Book Review: Eat the Evidence

Title: Eat the Evidence

Author: John E. Espy

Date: 2019

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN: 978-1948598156

Illustrations: black-and-white photo section

Quote: “He finally uncurled his hands from around the little girl's throat, sat down on the floor and started screaming that he hadn't done anything. Mary had grabbed his hands and put them around her throat, he said. She made him choke her.”

John E. Espy. Eat the Evidence (Kindle Locations 218-219). Open Books.

So he said...to people who'd seen that his excuse was not true, who'd watched him get up and attack another little child.

In the commercial media, images of mental illness tend to be selected for their soothing qualities. Usually young and pretty faces are matched with terribly sympathetic, motherly voices throbbing on about dainty, girly "mood disorders” that ought to be treatable with an extra dollop of mothering: depression, anxiety, sometimes anorexia.

In the real world, major mental illness usually appears in reaction to drugs—including the pills some women (and men) legally pop in the hope that pills will help them feel happier. Serious mental illness also appears in old age, in reaction to atherosclerosis and other things that damage the brain. What people my age mean by autism is another major mental illness, which is still rare; the young report more autism at least partly because they use "autism" to mean any brain or nerve damage, including cerebral palsy. 

Once in a while, though, people really do seem to be born, not with understandable perceptual differences, learning disabilities, chemical sensitivities, or mood swings, but with their brains wired so completely at cross-purposes to the rest of humankind that they really can’t be allowed to live among other people. They can’t be understood or reasoned with; they have to be stopped. They're not even clever sociopaths like Hitler; their violence doesn't even have an understandable motive like greed or fear. Their existence supports the idea of a cosmic Evil Principle. With few exceptions, this genuinely dangerous mental illness is almost always found in males. (Some claim to find it in male animals other than humans.)

Jeffrey Dahmer had it. Charles Manson had it. David Brown, who changed his name to Nathaneal Bar Jonah, had it. Eat the Evidence is volume one of what would fit into one printed volume, but is being published as an e-book trilogy, of the preposterous stories Bar Jonah told a psychologist and the extent to which other people could verify that some of those stories were partly true. 

Bar Jonah was “legally sane” enough to try to deny or justify the things he did. His fascination with the Bible and membership in churches even suggests that some part of his brain was close enough to normality to want to be healed through religious conversion. But he wasn’t healed. While people clung to hope that Bar Jonah could overcome relatively minor spiritual challenges like gluttony and homosexuality, Bar Jonah’s real problems were pedophilia, sadism, murder, and cannibalism.

He was different from other babies, in bad ways, even before birth. He was born with hereditary defects, like teeth that grew in without enamel, and his brain was probably damaged by a fever and by other things in early childhood. He was just a little boy when he suddenly started choking little Mary and claimed she had “made him” do it. His father found him repulsive—as did most people throughout his life—adding layers of emotional trauma to his fundamental insanity. Bar Jonah was the sort of guy people tend to pity, figuring he can’t be as bad as he looks. Bar Jonah was worse.

Espy tries to understand Bar Jonah and concludes that the whole idea of understanding a man like Bar Jonah is probably what readers will like least about his book. I will agree that Eat the Evidence is not your average true crime story about how a smart baddie almost pulled off a series of crimes until an even smarter detective, etc., etc. If you like true crime stories about nice clean bank robberies or clever swindles, you will not like Eat the Evidence. I would guess that, if anybody actually liked Raven or Helter Skelter, even they would not like Eat the Evidence. Bar Jonah was not clever at all; he got away with his crimes for years because the normal human brain does not comprehend such pure abomination. He confessed one of his murders in horrible detail to an acquaintance; when she told the police, the police assumed she was “crazy” and failed to investigate.

Where I think the book falls short of its own goal is that Espy tries to understand Bar Jonah as a typical pedophile. The concept of a typical pedophile may be as oxymoronic as the concept of a typical case of autism, but Bar Jonah’s insanity seems to me to be a separate thing from either his pedophilia or his homosexuality. Pedophiles who are not otherwise insane can, like Nabokov’s famous character, live with a sexual obsession they know better than to act out in any way, or can focus on building a relationship they can legally consummate when the child reaches age sixteen or eighteen or whatever the legal limit may be. Those who physically molest children often rely on denial, or on ordinary emotional blackmail, rather than physical brutality, to keep the children quiet; relatively few commit murder.

What readers probably need to know about the Bar Jonah Trilogy is that it’s not been edited to spare any sensitive readers anything. We’re not only told repeatedly that Bar Jonah had unusually small and foul-smelling private parts; midway through the book we get nude photos. We’re told exactly what his boyfriend did before moving in with him, in words of three and four letters. We’re told exactly how the same police department that refused to believe Bar Jonah’s confession, secondhand, tortured the mother of the murdered child with accusations based entirely in their own bigotry: the mother had been divorced and remarried a few times, and the child was biracial.

Do you need to read a book that’s guaranteed to disgust you? My impression of young parents in my part of the world is that they already tend to overestimate the number of pedophiles out there and the pedophiliac appeal of their offspring. And another stereotype to lay on fat guys with bad teeth, dead-end jobs, and exploitative boyfriends is probably not something the world really needs, either. 

But, given the persistence of the undead “Ignore any new information a woman offers, however well researched and verifiable it may be, because ‘she’s incompetent’” meme, perhaps we do need more awareness of what real “craziness” is: a rare thing found almost exclusively in males. On that ground, this close-up look at a genuinely mad man may have some redeeming social value.

Nathaneal Bar Jonah is no longer able to dispute Espy's representation of him; he died in prison in 2008. If you read this book, you'll probably be glad to know that.