Deliver Us by Kathryn Casey
(Full title Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields wouldn't fit in the subject bar.)
This couldn't have been an easy book to write, because this isn't one case but a bunch of different ones that spanned decades and happened all over the area between Houston and Galveston. They have many different perpetrators, some of which have been caught and are serving prison terms. Casey did a good job of keeping everything coherent, I was never confused about which case or victim she was talking about at any one time.
Casey is frequently spoken of in the same breath with Ann Rule; personally I prefer Casey. Maybe it's just that Rule was writing in an earlier era, but she tends to harp on about women's physical traits way too much. This was most evident in Small Sacrifices, where every other page contained a reference to Diane Downs' sex appeal or her "ample" breasts (WHY DOES HOW BIG HER BOOBS WERE MATTER, ANN) or her supposed resemblance to Princess Diana.
I decided to read this because Casey was one of the talking heads in the 3rd season of Netflix's Crime Scene. It's not redundant to both watch the miniseries and read the book, in case you had done one and were wondering. The Netflix series is mostly about the Calder Road dump site in League City--the titular "Texas Killing Fields" (it started being called that after the 1984 release of the movie The Killing Fields, which was about Cambodian journalist Dith Pran and the Khmer Rouge). The book is about the entire case, going back to some murders that happened on Galveston in the early 1970s. So the book has more information than the series; but because the book was published almost 10 years ago, the series has more updated information, particularly in the final episode.
The series also has Texas Monthly's Skip Hollandsworth as a talking head, so worth checking out for that.
Incidentally, if you were a fan of the OG Unsolved Mysteries back in the day, you will have seen two episodes that dealt with two different crimes in the series (which didn't really start to be linked until about 20 years ago, so in the show there's no connective tissue between them). One was a "final appeal" segment about Michael Self, a developmentally disabled gas station employee who confessed to a couple of the early Galveston area murders. He later claimed he was beaten and threatened by the police chief and one of his deputies, who a few years later were arrested as part of a bank robbery crew (which even for Texas is pretty wild). Self lost all of his appeals and died in prison of natural causes, but it's widely accepted now that he was wrongfully convicted.
The other episode featured the acting debut of Matthew McConaughey, who played the victim in the re-enactment.
I do wonder if the script actually called for him to be practically shirtless.
This couldn't have been an easy book to write, because this isn't one case but a bunch of different ones that spanned decades and happened all over the area between Houston and Galveston. They have many different perpetrators, some of which have been caught and are serving prison terms. Casey did a good job of keeping everything coherent, I was never confused about which case or victim she was talking about at any one time.
Casey is frequently spoken of in the same breath with Ann Rule; personally I prefer Casey. Maybe it's just that Rule was writing in an earlier era, but she tends to harp on about women's physical traits way too much. This was most evident in Small Sacrifices, where every other page contained a reference to Diane Downs' sex appeal or her "ample" breasts (WHY DOES HOW BIG HER BOOBS WERE MATTER, ANN) or her supposed resemblance to Princess Diana.
I decided to read this because Casey was one of the talking heads in the 3rd season of Netflix's Crime Scene. It's not redundant to both watch the miniseries and read the book, in case you had done one and were wondering. The Netflix series is mostly about the Calder Road dump site in League City--the titular "Texas Killing Fields" (it started being called that after the 1984 release of the movie The Killing Fields, which was about Cambodian journalist Dith Pran and the Khmer Rouge). The book is about the entire case, going back to some murders that happened on Galveston in the early 1970s. So the book has more information than the series; but because the book was published almost 10 years ago, the series has more updated information, particularly in the final episode.
The series also has Texas Monthly's Skip Hollandsworth as a talking head, so worth checking out for that.
Incidentally, if you were a fan of the OG Unsolved Mysteries back in the day, you will have seen two episodes that dealt with two different crimes in the series (which didn't really start to be linked until about 20 years ago, so in the show there's no connective tissue between them). One was a "final appeal" segment about Michael Self, a developmentally disabled gas station employee who confessed to a couple of the early Galveston area murders. He later claimed he was beaten and threatened by the police chief and one of his deputies, who a few years later were arrested as part of a bank robbery crew (which even for Texas is pretty wild). Self lost all of his appeals and died in prison of natural causes, but it's widely accepted now that he was wrongfully convicted.
The other episode featured the acting debut of Matthew McConaughey, who played the victim in the re-enactment.
I do wonder if the script actually called for him to be practically shirtless.