Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas

Book was in excellent condition. It arrived on time and was just what I was expecting.

I have to admit that the only reason I initially read this book was my curiosity at how the town of Jasper and the events which took place in said town would be portrayed. Jasper is my hometown, and I was 12 years old during that dreadful summer of 1998. Ultimately, when I found out that a professor at the very university I attend current day had written a book about my hometown and Bill King, I wanted to see if he, like nearly all others who had written or spoken of the topic, had made my town and fellow townspeople out to be some sort of ignorant, backwoods armpit in East Texas. Almost immediately, my attentions were diverted elsewhere...Ainslie does a terrific job of showing that this crime could have happened to any person in any town...ANYWHERE in the world. Although I may or may not agree with his diagnosis of Bill King, since I did not know him personally, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, if enjoyed is even an appropriate word. Coming from the mouth of a Jasper resident who has to deal with the horrid looks and comments from people who learn where she is from...that's saying a lot. This topic is quite sensitive to me, and that degree of sensitivity has not lessened in any way since July 1998. If any changes have happened, it's only gotten stronger. I strongly suggest reading this book for a better and less bias view of Jasper and James Byrd, Jr's murder.

I thought the author did an outstanding job of writng about the humanity of a person who did what we call a "inhunman" crime. It is all the more chilling that these acts were not done by some sort of monster, but a person, who is to some extent a result of his environment. The best part of the book, however is the description of the community of jasper and the very real people who tried to do the right thing in the midst of lots of media hype.

Authors and psychologists can spend lifetimes trying to know what shadows know. They prowl the obscure corners of human behavior, seeking to drag something back out to the light. But sometimes, the path only leads them deeper, darker. Dr. Ricardo Ainslie -- both an author and a psychologist -- has been chasing shadows along Huff Creek Road in Jasper, where James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in one of the past century's grisliest hate crimes. And each step has taken him deeper into the darkest recesses of a decayed mind. Countless articles, books and films have documented how King and two white friends -- fellow ex-con Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry -- offered the drunken Byrd a ride in the wee hours of June 7, 1998. But they didn't take him home. Instead, they chained him by the ankles to the rear bumper of Berry's truck and literally dragged him to pieces on a hard-pan logging road. They purposely left his dismembered corpse in the front yard of a small African-American church and cemetery. And King -- whose body was almost completely swathed in racist and Satanic tattoos, whose apartment concealed a stash of racist literature and clothing splattered by Byrd's blood, and whose distinctive cigarette lighter was found at the scene -- was the first of the three to stand trial. Widely seen as the ringleader of the butchery, he was convicted and sentenced to die. Unrepentant and his appeals all but exhausted, the 29-year-old King now awaits execution. But those trials didn't answer a central question: What made Bill King a monster? Partly at the request of King's father, the 55-year-old University of Texas psychology professor was drawn deep into the sometime savage, sometimes frighteningly ordinary world of a small-town killer. "Bill King, the man, is much more human than we would care to think," Ainslie writes. "When the global media descended ... in a relentless hunt for sensational material, they constructed a perhaps comforting, but ultimately obscuring, myth about King's monstrous nature. ... The truth is that King is all too close, in kind and in temperament, to me or to you." In King, we see a dim and distant reflection of ourselves, Ainslie suggests. Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to portray the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust, and Ainslie invokes it for other acts of evil. "To attempt to understand the motives at work in Bill King's life, to understand that there were reasons for his behavior, is not to exonerate him," Ainslie explains. "If we avoid examining King's life for fear that such an effort might appear to excuse him, then we risk missing precisely what we most need to know about this story." One of the most unsettling elements of the 254-page "Long Dark Road" is its hypothesis that "given the right alchemy, perhaps anyone might become capable of monstrous cruelty." "The transgressions involved may not be as momentously horrifying as the dragging death of an innocent man," Ainslie