Review - The Murder Room

Twenty years ago, three men obsessed with solving murders decided to form a group that would dissect cold cases baffling law enforcement bureaucracies. They named the informal organization the Vidocq Society, in honor of a groundbreaking French detective long dead. Although privately invited members lived around the United States and indeed around the globe, the gathering place for the monthly meetings was Philadelphia.

Although the Vidocq Society members did not seek publicity, inevitably journalists and law enforcement officers and the loved ones of murder victims became fascinated. One of those journalists is Michael Capuzzo, who has reported for the Philadelphia Inquirer and who lives in Pennsylvania.

(The book contains a strong Texas angle – Lubbock, to be precise. Stay tuned to this review.)

Capuzzo builds his book around the three Vidocq Society founders: William Fleisher, a former FBI and Customs agent who later created a private detective agency; Richard Walter, a profiler of criminals who worked many years in the Michigan prison system; and Frank Bender, a Philadelphia sculptor whose forensic creations predicted what disfigured murder victims (and sometimes elusive murder suspects) looked like. (Bender's career was the subject of the 2008 book The Girl With the Crooked Nose, by Ted Botha.)

The three protagonists, their colleagues throughout law enforcement, murder victims, grief-stricken loved ones plus the suspected and convicted murderers constitute an always fascinating – albeit gruesome – reading experience. Unfortunately, The Murder Room fails as a narrative because the organization is elusive. Capuzzo introduces specific cases, then drops them until many chapters later. He flits from protagonist to protagonist without chronological or any other discernible progression. He lionizes the three protagonists almost to the point of unreality.

The repetition, especially about the personal habits of these men, is tiresome. A better writer-editor collaboration would have shortened the 426 pages of text to about 300 pages.

Still, the book might be difficult to put down for readers who solve crimes in real life or who act as armchair crime-solvers. For viewers of fictional television dramas, The Murder Room is a real-life mélange of the shows Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, CSI, Lie to Me, Cold Case and maybe others you watch but I have missed.

Back to Lubbock: Normally, the Vidocq Society members refuse to entertain pleas for assistance from desperate relatives of murder victims. But when Fleisher received a call from James Dunn, father of the missing-and-presumed murdered Scott Dunn, Fleisher became involved, and then Walter became even more deeply involved until they played a significant role in solving what had been an unsolved Lubbock murder. (James Dunn collaborated on an earlier book about the case, Trail of Blood, with writer Wanda Evans.)

Following the trail in the Lubbock case, although the trail is disjointed in Capuzzo's telling, constitutes one of the most compelling story lines in The Murder Room.

By STEVE WEINBERG / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.

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