If you liked Making a Murderer, have we got a book for you
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Eli Sanders uses compassion and psychology to make sense of a brutal killing
The classic noir mystery is an exercise in screwing with the reader. Clues emerge at baffling speeds. Characters abruptly enter with guns or leave in burning cars. At the very end, the clever detective protagonist reveals all, tying the horror abruptly in a bow.
While the City Slept works exactly the opposite way. It’s the true story of a gruesome, random murder that author Eli Sanders attempts to make as predictable as possible. He wants to show you how violence flows from its causes as inexorably as gravity.
The murder occurs in 2009. Isaiah Kalebu, propelled by a particularly complex mental disorder, kills Teresa Butz in her home in the isolated South Park neighbourhood in Seattle. There is no apparent motive. She’s murdered in front of her partner, Jessica Hopper. The murder is preceded by elaborate sexual violence that one might describe as torture. Isaiah, the previous evening, had burned his house down, with his aunt inside it. While the City Slept isn’t exactly a pleasant read.
That’s not for lack of writerly craft. Eli Sanders — who won a Pulitzer in 2012 for his reporting on this murder — is in exquisite form. His writing, when describing police rushing to the scene, is appropriately cinematic: “the view out his windshield tightened, from a panorama of lights in the industrial valley below to a tunnel of amber-lit arterial with darkness beyond its edges.” When the police arrive, the crime scene is described with more tasteful transparency. Sanders manages to make something readable out of a big slow grind of bad circumstances producing worse outcomes.
About those circumstances: murderer Isaiah Kalebu’s life practically serves as a guidebook for how to generate criminality. Mental illness, like everything, is all about genetics being teased out by environment. Kalebu’s genome was a minefield — his mother’s side contained as many schizophrenics as not. As for his upbringing, his young single mother, fresh out of the foster care system, finds an unfortunate partner: a cold, abusive man who fled to America from a nightmarish civil war in Uganda. The household is constantly violent. There’s not a lot of money.
Isaiah is beaten frequently. He’s a bright kid. He constantly nags his sister to discuss marine life or politics. But he’s disruptive from an early age. He’s weirdly aggressive with other children. Sometimes he acts as if he can’t read, when in fact he’s precociously fluent. Nothing improves. His young life is increasingly stressful. At every stressful event, he gets a little more unstable. It’s hard to locate the moment of psychotic break — but if there was one, it happened when Kalebu discovered he was colourblind, destroying his brief dream of being a pilot.
His behaviour becomes increasingly scary, when it’s not comedic. He attacks his mother. He verbally assaults bus drivers all over town. He enters an office he doesn’t work at, claiming to be an African king, then attempting to fire the employees he’s just interrupted.
What happens in response to this is basically nothing, even though Isaiah is arrested on multiple occasions. He’s briefly taken into custody, then released with little treatment. He successfully manipulates poorly equipped case workers. In one farcical scene, a judge doesn’t find out about Isaiah’s temporary diagnosis of bipolar disorder because the court computers aren’t working. This is the crux of the book. Everybody knew Isaiah was crazy. The family knew about it. Parts of the government knew about it. Nevertheless, Isaiah was allowed to fester out of control.
The book seeks to explain how this happens. In doing so, it gives you a detailed education in the brokenness of the American mental health-care system.
Here’s a hugely compressed, inexact version of what Eli Sanders delicately lays out. In the mid- 20th century, you can throw somebody in an American asylum for basically any reason. They’re really bad, overcrowded places. Very few patients get better. Most get worse.
John F. Kennedy tries to improve the situation, in 1963. He helps pass the Community Mental Health Act, which provides states with funding to open up more reasonable facilities. Simultaneously, the government closes down a bunch of the old asylums. All of this goes terribly. Only half of the proposed facilities are ever built. A grand total of zero receives full funding. The funded ones don’t receive funding long-term.
So you get this patchy monstrosity of dysfunctional institutions not communicating with each other. Meanwhile: the guidelines for involuntarily commitment are changed unwisely. Previously they were too lax, but now they become too restrictive — you’re only able to put someone away if they pose an immediate danger to themselves or others. This is a very thin sliver of time if, like in many cases, a violently unstable person’s behaviour twitches from “slightly disturbing” to “horrific” in a matter of days or hours. This is yet another example of the fact that the pendulum of social change rarely swings in exactly the right direction at exactly the right speed.
Reflect, for a moment, on how difficult it is to decide when to put somebody in a mental institution against their will. There are lots of people who display troubling behaviour who end up producing nothing except bathroom graffiti. Unless you totally disempower law enforcement, some people inevitably get committed wrongly.
Have you ever heard of the Rosenhan experiment? Psychologist David Rosenhan, in 1973, feigned mental illness in order to be institutionalized. Seven of his associates did the same. But after their internment, they acted completely normal. They even took notes, openly, about the experiment they were conducting. The asylum staff took this behaviour to be further evidence of their madness. Rosenhan and his associates were only released after claiming to have taken their antipsychotic meds, which they had covertly flushed down the toilets. Once judged insane — on limited evidence — the system was incapable of viewing their behaviour normally.
The experiment had a second part, which was even more disturbing than the first. When Rosenhan published the results of his first experiment, uproar occurred. During the controversy, one hospital claimed to be impervious to such errors. Rosenhan said, OK, let’s see about that. He told them he’d send them a number of pseudo-patients like the ones in his previous experiment. A few months later, they triumphantly responded that they had caught some of his fakes. Rosenhan then confessed that he had, in fact, sent no fake patients. The hospital had been turning away people with real symptoms.
So: psychiatry is fairly fallible. Mental institutions make errors about their patients. Once you’ve admitted someone, it actually becomes more difficult, in some ways, to figure out how sane they are: you’re sticking them in an extraordinary environment where it may be to their advantage to feign unusual behaviours.
But if you take no lasting measures in the lives of people who appear to be unstable, you get Isaiah Kalebu. Also: grotesque stories about the mishaps of psychiatry are many, but it’s by definition impossible to write stories about what psychiatry prevented. Every time someone is committed wrongly, it’s a florid story that makes for frenzied headlines. But nobody could or would write a book about all the crimes that weren’t committed by mentally ill people who received appropriate care. No system administered by human beings could walk this thin a line.
While the City Slept, along with being an anatomy of a crime, is a loving portrait of its victims. The book does the same thing for Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper that it does for Isaiah Kalebu — it gets deep into the momentum of their lives. You get two great portraits of growing up queer in the pre-millennial U. S. They pursue awkward dreams. Their families do and don’t accept them. They meet, fall in love, get engaged, then the rest of the book happens.
Hopper emerges as something of a hero. She forgives Kalebu in the courtroom after sentencing — she says she’s sorry about whatever corrupted him. He responds with a barely coherent rant about how gay marriage will lead to the institution of Sharia law. She doesn’t alter or take back her sentiments. She says to whoever’s listening, repeatedly, that she wishes him no harm. People attempt to console her by prophesying Kalebu’s pain in prison. She does not relish it.
She has, in other words, a big heart, combined with an abundance of perspective. The book aims to give you the same thing. It starts with describing how the river that defines South Park was formed. It ends years after the murder that is its subject. Rather than making the crime at its centre as lurid as possible, While the City Slept brings it compassionate clarity. It’s slow, in parts. It’s tricky reading. It’s not a beach read or an episode of CSI: it’s bigger than that.