Killer Year–The Class of 2007

From the Land of Letourneau, the Pacific Northwest has another interesting case involving a female teacher and a boy.But this one represents a new low in almost every way. Jennifer Rice, 31, was charged today for having sex with a 10-year-old student.

Sex with a 10-year-old. Jeesh. What kind of sex is that?

Here’s a snip from the Seattle Times:

A former Tacoma elementary-school teacher accused of having sex with a 10-year-old boy at a freeway rest stop was charged Monday in Pierce County Superior Court with kidnapping with sexual motivation and ordered held on $500,000 bail.

Tacoma police and school-district officials said Jennifer Leigh Rice, 31, met the boy shortly after she was hired last year as a replacement teacher at McKinley Elementary School. The district did not renew her contract earlier this year.

According to charging documents, Rice took the 10-year-old boy with her when she left a party in his East Tacoma neighborhood around 3 a.m. Thursday. Police and prosecutors allege that the two were headed for an Idaho amusement park when they stopped at a rest area in Ellensburg, napped and had sex.

The boy’s father told police he had asked Rice to stay away from his son about a month ago when he became concerned about the interest Rice showed in the boy, charging documents say. The father said Rice had been to their house to watch movies with the boy, taken him on trips and communicated with him frequently by phone and online, charging papers say.

The boy’s family told police they called Rice as soon as they discovered the boy was missing. Rice told them she had not seen the child, but the boy called family members a few minutes later and said he was fine, charging papers allege.

The boy was returned to his family — dropped off at an uncle’s house in Puyallup — shortly after police told Rice an Amber Alert with information on her vehicle was being issued, prosecutors said in charging documents.

According to Tacoma School District officials, Rice was hired in October, placed on leave in April and her contract was not renewed after the school received complaints that she was socializing inappropriately with her students outside of school.

Here’s a bit more, from KOMO TV (love the quote!):

“I’m disgusted. It’s just, I can’t even talk right now,” said Toyanne Rhodes, whose 10-year-old son was Rice’s student at McKinley. “She was a good teacher. She was nice. If I ever had any questions I could call her anytime. I could talk with her, pop into her class anytime I wanted. I never would have thought.”

According to the Tacoma School District, Rice taught at McKinley from October 2006 to April 20, 2007. At that time she was placed on administrative leave while the district conducted an investigation to determine whether she was socializing with her students after school.

Rice is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail and could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

There are more questions than answers here. But, hey, questions are fun. What does a grown woman see in a boy? What kind of parents let there kid party with a grown woman until 3 a.m.? Doesn’t anyone watch the news and know that if an adult — teacher, pastor, coach — is taking too much interest in your kid, you ought to put a stop to it?

Let’s see if this tale inspires books (guilty!), TV movies, magazine covers — as did Mary Kay Letourneau’s story.

Or just plain disgust.  Time will tell.

Full disclosure here. I’ve had had my share of bad reviews. People despise me. Hate my books. Wish my mother had miscarried.

They hate my covers. Think I can’t spell. Can’t write. Don’t know a pronoun from a proctologist. Every now and then, they post on the internet book review sites just what they think about me. Sometimes I wince and wonder if they think I ran over their cat.

But I love cats and would never do that.

After A Wicked Snow came out, someone named “laci jo” posted this on Amazon.com.

I am so disappointed i cried! i know most of the players in this book and not only was the storyline awful there are a great many untruths! save your money and borrow one if you must read it…..ugggggggggggggg please my 5 year old son could do a better job! I love reading true crime books and no i don’t think i ever want to read another, by this author at least….jo

One problem. A Wicked Snow is fiction. Laci Jo says she knew most of they players in the book and they were mad at me. Hmmmm. A quick tap of the keyboard showed that LJ was a uberfan of another true crime writer.

Me thinks she didn’t read A Wicked Snow at all.

So take a moment and travel with me the literary dustbin we call Amazon. You know the place where every man is a reviewer and every writer should have known better? I’m all for discussion, reviews, book clubs, and other means of communicating a book’s shortcomings and value. But anonymous reviews sometimes smack of one-upmanship and envy. Who knows, I could be wrong. There could even be an altruistic reason for their typed ire.

Here are some of my favorite vigilante reviews of my true crime pals:

First up, M. William Phelps, who goes by the name of Matt and not William, for some strange reason (I blog with Matt over at www.crimerant.com). Here’s what Amy Vrescak of PA said about his book about Diane O’Dell, a murderous mom in Sleep in Heavenly Peace:

This story had a lot of potential to make for a fascinating read, but the author completely blows it. The writing is confusing and boring. I didn’t feel that the author was very successful in getting into Odell’s state of mind. Much of the writing was merely a report of others’ findings without any additional insight or discussion.

OMG. Much of the writing is reporting others’ findings? That’s what journalism is, dear. Reporting. If you want discussion, Amy, start a scrap booking group, for goodness sake. Seriously, I’m of the opinion that it is nearly impossible to “get into the mind” of another human
being.

Do you know what I’m thinking now? Of course not. You never really can KNOW.

Lisa, town unknown, has this to say about Aphrodite Jones concerning her book on the Michael Peterson murder case. She headlined it: Unreliable, ill-conceived, and badly written.

Another ghoulish ambulance chaser capitalizing on the grief of this poor family. It wouldn’t be so bad if the book contained facts, if it really tried to investigate what happened the night of Kathleen Peterson’s death. But it doesn’t. Jones has decided that Peterson is a sociopath and only includes information that she believes proves it. She doesn’t mention ever speaking to Michael Peterson, or to any of the people who knew him well. She has only spoken to those who had a reason to dislike him and believe him guilty. She contradicts herself so frequently that I have to believe she didn’t understand what she was talking about. The details she highlights from Peterson’s life also contradict so frequently with the other book in this vein, Diane Fanning’s “Written in Blood” that I scarcely know who to believe. They both show such obvious bias that I tend not to believe either of them. I hope Michael Peterson is guilty, and deserves the treatment he’s been given. It’s just too horrible to think of an innocent man being persecuted in this shabby way.

A decade or so ago, Aphrodite Jones was the hottest young writer in True Crime. She’s beautiful, smart, and has a great flair for the dramatic. She’s been a lot of things (author, lecturer and producer) but I can assure you, she’s never treated anyone shabbily. I have no clue if her book is trash, but I doubt it. Sometimes I doubt whether or not the reviewer READ the book, or if they were just part of the story and were mad they were shoved off the pages.

And then there’s this little winner posted by some coward named “A Reader.” Mr. or Ms. Reader takes on Dennis McDougal’s masterpiece In the Best of Families. The headline: Blah, Blah, Blah.

The review:

This book is AWFUL. Don’t waste your time or money. The writer is horrible, he’s all over the place, never keeping to the story, going off on adventures and subjects that have ZERO to do with the story AND is EXTREMELY BORING. I stopped reading 1/2 way through the book – maybe when I got nothing else to read on a rainy day I’ll finish it, or should I say, skip through the remainder as I did thus far. Horrible, horrible writing – don’t publish anymore books by this author!

Mr. Reader will be sorry to know that McDougal’s writing career has been just fine, thank you. Apparently, publishers are not so picky. And thank goodness they didn’t rely on you for marketing advice.

If there’s a better writer on this blog, I’d be hard-pressed to name him or her. Carlton Stowers has never written a dog (and most of us can cop to at least one). K. O’Brien of New Haven, CT, hated his Edgar Award-winning book, Careless Whispers.

I found this book generally interminable and sometimes incomprehensible, with poor pacing and organization, and it’s hero-worship of the detective became downright annoying. I read it many years ago, long before there was a public outcry over the convictions (and execution), but even then felt that the case was a reach. My advice is to avoid it, particularly since even the factual basis for the book is questionable at this stage.

It is hard to argue against one point made by KO. The facts changed. But what didn’t change was the riveting tale created by Stowers in Careless Whispers. The pacing was perfection.

I’d never even heard of Steven Long before coming to ICB. But from what I’ve been reading about him, his work, I doubt that this review is anything but a diatribe born of a too tight girdle. The reviewer is Kristen and she lives in Washington, DC. The book is Out of Control.

So is the review.

Very, very disappointing. I actually was happy to finish. I would have preferred some character background as most true crime books extensively cover the character. This had NONE! Horrible, scattered writing. I was having to flip back pages to see who was who. Very disappointing, especially since I was truly intrigued by this story. Pass on this book…

Now, now, if you haven’t posted a negative review, haven’t you at least clicked on the “was this review helpful” button? I have. Have I ever posted a negative review just to hurt someone? Nope.

You know maybe I should? Maybe I’ll feel better if I turn into a vigilante reviewer warning reviewers of books they should avoid. No I figured it out. They don’t want me dead. They’re trying to save the world from bad writing. Maybe save some trees.

Al Gore, are you listening? Bad reviews mean fewer books. Fewer books mean more trees.

Gregg Olsen blogs with M.William Phelps at www.crimerant.com.

Something’s wrong with one of the genres I love.

Even to admit that I love true crime books, probably makes you think I’m living a trailer park eating Doritos and watching TV all day long. But I’m not. 

At least, not the Doritos part.

Ann Rule’s latest, Too Late to Say Goodbye, debuted at number 13 on the NY Times list. Only number 13. Our Miss Ann hasn’t popped in on the list at a lower number than that—at least that I can remember—in years. Not only that, it fell off the after a couple of weeks.

Fell off!

The woman who wrote the book that was the basis for film, Boys Don’t Cry, Aphrodite Jones is being published by iUniverse. No matter how you slice it, the once heralded heiress-apparent to Ann is a self-published author now. Who would have thought that possible, say, five years ago?

Kathryn Casey, who has written some worthy TCs, is about to jump into fiction. Diane Fanning, an Edgar nominee last year for terrific true crime book, is doing the same. And why not? Print runs are larger and it’s a hell of a lot easier to make something up than to research the truth. Even I  have taken the leap.

Court TV is going to dump most of its gavel to gavel coverage next year. If you’re a TC fan, you know how much fun a trial can be—even the boring stuff is fun.

Reality is boring, remember?

Recent lists of “best TC books of all time” by Rule (and others) were devoid of any title published in the last few years.

So what happened? Two things, by my way of thinking. First, video might have killed more than the radio star. But TV also stabbed the heart of the TC publishing industry. Think about it. All of the Gretas and Nancys and Geraldos have humped the life out of so many great TC stories, that splendidly crafted and well-researched books were never written about some of the greatest cases of our time. Thank goodness TV sniffed and turned up its nose at wall-to-wall coverage of the great crime cases of the recent past. There’d be no Small Sacrifices, Fatal Vision or In Cold Blood if TV existed as it does in its current state.

Even TV shows like the CSI and Law & Order franchises have contributed to the slow death of TC. They perpetuate the easy-reader style of detective work that spoon feeds all clues and relevant details so no one has to think. Viewers/readers don’t like to think anymore. They don’t like to dig into a case the way they used to.

The way I see it, this publishing genre is on life-support. I hope that (like the cliché at the end of a teen slasher film) true crime publishing comes back to life and grabs a reader by the throat. All genres have their day — Westerns are a good example of one that has come and gone to some extent.

I’m going to eat some Doritos (OK, I lied, but in fiction, that’s OK) and plot out another novel.

By now the world knows the story of the two boys: one stolen four years  ago and one last week. Both were found and returned to their families. Both  dealing with the trauma of being abducted by a Missouri predator named Michael Devlin.

If you don’t know the story of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby, you will  soon enough. Oprah is going to have the Hornbeck family on her show  today. There will be books (I might even write one as it fits what I  do in my other life as a true crime writer). Movies. More interviews.  Magazine articles.

And on down the line.

When I think about this case, I think about other boys and girls who  have been snatched, abused, and returned. Most famously, the case of Steven  Stayner comes to mind. It was the subject of a true crime book, I KNOW MY FIRST NAME IS STEVEN.

In 1972, sex predator named Kenneth Eugene Parnell kidnapped Stayner,  then a second grader. Seven years later Parnell used Stayner to  capture another little boy, Timmy White, in Ukiah, California. The  nightmare ended when Steven went to the police for help. He wasn’t  about to let what happened to him, happen to Timmy.

There was no happy ending there. Steven died in a motorcycle accident  in 1989. His older brother, Cary, murdered four women in Yosemite in  1999 (again another true crime book). No one knows what became of little Timmy White.

I’ve often thought of Timmy. I read the book based on the Stayner case  more than once. I did a double take any time the Lifetime movie aired, showing Cary Stayner lurking in the background, the actor doing  a pretty good job of showing the confusion he felt by his brother’s  return. I cried when Steven Staynor’s life ended in that accident.

Of course, the plot of this story is true. Beneath its “I can’t  believe this happened?” surface in the Devlin case something seldom spoken  about: Boys being sexually abused by men. I was talking to a friend  the other day about what happened to him as a child, and I wanted to  tell him my own story. But even now in my 40s, I’m unable to give  voice to it.

A recent post on a blog, Crime Rant, I run with fellow true crime author M. William Phelps, came from a man named George:

I didn’t tell anyone till I came within a hair of throwing my life  away, I was 31. You have no idea the shame & guilt I felt for over 20  years. Even after years of finally dealing with all the issues  surrounding it, it still wants to destroy me. And I just had a sliver of what Shawn & Ben went through. I can tell you exactly what Shawn  felt & why he’d never tell. Keep in mind, most boys don’t.

How do you face your family, your mom, dad & everybody else & tell  them what happened to you? He felt like the lowest piece of garbage, a  freak, less than a male, any sense of masculinity shattered. He could  only imagine the eventual judgment of him by the ones he loved &  everybody else, he’d be called a fag, gay or the like. He feels that  he should’ve done something to fight him off but couldn’t/didn’t (not  that he could as a little boy), but this is what had been going  through his mind. This would all rush into his mind the very first  time it happened, what do you think it was like after the 50th, 100th?

I can’t even begin to imagine the whole dynamic of the kidnapping &  being torn from your family & threats to him & his family. Now the whole world knows it?

I appreciate George’s brave post. He has more guts than I. But now I’m thinking of Shawn and Ben and all the others and I’m hopeful  they will recover and live happy, safe, productive lives, knowing that whatever happened to them was not their fault.

I’ll read the book about Devlin. Like I said, I might even write it.  No matter what I do, however, I know one thing with complete certainty: I’ll never understand why a grown man would do that to a  child.

True crime author Gregg Olsen’s first novel, A WICKED SNOW, will be released by Pinnacle in March.