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Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas | 
 enlarge | Author: Ricardo C. Ainslie
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 307661
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 254
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0292705743
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1523092
EAN: 9780292705746
ASIN: 0292705743
Publication Date: October 1, 2004
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Condition: New! Still shrinkwrapped.
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Product Description
"Ricardo Ainslie is that rare writer: a scholar who is also a riveting storyteller. Long Dark Road is a deep, haunting, and impressively researched book that deserves a wide readership." —Dan Rather, CBS News "This book truly is a long, dark road—but one that leads to a profound understanding of human nature. It describes the journey of a healer into the pathology of a killer and the wounded community he left behind. One feels both enlightened and consoled by Ricardo Ainslie's probing and empathic mind." —Lawrence Wright, author and New Yorker staff writer "Unique and penetrating. . . . In its portrait of Bill King, Long Dark Road offers a glimpse into the mind of a killer that is unnervingly intimate. While never losing sight of the horror of the crime King was convicted of committing, Ainslie makes us understand, through dogged investigation and temperate empathy, the forces that helped warp an otherwise bright and promising individual into one of the most notorious criminals of our time." —Stephen Harrigan, author of Gates of the Alamo, A Natural State, Water and Light, and Comanche Midnight On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate monster, someone so inhuman that his crime could be easily explained as the act of a racist psychopath. Few, if any, asked or cared what long dark road of life experiences had turned Bill King into someone capable of committing such a crime. In this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, Ricardo Ainslie builds an unprecedented psychological profile of Bill King that provides the fullest possible explanation of how a man who was not raised in a racist family, who had African American friends in childhood, could end up on death row for viciously killing a black man. Ainslie draws on exclusive in-prison interviews with King, as well as with Shawn Berry (another of the perpetrators), King's father, Jasper residents, and law enforcement and judicial officials, to lay bare the psychological and social forces—as well as mere chance—that converged in a murder on that June night. Ainslie delves into the whole of King's life to discover how his unstable family relationships and emotional vulnerability made him especially susceptible to the white supremacist ideology he adopted while in jail for lesser crimes. With its depth of insight, Long Dark Road not only answers the question of why such a racially motivated murder happened in our time, but it also offers a frightening, cautionary tale of the urgent need to intervene in troubled young lives and to reform our violent, racist-breeding prisons. As Ainslie chillingly concludes, far from being an inhuman monster whom we can simply dismiss, "Bill King may be more like the rest of us than we care to believe."
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| Customer Reviews:
 long dark road July 14, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have to admit that the only reason I initially read this book was my curiosity at how the town of Jasper and the events which took place in said town would be portrayed. Jasper is my hometown, and I was 12 years old during that dreadful summer of 1998.
Ultimately, when I found out that a professor at the very university I attend current day had written a book about my hometown and Bill King, I wanted to see if he, like nearly all others who had written or spoken of the topic, had made my town and fellow townspeople out to be some sort of ignorant, backwoods armpit in East Texas. Almost immediately, my attentions were diverted elsewhere...Ainslie does a terrific job of showing that this crime could have happened to any person in any town...ANYWHERE in the world.
Although I may or may not agree with his diagnosis of Bill King, since I did not know him personally, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, if enjoyed is even an appropriate word. Coming from the mouth of a Jasper resident who has to deal with the horrid looks and comments from people who learn where she is from...that's saying a lot. This topic is quite sensitive to me, and that degree of sensitivity has not lessened in any way since July 1998. If any changes have happened, it's only gotten stronger.
I strongly suggest reading this book for a better and less bias view of Jasper and James Byrd, Jr's murder.
fascinating look November 15, 2005
I thought the author did an outstanding job of writng about the humanity of a person who did what we call a "inhunman" crime. It is all the more chilling that these acts were not done by some sort of monster, but a person, who is to some extent a result of his environment. The best part of the book, however is the description of the community of jasper and the very real people who tried to do the right thing in the midst of lots of media hype.
 Rehash February 1, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was so looking forward to reading this book, LONG DARK ROAD,(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) when I purchased it. I was very disappointed after the first two chapters. The 44 pages of the second chapter read almost word for word like a rehash of what Joyce King wrote with freshness and eloquence in her book, HATE CRIME, which was first published by Random House in 2002 and then by Anchor Books in 2003. On several pages, it looks like Ainslie simply rearranged some of Joyce King's wording. So I found myself desperately looking for originality in Ainslie's text, because he never acknowledges Joyce King's all-too obvious influence on his writing. Ainslie introduces some interesting psychoanalytic theories re: King in the middle of the book, including some, but not entirely new info on family history. Missing, however, is attention to the fact that most prisoners suffer from some form of mental illness, are usually poor, often come from dysfunctional families and have fallen through the cracks of the mental health care system in this country. Clear recommendations for early mental health care intervention for juvenile delinquents would have made Ainslie's efforts here more compelling and plausible. It is not clear why Ainslie interviewed King at all without clear recommendations in place for what could have been done to prevent Bill King's violent, criminal behavior. Instead of researching the failures of a system that places mentally ill juvenile delinquents in penal institutions with violent offenders, Ainslie focusses on the point that Joyce King already made clear in HATE CRIME--that there is a need for prison reform. We already read that in HATE CRIME. Moreover, Ainslie does not offer any comparative analysis of Bill King with other poor, bi-polar, traumatized young men or women who are housed in U.S. prisons or on death row. It is not at all clear where Bill King, then, stands in the broader analysis of the type of psychological study Ainslie is engaged in. The reader learns little that is new here. Moreover, they learn nothing new about Bill King's psychological condition that can not already be easily gleaned from news reports on the case, Joyce King's HATE CRIME, or other previously published materials on the dragging of James Byrd, Jr. I found this book lacking in depth and breadth of analysis.
Dark road to a darker place October 9, 2004
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Authors and psychologists can spend lifetimes trying to know what shadows know. They prowl the obscure corners of human behavior, seeking to drag something back out to the light. But sometimes, the path only leads them deeper, darker.
Dr. Ricardo Ainslie -- both an author and a psychologist -- has been chasing shadows along Huff Creek Road in Jasper, where James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death in one of the past century's grisliest hate crimes. And each step has taken him deeper into the darkest recesses of a decayed mind.
Countless articles, books and films have documented how King and two white friends -- fellow ex-con Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry -- offered the drunken Byrd a ride in the wee hours of June 7, 1998. But they didn't take him home. Instead, they chained him by the ankles to the rear bumper of Berry's truck and literally dragged him to pieces on a hard-pan logging road. They purposely left his dismembered corpse in the front yard of a small African-American church and cemetery.
And King -- whose body was almost completely swathed in racist and Satanic tattoos, whose apartment concealed a stash of racist literature and clothing splattered by Byrd's blood, and whose distinctive cigarette lighter was found at the scene -- was the first of the three to stand trial. Widely seen as the ringleader of the butchery, he was convicted and sentenced to die. Unrepentant and his appeals all but exhausted, the 29-year-old King now awaits execution.
But those trials didn't answer a central question: What made Bill King a monster?
Partly at the request of King's father, the 55-year-old University of Texas psychology professor was drawn deep into the sometime savage, sometimes frighteningly ordinary world of a small-town killer.
"Bill King, the man, is much more human than we would care to think," Ainslie writes. "When the global media descended ... in a relentless hunt for sensational material, they constructed a perhaps comforting, but ultimately obscuring, myth about King's monstrous nature. ... The truth is that King is all too close, in kind and in temperament, to me or to you."
In King, we see a dim and distant reflection of ourselves, Ainslie suggests. Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to portray the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust, and Ainslie invokes it for other acts of evil.
"To attempt to understand the motives at work in Bill King's life, to understand that there were reasons for his behavior, is not to exonerate him," Ainslie explains. "If we avoid examining King's life for fear that such an effort might appear to excuse him, then we risk missing precisely what we most need to know about this story."
One of the most unsettling elements of the 254-page "Long Dark Road" is its hypothesis that "given the right alchemy, perhaps anyone might become capable of monstrous cruelty."
"The transgressions involved may not be as momentously horrifying as the dragging death of an innocent man," Ainslie says, "but I believe that human beings, by nature and perhaps by wiring, struggle with our dark sides. This is one of the key premises of Christianity."
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