62 pages • 2 hours read
Jill LeovyGhettoside
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary: “Baby Man”
Based on the evidence thus far, including Midkiff’s testimony, Skaggs was certain that Devin Davis had killed Bryant Tennelle, and so he went into the interview intending “to come right at Devin […] Skaggs knew what he wanted from Devin—a full confession” (189). He had a strong enough case already, “[b]ut he knew the case would be far stronger with a confession” (189).
Confessions in ghettoside cases are common: “It was relatively rare for suspects in gang cases to invoke their right to an attorney,” and even if the suspect didn’t fully confess, they usually slipped up in some small way (190). Though Skaggs couldn’t understand confessions, La Barbera “believed it was the burden of guilt” that drove even killers to confess (190). Nevertheless, “[m]any gang members were interrogation experts” and knew how to work interviews, so confessions weren’t a given; in fact, many gang members bled information slowly in interviews, with their real aim to find out what the cops knew and what was happening on the street (190).
While Skaggs drove Davis by the crime scene, laying the groundwork for the interview, “Skaggs studied the teenager. Devin seemed immature for his age. He gave the impression of suffering from a mental or social disability” (191). In the interview room, “Devin was ready, in defensive mode” (192). Skaggs’s approach to interrogations was to improvise as he went along for the most part: “He began [his interview with Davis] talking aimlessly about the investigation. He started in the middle, digressed, and doubled back […] It was infuriating—and effective” (193). As Skaggs circled, Davis grew increasingly incensed, pleading with Skaggs to simply be forthright; interestingly, though, throughout the interview, Davis appeared less concerned that he was being implicated in murder, and more that Skaggs implied that Davis didn’t trust Skaggs.
Skaggs produced a combination of hard and fabricated evidence. He told Davis, for example, that video existed tying him to the crime, when no such video existed. He also suggested that Starks had given Davis up; he presented real letters that Davis had written, but falsely claimed they had been subjected to handwriting analysis. Skaggs at points struggled to control the interview—his meandering ways so frustrated Davis that at points it seemed like he might race ahead before being read his rights; at various points, Skaggs forced David to backtrack on things he had previously stated, such as that his nickname was not Baby Man.
Once the gravity of the situation began to set in, Davis grew somber and tearful. He hovered on the brink of confession, but continued to backtrack. Finally, Skaggs broke Davis; “Suddenly, he was talking so fast the detectives couldn’t keep up […] He was giving them the whole case” (202). Davis walked “the path to his own destruction resolutely, with one obedient answer after another, sobbing in between, saying over and over that he knew he would spend the rest of his life in jail” (204). He hadn’t expected to kill anyone, but when he was handed the gun, he was afraid to back down; he hadn’t chosen Bryant for any particular reason: “All I know is that he was black,” he said (205). “This was the fundamental fact of Bryant Tennelle’s death,” Leovy writes: “what killed Bryant was the one fact about himself that he could not change: he was black” (205). Leovy adds that “[t]o Devin Davis, that meant [Bryant] was killable” (206).
Two days later, Skaggs and Farell interrogated Starks, but with Davis’s confession, that interrogation “was anticlimactic” (207). Skaggs recited the litany of evidence against Starks; however, he was clear that he “had enough evidence to seek murder charges, and his chief purpose […] was to see whether Starks could present evidence to exonerate himself” (210). Starks mostly remained silent—he was more seasoned than Davis and the others—yet despite the many openings Skaggs gave him to present an alternate account, Starks remained resolutely stoic, insisting that he wasn’t involved in any capacity.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary: “Mutual Combat”
Several months after charges were filed in the Tennelle case, La Barbera was forced to cut overtime by 57%, one more impediment on top of the others. Many changes were afoot at South Bureau, from turnover at the top to the departure of Skaggs. Marullo “continued to live up to his moniker ‘Li’l Skaggs,’” but there was a dearth of good detectives as a whole (214). Overtime restrictions were about more than money, though; in some cases, it meant that time-sensitive aspects of the work, like key interviews, had to wait: “It was the practical difficulties that stung Marullo […] For ghettoside homicide detectives, the ability to work odd hours was essential” (215). La Barbera tried to soften the blow, and the older detectives were used to these kinds of impediments, but younger detectives like Marullo struggled and grew frustrated.
Nevertheless, the detectives continued to work tirelessly. Skaggs appeared in court for the conviction of Derrick Washington, who had killed Barbara Pritchett’s son, Dovon; on the stand, Derrick’s sister recanted her statement and denied having ever met Skaggs, a statement that was immediately undermined by tape recordings of her interview. Killings kept pouring in; Marullo and Kouri cleared a case that at first appeared to be a fight spiraled out of control, but instead turned out to be murder on the part of four Crip gang members. Still, morale continued to sag.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary: “Witness Welfare”
Although convictions rose steadily, and Skaggs was confident that Starks and Davis would be found guilty, Phil Stirling, the assistant district attorney on the case, was not as sure. Starks hadn’t confessed, which was concerning; the case rested on Midkiff’s testimony, and Stirling considered her to be a less-than-credible witness.
Though Skaggs was confident, he knew work had to be done. Midkiff needed to be prepped for the trial, but in order to do that, she had to be prepped to live a more normal life: “she was the kind of marginal person who could barely function outside the ghettoside world” (223). She was relocated from motel to motel; she drew male attention wherever she went, and motel managers soon grew tired of her and her companions “making noise.” Jail wiretaps caught threats against her, and “[s]he was always teetering on the edge of prostitution, a return to which would have been devastating to the Tennelle case as well as calamitous for her. Skaggs needed her safe, sober, and alive” (223).
As a result, Skaggs got very involved in Midkiff’s life, “checking up on her regularly and taking her to lunch when he could” (224). She had designs for her life, and she grew fiercely loyal to Skaggs, but she struggled to escape her old ways. She grew desperately lonely—she rarely saw her daughter, and after relocation, her network of friends disappeared: “Her life had appeared anything but solitary. But now, only a few miles from her old neighborhood, she was a castaway” (225).
Nevertheless, she and Skaggs developed an uneasy, but respectful, friendship. Skaggs “knew the names of all her family members and their acquaintances,” and “[h]e asked about them one by one” (227). He chided her for drinking too much and for her liberal leanings, but frequently expressed honest concern for her and a desire for her to better herself. She continued to fall back into stripping; she earnestly did not want to return to prostitution, but didn’t know how to go about getting a “real” job.
Elsewhere, another innocent person had been killed; Marullo and Kouri were on the case, though they encountered resistance and disbelief. The victim’s family believed the detectives were indifferent, and the victim’s uncle, a former gang member, claimed he would take care of it himself. His mother chastised them for always coming too late; nevertheless, she painstakingly drew a diagram of the scene. It “was of little investigative value,” as they “already knew most of it […] Yet the diagram was a poignant artifact of the deep yearning for justice. Even as her son lay dying, Joyce Cook’s thoughts had gone to the police investigation” (230). Marullo and Kouri eventually had to pass the case on to other detectives; the case remained unsolved at the time of the book’s writing.
The preliminary hearing in the Tennelle case took place in the summer of 2008. The man in the wheelchair and the probationer teenager were both subpoenaed, counter to what the detectives had initially promised. Both recanted their statements, and both were impeached and had their prior statements played aloud in court.
Midkiff was put up in a motel the weekend prior to the trial. She couldn’t sleep for nervousness the night before, and on the stand, she was all nerves, terrified of Starks despite his being chained. Still, the case cleared the preliminary hearing and would go to trial.
Despite La Barbera’s continued efforts to lighten the mood, homicide detectives continued to feel the squeeze of cuts. Marullo, tired of being hamstrung, took a uniformed job in a Southeast gang unit, a decision La Barbera took personally.
Part 2, Chapters 17-19 Analysis
The interrogations of Davis and Starks are a study in contrasts in numerous ways. It’s interesting, to begin with, that such an importance is placed on the interrogations—neither confession was necessary, as they had witnesses and evidence enough to convict both. However, Skaggs’s push for a confession from at least one of them reflects the thoroughness prized throughout the book; rather than resting on “enough,” what set Skaggs apart was that he created unimpeachable cases built on such a mountain of evidence that it would be impossible to view it any other way but his. At the same time, though, Leovy doesn’t present this as mere rhetoric and subterfuge on Skaggs’s part: his efforts to give Starks an opportunity to offer a different version of events and possibly exonerate himself were just as important to Skaggs in uncovering the truth.
This stands somewhat at odds with the content of the interrogations themselves, though. Skaggs, like other detectives, did not rely solely on the evidence he already had, or the truth as he could prove it. Instead, in seeking the truth, he did employ subterfuge—implying the false existence of some evidence while outright lying about other evidence. To be sure, the suspects are doing the same thing, and Leovy presents interrogations as often a kind of game, with gang members sometimes even performing a kind of reverse interrogation to discover what the police know. Still, this presents an interesting version of the truth, and carries the suggestion that in order to reach the truth, it is necessary to be less than honest.
A major theme of the book is the lack of funding that certain kinds of police work get, and this becomes most prescient in these chapters, with the announcement of rather extreme budget cuts in the wake of the so-called Great Recession of the late aughts. Homicide is presented as a labor of love throughout the book, but the one exception to that was leeway on overtime—detectives may have had to share a single makeshift interrogation room, but they were free to work as much as they could to get the job done. The new cuts change this, and for the first time (at least, in the span covered by the book), budgetary restrictions make the essence of the job, in many ways, impossible, rather than simply inconvenient. This makes for an interesting, sharp break—whereas high turnover had previously had more to do with the relative lack of prestige, budget cuts mean that detectives who are otherwise truly passionate about the job, like Marullo, are no longer interested because that passion is being extinguished. The case is being made that passion can only take people so far; at a certain point, restrictions become so oppressive that passion and good intentions become impossible—a point easily transferred to the residents of Watts, as well.
