Q. What's "Charmer" about?
A. In one sense, a series of horrifying murders. In another sense, race. It's also a story about homicide detectives, their stumblings and bumblings, hard work and intelligence and dedication. Real detectives, not TV or mystery characters.
Q. Who is "Charmer?"
A. George Walterfield Russell Jr., a cunning African-American murderer from an affluent suburb of Seattle.
Q. What was his problem?
A. He had many. One was a problem that is common to many blacks in America, including 0.J. Simpson. George Russell was an "oreo."
Q. What's that?
A. The word originated in the prison culture to describe a black man who downplays his racial identity and tries to out-white the whites. A black man who is treated like a pet by his white playmates and classmates but only allowed to come so close. A toy black, an icon, a symbol, but not treated as a fellow human being.
Q. What characterizes "oreos" like George Russell?
A. Confusion. Despair. Alienation. And that great common denominator of violent crime: rage.
Q. What were Russell's crimes?
A. He seduced and impregnated young teen-aged white women, assaulted others, and eventually murdered three women in their twenties and posed their bodies artistically to provide the ultimate shock value. A prosecutor called the gallery of bodies "the collected works of George Walterfield Russell." A dildo was rammed into the mouth of one victim and a copy of "More Joy of Sex" placed by her body -- in an example of a rare sexual perversion known as "piquerism," he stabbed one corpse 231 times after death and played a game of tic-tac-toe with his knife.
Q. To what do psychiatrists attribute piquerism?
A. Uncontrollable hatred and rage. In Russell's case, homicidal misogyny. He hated women to death.
Q. Did Russell have prior relationships with his victims?
A. Barely knew any of them.
Q. What did they represent to him?
A. In my opinion, females in general. The snooty white socialites who toyed with him in high school. The lustful sufferers from "jungle fever" who used his body but refused to take him seriously. The teenage white girls who fell for his seductive charms but rejected him as they matured. Also some of the black women by whom he was raised and -- in his distorted view -- by whom he was discarded.
Q. Didn't Russell have any social life with black women?
A. None except his beloved half-sister. He shunned the company of black women and bad-mouthed them on every occasion. He appeared to be as anti-black as the most ignorant racist.
Q. How was he caught?
A. Partially by extraordinarily ordinary police work -- thousands of hours of gumshoeing, canvassing, interviewing and re-interviewing, the kind of work that seldom draws attention. And partially by leaps of inductive reasoning by a couple of brilliant detectives. And partially by forensics: DNA testing and other analyses.
Q. Were the DNA tests the final nail for Russell?
A. It doesn't appear that DNA testing ever produces absolute results, at least as of the time of the Russell case. The tests showed probabilities -- 86% that the killer was black, for example. Ninety-four percent that a certain hair came from Russell. That sort of thing. But taken in toto, the DNA evidence was powerful.
Q. What kind of family produced this strange man?
A. Russell's mother is a professor of English and the Humanities and a lecturer on black culture. One stepfather is president of San Francisco State University, another is a dentist. His sister is a recent graduate of Yale. His grandmother taught school in Florida. A remarkable thread of achievement runs through the family.
Q. How was he raised?
A. In the typical American flux and confusion. When he was an infant. his bright young mother left home to get an education, leaving him in the care of his grandmother and four aunts in a backwater Florida town. When he was six, his mother brought him to Seattle to live with her dentist husband while she taught at the University of Washington. The family soon moved to upscale Mercer Island where Russell hobnobbed with the children of Boeing execs, corporate lawyers, doctors and other professionals. There were six or eight black families on the island, but neither Russell nor his parents had much to do with them. His mother and stepfather split up when the boy was fifteen, and she went east to teach at the University of Maryland and later Tufts. Russell chose to remain among the wealthy whites of Mercer Island.
Q. Books on African-American killers are almost nonexistent. What made you decide to write one?
A. George Russell's crimes were horrendous but fascinating, unique and significant. They were largely ignored by the media just as most black crimes are ignored or played down, O.J. Simpson being the rarest of exceptions. The present tendency of newspapers to play black crimes on page 34 or ignore them altogether is a disturbing variety of racial prejudice which can only make a difficult problem worse.
Q. What difficult problem?
A. African-Americans make up twenty percent of our population and commit fifty percent of our crime.
Q. Because they're inherently evil?
A. Because ninety-nine percent are deprived, alienated, stigmatized, isolated and rejected on a systematic, institutionalized basis -- and thus enraged on one psychological level or another. The privileged one percent (e.g. Clarence Thomas, Richard Pryor, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, George Walterfield Russell) live in a confusing world of rejection and self-doubt.
Q. Why can't the black community step in and solve its own problems?
A. You don't ask the man whose neck is being stepped on to stop the fight.
Q. In your opinion, what creates black criminals like George Russell?
A. To vastly oversimplify, a national pattern of racial prejudice, which produces rage, which produces crime.
Q. So George Russell should be forgiven his sins?
A. Of course not. He should be exactly where he is, serving life without chance of parole. To try to understand him is not to excuse his murderous behavior. Every criminal of every color must accept responsibility for his crimes. Otherwise we face anarchy.
Q. What got you so interested in racial matters?
A. I was raised by a man who ranted constantly about "niggers," "shines" and "jigaboos." I rebelled against him and his ideas in my teens, and the subject of race prejudice has preoccupied me ever since. I was thrown out of a second-floor barracks at Keesler Air Force Base for telling a group of Southerners that it was okay with me if my sister married a black. As a Time correspondent, I was ten feet away when hard-hat racists spat on Elizabeth Eckford and the other black children trying to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. I wrote "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" and "Black is Best -- The Riddle of Cassius Clay," both prize-winning books. My five-part series on how organized sport is helping to destroy a generation of black males was characterized by the editors twenty-five years later as "the most important series" the magazine had ever run.
Q. Why is it more important than ever that whites and blacks understand each other?
A. Because race prejudice is destroying America. Because the problem worsens every day. Because a state of terror exists in black neighborhoods and is spreading outward.
Q. Can the problem be solved?
A. Yes, but only by a massive effort, and I mean massive, on the order of what we did in World War II. Not by phony wars on crime, or hot-air campaign speeches, or token gestures.
Q. And if the problem isn't confronted and solved?
A. Our peaceful democracy will cease to exist. Ghetto crime and terrorism will become the norm in and out of the ghetto. Neither black nor white will be safe. The American way of life will end.
Q. Unless we begin to understand people like George Walterfield Russell?
A. Exactly.