TRUE CRIME

Laura Tillman

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City

Scribner

Hardcover 978-1-5011-0425-1 (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 256 pgs., $26.00

April 5, 2016

Laura Tillman was a rookie reporter at the Brownsville Herald in 2008 when she was assigned to cover a story about whether a historic building in Brownsville’s Barrio Buena Vida should be demolished. In a tiny apartment in the building, five years earlier, three children were murdered by their parents. Tillman interviewed Brownsville residents, some of whom said the building should go because it was haunted and a constant reminder of the unthinkable. Others said that was superstition—it was just a building.

The father of the children, John Allen Rubio, was born and raised in Brownsville. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury rejected that argument and sentenced him to die. Rubio’s lawyers won an appeal, but a second jury convicted him and again sentenced him to die. Tillman began collecting stories about the crime, reviewing courtroom evidence, and initiated a correspondence with Rubio, eventually interviewing him in prison. Maria Angela Camacho, Rubio’s common-law wife and the children’s mother, who was convicted and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences, never responded to Tillman’s letters.

Rubio’s childhood, Tillman found, was devastatingly dysfunctional, marked by fetal alcohol syndrome, a missing father, a drug-addicted mother, and hallucinations. Rubio’s teachers noted emotional disturbance from kindergarten and, oh yeah, he was probably schizophrenic and believed that his dead grandmother was a witch, issuing instructions. Tillman reproduces passages from Rubio’s letters verbatim which serve to give readers a feel for Rubio’s limitations. Angela Camacho’s backstory, unfortunately, is much less thorough.

Throughout The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City, Tillman evokes a melancholy, haunting atmosphere, a sense of held breath, of watching. She begins the story rather dramatically. She visits the building and notes “a cloud hovering overhead—an accumulation of meaning more dense and persistent than I’d ever intuited.” Fortunately Tillman soon settles into a compelling style without the purple prose. Her carefully measured dropping of startling and eerie facts into an otherwise routine passage is jarringly effective. Tillman provides an intelligent, thoughtful exploration of mental illness and its treatment by the legal system, capital punishment, the role of journalism in reporting on crime, the social pathologies of poverty and drugs, and curandera culture on the border.

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts is about how an entire social structure failed this family, beginning when the parents were children themselves. There were several critical points at which every social institution these individuals came into contact with—schools, Child Protective Services, health care professionals, Social Security, the police—let them slip through the cracks. That last day, when this obviously troubled family came into contact with the public and officials, Tillman reports, “every moment feels like one in a series of mistakes.”

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts is not mere titillation and ghoulish recitation of facts, historically typical of the true crime genre. Tillman joins the new breed of true crime authors, providing context, history, sociology and theology. Her first person narration becomes an intensely personal quest to understand the many-layered Brownsville and a search for what, if any, meaning could be gleaned from such an atrocity.