One mental exercise I'm putting myself through--while I'm stuck inside with nothing to exercise but my mental meat--is, reading texts written by, or on behalf of people who are now historically known to have lied. (Or who a headshrinker could more generously describe as functionally delusional) I'm starting with the three earliest books on the Amityville Horror. Before I dove into Jay Anson's elaboration on the folklore created by George and Kathleen Lutz, and the probably-incredibly-sleazy coattail riding book by quack psychic Hans Holzer (on which the fabulously disgusting AMITYVILLE 2 is based), I thought I should read the book about the DeFeo murders perpetuated at the iconic Ocean Avenue home before it was haunted by the "horror". High Hopes was written by prosecutor Gerard Sullivan, and though I expected this to be the truest of the "true" stories, it presents its own evidence of extreme bias.
Let me say first that I'm a bit of a crime buff, and that means I have to be hypervigilant about copaganda. For instance, I'm gaga for Ann Rule, who was not only an ex-cop--I thought I read that she was the first female officer in Seattle?--but she described the cops that figured into her reportage with a kind of intensely seductive poetry, transforming them into something like heroes of the old west. It's incredibly convincing, and I have to remind myself that Rule was from a whole family of cops with a very particular perspective, one that many people would find troublesome--including myself.
So anyway, though I was champing at the bit to read this courtside account of Ron DeFeo Jr's inexplicable annihilation of his family, Sullivan quickly indicted himself as someone I probably shouldn't trust. The first red flag came in the from of an odd tendency to break down other people into cop-lovers and cop-haters. Ok, so those might be considered facts... But then, he tries to acquit himself of bias against the defendants he tries, by insisting that he is only able to commit to prosecuting someone if he feels in his bones that they are truly guilty. His "proof"? He once contributed to the acquittal of a cop who had been accused of sodomizing two 14 year old girls. He doesn't say what his suspicions about the case were, or why he thinks the young girls would have told this gruesome lie. He does say that the cop was cast in a bad light by his personal porno consumption, though he is not able to go so far as to call that the sole piece of evidence in the case. It's unclear how it all even came to trial. But he protected a cop from a rape charge, and that's meant to be evidence of his dogged and unbiased devotion to the law. Can't wait to read the rest of this whopper!