Quote:
Originally Posted by pk1999
It seems to me that you know nothing of Marlene olive,and the things you wrote are from the book that Richard Levine wrote in the 80s.sad how people belive everything they read! Yes some of it is true in the book but for the most part it was made up!
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Actually, the events described are from the third part of
Canadian anthropologist Elliott Leyton's book from the 90s,
Sole Survivor: Children Who Murder Their Parents, which cites several sources for the case history and analysis of Marlene Olive.
I'm curious about (and not offended by) the passion with which you responded. If you feel that reading books teaches us nothing about Marlene Olive, then you must have had another way of learning about the events of her life and psychology. If so, then how exactly have you learned about them, and how exactly do the facts as you understand them differ from those described by Richard Levine (whose book I haven't read)?
If you dismiss the idea of learning about her by reading books and articles, then how do you suggest people learn about her instead?
What about her later life? I've read that, for a long time, she was consistently in trouble for drugs, shoplifting, prostitution and, in the 90s, a
longstanding ID-card-counterfeiting operation. ("Police say they have rarely come across a street-level forger believed to be as prolific or as skilled as Olive.")
How has her life been different from the descriptions offered in books and newspaper articles about her over the past several decades?
Leyton isn't at all unsympathetic to Olive, BTW. Rather, she suggests that, given the cultural programming she received and the systematic negation of her sense of identity through circumstances and the actions of her parents, her actions were predictable if not justifiable. He describes her as a whipsmart girl who wrote literate Plathian poetry at a precocious age, and concludes that her life could have been very different if she had been treated differently by her adoptive parents. I've always been fascinated by her personally.
I've also read that the judge at her boyfriend Chuck Riley's trial described him as the most easily manipulated person he'd ever had in his courtroom. I can't agree or disagree, as (1) the judge was being hyperbolic and (2) I've never spoken to the boyfriend. But it does seem clear that a sadomasochistic dynamic allowed the initiator of the crime, a young girl who seemed to be in the submissive role, to direct the man involved to commit acts he wouldn't never have contemplated otherwise.
As accounts of the case have become increasingly popular,
more and more people have claimed to know Olive or Riley personally (see the posts below the article). But if we can't trust books to tell us about them according to you, then shouldn't we be even less inclined to trust unsubstantiated accounts from anonymous people on the internet?