The meeting was called to order by president Marilyn
Victor. Introductions were made around the room. This is the first meeting with
the new officers.
Membership dues are due January 1. The treasurer is Wendy
Nelson. The amount is $50 and national wants a registration form filled out for
each person so use the one you were mailed or pick up a copy here tonight.
Libby Fischer Hellman was at OUAC for a book signing on
November 15. She is the national president of Sisters in Crime. Some members
went to French Meadow with her after her signing to talk about Sisters in Crime.
She talked about the 20th Anniversary celebration that will run from
Bouchercon 2006 through Bouchercon 2007. She also noted they are still looking
for newspaper monitors. Internet access means you aren’t limited to your local
paper.
Robyn van Horn updated us on the status of the Minnesota
authors project. She has added websites and published dates. It currently has 74
authors after deleting some long deceased authors. It has been sent to Charity
Tahmaseb who will post it to the web. A copy was passed around.
Several books were discussed as options for the next few
months. We decided on:
January – Whiteout by Ken Follett
February – Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
March – Open and Shut by David Rosenfelt
This month our book was anything by Michael Connelly.
Several members read a book by him and quite a few titles were mentioned. He was
generally well liked.
Our speakers for the evening were two members of the Dakota
County Sheriff’s forensic computer examination department. MIS staffer Meredith
Tanner and Deputy Coreen Kulvich were chosen to create this department when a
backlog of computers sent out for analysis lead to a decision to train people to
do this in-house. They spoke about the types of data they look for on
confiscated computers and how the computer has to be handled in order for the
information to be admissible in court. They also spoke about the specialized
software that allows them to search temporary or deleted files to find data on a
hard drive that will help the case against a suspect.
As was noted in the newsletter
and on the Chapter website, there was no regular meeting in September, due to a
scheduling conflict at our regular site. Our normal October meeting
resumed on October 4, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. at Once Upon a Crime. All officers
were present, along with a quorum of regular members.
Treasurer's Report.
The Chapter treasury currently has a positive balance of $720.00, with no
transactions since the last report. The Chapter will spend $150 on the dinner
to honor Minnesota authors in November, but none of those funds have yet been
disbursed.
BYLAWS VOTE.
The revised bylaws were approved and adopted unanimously by all members and
officers. They become effective and binding upon the Chapter as of November 1,
2005
ELECTION OF 2006 OFFICERS:
Since the November
meeting will be taken up entirely with the awards dinner, with little or no
business meeting, and since there was a quorum present and all offices were
uncontested, it was moved, seconded, and approved that we hold the election of
next years officers without further delay. The new officers for 2006 will be:
President: Marilyn Victor
Vice President: Robyn Van Horn
Secretary: Kimberly Reis
Treasurer: Wendy Nelson
Newsletter Editor; Pat Dennis
Web Maven: Charity Tahmaseb
Hearty congratulations and
thanks to them all for volunteering their valuable time and talent to keep our
chapter viable and working.
Dues
for 2006 are now being collected by Treasurer Ellen Kuhfeld. Once again, dues
are $50 for the year, with $40 of that amount going to the national Sisters in
Crime organization. Ellen will again take care of mailing in all the national
membership applications, so those of you who have paid her can ignore the
national renewal notices that you get in the mail.
Our October book
(originally our September book) was
Los Alamos,
by Joseph Kanon, a historical mystery set against the Manhattan Project,
which produced the world's first atomic bomb. The main character is an
undercover officer for Army Intelligence, sent to the Los Alamos site to
discretely investigate the murder of a minor security guard. The murder may or
may not be linked to the Project, which is so secret that its purpose is never
even spoken out loud and which really did attract not one but two active Soviet
spy rings. Some people felt that at over 500 pages, it was about 150 pages too
long, but all agreed that it is a fine piece of writing, highly evocative of
this very frightening period of history and laced with rich background and well
developed characters. Some people felt that the love affair between the main
character and the wife of one of the atomic scientists was a needless
distraction. This writer feels that Joseph Kanon's work is about as close to
"fine literature" as one ever finds in straight genre, and
Los Alamos
is quite possibly his best work.
For those who may be
interested in the period, the definitive work on the a-bomb project is Richard
Rhodes 'astonishingly thorough nonfiction book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
which has recently been reissued in trade paperback. There has also been at
least one other murder mystery set against the project, an early work by Martin
Cruz Smith, called Stallion Gate. It takes its title from the original
local (New Mexico) name of the Trinity test site, where the first atomic bomb
was exploded. It is perhaps less successful as a murder mystery than Kanon's
book, but equally well researched.
No new book was selected. For
November, we will not have a book discussion, due to the awards meeting. The
December book selection will be any book by Michael Connelly, which
was originally to have been our October selection. At the December meeting, we
will also take suggestions for 2006 books.
Our Guest Speaker
for the evening was Sue Matt, who is with the United States Postal
Inspection Service. The USPIS exists to "protect the mail and its customers
from criminal attack," and is the nation's oldest law-enforcement agency,
proudly claiming Ben Franklin as its first member. Its members are regular
law-enforcement officers, and they carry firearms, have subpoena and search
warrant authority, and arrest about 1,900 criminals annually. They graduate
from a 14-week course at the agency's training academy in Potomac, Maryland and
go on to intensive post-basic training in specific subjects, after which they
are eligible to become "case agents." Mandatory retirement age in the Service
is 57, so an applicant must be younger than 37 to begin the program. At the end
of week 8 in the Academy, trainees find out where they will be sent as their
first duty assignment. Sue, a former letter-carrier, works in the Saint Paul
office, which has 20 inspectors. District headquarters is in Denver, and its
authority also includes a two-person office in Sioux Falls and a one-person
office in Fargo. "They don't have a lot of crime in North Dakota," says Sue,
"but they prosecute everything."
Sue spends about half her time
in the office and half in the field, doing interviews, arrests, etc. Typical
USPIS cases may involve mail theft, mail fraud, identity theft, bogus
solicitations, bogus invoices, or the mailing of illegal substances, including
drugs, bombs, and child pornography. Cases can be referred by victims, by the
Federal Attorney General's office, or by any number of local police and similar
agencies. Cases often involve overlapping participation by other agencies.
These are a busy times for the
agency, especially since the rise of Internet crime. "Scams that have been
around for hundreds of years are being reborn on the Internet." And while the
initial contact is purely electronic, most scams sooner or later use the U S
Mail to send money or other materials, making them fair game for USPIS
investigation and Federal prosecution. Currently popular is something called a
"419 Scheme," because it bases its scam on Section 419 of the Nigerian Penal
Code. The victim is asked to provide a valid US bank account number, so that
huge amounts of money can be funneled through it to circumvent the 419 Law, with
the victim supposedly getting a substantial handling fee. The account, of
course, is immediately cleaned out, though sometimes the victim is first asked
to provide some front money for "legal fees." There are many variations, some
of them also coming quite close to the very old, possibly ancient, "Spanish
prisoner" scam. Sue handled one such case in which the perpetrator was a
50-year old Albert Lee woman who conducted her illegal business from a rented
post office box in Mason City, some 60 miles distant, and actually put on a
disguise when she went there to collect her mail! Part of her scam also
involved posing as a psychic, for which she variously used the names Dr. Azea,
Unique, or Aaron. She also made use of her very persuasive telephone
personality, which proved to be the thing that ultimately gave her away.
The USPIS also has its own
equivalent of an Internal Affairs investigation office, which has always
maintained "a zero-tolerance for USPS employee theft." Employees are routinely
watched through one-way glass, and there is no such thing as a minor infraction
of mail-tampering. Mail can only be opened with a search warrant from a federal
judge, except in rare cases of possible explosive or otherwise hazardous
packages.
Anthrax has totally changed
the way the Post Office does business. There is dust everywhere in mail-sorting
facilities, as one would expect, but all such places now have BDS (Bio Detection
System) equipment which routinely takes air samples and tests airborne dust
against "library samples" of dangerous substances. There are many hoaxes, of
course, but they are all taken seriously. There is also portable equipment, for
checking dust at remote sites.
Sue was an animated speaker
who obviously enjoys her profession, and it was a real pleasure hearing her. We
were, alas, out of Sisters in crime mugs at the moment, and she had to settle
for our enthusiastic thanks and a Once Upon a Crime Mug. Thanks, Gary.
As mentioned earlier, our
November meeting will be a dinner party at Soba's Restaurant, to honor our
Minnesota authors who won awards this year, and also to thank our hosts at Once
Upon a Crime, Pat and Gary Schultz. President Bobbye Johnson is coordinating
the particulars via direct email to the members. On December 6, we will
be back at our usual spot, with our speakers being the forensic computer experts
who were originally scheduled in September.
Other upcoming events:
National Sisters in Crime
President, Libby Hellmann, will be at OUAC Tuesday, November 15 at 7:00 pm, to
promote her new book. She would be most interested in meeting any of our
members afterwards.
National Vice President,
Rochelle Krich, will be in Minneapolis November 9 at 7:30, speaking at Kenneseth
Israel.
The June meeting was well
attended and marked by a fairly large amount of formal business.
BYLAWS VOTE.
The Chapter bylaws have now been completely rewritten and updated to reflect the
actual organization and structure of our chapter. The complete text of the
new bylaws is included at the end of this report, and at the September meeting,
a vote to adopt will be held. (Note:
to save space, the bylaws are not included on the website. Please email
Charity if you would like
a copy.) Only attending members may vote, no proxies allowed, and a simple
majority is sufficient for adoption (see Article X, Section 5, and Article XV.)
Should a majority of attending members feel that further revision is needed, the
adoption schedule will be moved back two months, to allow for 30 days advance
review of the new version.
We now have speakers or
programs lined up for the remainder of the year. In September, we
will have the two-person computer-forensics team from the Dakota County
Sheriff's department, which is sure to be popular. In October, we will
have a USPS postal inspector, being coordinated by Heather Farmer. In either
November or December, we will do an awards dinner meeting, to honor
our local writers who have won national awards this year. Pat Dennis is
researching the logistics, checking costs, etc. We currently have $723 in the
Chapter treasury, and it was moved and approved that in addition to buying the
dinner for the honorees, we will pay $150 towards the expenses of all members
who attend, prorated evenly among them. For the one remaining meeting of the
year, Catten Ely, who was our May speaker, will return to do a practical
demonstration of fingerprinting technology. We need to let her know which date
we want her for, immediately after the September meeting.
Bobbye Johnson has ordered a
rubber stamp for putting the Chapter logo onto bookmarks.
Even though the Minnesota
authors listing is nominally done, Robyn is continuing to receive additional or
updated information. So far, it has proved possible to incorporate it all into
the final edition, but we may have to arbitrarily assign a cutoff date sometime
soon. Once the list is incorporated into our website, it becomes much more
difficult to change.
Our book selection for the
month was Owl of the Desert by Ida Swearingen. This is a very
original work, part mystery, part suspense, and partly in a unique category that
has no familiar label. Seven or eight members had read it, and all found
something to like in it, including a strong main character, engrossing story
line, original and adept use of the language, rich local color, and a very sure
narrative voice. Surprisingly, this is a first novel, and we look forward to
many more fine works from Ms. Swearingen.
Our speaker for the evening
was Randy Nikula, who is a federal Probation Officer and the twin
brother of our February speaker, Tony nikula. He has a bachelors degree from
the University of Wisconsin Superior and a masters from the Humphrey Institute.
His first job was in a correctional halfway house (as opposed to a "treatment
halfway house") for gross misdemeanor offenders - DWI's, domestic abusers, etc.
He has been with the U. S. Probation Office for three years now.
The federal government divides
the United States into 93 criminal justice districts. All of Minnesota is a
single district, simply the "District of Minnesota." Wisconsin has two. There
are four federal prisons in Minnesota - Duluth, Sandstone, Rochester, and Waseca
- all of them for men, and five federal probation offices - Duluth, Fergus
Falls, Bemidji, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Nikula works in the St. Paul
office.
Most of the offenders in
Minnesota's federal prisons are there for drug offenses., cases generated by the
FBI, ATF, or DEA. In recent years, a higher and higher proportion of the cases
involve meth labs, with the majority of the offenders being from the outstate
areas. The geographical areas of heavy meth use are not well defined at this
time, but the preferred place of manufacture is definitely the isolated and
rural parts of the state. Bank robbery and kidnapping involving interstate
transport, of course, are also federal offenses, but they are fairly rare in
this part of the country. And lesser offenses such as assault would only fall
under U.S. jurisdiction if they occurred on federal property. United States
Attorneys decide whom to prosecute, in close cooperation with local
authorities. It's less a matter of specific quantities of drugs involved than
the viciousness of the offender and how badly all authorities want him out of
circulation. Federal sentences are generally harsher than local ones, and even
with parole, an offender will wind up doing 85% of his sentence behind bars.
And time spent in a federal prison is usually regarded as "harder" time than in
a state facility.
Besides supervising parolees,
U. S. Probation Officers also supervise people in the Witness Protection
Program, called WITSEC, and perform pre-sentencing investigations (PSI's) for
convicted felons. Every case must have a PSI, and it is done with a rather
interesting "point system." Every crime has a "base offense score," a specific
and predetermined number. From that, points are added or subtracted based on
information learned from interviews with family, friends, girlfriends, etc., and
on the behavior and attitude of the offender himself. So a given felon might
get two points off for being cooperative with his guards, say, and four points
added for coming from a family of known criminals. PSI interviews are never
taped, and some subjectivity on the part of the interviewing officer is
allowed.
Parole is defined as
"Supervised Release" in the federal system, and it follows much the same pattern
as in any criminal justice system. It is regarded as a transitional program,
integrating the felon back into society, and the goal of the PO is to get the
subject to adapt, rather than to look for petty reasons to send him back to
prison. There are a few exceptions. Possession of a firearm or association
with other known felons is virtually an automatic cause for a return to
custody. Even then, though, the return will be for three years, maximum. The
federal system is stingy about granting supervised release, and once it is
granted, it is usually not rescinded. There are 13 standard conditions that the
parolee must meet - holding a job, not lying to his PO, reporting all moves and
all contact with police, etc. - and most released prisoners manage to follow
them.
The PO's assigned to
supervised release programs also have the duty of administering the "Third
Party Risk" program, which means notifying "pertinent citizens" of the released
felons who are at liberty in their areas.
Not too surprisingly, staff
for all the above duties is at a critical level. "Since 9/11," says Nikula,
"there have been big, big budget cuts for everybody except 'antiterrorists.'
There are fewer and fewer PO's to do a constant or increasing amount of work."
Sad but familiar.
Robyn Van Horn has now
completed the list of Minnesota authors and their works for our web site, and
she presented it at the May meeting. The finished product ran to fifteen pages
and included over 70 authors! Who would have thought that Lake Woebegone would
be such a hotbed for sinister prose? Congratulations and many thanks to Robyn
for a most impressive job.
At the time of the meeting, we
still had no speakers lined up for the rest of the year. Since then, we have
acquired speakers for June and September, leaving the last three meetings of the
year still up for grabs.
Our June speaker will
be Randy Nikula. Randy is the brother of St. Louis Park Police
investigator Tony Nikula, who spoke to our group in February.
In September, we will
have Coreen Kulvich and Meredith Tanner, who together compose the
computer forensics team of the Dakota County Sheriff's Department. This is a
brand new and fascinating field, and one that is sure to grow exponentially, as
more and more criminal cases involve evidence which only exists electronically.
Kulvich and Tanner are real pioneers, and this promises to be a not-to-be-missed
presentation. There is a good write-up on the pair in the March 6 edition of the
Pioneer Press (page 3C.) It states in part, "Their findings have helped
garner convictions on everything from arson to tax fraud, but about half of the
36 forensics examinations they've completed in the last year relate to child
pornography or sex crimes."
Our May book selection, A
Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer, may not have been the most
disliked book we have ever picked, but everyone agreed that it was easily the
slowest. Nobody in the group was able to finish it, though one member says
she's still trying, somewhere around page 220. Robyn Van Horn said she gave up
after five attempts. A cursory look at the beginning gives a good indication of
why: the entire first page has only three sentences! Two of them are each over
seven lines long and have too many subjunctive and parenthetical phrases to
count. The overall effect is either exasperating or soporific, depending on
one's mindset at the time. Worse yet, the plot also follows a convoluted and
totally unhurried path, with no murder until about page 150, which most readers
will not reach. This is not typical of Margaret Frazer's writing at all, and
the consensus is that she was seeking to invoke an aura of the historical period
of the book (A.D. 1434) by adopting a deliberately dated style. If so, it was
not a well chosen strategy. One is reminded of Sinclair Lewis, who set out to
portray the stultifying effect of small town life and succeeded so well that the
resulting book, Mainstreet, is almost unreadable. So is A Play of
Isaac.
Our speaker for the evening
was Catten Ely (pronounced with a short "a," just as in the familiar
feline noun.) Ms. Ely has had a varied career in writing, communications, and
teaching, and has just completed her master's thesis (she graduated the day
after our meeting) on the topic of Cold Case Investigation. She taught the
class "CSI: The Basics" at Metro State University and is P.O.S.T. (Peace Officer
Standards and Training -- now required for entry into virtually all law
enforcement agencies) certified. She shared some of her thoughts about
forensics, including the famous Locard's Exchange Principle. Since it is
often referred to and seldom actually presented, it is reproduced here in its
entirety:
"Wherever he steps, whatever
he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent
witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his
hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves,
the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of
these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not
forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent
because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot
be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human
failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value."
We do not have a date for the
theorem, but Edmond Locard lived from 1877 to 1966, so presumably, his thoughts
have been with us for the better part of a century. In a similar vein, this
year marks the 100th anniversary of the first murder case (in Deptford, just
outside London) to be solved and successfully prosecuted by the use of
fingerprints. So except for DNA matching, most of what we think of as "modern"
forensics has been with us for quite a long time now. The real breakthroughs in
the last decade or so have been in the classifying and sharing of data across
jurisdictional and geographical lines. Things like tire treads, typewriter
characters, and even the exact pattern of soles on shoes, which used to be the
protected data turf of the FBI or Scotland Yard labs, are now available to any
police department which has a computer and the right subscription licenses.
Fingerprint matching is now virtually instant for all major jurisdictions, with
a national and sometimes even international data base. The era is nearly gone,
when a criminal could lose his past and begin a whole new career of offenses,
simply by migrating to a different part of the country.
The problem for the modern
criminologist can often be one of sorting out the junk. "Real crime cases,"
says Ely, "are full of flukes, inconsistencies, and actions which make no
sense." And every one of those actions, of course, leaves a trace. Fictional
crimes are often marked by red herrings, but real crimes are simply marked by a
lot of clutter.
And as thorough as
investigative techniques are today, there are still perfect crimes. "Poisoning
used to be easy to get away with in Minnesota," due purely to the limited number
of toxin checks in the standard autopsy. Ely also cited a case of attempted
murder in Abilene, in which a woman was progressively poisoning her husband with
antifreeze. It has a sweet taste and can easily be masked by coffee or
alcoholic drinks. Hard-to-detect poisons do not have to be exotic.
For you writers of frigid
felonies, by the way, Ely mentioned that all Minnesota statutes, criminal and
civil, are now available on line. Some of them are surprising. Abduction, for
instance, is DEFINED in Minnesota as being "for purposes of marriage." So
unless a child abductor, for instance, crosses state lines, we really do not
have a very good handle on prosecuting him or her.
With regard to TV "real crime"
programs:
CSI
is not technically very well done at all. Particularly annoying is the
profuse use of luminol in ordinary light. Real luminol only works only
in a totally darkened setting with a "black light" activating source, and its
use in general is declining anyway, as it tends to destroy DNA evidence and is,
itself, a carcinogen. Much more common now is flourescein, which is more
sensitive than luminol. Like luminol, it requires an alternate light source to
reveal the stains, but it does not require complete darkness to work. It
fluoresces green, rather than blue.
Homicide
is very well done technically and is highly recommended. It is now
available on DVD, without all the commercials.
Ms. Ely also handed out an
extensive recommended bibliography of nonfiction books about forensic science
and/or specific cases, plus a list of crime fiction authors who consistently get
the technology right. Those who missed the meeting may also obtain the lists
from her, via email.
by Rich Thompson
The business meeting in April
was fairly short. Ellen Kuhfeld reminded us that she needs both artwork and
text to keep the newsletter going at it present size and format. Robyn Van Horn
is continuing her work on the Minnesota authors' catalogue for the web site and
needs all the input she can get.
At least four of our members
are going to Mayhem in the Midlands in Omaha, on Memorial Day weekend.
This is a very reader-oriented conference and is often referred to as the
friendliest of the many annual mystery conferences. Less well known but also
coming up soon is Of Dark and
Stormy Nights XXIII, to be held June 11 in Chicago. This is run by the
Midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America and is very craft-oriented, with
many workshops, critique sessions, "pitch" sessions, etc. Registration cost is
$160 for MWA members, $185 for the rest of us.
As of this writing, we have no
speaker for June, nor for the remainder of the year after summer break. A
little help here, please, Sisters. It's your chapter, and it won't work
indefinitely if we all just rely on the efforts of a small number of committed
activists.
The collection of books for
Operation Paperback, at this year's Pikes Peak Writers Conference, was a
huge success. Members brought so many donations that your humble Secretary
couldn't even think about taking them on his airline flight, and they were
shipped to the conference via Parcel Post instead, all 52.5 pounds of them!
Many thanks to everyone who helped. Our men and women in uniform will be even
more thankful.
Our April book selection,
Cold Slice by L. T. Fawkes, was read by six highly entertained
members, who called it "a delightful book in which to lose yourself." It's
about a down-and-out ex-carpenter who, along with his fellow pizza-delivery
drivers, decides to solve the murder of one of their "crew." The book is full
of colorful, believable blue-collar characters and zany Janet Evanovitch-style
humor. As gritty and hardboiled as it is, many people are surprised to learn
that the author is a woman. The only complaints with the book were that, like
many first novels, it has so many characters that "you need a score sheet to
keep track of them all." But it has a well-crafted plot despite its frequent
wanderings, and a "good pivotal final clue." Nobody disliked the book.
Our book selection for May is
A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer.
Members who saw the film
adaptation of Hostage had little to say about it, possibly because it
seems to have little to do with the book. Devoted fans of Robert Crais
are advised to give it a miss, though fans of Bruce Willis will probably like
it.
Our speaker for the evening
was Orono Police Chief Stephanie Good, who says she has had "writer's
block for 44 years." She claims that she originally went into law enforcement
to learn about life, so she could be a writer. "They never asked me if I could
shoot somebody. I would have said 'no,' but they didn't ask, so I got hired."
Orono is one of the small
communities bordering Lake Minnetonka. They have a police force of twenty
officers, plus the Chief, and they also contract to do the law enforcement work
for the cities of Long Lake, Minnetonka Beach, and Spring Lake Park. Good is
not only their first woman Chief, but was also their first woman officer of any
kind and their first woman detective. Toady, there are two other women on the
force.
Between employment stints at
Orono, Chief Good worked for several years at the state Bureau of Criminal
Apprehension, where she worked on, among other cases, the Theodore Wirth serial
killer case, which was ultimately broken by the discovery of a drivers license,
dropped in a dried up creek bed! The killer turned out to be a man who was
already on "intensive supervised parole" from a prior conviction. Typically, he
killed another victim, or at least tried to, immediately after every visit from
his parole officer, since he knew that was the only time he would not be under
direct surveillance. The case also involved one copycat killing, where the
murderer borrowed the Wirth killer's MO to hide his own connection to the
victim.
At the time Good started at
the BCA, Minnesota had no sex-offender registration and no way to tap predatory
offender data bases of other states, making us something of a haven for habitual
predators. In 1998, then-Governor Ventura was trying to promote a new stadium
for the Twins, and he made a pitch on local TV news programs, asking people to
donate their state income tax rebates to the project. The same night, by pure
coincidence, Good was interviewed on KSTP, making a pitch for the creation of a
state-of-the-art criminal data base and registration program. Nothing happened
in the state legislature, but the broadcast generated an official reprimand from
the Commissioner of Public Safety, for the effrontery to the Governor. It also
generated over $650,000 in donations. The state's data system was born, or at
least begun. Since then, it has been credited with being indispensable in
solving the Dru Sjodin case, among many others.
We also heard about a lot of
frustration among police officers over the criminal justice system in
Minnesota. This is due, as much as anything else, to simple lack of prison
space. A life sentence here is defined as 35 years, but with an
elaborate system of "earning " time off, murderers can wind up actually serving
as little as four years behind bars. The standard sentence for first degree
rape is 43 months, with just as tiny a fraction likely to be actually served.
And with the state in ever deeper financial trouble and little public interest
in building more prisons, there is little prospect for that to change any time
soon. While at the BCA, Good worked on two baby-shaking murder cases. One
killer wound up getting sentenced to five years, and one -- the one who happened
to be a middle-class college kid -- got off with probation. She also echoed the
sentiment we have heard from several other police officers, that judges tend to
have delusions of grandeur about the effects of their restraining orders.
Stalkers and abusers of girlfriends, in particular, couldn't care less about
them.
Good also shared some
anecdotes with us about the lighter side of law enforcement around Lake
Minnetonka, and her allotted time slipped away all too quickly. Many thanks,
Chief.
Join us on May 3, 2005, when
our speaker will be Catten Ely, who will take us into the fascinating and
ever popular world of crime scene investigation, among other topics.
by Rich Thompson
Our president, Bobbye Johnson,
was off in sunny El Paso this month, for Left Coast Crime, and the meeting was
ably conducted by Vice President Robyn Van Horn.
There is nothing new to report
on the Minnesota authors project for our website. Robyn is still in need of
input from all you longtime readers of mysteries from Frostbite Falls. Email
her with whatever you have, even if it is not totally complete.
Operation Paperback
will be run again this year at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, in late
April. Conference staff collect new or good-condition paperbacks for shipment
to U.S. military bases and camps all over the world. This is an all-volunteer,
zero-overhead operation, with even the shipping done free of charge by the Air
Force. All books go directly to troops in the field, who are enormously
grateful for them. Anyone wishing to contribute books should bring them to the
April meeting, and they will be taken to the conference by Rich Thompson. Any
genre is acceptable, including readable nonfiction. Standard paperback only,
though, - no hardcover or trade paperback.
We will stay with Cold
Slice as the April book selection, even though it is not in the Ramsey
County or St. Paul library systems. At least six members report being able to
get a copy, which should be sufficient. Other monthly selections remain
unchanged, as well, with November and December deliberately left open at this
time. The selection list is now regularly posted on the back of the
All Points Bulletin, for handy reference. The book for October will be
any book by Michael Connelly, which was omitted from last month's posting.
As of this writing, the film
version of our January book, Hostage by Robert Crais, has finally
opened in Twin Cities theaters, to extremely mixed reviews. Chris Hewett of the
Pioneer Press hated it, which some of us usually take as a high
recommendation. The film section of the New York Times gave it a rather
ambiguous review, and the TV film critics, Roper and Ebert, disagreed strongly
on their ratings. This is very much in keeping with our own chapter's
evaluation of the book, with many of the same complaints being leveled at both
book and film (e.g. plot too complicated, some premises not believable, etc.)
Our book for March was
Monkeewrench, by P. J. Tracy, which is actually the pen name of a
mother-daughter writing team. The story involves a Twin Cities software company
that is developing a murder-mystery computer game which seems to be spawning
copycat murders in the real world, even though the game hasn't even been
released to the public yet. Not too surprisingly (since the book has been
nominated for several awards and won the Anthony for best first novel at last
year's Bouchercon,) everyone who read the book found something to like in it.
The plotting is tight, pacing is good, and the tension builds nicely to a
logical climax. The authors also make very effective use of local color. Minor
complaints were that the beginning jumps around too much and that it has too
many characters, none of whom is developed very deeply.
The authors will be at Once
Upon a Crime on April 29.
Our speaker for the evening
was Court Sylvester, who is a civil lawyer specializing in product
liability litigation, usually working for the defense. This is actually a
fairly narrow specialty, he says, though it can frequently be very
high-profile. The bulk of civil litigation has to do with business disputes,
known as "commercial litigation," rather than liability cases. The popular
notion that the courts are clogged with injury and damage suits, frequently
trivial or absurd, is simply not true, says Sylvester, even though "there is no
threshold of evidence to initiate litigation," i.e. no civil equivalent to the
grand jury system. The answer to the endlessly repeated question of , "Can I be
sued if I ..." is categorically, always, "Yes!" There is no human activity,
however innocent, for which one can NEVER be sued. However, plaintiffs with
patently absurd suits will find it very hard to get an attorney, and impossible
to get one to work on a contingency fee. And if an extremely frivolous suit is
dismissed early in the litigation process, the plaintiff can even be required to
pay court costs. The appropriate question is not "Can I be sued?" but "Can I
be SUCCESSFULLY sued?"
Civil litigation is about
money, always. Even in cases involving a death (such as car fires, which are
grimly referred to as "crispy critters cases") the loss of life will have a
dollar value assigned to it. Civil courts cannot impose criminal penalties,
and even "punitive damages" are forbidden in many states, though "intangible
damages" may be assigned. The rules of evidence and the burden of proof are
also much looser than in criminal cases, with the O. J. Simpson criminal trial
and later civil suit being a good example. Liability, unlike guilt as such, may
also be less than absolute, with juries sometimes being asked to assign a
"percentage of blame" to plaintiff and defendant. Minnesota is a so-called 51%
state. This means that if the plaintiff is 51% responsible for his own
troubles, he will be awarded nothing from the defendant, whereas if he is less
than 50% responsible, he will be awarded prorated damages accordingly. The
jury, of course, is not supposed to be aware of that fact.
Juries in civil cases are
smaller than in criminal cases. - six members in Minnesota, eight in several
other states, plus two alternates. The identity of the alternates is unknown to
the participants in the trial. In some states, it is also unknown to the jury
members themselves, right up until the time for the jury to vote! In another
departure from criminal cases, guilty votes do not have to be unanimous.
Minnesota has an exceptionally
long statute of limitations on product liability - 6 years for "negligent
design," 4 years for "strict liability" (marketing of a defective
product) and 3 years for "breach of warranty." In the former two cases,
the statutory period starts from the time the plaintiff discovered he had a
cause of action, which can effectively extend the liability period for a very
long time. In the case of breach of warranty, the statutory period dates from
the time of sale of the product, period. Drug liability cases are all regarded
as negligent design cases. All the above makes Minnesota a very popular place
to sue manufacturers, even when they are not headquartered here and the
plaintiff is not a Minnesotan at all. If the company operates or maintains some
kind of branch facility here, that is sufficient for "general jurisdiction" and
hence for a Minnesota-based lawsuit. Sometimes, the "branch facility" may
consist of nothing more than a storage shed.
Lawyers in civil cases have to
be, in effect, their own CSI technicians. Liability cases rely heavily on
questions of physical fact, and getting to the "scene of the crime" in a timely
manner and documenting the evidence can be problematic. Sometimes the time
lapse between incident and litigation is so large that there is little left of
the original scene or the machinery involved. Lawyers on both sides must then
rely heavily on the testimony of technical experts and may have competing
"reenactments" as evidence. Most often, though, as in all court proceedings,
the strength of a case comes down to making the opposition's witnesses look
dishonest and one's own witnesses look like virtue personified. "It's about
storytelling," says Sylvester. And exactly like characters in a novel,
witnesses don't always tell the stories they were supposed to.
Our next meeting is Tuesday,
April 5, 2005, at 7:00, when our speaker will be Orono Police Chief Stephanie
Good. Bring a friend and an alibi.
by Rich Thompson
Things are suddenly looking
much more positive in the speaker department. We now have firm speakers lined
up for March, April, and May. Also discussed but not yet firm is the
possibility of getting Ellen Hart or R. D. Zimmerman to talk about the current
vagaries of the publishing game. One member is also checking into getting a U S
Postal Service inspector, to talk about the post-911 state of postal security.
Our March speaker will
be Cort Sylvester, a criminal and civil trial lawyer.
Our April speaker will
be Chief Stephanie Good, the police chief for the City of Orono.
In May, we will hear
Catten Ely, a nonfiction writer, freelance editor, and teacher of various
subjects, including CSI basics. People wishing to review his credentials in
advance can go to his website at
www.copycatten.com/resume.
Our selected book for April,
Cold Slice by L. T. Fawkes, turns out to be out of print. But
since this is a series that depends heavily on having the information contained
in the first book, it was decided to stay with the selection and assume that
enough members can get a copy at either their local library or a used
bookstore. All other selections remain as listed in the January 2005 meeting
report (or the February 20005 All Points Bulletin.)
The national Sisters in Crime
Handbook was mailed out with the last newsletter, but only to those members who
asked for it. We will continue that policy. Those wishing a copy should email
a request to Ellen. Sisters in Crime pins are also available to all
members at no cost, but they will only be given out at meetings. If you want
one, you have to put in an appearance.
Robyn Van Horn is hard at work
on the directory of Minnesota mystery authors for our website and is finding it
a major undertaking. We will need to make some editorial decisions soon about
whether to include only living authors and authors whose work is still
available, and also whether to include authors who write with a Minnesota
setting but don’t live here themselves. It is assumed that the reverse of that
- writers who live here but use a non-Minnesota setting - will
categorically be included. Suggestions for inclusion should be emailed to Robyn
and should include the author’s name, all known publications, the series name
(if applicable) and the general type of writing.
Maisie Dobbs,
by Jacqueline Winspear, our February selection, was not read by very many
members, but those who did found it worth the effort. It does not have a
terribly strong plot, but it is rich in character development and setting, with
a lot of history of World War I and its aftermath. Bobbye Johnson also liked
the feminist slant of the main character. It’s worth noting that Dorothy
Sayers also played extensively on the theme of the roots of the Women’s Movement
in that period of history . In a postwar European and British world where
virtually an entire generation of young men had been killed, the roles and
opportunities suddenly available to women were nothing short of revolutionary.
The U. S., of course, entered the war late and did not have the same
experience.
Ms. Winspear’s other books are
not mysteries.
Our speaker for the evening
was Tony Nikula, an investigator with the St. Louis Park Police
Department. Officer Nikula is originally from Superior, Wisconsin, where, he
says, “we didn’t know what a suburb was.” But he has spent his entire police
career working for suburban police forces. After a friend who worked for the
Department of Justice, Wisconsin’s equivalent of our BCA, got him interested in
law enforcement, he completed a degree in criminal justice at the University of
Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and went to work for the police department in Fitchburg,
a suburb of Madison (notable for once having a burglary ring that became known
as the “Fitchburg Stealers.”) “It was a great training ground,” he says. “Once
one of the radio dispatchers acted as a phony rape victim, just to let me find
out how totally unprepared I was to handle that kind of case.” After seven
years at Fitchburg, he moved to St. Louis Park, where he eventually moved up to
his present position of Investigator, which combines the positions of Inspector
and Detective that some larger departments have.
St. Louis Park has a
population of roughly 45,000 and a police department with a total staff of 52.
Officer Nikula thinks this is a good ratio. Compared to a big-city police
department, an officer has a lot less available backup on the street, and the
department sometimes even has to partner with other jurisdictions to make up a
SWAT team. But on the plus side, an individual officer is much more likely to
be able to follow through on all the details of a given criminal case, rather
than losing it to specialized units in a multitiered bureaucracy. In fact, it
is more like the procedure that we are used to seeing in police dramas, which
seldom really happens in big cities like New York or Chicago or L.A. “Officers
get to become well-rounded, get to do their own follow-up, not just refer their
cases up the organization.” Because staff is not overwhelmed with the sheer
volume of cases, there also tends to be better record-keeping. “All radio
traffic gets written up, and investigation reports have an enormous amount of
detail in them,” which adds to police credibility when cases go to court.
Nikula also thinks there is a
higher level of enforcement in the suburbs. He mentioned a forgery case in
Hennepin County, involving a bogus check for $29,000. The forger was actually
apprehended in the act of passing the check, but he “lawyered up,” and the
County Prosecutor decided not to pursue the case. “They don’t like to bother
with ‘non-victim’ crimes, unless they get an easy confession. But in Anoka
County they charge everything.” All felonies go to the County for
prosecution, in small and large towns. Misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors are
prosecuted by a City Attorney.
St. Louis Park has a large
Hispanic community and also a large number of Russian-speaking residents. But
instead of typical “Russian Mafia” activity, the most common crime seems to be
identity theft and other forms of noncontact theft. The SLPPD take them very
seriously and pride themselves on a high closure rate.
One final observation: “The
TV program CSI both helps and hurts us. It creates a lot of respect for what
the police do to solve crimes, but it also implies that cops can fix anything.”
Well they can, can’t they?
Our heartfelt thanks to
Investigator Nikula for an informative and interesting evening.
Our next meeting is Tuesday,
March 1, 2005 at Once Upon a Crime, and our book is Monkeewrench by
P. J. Tracy. If you’re not locked up, show up.
by Rich Thompson
As planned, there was no
speaker at the January meeting, the entire time being devoted to miscellaneous
Chapter business. Thanks to all those dedicated members who showed up to help.
Major topics included:
The Newsletter.
Since everyone seems to like the new, expanded mini-book format, we are all
encouraged to make an effort to keep Ellen supplied with material. She has run
out of unpublished short stories from our members. But just as acceptable are
reports on conventions, news of upcoming conferences, signings and pub parties,
news items about true crime cases, quotes from favorite authors, and reviews of
books, movies, or TV programs. Share with us, folks.
The Web site
has not been updated for a long time, apart from posting the regular meeting
reports. In particular, the section on local authors needs expanding. It has
been estimated that there are more than 40 working authors in Minnesota at the
present time(!,) only a few of whom are listed on our site. Robyn Van Horn will
undertake the task of contacting each of them and inviting them to submit a
short blurb for inclusion, consisting of a biography sketch of about 75 words
plus a list of all published credits. To help her with this monumental task,
members are asked to simply list all the Minnesota authors they know of and
either email those lists to Robyn or bring them to the next meeting.
National Sisters in Crime
membership.
Several people have received renewal notices in the mail from our parent
organization. These may be safely be disregarded. Ellen has held off mailing
in the registration package, waiting for some stragglers, but it will be taken
care of shortly.
Speakers for 2005.
As of this writing
(1/12/05) we have no committed speakers for the coming year, but several members
are looking at possible candidates. Police, lawyers, crime-lab technical
people, PIs, arson investigators, and insurance investigators have all been
popular past speakers, and we will look for more of the same. This year we
will probably also do one or more programs primarily of interest to our
writer-members, on the technical and/or business aspects of writing and the
current state of the industry.
Handbooks
for 2004-2005 were handed out at the meeting and will also be mailed to absent
members. These are not to be confused with our By-laws which are
currently being updated by President Bobbye and will be available later this
year but will not be categorically distributed to all members.
Book selections for 2005 are:
February -
Maisie Dobbs, by
Jacqueline Winspear
March
- Monkeewrench, by P. J. Tracy
April
- Cold Slice, by L. T. Fawkes
May
- A Play of Isaac, by Margaret Frazer
June
- Owl of the Desert, by Ida Swearingen
September
- Los Alamos,
by Joseph Kanon
October -
Any
book by Michael Connelly. Longtime members may recall when this was our
standard format, rather than picking a specific novel. We will resurrect the
practice and see what kind of reception it gets.
November and December
- We picked no books for the last two months of the year, secure in the belief
that something new and notable will hit the bookstore shelves between now and
then.
Our book for last December,
which we didn’t have time to discuss at that meeting, was No Man Standing
by Barbara Saranella, about a single mother whose respectable and stable
life is upset by a distress call from a friend out of her former hell-raising
life of drugs and prostitution. Several people were surprised at the quality of
the writing, with solid characters and a strong, likable narrative voice.
Bobbye Johnson has met the author and says that she, herself, is much like her
main character Murch, i.e. an auto mechanic and ex-con, which may give her book
some of its “ring of authenticity.”
Our book for January,
Hostage by Robert Crais, got mixed reviews. This is not one of Crais’
series of Elvis Cole PI novels, but a stand-alone novel, done in the aftermath
of his 1998 book, L. A. Requiem, when his writing took a pronounced
upturn in quality. Nevertheless, some people thought it was not his best work,
though it had his usual strong writing and interesting character development.
It involves an affluent suburban being taken hostage by some hapless,
out-of-control criminals in the wake of a C-store robbery that goes bad. The
unique twist is that the family in question is that of a mob accountant, whose
employers are not at all happy with the state of siege. Further complicating
things are the facts that one of the criminals is a latent homicidal maniac and
the local, suburban police chief is a burned-out former hostage-negotiator from
the Los Angeles Police Department. Some people thought the plot was just too
complicated, and several were skeptical of the device of the accountant having
huge sums of cash in his home safe and of the police stumbling onto his computer
records.
Typical of Crais’ later work
is his frequent experimenting with new and unorthodox literary conventions. In
Requiem, he freely mixes first- and third-person narrative voices and
somehow makes the shift seem amazingly natural. In Hostage, he uses so
many shifting points-of-view as to defy counting, but he helps the reader out
by prefacing each scene with a headline-like label, telling us whose mind we’re
about to go into. Several people liked this format. And there is no doubt that
he is a masterful enough writer that he can get away with defying traditional
forms.
The general consensus: great
writing, but a possibly overworked plot. The film version of the book, by the
way, was released this month but has not yet found its way to the Twin Cities.
It has Bruce Willis as the police chief, which surprised some people and
dismayed others.
The next meeting is February
1, 2005 at 7:00 PM, at Once Upon a Crime. Unless you’re hopelessly tied up with
committing indelible fiction, do join us.
