A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink
February 1, 2025
June 1990. A UCLA student is stabbed to death; his body is found in a tunnel near the infamous Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his "family" lived in the 1960s. Rick Jackson and his partner led the investigation, but this was no straightforward murder case. Was the Spahn Ranch relevant? Why was the victim wearing a magical symbol? Who had a motive to kill this seemingly fine, upstanding citizen? This true-crime tale, written by detective Jackson and investigative detective McGough, is the kind of book descriptors like "searing," "intense," and "haunting" were custom-made for. The case itself is utterly compelling--a murder with potentially satanic overtones, committed in the midst of the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and '90s--and the writing is exquisite, keeping the reader glued to the page. The book comes highly recommended with a foreword by renowned crime fiction writer Michael Connelly, who's known Jackson for many years (the detective was part of the inspiration for Connelly's protagonist Harry Bosch), and if you can't trust Connelly, who can you trust? This is a first-rate work of true crime.
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March 1, 2025
True-crime memoir that minutely details the labyrinthine investigation of a brutal murder. Retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Jackson (writing with McGough) surveys his 34-year tenure via the long road to justice in the 1990 stabbing of UCLA student Ron Baker in a train tunnel near Chatsworth Park. Given the era's suspicions of occult conspiracies, investigators first pursued "a possible 'devil worship satanic connection.'" Yet Jackson's suspicions soon fell on Ron's roommates, Duncan and Nathan, white and Black military veterans, respectively; despite their affability, once Duncan fails his polygraph, "the evidence [soon] stubbornly suggested that Duncan and Nathan had had a hand in Ron's killing, whether or not it made sense." Duncan, a committed fabulist, faked his own kidnapping and disappeared, only to be later apprehended for passport fraud; he agreed to record Nathan admitting to their planning of the killing as a faux kidnap for ransom, an "outlandish motive." This convoluted investigation plays out against the backdrop of the Rodney King beating and O.J. Simpson's trial: "In the span of just a few years, Los Angeles and its criminal justice system had become ground zero for the country's racial divisions." Regarding Duncan's and Nathan's divergent fates, Jackson ruefully observes, "Little did we imagine at the time how perceptions about race would enter the equation later." After five years, both were convicted at trial and "thus deserved the same sentence: life without any possibility of parole." Yet 25 years later, Duncan successfully received clemency while Nathan has not, deepening the appearance of structural racial bias in this bizarre case. Interviews are represented at length, which seems exhaustive, yet it allows the reader to follow a complicated homicide investigation with only senselessness at its heart. Satisfyingly intricate journey into the policing of urban violence.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.