Long Dark Road: Bill King And Murder In Jasper, Texas

Rating:
Summary: Dark road to a darker place
Review: Authors and psychologists can spend lifetimes trying to know what shadows know. They prowl the obscure corners of human behavior, seeking to drag something back out to the light. But sometimes, the path only leads them deeper, darker.

Dr. Ricardo Ainslie -- both an author and a psychologist -- has been chasing shadows along Huff Creek Road in Jasper, where James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in one of the past century's grisliest hate crimes. And each step has taken him deeper into the darkest recesses of a decayed mind.

Countless articles, books and films have documented how King and two white friends -- fellow ex-con Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry -- offered the drunken Byrd a ride in the wee hours of June 7, 1998. But they didn't take him home. Instead, they chained him by the ankles to the rear bumper of Berry's truck and literally dragged him to pieces on a hard-pan logging road. They purposely left his dismembered corpse in the front yard of a small African-American church and cemetery.

And King -- whose body was almost completely swathed in racist and Satanic tattoos, whose apartment concealed a stash of racist literature and clothing splattered by Byrd's blood, and whose distinctive cigarette lighter was found at the scene -- was the first of the three to stand trial. Widely seen as the ringleader of the butchery, he was convicted and sentenced to die. Unrepentant and his appeals all but exhausted, the 29-year-old King now awaits execution.

But those trials didn't answer a central question: What made Bill King a monster?

Partly at the request of King's father, the 55-year-old University of Texas psychology professor was drawn deep into the sometime savage, sometimes frighteningly ordinary world of a small-town killer.

"Bill King, the man, is much more human than we would care to think," Ainslie writes. "When the global media descended ... in a relentless hunt for sensational material, they constructed a perhaps comforting, but ultimately obscuring, myth about King's monstrous nature. ... The truth is that King is all too close, in kind and in temperament, to me or to you."

In King, we see a dim and distant reflection of ourselves, Ainslie suggests. Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to portray the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust, and Ainslie invokes it for other acts of evil.

"To attempt to understand the motives at work in Bill King's life, to understand that there were reasons for his behavior, is not to exonerate him," Ainslie explains. "If we avoid examining King's life for fear that such an effort might appear to excuse him, then we risk missing precisely what we most need to know about this story."

One of the most unsettling elements of the 254-page "Long Dark Road" is its hypothesis that "given the right alchemy, perhaps anyone might become capable of monstrous cruelty."

"The transgressions involved may not be as momentously horrifying as the dragging death of an innocent man," Ainslie says, "but I believe that human beings, by nature and perhaps by wiring, struggle with our dark sides. This is one of the key premises of Christianity."

Rating:
Summary: Rehash
Review: I was so looking forward to reading this book, LONG DARK ROAD,(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) when I purchased it. I was very disappointed after the first two chapters. The 44 pages of the second chapter read almost word for word like a rehash of what Joyce King wrote with freshness and eloquence in her book, HATE CRIME, which was first published by Random House in 2002 and then by Anchor Books in 2003. On several pages, it looks like Ainslie simply rearranged some of Joyce King's wording. So I found myself desperately looking for originality in Ainslie's text, because he never acknowledges Joyce King's all-too obvious influence on his writing. Ainslie introduces some interesting psychoanalytic theories re: King in the middle of the book, including some, but not entirely new info on family history. Missing, however, is attention to the fact that most prisoners suffer from some form of mental illness, are usually poor, often come from dysfunctional families and have fallen through the cracks of the mental health care system in this country. Clear recommendations for early mental health care intervention for juvenile delinquents would have made Ainslie's efforts here more compelling and plausible. It is not clear why Ainslie interviewed King at all without clear recommendations in place for what could have been done to prevent Bill King's violent, criminal behavior. Instead of researching the failures of a system that places mentally ill juvenile delinquents in penal institutions with violent offenders, Ainslie focusses on the point that Joyce King already made clear in HATE CRIME--that there is a need for prison reform. We already read that in HATE CRIME. Moreover, Ainslie does not offer any comparative analysis of Bill King with other poor, bi-polar, traumatized young men or women who are housed in U.S. prisons or on death row. It is not at all clear where Bill King, then, stands in the broader analysis of the type of psychological study Ainslie is engaged in. The reader learns little that is new here. Moreover, they learn nothing new about Bill King's psychological condition that can not already be easily gleaned from news reports on the case, Joyce King's HATE CRIME, or other previously published materials on the dragging of James Byrd, Jr. I found this book lacking in depth and breadth of analysis.