The Edge Online - Reviews: Simon Whitechapel

Crossing to Kill
Simon Whitechapel
Virgin paperback, 304 pages
Review by Steven Blake (2000)

Editor’s note: The case is still (2010) unsolved, and some claim there have been as many as 5000 murdered women. According to Amnesty International it’s 300 plus. Ciudad Juarez’s problems have worsened, and now involve drug cartels and gangland galore (perhaps they always did.)

For the last seven years, the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez has been a happy hunting ground for rapists and murderers. Men of the violent, women-hating variety seem to descend on its streets to run amok. Or is just one man behind it all? Or behind most of it? Could this be a one man reign of terror to make Jack the Ripper look insignificant, assuming of course that Jack the Ripper was one man who worked alone? (My favourite Ripper theory is that ‘he’ was a woman, a crazed midwife. I also like the conspiracy theory starring Prince Eddy, aka Collar-and-Cuffs, and Walter Sickert, also silly, at least in the form in which it’s presented. If the Ripper was any of the known suspects he was Hutchinson. If.) Certainly our man or men here exhibit a fondness for dark alleys, and Ciudad Juárez isn’t a million miles from the Victorian East End.

This is the first account of/literary investigation into these crimes (there will be many others) and it’s strong on detail. Whitechapel looks in depth at the circumstances and conditions of the women of Ciudad Juárez. Violent, sprawling, over-polluted and over-crowded, the city is close to the border with the good ole’ US of A, and people move there to work in the regulation-lite factories that sell to the States. And let’s face it, if workers are less protected than in the States then they’re unprotected indeed. And Ciudad Juárez seems to be a bit like a lawless frontier town from an old Western. And there our analogy ends, ’cos there ain’t no white knight gunslinger riding to the rescue. There aren’t many police either, and what there are don’t always seem too clever. The factory women get off the bus home from work and they’re on their own, with higher-than-average chances of being raped and murdered.

Crossing to Kill bears the fruits of Whitechapel’s copious research, and presents his theory about the ‘serial killer playground’, about how he fingers Abdul Latif Sharif, a real life Egyptian chemist who seems to hail from the pages of a pulp novel, for being directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths. He also makes many digressions. Whitechapel is interested in the psychology of the place and the murders. What he seems to be saying is that we generally ignore environmental psychology in our daily lives, and we ignore it at our peril.

The editor will be pleased to read that I think that Whitechapel is, broadly, right about this, but is his theorising about the murders correct? I dunno. He is certainly right to say that he is telling ‘the . . . story of a labyrinth of mirrors’, though whether he is telling the true story, or a true story, or merely what could turn out to be fiction, I can’t tell. If Crossing to Kill were fiction it would be a serial killer novel that would be branded as ludicrous in its few reviews. But in real life the details of many a serial killer’s career sound far-fetched. For example, Dennis Nilsen, or consider the Zodiac case. By definition, these are extraordinary crimes (or are they?). There could be multiple paths through this particular labyrinth. At least someone’s trying to find one.