THE MINT CONDITION OF HIS LIBRARY, THE PRISTINE, UNREAD IMMACULATENESS OF HIS VOLUME OF SARTRE EVOKES NO LESS A CHARGE AGAINST R .D . TURNER: TRUE MURDERER, FALSE SCHOLAR! tical Reason (London, 1976), a gift from my wife which bore a special holiday message on its inside flyleaf: the signature of previous owner R.D. Turner. Suddenly, and in a disquieting way, a peculiar fetish had found its way into our home. During the French Revolution, women were observed dipping their kerchiefs in the blood of those executed on the guillotine. In the nineteenth century, similarly ghoulish mementoes of infamous criminals enjoyed a certain vogue in that nether zone of popular superstitions and heterogeneous fears that seems to be to Browning to Yeats), Latin and Greek literature (in bilingual “ pony" editions popular among students), European letters and fine arts. The extent of the murderer’s taste was represented by the finest primary texts (Collected Works of. . ., Complete Poems o f. . .); the depth of his interest was reflected in the number of scholarly secondary texts as well. Aspects of the crime struck particular chords in the media: Sundby, a striking regular on Turner's West Seattle route, had spurned his advances and called 911 repeatedly to get help for what she perceived to be a worsening situation. Witnesses overheard her screams and A few days before he killed Ela Sundby ( or so the story goes), Driver) in a bus. Friends of the victim and witnesses seemed confident that his conv ic tion was assured. The Dos- toevskian overtones of his secret intellectual life (reminiscent of the double ax murderer Raskolnikov’s literary bent in Crime and Punishment) were soon overshadowed in Seattle media by similar quirks in the personality of the Goldmark family murderer David Lewis Rice (bringing to mind the murderer Smerdyakov, who blindly follows Ivan and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov). As it always does, the season of gifts brought a book my way: a like-new copy of Sartre’s Critique of Dialecwith us always. Romantic poet Theophile Gautier would write about the severed hand of Lacenaire, the celebrated dandy/ murderer: Depraved curiosity! I touched, despite my disgust, the cold flesh, the reddish down, as yet unwashed after execution. Like the murderer’s hand, mummified and stored away in the past, this object under the Christmas tree—this book bearing its peculiar aura—must exist in the present. Like the skull of Robespierre in its glass case, like any object endowed with history and horror, this gift had come Metro bus driver cum literary amateur cum homicidal maniac R.D. Turner made the rounds of used bookstores with his extensive collection of perfectly preserved editions in an attempt to sell. One buyer would later assert that the vast majority of the books—which attest to years of patient, selective accumulation—appear never to have been opened, much less read. Imprints ranged from Oxford University Press to the upper crust of American scholarly presses and arts publishers. The titles reflected an encyclopedic interest in English poetry (from the Pearl poet to Spenser to Milton linked Turner directly to the crime, which was committed with a kitchen knife. Sundby was portrayed in reports as a trusting, dependable working woman whose glamorous beauty (portrayed in lavish front page photos) drew men to her. News stories suggested, in a strangely inconclusive way, that she enjoyed little permanence in her relations with the men she attracted. Turner’s portrait emerged according to a profile that has become numbingly familiar: a quiet, reserved loner, he was a steady worker who seemed simply to have snapped, a sort of Travis Bickle (Taxi Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1987 27 C an da ce B ie ne m an
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