Bill James read 1,000 true crime books ...

You may think there’s nothing left to say about the Lizzie Borden case. It’s been more than 130 years since the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden, and we’ve all heard about the axe, the whacks, etc. But there’s a detail of that case that has never made sense, and all these years later, it’s the piece that makes this case impossible to resolve. In his book Popular Crime, that’s where Bill James starts with this one.

James is best known for his lifelong study of (obsession with) baseball statistics. He created the statistical system known as Sabermetrics, which led to the winning theories Michael Lewis wrote about in Moneyball. Then about a decade ago he decided to apply this same meticulous research to true crime, and the result is Popular Crime. His focus is on the amplification of crime stories (mostly murder) by popular culture. The stories that the public couldn’t get enough of, and how that intense interest may have distorted our understanding of crime and its aftermath.

His strength is in intensely readable and relatable storytelling, his focus on logic, his ability to strip away all the mythmaking and fanciful theorizing. And he does it best with cases that have long been “understood” by the public. Of course Richard Hauptmann killed the Lindbergh baby (possibly by accident, with a fall from a ladder). Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were most likely killed by Eleanor Mills’ irate husband, not a conspiracy of Hall’s wife and her family. JonBenet Ramsey was murdered by someone who let himself into the Ramsey family’s basement while they were out, not by JonBenet’s grieving parents.

And the sticking point on the Borden case is the very narrow window of time, between when Andrew Borden arrived home (observed by many people on the street) and the time when Lizzie and the family housemaid were out in front of the house, shrieking about murder. Less than 15 minutes elapsed. In that time, Andrew arrived home, lay down for a nap on the couch, and had his head brutally caved in with a blunt instrument, an attack that would have produced prodigious blood spatter. A very short time later, Lizzie was seen by many neighbors, without a drop of blood on her. James doesn’t know, but his dissection of the evidence, in a few lean, compact paragraphs, questions everything we think we know about this one.

I’m very interested in smart, logical takes on conventional wisdom in true crime, writers and researchers who are willing to go beyond assumptions. The filmmaker Errol Morris did this in his examination of the case of Jeffrey McDonald, the Green Beret Murders, in his book Wilderness of Error. This is a case that has been written about at length (in Joe McGinnis’ Fatal Vision), re-examined in Janet Malcolm’s study of the lawsuit McDonald brought against McGinnis (The Journalist and the Murderer) and now Morris’ book, which looks at how our understanding of that story has been distorted by the books, the TV movies, the endless media coverage.

I’m currently reading James’ latest book, The Man From the Train, which traces a trail of carnage in the early years of the 20th century. It connects the dots with dozens of gruesome axe murders that were mostly unsolved, and cut a swath across most of the rural United States, most notably what’s long been known as the Villisca Axe Murders. Working with his daughter, Rachel James McCarthy, he has done enough research to not only tie this series of murders together, but to name the murderer.

This is amateur investigation taken to its extreme, a feat accomplished by a writer and researcher who is organized and dedicated, and who has been able to focus his efforts so completely on one story to see it through to its conclusion. It makes for riveting reading.