The Best American Crime Reporting 2007

The Best American CRIME REPORTING 2 0 07 G u e s t L I N DA S e r i e s E d i t o r FA I R S T E I N E d i t o r s O T T O T H O M A S P E N Z L E R H. C A N D O O K Contents Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook | Preface v Linda Fairstein | Introduction xi Tom Junod | T he Loved Ones 1 Neil Swidey | The I nside J ob 33 Steve Fennessy | The T alented D r. K rist 53 Sean Flynn | T he C ase of the K iller P ries t 79 Matthew Teague | D ouble B lind 109 C. J. Chivers | T he S chool 131 Pamela Colloff | A Kiss Before D ying 187 Steve Fishman | The D evil in D avid B erkowitz 209 iv Content s Allison Hoover Bartlett | T he Man W ho L oves Books Too M uc h 231 Ariel Levy | D irty O ld Women 249 Dan P. Lee | W ho K illed E llen A ndros? 261 David Bernstein | Fatal C onnection 281 Mark Fass | L ast S een on S eptember 10th 295 Brian Boucher | M y Roommate, the D iamond T hief 311 Douglas Preston | T he Mons ter of F lorence 323 Permissions About the Editors Other Books by Linda Fairstein, Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher P re fa c e The common thread of crime is crisis, which has the striking power to generate suspense in its development and poignancy in its outcome. How, the heart asks, did this crisis come about, by what means will it be resolved, and at what human cost? The nature of human crisis is staggeringly diverse, as is the human reaction to it. In Tom Junod’s “The Loved Ones,” crisis comes not from the agency of man, but through the murderous intervention of nature into his otherwise routine affairs. Churning across an overheated sea, the massive storm closes in upon New Orleans, then hits it dead-on. Here is crisis on an epic scale, a natural catastrophe to which, on a small scale, individual human beings must respond. How the owners of a long-respected nursing home did, in fact, respond, whether dutifully or criminally, is now the subject of a much-publicized investigation. Thirty-four people inside that home were drowned by the steadily rising waters that finally engulfed them. But could they have been saved from this crisis? And if not, then why are any but a murderess named Katrina being vi Pr e fac e charged with their deaths? Is this reaction to crisis, the human need to find human fault though only nature is to blame, not itself a crime, or at least a grave injustice? Political crises, like the massive ones of nature, also seem beyond the scope of man. What single human being could have stopped the rise of Hitler or Stalin or Mao, and in doing that, prevented the slaughter of untold millions? The complex forces that created the lethal mix of religion, ethnicity, and regionalism that, in turn, drove a select group of Chechen terro