Book Review: Killers Amidst Killers by Billy Jensen
A podcaster goes looking for the killers who prey on the most desperate women.
William Morrow, 2022, 256 pages
Best-selling author, cohost of the hit podcast The Murder Squad, and true-crime investigative journalist Billy Jensen goes to Columbus, Ohio, where he examines the unsolved cases of 18 dead and missing women whom he suspects were the victims of serial killers on the loose and operating under cover of the opioid epidemic in America's heartland.
In Chase Darkness with Me, listeners learned Billy Jensen's journalist origin story, his struggles, his call to adventure, and his first successes in solving murders.
In Killers Amidst Killers, listeners will ride shotgun with Jensen as he takes on serial killers who are walking among us and planning their next moves in real time. The facts are not in old police reports and faded photos. They unfold before our ears.
Our story begins in 2017, when two young women, best friends Danielle and Lindsey, go missing within weeks of each other, and their bodies are found soon thereafter.
As Jensen investigates Danielle and Lindsey's cases, he comes across other missing and murdered women, and before long, he uncovers 18 of them. All unsolved. And no one was talking about it.
These are not women who were raised in the street. They got hooked on pills. The pills were taken away. They get hooked on heroin. And when the money was gone, they had to sell themselves. It all happens very quick.
Through his investigations and the help of experts, Jensen identifies serial killers in Cleveland and Columbus. Why there? Because it's easy. Sharks go where the swimmers are. Serial killers go where the easy prey are-ground zero of the opioid epidemic. The heart of America.
Jensen hunts these predators to bring peace to the victims' suffering families while putting a spotlight on a system that is leaving hundreds of thousands of bodies in its wake.
Billy Jensen is a podcaster and author who became famous for his true crime investigations. I was expecting this book to be a little more investigatory; the premise is that serial killers are going undetected because they target addicts and sex workers (often the same thing) who no one cares about. He does uncover a few cases like this, but it's not some secret network of serial killers who've cunningly discovered a "safe" population of prey. It's mostly opportunistic sociopaths who are often homeless and/or jobless drifters themselves. They make use of prostitutes, they hook up short term with junkies, and when something goes wrong, or the urge strikes them, they kill them. This does in fact largely go undetected because the police don't put a lot of resources into finding the murderer of a junkie street whore, and they especially don't do a lot of cross-department collaboration and comparing of notes. One of the big takeways from this book is that if police departments talked to each other more and just applied some basic data science, they'd probably uncover a lot of patterns and a lot of killers.
Another pattern seems to be that vice cops are pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It's the lowest prestige department and at least in every city Jensen went to, it was just known that if not every vice detective was corrupt, there was always, always more than one who treated getting freebies from girls on the street to be a perk of the job. Unsurprisingly, more than one vice cop has turned out to be a serial killer himself.
Mostly, though, Killers Amidst Killers is not really a thriller or Billy Jensen on the trail of devious serial killers. He does get personally involved in a few cases, and even interviews a few killers and suspected killers in prison. One of things he tells the reader is that anyone (with sufficient time and gumption) can help solve unsolved murders, especially of the sort of women who no one else cares about. But few are as dedicated to the job as Jensen. He drives across the country, he pesters police departments, but he doesn't actually solve a lot of cases.
As the subtitle indicates, the real theme of this book is the victims of the opioid epidemic, so Jensen spends a lot of time talking about the hollowing out of places like Rust Belt Ohio, and how impoverished, unemployed people fall into substance addition. He specifically talks about the opioid crisis, and takes a couple of chapters to talk about Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, whom he blames for far more misery than any serial killer.
Ultimately, the killers themselves are banal, pitiful people. Jensen hates media "superstar" killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and fictional ones like Hannibal Lecter. The killers he finds, and sometimes talks to, are not brilliant and clever men with a plan. They are generally stupid, narcissistic, delusional, and pathetic. They kill prostitutes because those are the women they can access; then they lie (to themselves and everyone else) about what happened. They get away with it because they're in the wind, and nobody cares about the women they kill but their families.
There wasn't really a lot new here. Mostly some interesting interviews and a lot of class indignation. The stories are poignant and sad tales of desperation. Opioids kill more people by orders of magnitude than serial killers, yet serial killers make for sensational narratives; heroin and fentanyl is just something that "happens" to addicts.
My complete list of book reviews.
William Morrow, 2022, 256 pages
Best-selling author, cohost of the hit podcast The Murder Squad, and true-crime investigative journalist Billy Jensen goes to Columbus, Ohio, where he examines the unsolved cases of 18 dead and missing women whom he suspects were the victims of serial killers on the loose and operating under cover of the opioid epidemic in America's heartland.
In Chase Darkness with Me, listeners learned Billy Jensen's journalist origin story, his struggles, his call to adventure, and his first successes in solving murders.
In Killers Amidst Killers, listeners will ride shotgun with Jensen as he takes on serial killers who are walking among us and planning their next moves in real time. The facts are not in old police reports and faded photos. They unfold before our ears.
Our story begins in 2017, when two young women, best friends Danielle and Lindsey, go missing within weeks of each other, and their bodies are found soon thereafter.
As Jensen investigates Danielle and Lindsey's cases, he comes across other missing and murdered women, and before long, he uncovers 18 of them. All unsolved. And no one was talking about it.
These are not women who were raised in the street. They got hooked on pills. The pills were taken away. They get hooked on heroin. And when the money was gone, they had to sell themselves. It all happens very quick.
Through his investigations and the help of experts, Jensen identifies serial killers in Cleveland and Columbus. Why there? Because it's easy. Sharks go where the swimmers are. Serial killers go where the easy prey are-ground zero of the opioid epidemic. The heart of America.
Jensen hunts these predators to bring peace to the victims' suffering families while putting a spotlight on a system that is leaving hundreds of thousands of bodies in its wake.
Billy Jensen is a podcaster and author who became famous for his true crime investigations. I was expecting this book to be a little more investigatory; the premise is that serial killers are going undetected because they target addicts and sex workers (often the same thing) who no one cares about. He does uncover a few cases like this, but it's not some secret network of serial killers who've cunningly discovered a "safe" population of prey. It's mostly opportunistic sociopaths who are often homeless and/or jobless drifters themselves. They make use of prostitutes, they hook up short term with junkies, and when something goes wrong, or the urge strikes them, they kill them. This does in fact largely go undetected because the police don't put a lot of resources into finding the murderer of a junkie street whore, and they especially don't do a lot of cross-department collaboration and comparing of notes. One of the big takeways from this book is that if police departments talked to each other more and just applied some basic data science, they'd probably uncover a lot of patterns and a lot of killers.
Another pattern seems to be that vice cops are pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It's the lowest prestige department and at least in every city Jensen went to, it was just known that if not every vice detective was corrupt, there was always, always more than one who treated getting freebies from girls on the street to be a perk of the job. Unsurprisingly, more than one vice cop has turned out to be a serial killer himself.
Mostly, though, Killers Amidst Killers is not really a thriller or Billy Jensen on the trail of devious serial killers. He does get personally involved in a few cases, and even interviews a few killers and suspected killers in prison. One of things he tells the reader is that anyone (with sufficient time and gumption) can help solve unsolved murders, especially of the sort of women who no one else cares about. But few are as dedicated to the job as Jensen. He drives across the country, he pesters police departments, but he doesn't actually solve a lot of cases.
As the subtitle indicates, the real theme of this book is the victims of the opioid epidemic, so Jensen spends a lot of time talking about the hollowing out of places like Rust Belt Ohio, and how impoverished, unemployed people fall into substance addition. He specifically talks about the opioid crisis, and takes a couple of chapters to talk about Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, whom he blames for far more misery than any serial killer.
Ultimately, the killers themselves are banal, pitiful people. Jensen hates media "superstar" killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and fictional ones like Hannibal Lecter. The killers he finds, and sometimes talks to, are not brilliant and clever men with a plan. They are generally stupid, narcissistic, delusional, and pathetic. They kill prostitutes because those are the women they can access; then they lie (to themselves and everyone else) about what happened. They get away with it because they're in the wind, and nobody cares about the women they kill but their families.
There wasn't really a lot new here. Mostly some interesting interviews and a lot of class indignation. The stories are poignant and sad tales of desperation. Opioids kill more people by orders of magnitude than serial killers, yet serial killers make for sensational narratives; heroin and fentanyl is just something that "happens" to addicts.
My complete list of book reviews.