Lorna Fox Scott reviews the new Library of America volume True Crime: An American Anthology, edited by Harold Schechter.  She quotes Americans who have tried to explain acts of extreme violence that their countrymen have committed.  Cotton Mather could say that acts of violence were symptoms of irreligion.  But what would Mather have made of a case like this?

Farmer Yates, who in 1781, as he tells his examiners in what reads like an uncensored transcript, is suddenly commanded by an unidentified “Spirit” to slaughter his beloved family for being “idols”? Vividly reliving the inner struggle of human love with mystic duty, in between enthusiastic pursuits of the victims through the snow, this text stands out as the only perpetrator’s narrative in the collection; its anonymous presenter cannot in the end decide whether Yates was stricken by “the effect of insanity” or “a strong delusion of Satan.” The old certainties are fraying.

Ambrose Bierce was less interested in explaining why people commit acts of extreme violence then in pointing out the glee with which the public receives accounts of those acts:

His “Criminal Market Review” from the late 1860s is unusual for its admission that crime is not so much a deviation as the very image of the national economy: “Robberies are looking up; Assaults, active; Forgeries, dull.” Taking a swipe at the veiled Californian relish in violence–“Our joy at the mutilation of old Hulton has been deeply unspeakable; our lively interest in the shooting and hacking of and by the Dudleys, Ingham and Miller, has been testified in a novel and interesting manner by a private scalp dance at our own apartments”–Bierce links this to the war. “It pleasantly reminds us of the time when we were a soldier.” Then, like Twain satirizing the social worship of “blackguards”: “Yosemite is a conceded fiction, and the Big Trees a screaming joke…. But we are handy with the pistol and wield a butcher-knife as deftly as an Indian or anybody.”

Twentieth century writing has shown new forms of self-consciousness.  Edna Ferber’s comments on the trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann include not only scorn for the gawking crowd but sympathy for the accused murderer; Zora Neale Hurston’s reports on the trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman accused of shooting a white physician, show the defendant and the crime lost to public awareness as black and white act out the rituals of race. 

Fox quotes a haunting conversation that occurred in 1949.  A man had gunned down a dozen people on the street in his New Jersey neighborhood, then gone home.  The phone rang.  He answered it.  Calling was a reporter from The Camden Evening Courier. 

Mr. Buxton asked how many persons Unruh had killed.
 The veteran answered. “I don’t know. I haven’t counted. Looks like a pretty good score.”
  “Why are you killing people?”
  “I don’t know,” came the frank answer. “I can’t answer that yet. I’ll have to talk to you later. I’m too busy now.”

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