A Murder Trial to Cover, Axes to Grind
Review by Dwight Garner
REASONABLE
DOUBT
The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of
Chris McCowen
By Peter Manso
Illustrated. 435 pages. Atria Books. $25.99.
A few years ago the terrific Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam spotted,
and put a name to, a burgeoning true-crime genre. He called it Cape Cod
Exploitational. There should be a shelf reserved for these salt-speckled things
at every good indie bookstore.
The vices of New England’s fading and eccentric WASP elite, on the Cape
and elsewhere, are an all-American and multigrain form of intellectual snack
food. In her book, “True Prep” (2010), the sequel to “The Official Preppy Handbook,” Lisa
Birnbach zeroed in on our prurient interest. “The world is surprised and
intrigued by the details” of the crimes and misdemeanors of the well-born, Ms.
Birnbach wrote, “because we all look so cool, calm and proper.”
The 2002 murder of Christa Worthington was the new century’s first big
patrician horror story. You remember this crime, because once you’ve heard its
heartbreaking details they’re impossible to forget entirely.
Worthington, a 46-year-old Vassar graduate, fashion writer and single
mother from an old Cape Cod family, was stabbed to death in a hallway off the
kitchen of her cottage in Truro, Mass. Her body remained on the floor for more
than 24 hours, while her curly-haired 2 ½-year-old daughter clung to her bloody
and half-naked corpse. Nearby her cellphone glowed with the lone numeral 9, the
first digit in 911.
Part of the fascination of this murder was the window it opened on the
offbeat, moth-eaten Worthington family. Worthington’s father, Christopher
Worthington, known as Toppy, had a relationship with a much-younger heroin
addict he’d met through an escort service. Every rock that Boston’s tabloid
press turned over had a weird bug or two beneath it. Christa Worthington’s
daughter turned out to be the result of her affair with a roguish, married
local fisherman.
The murder has already inspired one book, the novelist Maria
Flook’s “Invisible
Eden,” published in 2003. Ms. Flook’s account was
intense and insightful — I enjoyed it — but fluky. How this poised writer ended
up typing lines like “he captained her onto the pillowy pier of her
Posturepedic” I’ll never know, though I bet the audio version would be fun to
hear.
Now comes Peter Manso, a biographer of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando,
to take a mighty whack at the Worthington case. Mr. Manso is a long-time Truro
resident and the author of a previous Cape Cod Exploitational titled “Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape”(2003). He writes that he knew Worthington — he calls her “my neighbor”
— for more than a dozen years.
Mr. Manso became a fixture at the 2006 murder trial, and an openly
partisan one. He provided research and other assistance to aid the defense of
the man he says was falsely accused and ultimately convicted of the crime: a
34-year-old black garbage collector, Christopher McCowen, who has an IQ of 76.
Mr. Manso fought for Mr. McCowen in print and as a guest commentator on
Court TV too, earning him the ire of the local district attorney. Mr. Manso
suggests this is why his phone records and samples of his DNA were seized
without his knowledge, and why he was arrested for
not having up-to-date permits on three guns he owned.
I looked forward to reading Mr. Manso’s “Reasonable Doubt: The Fashion
Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen.” His oral
biography of Mailer was bristly and blood
warm, like a freshly killed wild boar. And I’ve always enjoyed Mr. Manso’s
author photographs — his mop of hair, his sneaky resemblance to Al Pacino or
Richard Price, the way he scowls as if he’s just caught you snatching his
morning newspaper from the front porch. He looks like he’s full of beans.
It’s unhappy work, then, to report that “Reasonable Doubt” is a disaster,
at once lumpen and bonkers. At heart it’s a barely digested condensation of the
official trial transcript, which ran to 3,878 pages. Reading Mr. Manso’s
extended play-by-play, which seems to account for every lunch break and
judicial sidebar, feels a bit like hiking the Appalachian trail, which as Bill
Bryson reminded us in “A Walk in
the Woods” is pretty awful
because you’re always in the trees; there are few striking open vistas.
The problems with “Reasonable Doubt” start big and grow smaller, like a
set of Russian nesting dolls. The book has no human texture. Christa
Worthington never comes to life — the author does not even try to give us an
account of her childhood, Vassar years or time as a journalist and world
traveler — nor does any person here.
What little one does learn of Worthington is evocative and tantalizing.
“Read this: The unexamined life isn’t worth living,” she wrote in her journal,
“but the examined life will make you want to die.”
When it comes to the accused, Mr. Manso convinces you that he is
probably right; it’s not improbable that Mr. McCowen, whom the defense argued
had a sexual relationship with Worthington, was framed for her murder. Others
had more motive to kill her, and Mr. Manso points to possible suspects. The
prosecution, he writes, found “no fingerprints, no forensic evidence of any
kind, no witness to tie the defendant to the crime.”
But as “Reasonable Doubt” becomes a meditation on racial attitudes on
the Cape, it becomes an increasingly heavy-handed one. This book contains
throwaway lines like: “Without rape, the state had no Mandingo, no King Kong,
no dark-skinned beast to contrast with the fair-skinned victim.”
Everything is crude overkill. “The DA threw his full staff onto the case
the way Rommel used his tanks to overrun North Africa,” the author writes. A
judge speaking to jurors is described as being “at his Phineas T. Bluster
best.” People here “hobnobbed” rather than socialized, and “penned” articles
rather than wrote them. Law-enforcement misconduct is “like mold on a
particularly smelly blue cheese.”
Mr. Manso’s sad attempts to settle scores with the district attorney are
painful to witness. Mr. Manso wrote that the district attorney came to be
perceived as a “wacko” and “the DA who couldn’t keep his zipper shut.” He notes
that “with his small, lipless mouth and receding chin, he resembled nothing so
much as a nibbling chipmunk.” He writes about the man’s “drugstore hair dye”
and “strut reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s goose step.”
Let me out of here. Mr. McCowen, who continues to appeal his conviction,
deserves a better champion. Few books will I not reread sooner.
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