Review: "The Cleveland John Doe Case" by Thibault Raisse

 

The Cleveland John Doe Case by Thibault Raisse Crime Ink, 2025     On the afternoon of July 30, 2002, the body of Joseph Chandler was discovered in the bathroom of his spartan studio apartment in Eastlake, Ohio. It had been an unusually hot summer in Northern Ohio—where Eastlake is a suburb of Cleveland sitting on the shoreline of Lake Erie—and Chandler had been dead for almost a week when a maintenance man discovered his body. The air conditioning in his room had been turned off and the fetid odor of rotting flesh filled the apartment. It was obvious to the investigating detective that Chandler had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but what he didn’t realize at the time was that Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in Texas as a young boy and the dead man was someone else entirely. The Cleveland John Doe Case adeptly introduces Chandler—he had lived in the Dover Apartments for 17 years and worked at a nearby chemical factory for just as long, but he was like a ghost because no one knew anything about him—and the investigators working the case from when the body was discovered in 2002 until the early-2020s when DNA helped identify Chandler’s birth name. And there were five separate investigators, including a couple private eyes and the U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio.   The investigative question changing over the years from How did Chandler die?, to Who was Chandler?, to Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity? It is an intriguing case from beginning to end and Raisse wrings the facts out with precise and fluid writing and an obvious high dosage of research gleaned from interviews with the investigators, Chandler’s family, police records, and other documents. The only disappointment, and this is hardly anything at all because it only adds to the mysterious nature of the case, is that the final investigative question, Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity for so long? is yet to be solved. But I tell you, as Raisse details in The Cleveland John Doe Case, there are a bevy of high-profile theories about what made Chandler take a new name. And each, as well The Cleveland John Doe Case in its entirety, are worth your reading time. The Cleveland John Doe Case was translated into English from its original French by Laurie Bennett. It is part of Crime Ink’s 50 States of Crime series where French journalists reevaluate major American crimes; one for each of the 50 states of the U.S.

Check out The Cleveland John Doe Case at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers" by Frank Figliuzzi

 

Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi Mariner Books, 2024   I don’t review much non-fiction here, or anywhere else, but a slim true crime, Long Haul by a former FBI Assistant Director, Frank Figliuzzi, grabbed me by the nose and kicked me in the gut. Long Haul is a different kind of true crime tale than I usually read because its focus is a broad view of a specific type of crime (murders around the U.S. highway system) with a specific type of victim (generally female sex workers) committed by men working in the trucking industry; i.e. long-haul truck drivers. While Figliuzzi discusses specific cases of truck driver murderers, such as John Robert Williams, the so-called “Big Rig Killer,” who confessed to killing dozens of women he picked up at truck stops, he primarily focuses on the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings (HSK) initiative while questioning—without making any conclusions—if the lonely isolation of the road creates murderous monsters or these monstrous men are drawn to the industry for some reason. According to the HSK, there have been at least 850 killings in the United States in the past few decades linked to long-haul truck drivers with more than 200 of those festering in the unsolved bin. Figliuzzi tackles the murders from three angles. The first is by gaining an understanding of the trucking industry. He interviews an old-time truck driver, now retired, with more than 40-years pushing rigs and tags along for a week with a current driver to see what the roads are like today. He provides the reader with a bug-spattered view of both the rewards and the problems of driving—isolation and a type of sedentary overwork coupled with low pay and the chaos of quotas, deadlines and uncontrollable factors like weather, traffic, and truck maintenance. Second, Figliuzzi interviews the FBI’s lead analyst in the HSK, and an expert with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, to get a handle on the breadth of the issue. What he discovers is the problem may be larger than the numbers indicate because the initiative relies on local law enforcement agencies to enter data in the FBI’s ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) database, but many don’t. And finally, Figliuzzi interviews social workers and survivors of truck stop human trafficking. These women’s stories are harrowing and sobering. Sobering to me because my father spent the better part of his working life in the trucking industry as a diesel mechanic and later, after retiring, as a driver for a large commercial outfit. He told stories that seemed funny to my much younger self. Like, as a mechanic, finding a woman stashed away in a truck’s sleeper against company rules. She was screaming high and my dad figured the driver was trying to hide his girlfriend, but maybe it was more sinister than that. Long Haul was like listening to my dad tell stories about long roads, angry customers, spoiled loads, infuriating break-downs, and all the strange things he encountered as both a driver and a mechanic. But while his antidotes were meant as entertainment, Long Haul’s perspective is darker. It is as fascinating and as hair-raising as anything I’ve ever read; and I tell you, I’ll never look at a truck stop the same way.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the hardcover at Amazon.

This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates

 This Red-Handed Wretch:

Bill Hickman and The Murder of Richard Yates

by Ben Boulden

 

 

In the dying minutes of October 18, 1857, the notorious lawman, lawyer, and admitted murderer, William Adams Hickman – labeled, “this red-handed wretch,” by the New York World and popularly known as Wild Bill – “used up” the mountaineer Richard E. Yates. The Mormon militia, called the Nauvoo Legion, had arrested Yates on a charge of spying for the approaching U.S. Army during the Utah War. Hickman claimed Yates’s killing had been ordered by Mormon prophet Brigham Young. A claim contradicted by the men Hickman implicated in Yates’s murder, and by Mormon historians ever since, but the conditions in Utah at the time, gives a ring of possibility to Hickman’s claim anyway. ...

[Read the rest of “This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates” at Dark City Underground]