Hooked on Crime

Between salmon trips, Jack Olsen fishes for lurid stories
The Morning News Tribune
May 30, 1990

From the green, saltwater retreat of Bainbridge Island, the road runs 850 miles across I-90, then south on Wyoming 310 to the dusty, shadowy town of Lovell.

Jack Olsen knows the way. He knows it by heart. He made 10 trips from the south end of Bainbridge Island to Lovell -- the droopy, demoralized Mormon enclave known as The Rose City of Wyoming.

Because of Olsen's snoopy skills, all the world knows Lovell for more than roses. Olsen's book Doc hovers atop the paperback best-seller lists, celebrating Lovell as the town raped by its own doctor.

Doc is the startling story of Lovell's last two doctors. The town doesn't dote on doctors much anymore. Dr. William Watts Horsley planted rose bushes all over Lovell in the 1940s, '50s and '60s before he died in 1971. But Horsley's real legacy to Lovell was having sex with boys and men in his office.

Introducing Lovell to the reader through the dying old rose bushes lovingly bequeathed by Horsley, Olsen tells the story of Lovell's most celebrated doctor, John Huntington Story, who left a bruised legacy. He raped from 45 to 100 of his women patients.

Called a sawed-off Cary Grant by Olsen, called a trustworthy doctor by some Lovellites, and a dirty pervert by other townspeople, Story, 63, is doing 15 years in Wyoming State Prison at Rawlins.

Olsen, 64, works on his crisply written crime books while harbored on the south end of Bainbridge Island.

Long a newspaper reporter and magazine correspondent, and the former fishing editor of Sports Illustrated, Olsen's vivid writing has made him ace of the true crime writers. He works in a cramped room between the garage and back yard where his wife, Su Peterson, who was cover girl for Sports Illustrated's first swimsuit issue in 1965, grows rhododendrons, tomatoes, nasturtiums and herbs.

The work room has a computer, stacks of unopened mail, a sign reading "WELCOME HOME DAD" from Olsen's 9-year-old son, Harper, who is known as Harper The Barbarian, and a Shostakovich tape roiling almost constantly. Olsen considers himself the foremost expert on south Bainbridge of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer.

"I am a spasm writer," Olsen said. "I might not write for two weeks."

Olsen's biggest distractions are telephone interviewers bursting to discuss his latest book -- "I do phoners by the millions," he said -- and salmon.

"I don't get writer's block," Olsen said. "It just means I'd rather be fishing. So I go fishing and call it writer's block."

When this affliction strikes deep, Olsen can be found in a 17-foot open boat just off LaPush.

The telephone also brings ideas for books. Just as Olsen completed Cold Kill, a book about Texas murderer David West, he got a call from a Sacramento psychologist and criminal justice consultant named Tom Hill. He told Olsen, "My cousin is getting railroaded in Lowell, Wyo., by a bunch of Mormon women."

They claimed that Story, the trusted family practitioner, had been raping them for years, disguising the act as a pelvic examination. It did seem strange that women suffering from infected ear lobes and sore feet were regularly subjected to long, painful pelvic exams by Story.

"I drove down to Lovell, sat eight of these women in a living room and listened to their stories," Olsen said. "I figured either these women were the eight greatest actresses in history, or Story raped them."

A jury agreed with the women. After Story was convicted and sentenced in 1985, Olsen made 10 pilgrimages to Lovell. He read books on Mormonism. He read gynecology textbooks. He and a pocket-sized Panasonic tape recorder listened to hundreds of people in the town of 2,447.

"I embrace technology," Olsen said. He remembers lugging a 35-pound Revere tape recorder about Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 when he covered the integration of Central High School for Time magazine.

"Both sides in Lovell were eager to present their sides of the story," Olsen said. "The case against Dr. Story was voluminous. At least 45 women came forward to admit that be diddled around with them."

"Many of the women were quite intelligent," Olsen said, "but they were products of Lovell. They were strict Mormons in a small Mormon town, taught by their pastors and parents to look up to males. And they were taught never ever to discuss sex, no matter how extreme."

Olsen interviewed Story's victims for six months, intentionally avoiding the doctor.

"I wanted him to hear a lot about me, what I was doing," Olsen said.

Story's curiosity landed Olsen a seven-hour interview at Rawlins State Prison.

"He displayed all the symptoms of a psychopath," Olsen said. "He attacked everyone else. He admitted nothing. He had a narcisstic view of himself."

Olsen continues exploring dangerous geeks. A book takes Olsen 18 months: one year of research, six months of writing and fishing.

He is now working on "The Man on the Bike."

"It's about a guy in Rochester, N.Y., named Arthur Shawcross," Olsen said. "He killed two children, spent 15 years in the joint, got out and killed 11 prostitutes.

"The title comes from Shawcross's bicycling. He rode around Rochester on this old piece of crap bike."

Someone who submerges himself in such a creepy netherworld of rapists and murderers might be expected to live in a seedy Chicago rooming house, with the El trains rattling past, smoking Camels and drinking rye.

Olsen once was immersed in city slime. A native of Philadelphia, he lived in New York, Washington and Chicago before finding better places. He was a deputy sheriff in Gilpin County, Colo., 9,200 feet up on the Continental Divide before heeding the call of saltwater and moving to Sequim 19 years ago. A resident of Bainbridge Island for 14 years, Olsen takes his family to Seattle Mariners games, listens to Shostakovich and dreams of salmon.

"The real world is a long ways from here," he said. "Out here is a fairyland, a fantasy that lets me wash off all the grime."

Jack Olson's 5 favorite places In Washington

1. Skunk Buoy 2 miles off LaPush: "Absolute heaven."
2. Oysterville: "The whole Long Beach Peninsula is fantastic."
3. Spokane: "I've got weird tastes."
4. Dungeness Spit: "I used to be able to fish for days and not see another boat. Now, it's wall-to-wall boats."
5. Commencement Bay: "Tacoma is a real working place. No prima donna stuff like Seattle."

All the Rage

It's what spawns psychokillers, the master crimewriter says. That, and another crushing condition.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
May 2, 1993

The day after a particularly grisly murder-suicide of a geriatric couple in a fancy Rittenhouse Square high-rise, a burly, upwardly middle-aged man with a badly twitching face of a pug hears a police siren, sticks his head out his nearby hotel window, cranes his neck in curiosity and proclaims, "They're playing my song."

Always trying to figure out the siren's source, that's Jack Olsen, master of true-crime writing, an Upper Darby fugitive who attended Penn on the GI Bill. "I haven't had an honest job for 20 years," teases the best-selling Edgar-winning author, a former Time magazine bureau chief who lives on a "crime-free" island in Puget Sound with his second wife -- a Sports Illustrated bathing suit-model-cum-nutritionist -- and their two young children. "I'm just fascinated by human behavior. What makes people do the things they do."

Creeps, weirdos, perverts: Jack Olsen is their Dostoevsky. Blood-and-guts is his meat-and-potatoes, but it's blood-and-guts-with-soul. The latest of his 25 books published in 11 countries and nine languages, The Misbegotten Son, is an amazing exposé of a serial killer's psychology, a spectacular study of sociopathy, detailing the lurid progression of a sweetheart of a guy from starting fires, torturing animals, molesting children, to eventually offing at least 11 women while managing to marry three more who didn't suspect a thing. Yuck.

Gee, I'm confusing mass murderers and serial killers. "The serial killer kills, cools off, kills, cools off -- that's the way the FBI defines it," he says, launching into a digression on mathematics and psychopathology. "A psychotic," he explains, taking a nip from his apple juice at the Latham, "thinks 2 and 2 are 5. A normal person knows 2 and 2 are 4. A neurotic knows 2 and 2 are 4, but can't stand it. And a psychopath knows 2 and 2 are 4 or 6 or 71 or 800, depending on what he thinks you WANT him to believe, because he's just putting on a show, an appearance."

How'd get into this stuff? "Right here. A Penn criminology professor brought our class to Holmesburg Prison. So I get inside and see that these dudes look like me. Me plus a few years. That was a shocker," he admits. "I thought criminals were gap-toothed, slimy mustaches, crew cuts and muscles. Anyway, these guys, they looked like me, except I was pretty young. And I since have found that out at penitentiary after penitentiary: They are me but just another version. They took another fork in the road. So that probably is what hooked me."

Doesn't he ever get creeped out immersing himself in their mental and emotional processes? "Hey, I got news for ya. All of these people were once 7 or 8 or 9 pounds of protoplasm in their mother's arms. That's the way they started, just like you and me. What happened? What happened to make them into these bizarre things?" Right -- what turns someone into a Hannibal Lector? "Just keep reminding yourself that Silence of the Lambs is fiction. The typical sociopath is not like Hannibal Lector," he declares.

"You couldn't be in that guy's presence for more than a few minutes without realizing there's something wrong here. He's not your typical sociopath. When you're in the presence of your typical sociopath, he acts just like me, or the bartender, or your husband, whoever.

"That's their stock-in-trade; they don't act like Hannibal Lector. Hannibal Lector's the least-likely psychopath I've EVER encountered in literature or film. Because he's got a big sign on him: SOCIOPATH. That's the very opposite of what sociopaths do, you see."

Are these multiple maniacs proliferating? "Yes, there are certainly more of them. Between 1900 and 1910, there were something like two serial killings in the United States. And then it continued along about that way until around 1940 or 1950, when it just went -- WHEW! -- straight up the graph until it's just a commonplace now. Why? Flux. Social breakdown, social disintegration. You don't raise well-adjusted, bonded, attached, caring, loving people in a state of constant flux. And I mean that to apply even to the 'upper classes'...

"It's partly that. It's partly that everyone has weapons. It's partly that everyone can get from one place to another overnight. The killing of one human being by another does not seem bizarre to us because we see it all the time. If you're stuck in a hotel room and you flip that tube -- last night the first four stations that I flipped past, three of them had a human being holding a gun on another human being. The act of holding a gun on another human being is one of the most profound acts that you can commit. Within a fifth of a second he's dead and you're a criminal. And yet you see it on TV as if it were, you know, get up in the morning ordering breakfast, it's so common. We no longer have a reverence for proper behavior, for life. The bonding procedures are completely screwed up."

Is serial murder a sex-linked trait? "Most criminals are men. Most sex criminals are men. See, is this sexist? It's just a fact. Men have more," he pauses, "they seem to have more difficulty with the Oedipus complex than women have with the Electra complex. For one thing, men seem to have more trouble with Mommy than women have with Daddy," he says, sloughing off my disagreement. "My idea about crime is that crime is created by rage... Rage and arrested development...

"I have a secret impulse that I've never admitted publicly until now. To rub men's noses in the crime of rape, and let them know what it's really like. Because I don't think the average male has the slightest understanding of what rape is like. At the most extreme, you get guys like the police captain in my book Son who advised the women in Spokane, 'If you're gonna be raped, lie back and enjoy it.' That's the worst type," he fumes. "But the average male still thinks, Yeah, well, OK, it's not pleasant, I know that, but there are a lot worse things can happen.

"Well, I want to say that there aren't many worse things can happen to a woman than rape. Rape is a," he fumbles, "rape is a little murder. And I realized that in research, in interviewing the women for Son, hey, this is a heavy-duty crime, this is not fun in any way, shape, manner or form. And this stays with these women. I interviewed a prostitute who had been raped five years earlier, a prostitute who couldn't talk about it without becoming semi-hysterical. That's when I really got the message this is a terrible crime. So I always sort of wanted to rub men's noses in rape." He thinks his works have done that. "So I'm satisfied."

Having peeled away the psyches of these brutes, what's his solution to America's crime explosion -- the lethal carjackings, the senseless muggings, the roving bands of thugs, the drive-by shootings, the druggers? "Well, it's certainly not the usual law-and-order cliches -- more prisons, longer sentences, police crackdowns, etc. Those are Band-Aid answers by cheap politicians running for office on the backs of others. At the risk of sounding pompous, I think the essential problem is our economic system.

"Yes, it's superb at creating big care and computers and supermarkets and rows of toys at Toys R Us, but it's also superb at producing alienation, loss of personal touch, feelings of inadequacy, despair and uselessness. And far too much of our criminal behavior grows from barren, frustrating, stunted, unfulfilled, ENRAGING situations, which more often than not are rooted in poverty.

"America has more than enough resources to provide a decent life for every citizen. But these assets are distributed neither equitably or with foresight. For the most part, those who are down are doomed to stay down, to live and die in the ghetto, to spend their lifetimes looking up. When we solve the eternal problem of the distribution of opportunity and wealth, we'll have solved the problem of crime -- and not before," says Jack Olsen. "Everything else is rhetoric."

"I've Always Gravitated to Crime"

New York Times
March 14, 1993
Lynn Karpen

"I have always been a journalist and I've never been anything but a journalist," Jack Olsen declared during a telephone interview from Philadelphia, where he is currently on tour to promote "The Misbegotten Son." The author of more than 25 books ("I'm not sure how many; I've sort of lost track") on subjects ranging from bridge to boxing, he has always simply chosen whatever interested him to write about.

"I guess it was a little self-indulgent, but I figured if I was interested, the public would be too. The problem was," he continued, "you can't build a nucleus readership this way. People didn't know what they were going to get next."

"The Misbegotten Son," the carefully researched story of a serial killer, is the latest of Mr. Olsen's books about crime and criminals. "All through my career as a newspaperman and magazine writer, I've always gravitated back to crime," said Mr. Olsen, who is 67 years old. "I've always been interested in crime, right from the start, right from a criminality course I took at Penn State. I took it as an elective because it looked easy. Then we took a field trip to Holmesburg Prison, and I'm 19 years old and we get inside and I see all these guys who look just like me. I thought that criminals looked different. And this is what I attribute my interest in crime to.

"I start every book with the idea that I want to explain how this seven or eight pounds of protoplasm went from his mommy's arms to become a serial rapist or serial killer. This is my drive and my compulsion. I think a crime book that doesn't do this is pure pornography."

Mr. Olsen is currently working on his next book, the story of a triple murderer, in his own backyard of Washington State, where he lives on an island in Puget Sound. Researching "The Misbegotten Son" in Watertown, N.Y., near the Canadian border in the dead of winter made him determined to stay close to home next time. "I said to my wife, "I don't care if it's just a book about shoplifting, but it's going to be around Seattle."

Interview with Jack Olsen about his book Charmer

Q. What's "Charmer" about?

A. In one sense, a series of horrifying murders. In another sense, race. It's also a story about homicide detectives, their stumblings and bumblings, hard work and intelligence and dedication. Real detectives, not TV or mystery characters.

Q. Who is "Charmer?"

A. George Walterfield Russell Jr., a cunning African-American murderer from an affluent suburb of Seattle.

Q. What was his problem?

A. He had many. One was a problem that is common to many blacks in America, including 0.J. Simpson. George Russell was an "oreo."

Q. What's that?

A. The word originated in the prison culture to describe a black man who downplays his racial identity and tries to out-white the whites. A black man who is treated like a pet by his white playmates and classmates but only allowed to come so close. A toy black, an icon, a symbol, but not treated as a fellow human being.

Q. What characterizes "oreos" like George Russell?

A. Confusion. Despair. Alienation. And that great common denominator of violent crime: rage.

Q. What were Russell's crimes?

A. He seduced and impregnated young teen-aged white women, assaulted others, and eventually murdered three women in their twenties and posed their bodies artistically to provide the ultimate shock value. A prosecutor called the gallery of bodies "the collected works of George Walterfield Russell." A dildo was rammed into the mouth of one victim and a copy of "More Joy of Sex" placed by her body -- in an example of a rare sexual perversion known as "piquerism," he stabbed one corpse 231 times after death and played a game of tic-tac-toe with his knife.

Q. To what do psychiatrists attribute piquerism?

A. Uncontrollable hatred and rage. In Russell's case, homicidal misogyny. He hated women to death.

Q. Did Russell have prior relationships with his victims?

A. Barely knew any of them.

Q. What did they represent to him?

A. In my opinion, females in general. The snooty white socialites who toyed with him in high school. The lustful sufferers from "jungle fever" who used his body but refused to take him seriously. The teenage white girls who fell for his seductive charms but rejected him as they matured. Also some of the black women by whom he was raised and -- in his distorted view -- by whom he was discarded.

Q. Didn't Russell have any social life with black women?

A. None except his beloved half-sister. He shunned the company of black women and bad-mouthed them on every occasion. He appeared to be as anti-black as the most ignorant racist.

Q. How was he caught?

A. Partially by extraordinarily ordinary police work -- thousands of hours of gumshoeing, canvassing, interviewing and re-interviewing, the kind of work that seldom draws attention. And partially by leaps of inductive reasoning by a couple of brilliant detectives. And partially by forensics: DNA testing and other analyses.

Q. Were the DNA tests the final nail for Russell?

A. It doesn't appear that DNA testing ever produces absolute results, at least as of the time of the Russell case. The tests showed probabilities -- 86% that the killer was black, for example. Ninety-four percent that a certain hair came from Russell. That sort of thing. But taken in toto, the DNA evidence was powerful.

Q. What kind of family produced this strange man?

A. Russell's mother is a professor of English and the Humanities and a lecturer on black culture. One stepfather is president of San Francisco State University, another is a dentist. His sister is a recent graduate of Yale. His grandmother taught school in Florida. A remarkable thread of achievement runs through the family.

Q. How was he raised?

A. In the typical American flux and confusion. When he was an infant. his bright young mother left home to get an education, leaving him in the care of his grandmother and four aunts in a backwater Florida town. When he was six, his mother brought him to Seattle to live with her dentist husband while she taught at the University of Washington. The family soon moved to upscale Mercer Island where Russell hobnobbed with the children of Boeing execs, corporate lawyers, doctors and other professionals. There were six or eight black families on the island, but neither Russell nor his parents had much to do with them. His mother and stepfather split up when the boy was fifteen, and she went east to teach at the University of Maryland and later Tufts. Russell chose to remain among the wealthy whites of Mercer Island.

Q. Books on African-American killers are almost nonexistent. What made you decide to write one?

A. George Russell's crimes were horrendous but fascinating, unique and significant. They were largely ignored by the media just as most black crimes are ignored or played down, O.J. Simpson being the rarest of exceptions. The present tendency of newspapers to play black crimes on page 34 or ignore them altogether is a disturbing variety of racial prejudice which can only make a difficult problem worse.

Q. What difficult problem?

A. African-Americans make up twenty percent of our population and commit fifty percent of our crime.

Q. Because they're inherently evil?

A. Because ninety-nine percent are deprived, alienated, stigmatized, isolated and rejected on a systematic, institutionalized basis -- and thus enraged on one psychological level or another. The privileged one percent (e.g. Clarence Thomas, Richard Pryor, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, George Walterfield Russell) live in a confusing world of rejection and self-doubt.

Q. Why can't the black community step in and solve its own problems?

A. You don't ask the man whose neck is being stepped on to stop the fight.

Q. In your opinion, what creates black criminals like George Russell?

A. To vastly oversimplify, a national pattern of racial prejudice, which produces rage, which produces crime.

Q. So George Russell should be forgiven his sins?

A. Of course not. He should be exactly where he is, serving life without chance of parole. To try to understand him is not to excuse his murderous behavior. Every criminal of every color must accept responsibility for his crimes. Otherwise we face anarchy.

Q. What got you so interested in racial matters?

A. I was raised by a man who ranted constantly about "niggers," "shines" and "jigaboos." I rebelled against him and his ideas in my teens, and the subject of race prejudice has preoccupied me ever since. I was thrown out of a second-floor barracks at Keesler Air Force Base for telling a group of Southerners that it was okay with me if my sister married a black. As a Time correspondent, I was ten feet away when hard-hat racists spat on Elizabeth Eckford and the other black children trying to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. I wrote "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" and "Black is Best -- The Riddle of Cassius Clay," both prize-winning books. My five-part series on how organized sport is helping to destroy a generation of black males was characterized by the editors twenty-five years later as "the most important series" the magazine had ever run.

Q. Why is it more important than ever that whites and blacks understand each other?

A. Because race prejudice is destroying America. Because the problem worsens every day. Because a state of terror exists in black neighborhoods and is spreading outward.

Q. Can the problem be solved?

A. Yes, but only by a massive effort, and I mean massive, on the order of what we did in World War II. Not by phony wars on crime, or hot-air campaign speeches, or token gestures.

Q. And if the problem isn't confronted and solved?

A. Our peaceful democracy will cease to exist. Ghetto crime and terrorism will become the norm in and out of the ghetto. Neither black nor white will be safe. The American way of life will end.

Q. Unless we begin to understand people like George Walterfield Russell?

A. Exactly.

Amazon.com talks to Jack Olsen

Amazon.com: How did you begin writing? Did you intend to become an author, or do you have a specific reason or reasons for writing each book?

J.O.: I began writing in desperation -- I kept flunking my engineering courses at the University of Pa. while getting straight A's in a subject entirely alien to me: English. Then a criminology professor took us on a field trip to a penitentiary and I discovered that the place was filled with guys who looked just like me. That began a lifelong interest in what makes criminals, how to detect and avoid them, how not to raise them, how to live in a culture that is becoming increasingly criminal in nature. In my 26 books and hundreds of articles, I've written about everything under the sun, but my last seven books have been about crime.

Amazon.com: What authors do you like to read? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?

J.O.: I enjoy authors who write seriously about crime -- non-embroidered, non-embellished true journalism. I mean authors like Darcy O'Brien, Fox Butterfield, Pete Earley, Jim Schulte, Harry MacLean, Shana Alexander, Lowell Cauffiel, T. J. English and others. The strongest influence on my reporting has come from Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, John Bartlow Martin, John McPhee, Gerold Frank, Dr. Frederic Wertham, Dr. Hervey Cleckley, John Hersey and Red Smith. The strongest influences on my writing have been James Joyce, E. Annie Proulx, J. B. Priestley, R. F. Delderfield, James M. Cain, John O'Hara, James Thurber, Earl Thompson, Stendhal, Ford Madox Ford, Tolstoi, and of course the greatest of them all: Bill Shakespeare.

Amazon.com: Could you describe the mundane details of writing: How many hours a day do you devote to writing? Do you write a draft on paper or at a keyboard (typewriter or computer)? Do you have a favorite location or time of day (or night) for writing? What do you do to avoid--or seek!--distractions?

J.O.: My writing habits are so lousy I hate to commit them to paper. I might write for 12 hours straight and then go fishing for a week. I might go fishing for 12 hours straight and then write for a week. I write at all hours of day and night. I've worked on a computer for at least a dozen years, starting on a Lanier Word Processor that cost $15,000 and crashed every hour and a half. I wouldn't know what to do without one. I can't imagine how Keats and Tolstoi and all those other dudes got along without at least one megabyte of memory. They must've had huge craniums.

Amazon.com: Do you meet your readers at book signings, conventions, or similar events? Do you interact with your readers electronically through e-mail or other online forums?

J.O.: Lately I've been flogging Salt of the Earth and meeting my readers under any and all conditions, including at least two dozen signings and a raft of radio, TV and press interviews. I'm also active on CompuServe's Author and Crime forums, and on Internet's true crime and book review newsgroups.

Amazon.com: When and how did you get started on the Net? Do you read any newsgroups such as rec.arts.books and rec.arts.sf.written, mailing lists, or other on-line forums? Do you use the Net for research--or is it just another time sink? Are you able to communicate with other writers or people you work with over the Net?

J.O.: I've become so dependent on the Internet for research that I think I'd just quit and become a sanitary engineer if I had it to do all over again.

Amazon.com: Feel free to use this space to write about whatever you wish: your family, your hometown, hobbies, favorite places, where you've lived, where you went to school, what jobs you have had, your last (or planned) vacation, your favorite color/food/pet/song/movie, what books you'd take to a desert island, what you intend to do before you die, or what you think of just about anything.

J.O.: Before I die I would like to take some small part in the rehabilitation of the so-called "true crime" genre, which to my eyes has become more like the "false crime" genre. So many embroidered and embellished works are being published as fact that it's tilting the whole genre away from true journalistic competence. As an Edgar judge last year, I discovered that in this morass of compost some really good stuff is being published -- though not necessarily being read. Four great examples are Darcy O'Brien's Power to Hurt, Fox Butterfield's All God's Children, Jim Schutze's By Two and Two, and Pete Earley's Circumstantial Evidence (Edgar winner). I recommend them all. And throwing modesty to the winds, I can tell you that the New York Times has published two very favorable reviews of Salt of the Earth, for which I'm grateful, and the other reviewers have more or less followed suit.

True Crime doesn't pay

A conversation with Jack Olsen
Point No Point
Winter 1998/99
Michael Hood

"The true crime genre is dead and I'll tell you why." Jack Olsen declares, holding forth on his favorite subject these days, the sorry state of writing and publishing non-fiction books.

Jack Olsen, 73, is a former Time magazine bureau chief and Sports Illustrated editor. The Bainbridge Island resident has written more than 30 books, including six novels, but he's best known for his reportage over a half-century career. his work covers a wide range of subjects with books such as The Bridge at Chappaquiddick about Ted Kennedy's bad night; The Night of the Grizzlies, an eco-thriller; and Silence on Monte Sole, a detailed study of a Nazi massacre in Italy. His account of an ill-fated Alpine expedition in 1957, The Climb Up to Hell, is being re-released this fall by St. Martin's Press.

Olsen has made his most visible mark, however, in the genre of true crime, or "crime journalism," as he prefers. He began chronicling psychopaths before anyone (himself included) really knew what they or their diseased behavior were bout. Olson wrote one of the genre's defining classics, Son: A Psychopath and His Victims. It is the story of Kevin Coe, Spokane's South Hill rapist, whose rich and influential mother was sent to prison after trying to hire a hitman to kill the judge and prosecutor responsible for convicting her son.

Another of his major works is Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell, an incredible account of a Wyoming doctor who relied on his small town patients' naivete and Mormon female submissiveness to rape generations of them on his office examining table. Olsen has won two prestigious Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, including a special Edgar for Son and the 1989 prize for Best Fact Crime for Doc.

So why does Jack Olsen pronounce his genre dead?

Because he feels that it no longer stresses accuracy, substance over style, and the reporter's responsibility to get the facts right without inserting himself or herself into the story. Olsen believes these values are being abandoned by current writers, but the complaint is as old as the true crime genre itself.

The problem presented itself at the very beginning with Truman Capote's inventive conjecture and manufactured quotes in writing In Cold Blood. This extravagantly successful "non-fiction novel" about the 1957 Clutter family murders in Kansas is considered the first true crime book.

Blood's success also pumped up a New Journalism that emphasizes character and social analysis over the who, what, when and where of traditional reporting. Olsen is definitely and defiantly a member of the old school.

"I recognized it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it," Olsen says. "Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes.... The book made something like $6 million in 1960's money, and nobody wanted to discuss anything wrong with a money-maker like that in the publishing business."

Nobody except Olsen and a few others. His criticisms were quoted in Esquire, to which Capote replied, "Jack Olsen is just jealous."

"That was true, of course," Olsen says, "I was jealous -- all that money? I'd been assigned the Clutter case by Harper & Row until we found out that Capote and his cousin, Harper Lee, had been already on the case in Dodge City for six months.

Olsen explains, "That book did two things. It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down. I blew the whistle in my own weak way. I'd only published a couple of books at that time -- but since it was such a superbly written book, nobody wanted to hear about it."

Olsen fast forwards 30 years to the tremendous success of the so-called "non-fiction" book, Sleepers, by Lorenzo Carcaterra. "Here was an $8 or $9 million book, a story of injustice in Hell's Kitchen. Very sensational -- a priest suborning perjury, the DA putting in the fix, two heroic boys getting even for a year in a reformatory where they were sodomized."

Just one problem, Olsen adds: "It was 100 percent bullshit." He and six other crime authors petitioned the publisher, Ballantine, to withdraw the book, to refund the money of those who bought it under its pretense of non-fiction, and to reissue it as a novel.

All to no avail. Though thoroughly exposed to be unfactual by Olsen's group and many others, the paperback was published a year later still claiming to be a true story. "I was trained as a journalist. I wasn't trained as a wonderful guy [but] an accurate guy, an honest guy. I was trained as a journalist and if you're a journalist, you better get it right! That's the difference between myself and all these shuck and jive artists.'

Take Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, another extremely successful book, a unique combination of travelogue and true crime in Savannah. Olsen says, "It's an amazing story. As I was reading it, I was saying to myself: John Berendt goes down to Savannah, Georgia, he meets all these fantastic people, he meets the killer, he gets intimately involved in this whole murder -- I'm saying to myself, why can't this ever happen to me?" Then Olsen met Berendt at a writers' conference and learned that he hadn't been involved in the murder at all, he'd merely inserted himself into it as a vehicle for telling the story.

"So here's perhaps your best-selling hardcover book in modern history and the main thrust of it is faked. He came down later and constructed the whole thing with himself in it. It was a literary device he never let us in on. I have to say it was a good job of craftsmanship -- except it was not true."

Random House sells Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as "true." The New York Times has listed it for nearly four years as a "non-fiction" best seller, even though Berendt acknowledges "rounding the corners" and inventing dialogue "to make a better narrative."

"Apparently it's no longer important to the reading public whether you go out and bust your ass to get the facts right or you just make it up. That completely wipes out the main tool we journalists have -- technique, journalism, research. You don't need that any more."

Book sales are down for true crime which has always been, surprisingly, predominantly a women's market. True crime no longer pays and the best crime journalists are quitting. The list of deserters is impressive.

Edgar winner Harry McClean, an attorney who made The New York Times best seller list twice, has taken to writing legal thrillers a la John Grisham.

Darcy O'Brian, a Tulsa literature professor and author of the classic study, Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers, publicly abandoned true crime shortly before his recent death, declaring "It deserves to sink."

Masquerade author Lowell Cauffiel told the New York Daily News he's written his last work in the genre because "It's gone the way of westerns."

Barry Siegel, author of A Death at White Bear Lake, is now writing novels. And you can now add Olsen as the latest MIA. He has forsaken the genre and is now working on a "justice book" relating the story of Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

True crime's decline can also be blamed on so-called "instant books," which exploit the public's prurient interest in lurid crimes with bad writing and superficial research mostly based on newspaper clippings. Ann Rule, the genre's "queen," laments that true crime is "drowning in its own blood."

"I've reached the point," Olsen says, "if my next door neighbor turned out to be the goddamndest quadruple murderer involving sex, incest, serial murder, I wouldn't dream of writing about it. Because it would go right on the true crime shelf, in between this piece of crap and that piece of crap, and the average reader is going to say there are three pieces of crap."

Economics also plays a role. The cost of researching serious true crime accounts, with all the travel and other expenses, is usually over $50,000 per book. Most authors have to front these expenses out of their own pockets. "The best true crime authors can no longer afford to spend a year and a half, two years getting it right when there's no premium for it," he says. "We could just as easily sit home and make it up.

"Other forms of journalism have been engaged," as Max Frankel observed in The New York Times Magazine, "in a heroic battle... to preserve the meaning of fact and the sanctity of quotation marks.... Reporters have been losing their jobs for committing fiction, a crime that is no crime at all in too many other media."

Olsen agrees. "These other forms of journalism insist on things being true, but the one form that'll be sitting around a hundred years from now -- books -- nobody cares. I've suggested that book publishers have fact-checking departments just like newspapers, but they say it's too expensive, that books cost too much already. With the computer and its search facilities -- this should be the heyday of truth and accuracy in journalism. My career would be over if it weren't for the computer. The computer has extended my career by 10 or 15 years."

Another reason for this situation, Olsen says, is a lack of good critics. "The fact that Carcaterra can get away with Sleepers [is because] we don't have critics like Dwight MacDonald or A.J. Liebling -- they would've taken that guy apart."

'Son' author 'documented humanity of his victims,' friend says

The Spokesman Review
October 8, 2015
Carolyn Lamberson

From 1978 to 1981, more than 40 women were brutally assaulted on Spokane's South Hill. Eventually, Kevin Coe (then known as Fred Coe) was convicted of some of the assaults. He served 25 years in prison and remains confined to the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island. He has always maintained his innocence.

The story was already national news. After all, Coe was the son of a prominent Spokane family - his mother, Ruth, was a noted socialite, and his father, Gordon, was managing editor of The Spokane Daily Chronicle. The case took a bizarre twist when his mother, Ruth, was arrested and convicted for trying to take out a hit on the judge and prosecutor in her son's case.

In 1983, journalist Jack Olsen published "Son: A Psychopath and His Victims," which became a national best-seller and won an Edgar Award for nonfiction.

Now, Scribner has re-released "Son" in print and for the first time as an e-book. Olsen, a longtime resident of Bainbridge Island, died in 2002. His friend Gregg Olsen, a best-selling true-crime writer and no relation to Jack Olsen, was tasked with writing a new forward for the book. In an email interview, we talked with Gregg Olsen about the lesson that can be learned from reading "Son" today and the impact Jack Olsen's work had on his own life.

Q. You write in the new forward that "Son" inspired you to become a true-crime writer. What was it about "Son" that you found so fascinating?

A. While the crime spree was horrific and disturbing enough, one of the things that made "Son" such a compelling book was the way Jack Olsen dug into the history and psychology of both sides of the crime. He wrote about Fred, Ruth and Gordon with a kind of immersive narrative that put you, the reader, right there with them. Reading that book is like lifting up the curtain and finding out that the people next door were not as they seemed at all – and once you got to know them, you wanted to put up a For Sale sign and get out of the neighborhood.

As great as Jack Olsen's research and writing could be, it was the way he documented the humanity of his victims that also resonated with me – and still does. I always considered Jack's books to be about people first. Not a crime. They were people who were touched by something very dark and evil. For the victims in Jack's books (he wrote 30 others, many dealing with true stories of rape or serial killers), the evil didn't define them at all. For the perpetrators, he made us see the trajectory of life events, circumstances, sometimes even biology that led them to do the unthinkable.

Q. Since the Coe case, Spokane has seen its share of high-profile crime and intrigue. The serial killer Robert Yates, ousted mayor Jim West, Ruby Ridge just up the road from here, even the recent Rachel Dolezal controversy all come to mind. Why re-release "Son" now?

A. "Son" is an American classic in a genre that doesn't get a whole lot of respect. It has been out of print for many years and there's a renewed interest in the kind of thoughtful reporting on crime that "Son" exemplifies.

Q. Did you ever interview Coe?

A. No. The closest I got was talking to a woman who was in love with him, wanted to marry him and was trying to help win his release. She was sure that he was not the monster the world – and this book in particular – had made him out to be. He'd convinced her that he'd been wrongly convicted.

Q. What can we learn from revisiting this story now?

A. So much time has passed that the Coe story has now drifted into the realm of Spokane history, but like other notorious crimes they linger in the memories of those who lived through it. What can be learned? I'm still inspired by the victims who stood up and faced their attacker when rape was something that was barely talked about in polite company.

Rape still exists, of course. But I think "Son" is a great reminder that evil can be extinguished when we rally around each other with compassion and vigilance. Guys like Coe are out there and when they do their evil deeds, we know that no one asked for it. We know that no one should live with shame because of it. But there was a time, not long ago, when all of that wasn't true.

Jack Olsen's book reminds all of us that no matter how beautiful the place, no matter how pretty it's surface, bad things lurk there. And we're just not going to stand for it.

"Son"

By Jack Olsen, with a new foreword by Gregg Olsen ($18 paperback, $7.99 eBook)