence that he did abortions.

1. Interesting question. I didn't set out to make it that way. (And I do make quite a few judgments. Just not as many as I could have!) I did try not to be maudlin or self-pitying. But the tone, I think, comes as a side effect of two questions that I asked myself frequently, during rewrites (first drafts, I was just trying to get it all down):

Is this honest?

Is this fair?

By fair, I don't mean that news reporting "the truth is somewhere in the middle" bullshit. I mean that I tried not to leave any relevant information out, nor put any irrelevant information in, for the purpose of making me look better, or someone else look worse.

Also, to tell the whole story, I had to try to find out or guess at what the hell other people had thought they were doing. I think there's a line in the book that goes something like, "No one was deliberately trying to drive me insane. It just worked out that way."

So even though I think that pretty much every adult who had anything to do with me was at least partly crazy, selfish, turning a blind eye, willfully ignorant, or (in some cases) outright malicious and sadistic, and I don't forgive a lot of they're actions, I can also see where they were coming from. The non-malicious ones, anyway. Because of that, I think the book ended up with a fair amount of righteous anger, but not a lot of condemnation.

[kate_nepveu]

2. Yeah, I have no idea where the abortion idea came from. That "casebook" said that he did patent medicines and dental work. Perhaps it was to account for some of the nature of the mutilations? It can't have been to account for the scar that was thought to be Cora's, since that was (a) old and (b) from removal of an ovary. Regardless, it hardly seems necessary to specify "abortion."

1. Thanks! My booklog entry has been massively delayed because I sent the book to my mom (who liked it a lot), and at the moment it's sitting next to me waiting for me to find the time for choice quotes; so it was something I was thinking about. I certainly think it's a better book for your efforts, both in the sense of more complete and in the sense of easier to read.