I
really enjoyed Townsend’s first book, Queen City Gothic, delving into
Cincinnati’s most infamous unsolved cases (for my interview with the author
about these books and other famous murder cases, see Part 1 here and Part 2 here). I think I like Notorious even better than Gothic, just for the closure. Queen
City Gothic is a riveting read, but the frustration of either not knowing or
not catching the perpetrators was aggravating as all hell. Here, Townsend peels
back the mysteries and exposes these fascinating murder cases to light. As he
put it himself, this one is “about justice.”
Queen City Notorious is the perfect mix of crimes and time periods throughout the 20th
Century. For each case, Townsend describes what happened and puts the case in historical
context with other major events occurring around the world. He then describes
the players in each drama, what happened and why. For some crimes in the book, though
ostensibly solved, there are still major facts or actions that are unknown.
Townsend expertly speculates what may have happened and who probably was—and wasn’t—involved.
The
first case is one of the most horrific—in 1910, Alice Van Zandt is roasted to
death over a gas oven by her husband, left to die while their small child
tottled around in the next room. The most outright shocking case was failed
businessman Vinton Perin shooting his wealthy mother-in-law Frances Rawson in
her Clifton mansion in 1924. Today that case would cause a national sensation
and rock every tabloid on the market. It’s almost funny how local papers didn’t
know how to report the case of Betty Butler, a black lesbian, drowning her love
rival Evelyn Clark after strangling her in Cincinnati’s Sharon Woods. They
couldn’t report many aspects of the story in “family” papers in 1952.
One
of the outright strangest stories is when all-American college athlete Jack
Rauss slew Goldie Cunningham and her disabled husband James in 1961. It seems
he went to visit them and Goldie said something bad about his mother, her close
friend, which Jack couldn’t abide. He killed her in a crime of passion, then murdered
James because he was a witness. After serving ten years in prison and becoming
a prison trustee, he was released on parole and never committed another crime. Bizarre.
There’s
even a bad-boy/girlfriend love triangle murder. Bobby Abbot was going with
Alice Ewing in 1964, but he tricked nursing student Wanda Cook into coming to
his room at the old Sheraton Gibson Hotel. When she wouldn’t succumb to his
desires, he killed her. Alice helped him put the body in a trunk and ship it cross-country.
It got as far as Columbus when it was discovered and Bobby and Alice were arrested.
They couldn’t blame each other fast enough. Bobby went to maximum security, but
Alice was convicted as an accessory and didn’t do much jail time. She’s still
alive and lives in Northern KY. And she doesn’t like to talk about the past.
Townsend
ends the book with another odd passion crime: the murder of Dr. Jane Shutt by
her adopted daughter Barbara. This one is fascinating—Dr. Shutt was married to
a much older man, and was having an affair. When Barbara learned her adopted
parents were separating and she would have to move out and make her own way,
she lost her mind and murdered her mother most viciously. Then she tried to
cover it up and did a sloppy job of it. She was convicted, did time in prison, was
eventually released and, as Townsend puts it, never got so much as a traffic
ticket for the rest of her life.
You
don’t have to be from Cincinnati to marvel at these crimes of passion and gain—you
can enjoy the sharp police work and seeing the bad guys get what’s coming
regardless of where these crimes happened. Townsend unfolds each story layer
by layer, unraveling the mystery into a just, if not always satisfying,
conclusion. Once you get your teeth into one of these stories you won’t be able
to stop reading them all.
Rating:
***** out of 5 stars
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