Killer strippers and Sarah Palin
Newsweek, it goes without saying, is a tedious, dreadful rag which nobody on earth should buy unless threatened with death or — at the very least — castration. A week or so back however I made the foolish error of purchasing a copy, seduced as I was by the cover story on ‘America’s obsession’ with True Crime, a genre for which I have some enthusiasm. Even before getting the mag home however I knew I had made a mistake, and lo and behold, when I did open it, it was full of the usual hackery explaining things I already knew, could have guessed or didn’t need to know. Particularly awful was Walter Mosley’s banal yet pretentious essay purporting to explain that the reason Americans read True Crime is because ‘we need to cleanse the modern world from our souls’. (Yes indeed Walter — that’ll be why I felt so nauseated and filthy after reading Tim Cahill’s Buried Dreams about John Wayne Gacy.) Worst of all, however, nowhere in this special issue was there mention of Fred Rosen.
Not that I was surprised. You see, Fred Rosen is the kind of True Crime author who doesn’t get glowing write-ups in prestigious magazines such as Newsweek. Although he won an award for The Historical Atlas of American Crime he still specializes in the kind of salacious, tawdry narratives that clutter up the shelves of supermarkets and thrift stores, which is where I first discovered his horrific Lobster Boy, the true story of the murder of Grady Stiles III. Stiles was a sideshow performer with ‘lobster claws’ instead of hands and feet who terrorized his family for decades before his wife paid a couple of teenage stoners to shoot him in the head. One of the most squalid and depressing narratives ever put to paper, it is — as I have argued before — full of grim truth, and in a world of tedious, pseudo- cult books that strive towards subversion, Lobster Boy is a work of genuine, fiendish anti-literature which you should buy now if you have the stomach for the tale of a man who rips his wife’s IUD out with his claw before beating her black and blue.
Since then Rosen has written many other books, all about horrible things, among them Gang Mom and the magnificently titled Body Dump. His most recent, Deadly Angel, the True Story of Alaska’s Stripper Killer was published in May of this year. Here Rosen inflicts upon the reader the grim story of Mechele Hughes a sociopathic stripper unable to spell her Christian name who spent a few years in the 1990s exposing her skin to needy males at the Great Alaskan Bush Co. strip club in Anchorage in exchange for cash and presents. One of her patrons, Kent Leppink eventually became her fiancé, but she had him shot so she could claim his $1 million life insurance policy. Well actually it’s not that simple. Evidently some kind of sexual sorceress, Hughes seems to have had at least three fiancés, and sometimes they all lived together under one roof, until she persuaded one of these dupes to kill Leppink on her behalf. Alas for Hughes, Leppink had suspected she was going to murder him, and had arranged for her name to be removed from his insurance policy before his death. With the police on her trail, Hughes fled Alaska in 1996 to start a new life as a soccer mom and all round upstanding member of the community in Olympia, Washington. Arrested ten years later, she was extradited to Alaska, where she was found guilty of Leppink’s murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. (The ex-fiancé who had pulled the trigger was also sent down, and was later murdered in jail.)
Deadly Angel, although filled with unpleasant details, is nowhere near as grotesque as Rosen’s masterpiece Lobster Boy. Even so, there are some strikingly bizarre, subterranean elements. For example, the book opens with an eerie letter Hughes’ victim Kent Leppink wrote to be opened in the event of his death, in which he fingers Hughes and her accomplice for his murder; thus his ghost has a role in directing the investigation throughout the book. Deadly Angel also contains a condensed history of strip clubs in Anchorage, precisely the kind of marginal knowledge that you only find in the sleaziest (and thus best) true crime. Hughes fled Alaska with a pet toucan in tow. Finally and perhaps most shockingly of all, the ubiquitous Sarah Palin manages to infiltrate the narrative. Fresh from her role as the butt of the joke for semi-corpse David Letterman and ten thousand other lazy-as-shit comedians, here Palin appears in her incarnation as mayor of Wasilla, where Hughes was living at the time of Leppink’s offing. Fortunately for those such as myself suffering from Sarah Palin exhaustion syndrome, those pages can be skimmed over quite quickly.
One of Rosen’s major themes in the book is the interplay between film and real life. He cites two movies in particular — Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a classic film noir about a femme fatale who persuades an insurance agent to kill her husband and The Last Seduction, in which Manhattanite Linda Fiorentino manipulates a provincial yokel into murdering her spouse. While the parallels with Double Indemnity are coincidental, it is a very different matter with The Last Seduction. According to a stripper colleague named Lora Aspotis who watched the film with Hughes: ‘She… told me that was her heroine and that she wanted to be just like her.’ The prosecutor even attempted to introduce the film as evidence against Hughes during her trial, although he was overruled.
The truth however is that while Hughes may have seen herself as a master manipulatrix and all-round sexual supervixen a la Fiorentino’s character, she was sorely mistaken. If she’d been that clever she’d never have wound up in a book written by Fred Rosen, who aptly quips in the book ‘most criminals are nowhere near as bright as they think they are.’ Indeed, Deadly Angel is a crime story entirely without mystery, in which the dead man reveals at the very beginning precisely whodunit; after that it’s just a matter of time. Pace Walter Mosley and his NPR-ready platitudes, what True Crime books such as Deadly Angel give us is not cleansing but anti-catharsis. Sure, the killer gets sent to jail, but there is no redemption, no meaning, just a profound plumbing of the astounding shallows of the human soul. Rosen confronts us with the lesson-free story of sad lives gone hopelessly wrong, and rubs our noses in the depressing rubbishness of crime. It is little surprise then that Rosen at times sounds more than a little weary. Although his prose is usually deadpan, even at times flat, occasionally a burst of contempt escapes him, such as when he describes Hughes’ transition from sociopathic stripper to model mother:
‘She gyrated her way into a new life with a combination of pelvic thrust and pole slithering…’
Or:
‘In between showing her bush at the Bush, Hughes had allegedly worked as a volunteer in various Alaska charities. Apparently, none of the men in her Alaskan life knew she was a closet humanitarian and intellectual, anxious to gain academic honours.’
However if that all sounds a little harsh, at the end of the book Rosen provides us with the details of an alternate reality in which Mechele Hughes (now Linehan) is the loving mother she reinvented herself as, tragically found guilty of a crime she did not commit. Entrance is free: all you need do is click on this link to be transported to ‘A positive place to share in the journey of bringing Mechele Linehan home.‘ You can even buy ‘Free Mechele’ merchandise, including bibs, boxer shorts and T-shirts for dogs. As for Rosen, he’s already moved on. In November he will publish Body Count: On the Murder Trail of Bayou Red, the Record Setting Serial Killer Who Terrorized the Deep South. Apparently Bayou Red killed loads of people but hardly anybody noticed. I look forward to an exceedingly grim read.
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If this were Christmas and I still had the book, I would mail you a copy of the memoirs of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, because it would make such a perfect a match between true-crime reader and book that it would align the planets.
Align the planets or hasten the end of everything? By the looks of things, I may have to declare that Christmas has come early and obtain a copy. Then again, my birthday isn’t far away…
You are one helluva writer..my favorite in fact. I’m still fascinated with the idea of Dan Kalder Fan Club. Speaking of planetary alignment..how goes your work on “The End”? You better get it out soon!