The true crime genre sometimes gets a bad rap as the literary equivalent of the made-for-TV-movie. Actually, that comparison is sometimes spot-on. But MURDER IN ROOM 103 is proof that true crime doesn’t have to be crap.
Without the backing of Court TV and her role reporting on the Jamie Penich murder on the network, I suspect that author Harriet Ryan never would have written a book. Ryan has done an impressive job, though, and can give up her day job whenever she’s ready.
Way back in 2001, 21-year-old Jamie Penich was growing weary of living in her hayseed Pennsylvania hometown. So she dumped her fiancé and signed up for a study-abroad program, ultimately ending up in Seoul, South Korea. A night of revelry with fellow students and some American GIs ended in tragedy when someone left her naked and stomped to death in her motel room.
The list of suspects included several of the GIs whose advances she had rebuked; her roomie, who claimed to have slept through the violent stompathon; and her friend and co-partier, Kenzi Snider, the last known person to have seen her alive.
The book highlights the problems of multinational cooperation in law enforcement, or the lack thereof. When an American is victimized in another country, there are a host of jurisdictional issues and other hurdles that wouldn’t be a problem if the crime happened in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Issues of habeas corpus and the intricacies of custodial interrogation also are addressed.
This particular investigation was hampered due to the bungling of the crime scene by Korean investigators and their shoddy interviews. Less-than-adequate translations of the American witness statements also presented problems. When the heavily relied upon practice of using hypnosis on witnesses failed to provide any real breakthroughs, the case was all but closed by the Koreans.
An American FBI agent, at the urging of a prominent U.S. senator, took a special interest in the case. He tirelessly and zealously worked the case until he finally zeroed in on a suspect and ultimately obtained a full confession. But will a confession in the absence of any meaningful physical evidence or corroborating witnesses convince a panel of Korean judges that the murderer had been arrested? Would it in our country? Should the confession hold up now that the accused has recanted it?
In true whodunit style, Ryan clearly lays out all the evidence, the suspects, the alibis and the possible motives, then lets the reader play juror. It’s not clear-cut, though. One will most likely finish the book and have more questions than answers. I found it unsettling that the case was not tidily wrapped up. But hey, that’s how true crime plays out sometimes. –Ken Davis
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