Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503110030
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LANA WHITED
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The title of N.P. Simpson's first book is more apt than even its author realizes.
``Tunnel Vision'' is a nonfiction account of a multiple homicide in August 1981 at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and its aftermath. A 15-year-old boy, Carlton ``Butch'' Smith,'' is the primary suspect in the deaths of his 12-year-old sister, his 13-year-old male cousin and his aunt (the cousin's mother). Simpson's book is an attempt to show how Smith was the victim of authorities' ``tunnel vision.'' He was charged five years after the crime and subsequently imprisoned for five more years awaiting trial while attorneys conducted a jurisdictional battle with federal, state and military officials. Simpson characterizes investigators' attitude about Smith's guilt as ``a matter of statistical odds ... A young man with a history of violent outbursts is at the scene of a violent crime. What were the odds that another person with the potential for violence also had been in the house that night?''
Whatever the ``odds'' of Smith's guilt, unfortunately, the odds are good that an amateur true-crime writer such as Simpson, attempting to vindicate her subject, will commit the same fallacy that she criticizes in investigators. After 200 pages of details (those on one side often no more convincing than the other), Simpson ultimately declares in an epilogue that there are more believable explanations for these crimes than that Smith committed them. What Simpson (and the investigators) must realize is that solving a murder case is not a matter of ``odds'' or probabilities. It is a matter of evidence. And while the evidence in this case doesn't clearly implicate Smith, it doesn't absolve him, either.
Despite Smith's confession (probably coerced) and some evidence of an incestuous relationship between him and the sister who was killed, Simpson presents her subject as a boy/man subject to occasional blackouts who may not even know himself whether or not he committed these crimes. Her conclusion that the case will probably never be solved only adds to the reader's frustration with the book's lack of resolution. After about 40 pages of complicated legal maneuvering, the reader learns that Smith was never tried -- and doesn't know whether to be relieved or angry.
Simpson's book does convince us of two things: one (not new), that the American judicial system is a three-ring circus; and two, as Joe McGinniss's ``Fatal Vision'' taught us several years earlier, military police and courts have no business handling anything as serious as homicide.
Lana Whited teaches English and journalism at Ferrum College.
by CNB