The Pied Piper

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I am not a “murderino.” I am not endlessly fascinated by True Crime stories for whatever macabre thrill or puzzle-solving thrill they give. I'm an amateur historian who is fascinated by learning history, including “how people lived before today.”

Author Harold Schechter's murder books are simply some of the best resources for learning about quotidian history - micro-history - that I've found. The books are generally about some “crime of the century” that has long since been forgotten, but in recounting the story, Schechter sheds a light on a forgotten bit of pop history and also forgotten people and their forgotten customs and attitudes.

In this case, the setting is Tucson, Arizona in the early 1960s. It was the time of Elvis. James Dean and Marlon Brando's punk/bad-boy charisma had taken a hold on the imagination of some of America's youth. This was a moment before the “sex,drug and rock roll” of the hippies. Charles Schmid - who was in his early twenties - modeled himself on these Hollywood icons, complete with pouting lips, fake beauty mark and cosmetically-enhanced skin pallow.For unclear reasons, he had a charisma with the young people of Tucson.

Schmid was evil. He decided that he wanted to “kill a girl” and he persuaded two of his followers to set up a 15 year old neighbor as a victim. He then followed up by killing his 15 year old girlfriend - he was approximately 24 - and her 13 year old sister. He bragged about his deeds, but no one turned him in until another unstable follower informed on him. He escaped the death penalty because the Supreme Court had held the nation's death penalty laws to be unconstitutional, but was killed in jail soon after.

The story is tragic. I listened to it as an audiobook and found my heart grieving for the lost young girls.

The story is also historically informative. I was amazed at how cavalier parents of the time were in allowing their high school era daughters to date men in the mid-twenties. In fact, Schmid had married a fifteen year old the month before he was arrested with her parents' consent. Such was the time, I assume, that girls were expected to marry, the younger the better.

We also get a glimpse of life in Tucson in the early 1960s before the world changed.

Finally, the book is a meditation on the inexplicability of evil. We can't explain evil. Evil is a deformation in the good. We can observe it. We can describe it, but what “reason” would motivate such cruelty and waste is ultimately something we can only observe.

This is short book. I listened to it as an audio book in the space of an hour.