|
  Sentenced to Life
When Richard Daniel Starrett
confessed to police that he was responsible for a two-year spree of kidnapping,
rape and murder in Georgia and South Carolina, one person was skeptical.
Starrett's mother, Gerry, couldn't believe that her son was involved in any
crimes. After all, she maintained, he came from a "perfect" all-American
family.
Gerry Starrett's stance went deeper than maternal love. Despite her son's
confession, the testimony of several of his victims and further evidence
uncovered by police--and despite gentle prodding from her husband--she turned
away from reality. Her son was not guilty, period.
This, more than the crimes themselves or Danny Starrett's journey through the
legal system, lies at the heart of A Stranger in the Family: A True Story of
Murder, Madness, and Unconditional Love (Penguin Books, 1995), the latest
book from Pulitzer Prize winners Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith '73.
A Stranger in the Family is, as its jacket copy attests, "a stunningly
intimate portrait of a diseased mind and the moving story of a loving family's
slow and painful disintegration." To understand Danny Starrett, it's almost
enough to know that he chose his victims by cruising the classified ads. He
would call the advertiser's number, and if a woman answered he would then show
up at her door hoping she was both young and alone. If so, he was likely to
kidnap her, take her to his home and rape her.
Eventually, Starrett murdered one of his victims, a teenager named Jeannie
McCrea, whom he described as a willing hostage. "She didn't fight back,"
Starrett wrote in a journal after he was arrested. "She was acting like she
almost expected things to turn out this way. It was almost as if I had invited
her out for a weekend date and had just dropped by to pick her up."
The murder increased the intensity of the manhunt for Starrett, and once he
was captured his conviction was almost a matter of course. But Gerry Starrett
mounted both a costly legal battle and a public relations campaign in her son's
defense. How, she asked over and over, could a young man who was married, the
father of a 2-year-old girl, and a former model child be a serial rapist and
murderer? She maintained that Danny's childhood oddities--he was hyperactive,
disruptive in school, a verbal bully to his siblings--had largely disappeared
once he became, in his preteens, a voracious reader. She said he had a
brilliant mind and an easygoing, attractive personality--he had everything
going for him.
One by one, the other members of Starrett's family were convinced of his guilt
(and his mental illness), and they pulled away from Gerry. Danny's father
withdrew emotionally. The family fell apart. Danny was sentenced to 10 life
terms. His mother told a reporter that the experience had made her "free."
"`I have done everything right,' she explained," write Naifeh and Smith. "`I
have worked forty hours a day, making sure that everything with this family was
perfect, and all of a sudden, none of it makes any difference. And so all that
effort, I now realize, just doesn't matter. And, in a way, understanding that
has set me free." . . .
"After [the] day [Danny was sentenced]," they write, "Gerry never worried
about Danny again--at least not in the same way. She still had waking
nightmares about what might happen if he ran into `some male three times his
size who was raised on the streets and didn't share Danny's concept of reasoned
discourse.' But at least the real nightmares were gone, the ones that had come
in the middle of the night to roil her sleep, the ones in which a child
wandered into the path of an onrushing car or teetered on the edge of a great
cliff while she watched helplessly from a distance, unable to run to save him
or call out a warning."
Shifting Sands
Until relatively recently, the study of African history meant examining the
exploits of Europeans in Africa. Introductory courses in the continent's past
generally paid lip service to African kingdoms that rose and fell even before
the first Portuguese traders arrived in the 15th century--and, one suspected,
those kingdoms only got noticed because their organization paralleled that of
European monarchies. The patterns of ordinary life across most of Africa were
counted valueless or, at best, lost in the mists of preliteracy. The influence
of Africans on Africans was left for anthropologists and archaeologists to sort
out.
Times have changed. But, as Associate Professor of History James L.A. Webb
notes in his newest book, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change
Along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995),
there still are time-honored "truths" about African history that can stand
reconsideration.
Webb's study describes the ways in which ecological change in a region of West
Africa called the sahel (now largely consumed by the rapacious Sahara Desert)
forced sahelian populations into new social and political alliances and
influenced their congress with North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and European
trading stations on the coast of what is now Senegal. As the desert moved
relentlessly southward sahelians who had survived on farming and livestock
herding found that they either had to move or to take up new economic
activities such as trading. Those who moved ahead of the desert and into the
savanna lands on its edge eventually merged with other groups from the north
and east. The new residents of the desert edge, who called themselves Whites to
differentiate themselves from sub-Saharan black Africans, established trade
links with North Africa and with the European traders on the coast. Their
communities were headed either by clerics or by warriors. The cleric-headed
groups grew grain and other crops to trade for precious salt. The warriors
captured hundreds of thousands of slaves for markets around the world.
It shouldn't be controversial to write that the North African demand for black
African slaves exceeded that of the Atlantic slave trade. It did. As Webb
describes it, political violence spread through the sahel and southward, and
black African slaves "poured" north, where the demand was insatiable. In one
horrible irony, he notes, the trade in slaves for Arab-bred horses was both
brisk and symbiotic: the horses were needed for lightning raids on villages,
where children were scooped out of sorghum fields into bags and thrown onto the
horses' backs, but they also were susceptible to a host of insect-borne
diseases and died in great numbers. So the sahelian raiders needed more and
more horses, which meant acquiring increasing numbers of tradeable slaves. But,
though Webb's conclusions are clearly supported, they may raise a few eyebrows
in the Africanist community. Until now, it was broadly assumed that the
Atlantic slave trade accounted for most of the economic changes wrought in the
sahel and sub-Saharan Africa from 1600-1850. European and American demand for
slaves was supposed to be the key element in building new economic, social and
political systems in the regions. It was important, Webb says, but it
was not determinant. That dubious distinction is shared by ecology (the
desertification of the sahel) and by White activities in trading and warfare.
Thanks to Webb's book, another piece of African history has been liberated
from Eurocentrism and returned to the peoples of the continent.--Sally Baker
 Alan Taylor '77
William Cooper's Town
Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
Alfred A. Knopf
Historian Alan Taylor '77 once again turns his deft hand to a portrait of a
particular American place in a rollicking time. As he did in Liberty Men and
Great Proprietors (University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Taylor serves
up an engrossing tale of entrepreneurship--and skullduggery--in the early
United States.
William Cooper, who came from humble, Pennsylvania Quaker stock, learned as a
young man how to manipulate political and economic circumstances to his own
advantage. Displacing a host of more rightful owners, he assumed control of a
large tract of land in New York and founded Cooperstown, settling there with
his family--including son James Fenimore Cooper. William Cooper eventually
became presiding judge and U.S. Congressman from Otsego County.
James Fenimore Cooper chronicled his father's life and the settling of Otsego
County in a novel, The Pioneers. Taylor uses quotations from The
Pioneers to provide a loose framework for this book, and they not only help
put historical facts in a fascinating second dimension (we look at them from
Taylor's viewpoint and from James Fenimore Cooper's), they coincidentally make
the reader want to revisit Natty Bumppo, Chingatchgook & Co.
Taylor's exquisite attention to details of place, time and metaphorical
setting make this book, winner of the 1995 New York Historical Association
Manuscript Award, read like a sprawling novel. Most readers will be hooked from
the first page and will hardly look up until the last.
Mule Train
Faculty File | Table of Contents | Student Life
|
|