Notes on Notes on an Execution

I, like so many women, am a true crime junkie. A guilty one, who examines the injustices, prejudice and copaganda inherent in so much of it... but that doesn't stop me stuffing my face with popcorn while I ingest human misery for entertainment. 

You are welcome to judge me. I judge myself. I've always liked crime fiction but I only started watching true crime in the months following my dad's (perfectly natural) death. It involved no thinking and there was something about seeing the very worst of humanity that made my own simple pain less extreme. 

Notes on an Execution [Danya Kukafka] is sold as a story that examines our fascination with serial killers. Instead of seeking answers from an ultimately pathetic individual, it's a book that tells the stories of the women around him as the clock counts down to his execution. It aims to refocus on the victims, rather than his whacked out theories, and to examine the sick, invasive interest so many have in serial killers as a species. It questions the purpose and benefit of the death penalty itself, and the injustices in the system.

Only... it doesn't really do any of that. By its very nature, it can't. 

Ansell Packer is twelve hours from lethal injection. We spend time in his POV at various points throughout the countdown, as he seeks to both escape and cement his legacy. He is your standard white boy serial killer - abused, animal torturing, cold, and - so he thinks - intellectual. He killed three teenage girls and then, years later, his own wife. 

He's charming but not magnetic, a psychopath but seeking the love of a family, a terrible husband but not outright abusive, attractive but gone to seed... one can imagine Benedict Cumberbatch beating down his agent's door for this role, back when he was obsessed with being gritty and American.   

Our fascination with these kind of men is the problem, the book wants us to know. His 'theories' don't matter. His story doesn't matter. He is nothing in comparison to the story of the women he murdered. All things I more or less agree with. Throughout the rest of the book, we focus on three women in his life - his mother, the detective who caught him, and his sister-in-law.

Only... Ansell is pretty much the main character. We may technically spend more time with others, but we return to him, in the present, as the clock ticks down. You can't blame a reader for finding that more interesting than his sister-in-law's constant moping about being the 'boring' twin.

Why is everyone so interested in people like him? the book opines, while never showing anyone being remotely interested. He gets no media attention, doesn't have groupies or podcasts, and goes to his death with minimal fanfare (his big escape plan predictably falling apart). Yes he pins his hopes on publishing his big 'theory', but one can hardly blame someone facing imminent death for being concerned with the mark they leave on the world.   

Why make him relatively sympathetic? We start up front with his early years, seeing him as an abused child, and in the foster system, where his is already showing signs of what he'll become. His kills are utterly glossed over, with the book spending no time with any of the teenage victims or their family. The attacks are presented as if they are a result of PTSD. 

Are men like him so fundamentally damaged that they were always on this path to execution, despite his attempts to change? Or is he a pathetic nobody who wiped out three young women and who deserves no consideration at all? The book can't have it both ways.

This inconsistency is imbedded throughout. If the system is racist and sexist and ultimately pointless... why do we spend the most time with a female POC cop who whole-heartedly believes in it? If the death penalty is just a way for a killer to become a martyr, why isn't he shown as one? If the victims are important, why are their lives barely mentioned except in vague 'what a shame, they could be a mom now, if only they'd lived!' ways.

Aside from Ansell, only one other POV character is particularly engaging: his mother, who gets probably the least amount of time. Her journey from abused teen to centred and genteel elderly commune hippy is the best part of the book. If this was a film review this would be the point where I'd tell you that some classic English actress did her best with the material and lack of screen-time but couldn't save the movie single-handed.

The problem lies in Saffron and Hazel's characters. Hazel in particular is a weak choice, spending so much of the book resenting her sister that it's hard to see her as an aggrieved victim of Ansell. Considering that she has a loving husband, a family, and a successful business that her parents 'ooh' and 'ahhh' over, it's churlish to root for her against a sister trapped in a miserable marriage, whose life has gone nowhere. Even her eventual grief is selfish, as she mainly complains that her mother clearly thinks the wrong sister was taken. Her one and only role is to witness something strange and put two and two together near the end of the book.

Saffron's role is vital, as she uses her childhood knowledge to catch Ansell, but she's a hard character to like and we spend so much time with her that I actively started rooting against her. She's overcome a foster-care childhood and teenage drug addiction (conveniently never mentioned again, she just got over it) to be a successful detective whose career is on the rise. Her personal life is empty and grim. She faces sexism and racism from fellow officers and is frustrated by it, but accepts it as just the way things are. Post Black Lives Matter it gives her a selfish undercurrent that doesn't seem intended - she pulled herself up by her bootstraps so everything is just fine. Even Brooklyn Nine Nine, the most optimistic of cop comedies, had a few 'are we the baddies?' moments.

She's portrayed as an excellent, if relatively inexperienced cop and yet her actions portray her as the worst kind of maverick. Her bosses tell her to back off and instead of sharing a personal story that would at least get their attention (hey, the suspect killed a bunch of animals and a put a dead fox in my bed when we were kids!) she goes rogue. She involves his wife, stalks him for days at a time, and warns people away from him. Her [spoilers!] actions see him cast out from his new peaceful life and outright lead to him murdering someone, which he might never have done in other circumstances. She never faces any consequences.  

Absurdly the only one who critiques the justice system is Ansel, who is about to be murdered by it. He's the one who points out the fact that as a white person on death row, he is both a minority, and treated with a good deal more respect. He's the one questioning the purpose of the death penalty, and the corruption of the prison system. Why he was chosen as a voice for this I'll never know, since he's the only one saying any of it and the author spends the rest of the time telling us not to listen to him. 

I don't normally research writers before reviewing them, but after writing this, I checked to see if I was correct in my assumption that they are white and young. Indeed, the author currently isn't even thirty. From my aged perspective (thirty-five) this is a book where the buzz overtook the critics. It needs some more life experience before it can comment so easily on a death.