Laura TillmanReseñas

I think Long Shadow might be a little overrated. At least I feel ... unenlightened? My biggest complaint is that the writing is deft, but does not quite live up to the lyricism promised by the title. I think I was expecting another [b:Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir|17318628|Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere A Memoir|Poe Ballantine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1361785728s/17318628.jpg|23987694]. This is not that. It is above-average true crime, but it is, in the end, true crime. Tillman attempts to find meaning in the brutal deaths of three children and, in the later chapters, how the community relates to the building where it happened, but there just isn't any meaning to find. Tillman does a good job linking poverty and mental health, and astutely points out that spiritual belief, usually maligned in cases like these as the cause of the crazy, can also be a source of healing for many, many people who never make the news because they get better and do not commit atrocities.

I hated this book. I did not hate it due to the subject matter, which was horrific, but hated it due to the muddled writing and nonexistent editing. The writer went on so many tangents and at such random intervals that I am certain I sustained at least one whiplash injury while reading this book. The writer claims to have reached some level of understanding about the events and people surrounding these events. I am glad she did, but she did nothing for this reader other then leaving me annoyed and with no more understanding then I had when I started this vanity project.

There's a building in Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the country, where something terrible happened. A lot of terrible things happen in Brownsville -- right on the Mexican border, it's a center for drug trafficking as well as immigration, both legal and not, and the usual urban crimes born of poverty and desperation -- but this was bad enough that the whole building lies under its shadow.

This isn't the usual kind of true crime book, and if you try to read it that way you're going to be disappointed. The facts were never really in doubt. In the spring of 2003, John Allen Rubio, with the assistance of his common-law wife, horribly murdered his three children. The oldest girl was only three years old. Less than a day later, they both confessed to the police; Rubio believed the children were possessed. Or maybe, he admitted when questioned, it was the spray paint he'd been huffing.

But Tillman isn't telling that story as much as she's telling the story of the community in which that crime occurred. What did the neighbors think of John and Angela, both before and after the murders? What was it like, to be them, to live in their world? And if John truly, sincerely believed that the children were possessed when he killed them, does that make him not guilty by reason of insanity? What if he had schizophrenia? What if he had brain damage from long-term drug use, or a low IQ from his mother's long-term drug use? If the state of Texas executes him for his crime, what does that say about us, and the world we live in? And can the community ever come to terms with what happened? Tillman doesn't offer answers to these questions, but she asks them with care, and I think they're important ones.

Not for the faint of heart

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City by Laura Tillman (Simon & Schuster, $26).

Even if you’re a fan of true crime reporting, as I am, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts is a very hard book to read. Laura Tillman herself seems to realize that, titling one chapter, “Don’t Read This Chapter Before Going to Bed.”

A reporter in Brownsville, Tex., Tillman writes about the case of John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho, who murdered and decapitated their three young children in 2003. Rubio’s defense claimed that he was mentally ill and believed the children to be demons.

What Tillman does here is different than the typical “true crime” book, in that the organization of the narrative is based on her reporting; rather than pull together a tidy narrative arc, she introduces information as she uncovers it. This might throw some readers off, but those of us who recognize what she’s doing will read this as a journalism procedural, an inside look at how reporting is actually done.

It’s a very interesting take, one that provides insight into the poverty of the community, the lack of resources for help with mental illness or parenting, and the emotional devastation that followed the murders.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com

I don't know how to explain my feelings toward this book. It is an extremely compelling story, but the writing quality is poor. There seemed to be no real outline or backbone to it. The purple prose only highlighted this flaw, as did the repetition of unimportant things and the lack of refreshers given for details that seemed more important.

If all you knew about the case was the manner in which Julissa, John Stephon, and Mary Jane died, then it would seem impossible to feel bad for John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho, but what happened to them within the justice system is awful for other reasons. This is a case where a man with a severe mental illness (paranoid schizophrenia) and an intellectual disability (IQ in the low 70s) and a woman who had a shared psychosis with this man because of her own intellectual disability (IQ in the 50s) end up imprisoned, and, for him, end up on death row, but the writer is busy talking about superstitions & personal fears. It's almost like she doesn't completely perceive the gravity of the situation, the level of injustice that's going on. As lovely as it is to learn about regional cultural beliefs, I was more concerned about the fact that this man who should be in a hospital will probably face lethal injection. The writer could only view this as horrible once she met Mr. Rubio, but it seems like anyone with a basic sense of compassion would figure out after learning about his background. Instead, she was oblivious to it, which made her seem callous. It made the whole book feel callous. Also, the stalking of Ms. Camacho's family was a bit disturbing. I understand she felt that she needed to hear from them for her newspaper article and her book, but her behavior was quite creepy. I'm surprised that they didn't issue a restraining order after the second or third time she showed up outside the woman's front door.

The writing honestly reminded me of what you'd find in an essay by a bored, uninformed student who waited until the last minute to do an assignment. I have a hard time believing that this is something the writer was encouraged to get published, at least in its current form. I have no doubt that she has talent, but the fixations on pointless details within the work are distracting and annoying. I wish she had explained more about Rubio's mental health than how a superstitious grandmother convinced her to throw away a perfectly good pair of tennis shoes. This wasn't her memoir. This wasn't even a memoir for the building. It was an unfocused work of nonfiction that was rather disappointing.

This is undeniably a tragic, heartbreaking story – in 2003, three small children murdered by their (step)parents in Brownsville, TX, because of demons. And this is nonfiction. Real people killing real, innocent children. The parents were poor, not well educated, and the mother had a very low IQ. Still, can you murder your children, and horrifically at that, because you believe they are possessed by demons? Sadly, you can. They did.

Despite the very touching story, the telling of it did not impress me as I expected. Although the author interviewed those she could and repeatedly visited the site of the murders, I felt like I was reading newspaper articles rather than an in-depth coverage. Towards the end of the book, especially when writing about the death penalty, the author showed much more emotion.

There was a good deal about what should happen to the building where the murders occurred, and the author told what has happened, and what has not, up to the point of her writing. While I understand the concern, and the deep emotional connection of residents near there, the building is not what mattered to me.

While the story is interesting, it surprised me that there did not seem to be a more emotional connection. I felt too set apart from the story. I didn't really get to know the people involved.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of this book, and although it was well read, the narrator's speed was too slow for me.

TRUE CRIME
Laura Tillman
The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City
Scribner
Hardcover 978-1-5011-0425-1 (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 256 pgs., $26.00
April 5, 2016

Laura Tillman was a rookie reporter at the Brownsville Herald in 2008 when she was assigned to cover a story about whether a historic building in Brownsville’s Barrio Buena Vida should be demolished. In a tiny apartment in the building, five years earlier, three children were murdered by their parents. Tillman interviewed Brownsville residents, some of whom said the building should go because it was haunted and a constant reminder of the unthinkable. Others said that was superstition—it was just a building.

The father of the children, John Allen Rubio, was born and raised in Brownsville. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury rejected that argument and sentenced him to die. Rubio’s lawyers won an appeal, but a second jury convicted him and again sentenced him to die. Tillman began collecting stories about the crime, reviewing courtroom evidence, and initiated a correspondence with Rubio, eventually interviewing him in prison. Maria Angela Camacho, Rubio’s common-law wife and the children’s mother, who was convicted and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences, never responded to Tillman’s letters.

Rubio’s childhood, Tillman found, was devastatingly dysfunctional, marked by fetal alcohol syndrome, a missing father, a drug-addicted mother, and hallucinations. Rubio’s teachers noted emotional disturbance from kindergarten and, oh yeah, he was probably schizophrenic and believed that his dead grandmother was a witch, issuing instructions. Tillman reproduces passages from Rubio’s letters verbatim which serve to give readers a feel for Rubio’s limitations. Angela Camacho’s backstory, unfortunately, is much less thorough.

Throughout The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City, Tillman evokes a melancholy, haunting atmosphere, a sense of held breath, of watching. She begins the story rather dramatically. She visits the building and notes “a cloud hovering overhead—an accumulation of meaning more dense and persistent than I’d ever intuited.” Fortunately Tillman soon settles into a compelling style without the purple prose. Her carefully measured dropping of startling and eerie facts into an otherwise routine passage is jarringly effective. Tillman provides an intelligent, thoughtful exploration of mental illness and its treatment by the legal system, capital punishment, the role of journalism in reporting on crime, the social pathologies of poverty and drugs, and curandera culture on the border.

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts is about how an entire social structure failed this family, beginning when the parents were children themselves. There were several critical points at which every social institution these individuals came into contact with—schools, Child Protective Services, health care professionals, Social Security, the police—let them slip through the cracks. That last day, when this obviously troubled family came into contact with the public and officials, Tillman reports, “every moment feels like one in a series of mistakes.”

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts is not mere titillation and ghoulish recitation of facts, historically typical of the true crime genre. Tillman joins the new breed of true crime authors, providing context, history, sociology and theology. Her first person narration becomes an intensely personal quest to understand the many-layered Brownsville and a search for what, if any, meaning could be gleaned from such an atrocity.

Published in Lone Star Literary Life.

This is an insightful look into a horrible crime. On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas, parents John and Angela murdered their three small children in a brutal way. The author, a reporter, first became interested in this crime when she was sent to cover the story of whether or not the decrepit building where the crimes were committed should be demolished or restored for another use. She quickly became interested in the crime behind this story and started researching it. She studied the records, talked to people in the neighborhood and even started communicating with John about the crimes. It became obvious that there were a number of factors in play here – mental illness, poverty and drug abuse - but there really was no simple explanation for why two people decided to kill three children in this manner. This book is beautifully written and makes the reader examine his or her own beliefs as to why such horrific acts occur, as well as how such people should be punished.