Author speaks for victim in real-life crime story
"Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obesession, Revenge, and Murder" by Ann Rule. The Free Press, $25; 446 pages.
One of the first statements 13-year-old Stevie Bellush made to the police after she discovered the murdered body of her mother, Sheila, was that her father, Allen Blackthorn, was behind the crime. Her stepfather, Jamie, and her sister, Daryl, soon made the identical accusation. In the end, they were proved right. But it took the combined efforts of the sheriff's office of Sarasota County, Fla., (where the crime was committed), the police and district attorney's office of San Antonio, Texas (where the crime was planned), the Texas Rangers, and (because the crime involved interstate travel) the FBI and U.S. attorney's office to bring Blackthorn to justice. And it took them the best part of three years. But finally not only Blackthorn but also the three men he hired — “the Three Stooges of murder” – were behind bars, serving sentences ranging from 19 years to life.
In this and all her accounts of real-life crime, Ann Rule sees her most important function as that of speaking for the victims. In this particular case the victim, Sheila Bellush, had feared that her ex-husband would kill her, and once expressed the wish that, in that tragic event, Rule would write about her. Here, as always, Rule works to give a very detailed background, to make the victim and the survivors real and largely sympathetic. And she does much the same for other people involved in the case, such as witnesses, detectives, and prosecutors.
Good though it is, "Every Breath You Take" isn't quite as interesting or compelling as the other Rule true-crime book, "Bitter Harvest," about a woman who killed two of her children in a deliberately set fire, while simultaneously attempting to poison her husband. Maybe the difference is in the two killers. In spite of her horrific crimes, Debora Green of Bitter Harvest was a brilliant, witty, popular physician, and in destroying her children's lives she also destroyed much capacity for good in her own life.
For Green, readers may feel some pity, and a fascinated curiosity about why her life had gone so horribly wrong - a curiosity Rule partly satisfied.
On the other hand, Allen Blackthorn, chief villain of the current book, despite his acknowledged brilliance and powerful charm, seems to have lost all good intentions at a very early age. From childhood onward he was coldly self-centered and manipulative. In copious detail Rule describes how Blackthorn used and abused virtually every person he was involved with. Though he left debts wherever he went, he enjoyed the life of a retired multimillionaire. He was a cross-dresser who sexually abused his own daughter for years. He had a ferocious temper and definite sadistic tendencies, and once kicked his first wife in the stomach when she was pregnant, forcing her to have an abortion. Long before he had Sheila, his third wife, killed, he had, in fact, committed murder, when with his car he ran down a motorcyclist who had dared to pass him. Sheila had lied for him, then, out of fear, and Allen escaped justice.
In short, this book tirelessly evokes the reader's anger, disgust, and outrage. Rule's insight and thoroughness make her detailed accounts of real-life criminal cases particularly outstanding.
