The executioner's song

AMERICANS are obsessed by crime. It doesn't matter under what guise we get the information, as truth or fiction are largely irrelevant issues provided the details are lurid enough. Watch an hour of CSI and you'll get all the blood, semen and charred corpses you could ever hope for, but nary a curse word or a bare nipple, which would obviously be too unseemly. And maybe that's the ultimate question here: Why do we love dead bodies and murder, but blanch at the appearance of a live, nude human?

Maybe it because we think the people who perpetrate these crimes are so unlike the rest us and therefore are worthy of study, even within the scope of entertainment, where they can then be turned off or set aside without problem. They aren't us, so therefore they are a sideshow. In The Best American Crime Reporting 2008, editors Jonathan Kellerman, Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook have selected 15 articles that often prove just the opposite. Crime, and the aftermath, both for the victims and the perpetrators, ends up being a very human affair.

For instance, in "The Caged Life," Alan Prendegast writes about the living conditions of Aryan Brotherhood member Tommy Silverstein who has lived in solitary confinement for the last 23 years for killing prison guard Merle Clutts. And yet when Prendergast describes Silverstein's life -- a numbing repetition that consists mostly of waiting -- it's hard not to wonder if it might be less cruel and unusual to simply kill the man. That's the existential question: If our loved one was murdered, would we want the killer to suffer decades of boredom before dying or just certain death? Silverstein wonders, too. Prendergrast quotes him as writing: "Even though we may not execute people by the masses, as they do in other countries, our government leaders bury people alive in cement tombs. It's actually more humane to execute someone than it is to torture them, year, after year, after year."

Except, of course, when you consider how long it takes to execute someone. Tad Friend explores this issue, and others, in the fascinating "Dean of Death Row," which details the career of Vernell Crittendon, the man charged with handling the executions of death row inmates at San Quentin since the late 1970s. In California, the length of time is usually about 22 years between conviction and death, which, in Crittendon's case, meant plenty of time to help those who wanted it, or, finally, kill those who deserved it (though, of course, not all agree on who deserves it and who doesn't, not even Crittendon). But Crittendon isn't perfect -- when a man asked for pizza as his last meal, Crittendon got him Tombstone, just to be funny -- and he's also weighed down by what his job has left him with. While his execution team would take five days off and seek counseling after a death, Crittendon would be back at work the next day, even though he acknowledges the lingering effects of the experience. Still, there is a ghoulish cast to the man that is unsettling, specifically when he notes he "always wanted to be able to see the moment when the life had left the person."

Death rules this collection, and often in preventable ways, like the story of John Dowery (in "The Story of a Snitch" by Jeremy Kahn), who, after being relocated after snitching on a murder and getting shot six times for his troubles, returns to the old neighborhood again and visits a neighborhood bar, where he ends up getting a bullet to the head. But then there are also the bizarre tales of odd life which alternately show surprising humanity -- like the one about the Angel of Death, ex-nurse-turned-serial-killer Charles Cullen, who ended up as the only organ match for a relative of a former girlfriend ("The Tainted Kidney" by Charles Graber) -- or desperate human flaws, like the Pittsburgh grifter who conned money and adoration from women by pretending to be various members of the Pittsburgh Steelers ("I'm With The Steelers" by Justin Heckert), and said that, "I can't help myself ... I just idolize these guys and what they do, and the attention they get from women, and I just want that for myself, and I don't think I can do it on my own and I just want to be them."

On television and in books and movies, there is always a "why" to it all, which makes it palatable enough for us to consider it all very plausible, but what makes these essays so compelling is that, like with the Steelers' fan, or in "Just A Random Female" by Nick Schou, the frightening tale of the murder of a young female college student, often there is no reason apart from blind compulsion; a person selected to be victimized merely for being a person.