No Mercy by John Walsh

I have a confession to make: I have never seen that program called America's Most Wanted. I'm not much of a television watcher. I don know what the show is about, though, so when I saw John Walsh's No Mercy on the shelf, I picked it up.

I was in the middle of John Douglas's new book at the same time and it was weird to read about some of the same cases from two different points of view. Oddly enough, while Walsh credits the FBI with their help on some cases, Douglas never mentions the much-heralded television program.

Walsh isn't a great writer. The tone is a little self-righteous, a lot judgmental, and the language is somewhat choppy. But the message is clear and Walsh blows a trumpet for the success of the program and not himself. I like that. His outrage is not hidden in clever wording or simply suggested - he says what he feels about the bad guys and he explains in no uncertain terms why he believes what he does. His logic is clean and reasonable; his delivery is hardly eloquent.

Finally, the book seems to waver between being about cases America's Most Wanted helped break and a battle cry for missing children and victim's rights. I finished the book wondering which was his goal. Maybe both. I don't know.

Okay, so enough already about the method, let's talk about the content.

Walsh starts out talking about Eddie James, a murderer who went into the home of his close friends, raped and strangled an eight-year-old girl, stabbed her grandmother 23 times in her bed, and then tied up the little girl's seven-year-old sister while he showered, robbed the house and then left.

They put the story on the air, hoping to find James, who'd gone into hiding. Eventually they added this killer to their list of caught criminals. It's a good - and scary - story.

Other cases Walsh covers are the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, John List's mass murder of his own family, and the killer Andrew Cunanan, who ended his spree with fashion designer Gianni Versace. Besides showing how effective the television program is at helping catch felons, Walsh really opens one's eyes to how random crime can be. Many of the victims in this book were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My personal favorite section dealt with a case of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction. A summarization: The episode running on March 19, 1993 featured two new stories. The first had a re-enactment of a robbery and shooting at a Salt Lake City restaurant called the Green Parrot. In this robbery, a nice guy named Merritt Riordian was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Riordian was a chef at the Green Parrot and he surprised the robbers at the restaurant. They shot him and ran away. The program gave the relevant information and a phone number to call if anyone recognized the missing gunman.

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