Trices Group Book Review Journal

Hunting Evil

Smith, Carlton

by:

St. Martin's Paperbacks

Publisher:

Location:

2000

Gregory Urquiaga

Cover:

Paperback

Type:

Lynard Barnes

reviewed by:

05/15/2005

Comment:

* * Readable. Nothing new.

HUNTING EVIL is the first book this reviewer has read by Carlton Smith. If you have read reviews in TGBRJ you know we do not dwell on the history or qualification of authors because, quite frankly, authors are not relevant to the subject matter of a book unless the subject is the author. Of course the publishing industry takes exactly the opposite view. That's okay. The publishing industry sells "expertness", not ideas–whether fiction or current events. Authors on the other hand generally want to sell ideas. Publishers and authors are from two different worlds. The authors published by publishers may be "experts", but they do not have a monopoly on ideas or the last word in "expertness" on the idea they are trumpeting. Thus, in TGBRJ, authors are secondary considerations in book reviews. Why is this relevant now?

Carlton Smith mentions his qualifications for writing HUNTING EVIL a number of times in the book (and also in another of his books, SHADOWS OF EVIL, to be reviewed here at a future date). He was a journalist for "The Los Angeles Times" and "The Seattle Times" in the 1970s and 1980s. He mentions his history to explain the steps he took to unravel the crime spree of James A. "Froggie" Daveggio and Michelle Michaud. Cutting to the chase, HUNTING EVIL is excellent reporting. But this reviewer has a problem with the book.

Daveggio and Michaud were arrested in December of 1997 for the abduction and rape of a woman in Las Vegas. The pair were eventually charged with the abduction, rape and murder of Vanessa Lei Samson which was their last act of depravity before being apprehended. In reporting the facts, Smith presents us with a sketch of the early lives of Daveggio and Michaud (as revealed by family and friends as well as a confession by Michaud) and draws conclusions regarding their personalities and character. Daveggio was an angry teenager who grew into an angry man; Michaud a suppliant young teenager trying to gain the favor of and please a non-existent father. She grew into a submissive and fantasy prone woman who was perfect in her own eyes and lived life vicariously through others–Daveggio in particular. Two more un-interesting people you are not likely to find anywher except in the pages of a true-crime book. Which raises a question. It is a question Carlton Smith raises and provides an answer to in his description of the life of James Daveggio.

On his way to describing Daveggio, Smith devotes three chapters to one Marvin Lee Mutch. According to Smith, Mutch was charged and convicted of the murder of thirteen year old

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Cassie Riley in September, 1974. Sometime before (in the spring or summer of that year) Riley had been the girlfriend of the then fourteen year old James Daveggio. Smith draws the conclusion that Daveggio should have been a suspect in that murder. Daveggio knew the victim, he had new tennis shoes, the soles of which would have matched the shoe prints found at the murder scene, and his sister believes he was capable of the murder. Smith thus lays the foundation for this theme that Daveggio tip-toed through the cracks of the justice system from an early age without really being hammered. As Daveggio grew older, married, produced and abandoned one family and started another, he spent three months in the army before being given a medial discharged for starring "into the sun until he couldn't see". All this before reaching the age of 21.

Daveggio's run-ins with the law started shortly after the murder of Cassie Riley. He spent time in juvenile corrections, used an assortment of drugs and added to his reputation as a bullying, angry young man. After his encounter with the army, he would be arrested and charged with a number of "personal assault" crimes. On two occasions he was arrested for assaulting women–kidnaping and sexual assault being the specifics.

According to Smith, by the time Daveggio met Michelle Michaud, he had developed a taste for reading true-crime books about serial killers. Smith portrays the relationship of Daveggio and Michaud as one in which Daveggio would fly off into his demented "the-world-owes-me" mode and Michaud, ever desirous of winning "father's" approval, would scamper along to catch up–even to the point of participating in a sexual assault on her daughter. Daveggio had already sexually assaulted his own daughter. By the time they murdered Vanessa Samson, the Daveggio-Michaud relationship had become horridly predictable and infinitely boring. Carlton Smith uses the right epithets:. Angry man. . . woman of no self-esteem.

Does this book serve any worthwhile purpose? Smith covers the lives of these two damaged people and their damaging ways in some detail. One could say that the book introduces us to people we might otherwise not know exists. That's a stretch. People like Daveggio and Michaud often popup in a news headlines. That may be where they belong, not in a book. But Carlton Smith has another answer to the question.

People like James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud don't just drop out of the sky or are born totally wrapped-up in themselves, ready to mushroom into full blown monsters at a particular time. These people are created. Meticulously created. They are created by other people.

In HUNTING EVIL, as a prelude to the insipid lives of Daveggio and Michaud, Smith presents us with numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Behavioral Science Unit study of serial killers. Presumably, armed with information such as "half of [future serial] killers experienced physical abuse as children", we are able to appreciate why people like Daveggio and Michaud go through life inflicting the pain and destruction they do. It is a valid argument for explaining why should know about these two particular miscreants, but it does not address questions of the relevancy or value of the book. The only glimmer of insight gained from reading HUNTING EVIL is that the evil gets perpetuated. But we know that already.

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