Stalking Justice: The Dramatic True Story of the Detective Who First Used DNA Testing to Catch a Serial Killer.

Paul Mones Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. 314 pp., $23.

Reviewed by Victor Williams

Published during a time of unparalleled media attention to criminal justice issues, Stalking Justice is a more important work to the legal profession than its "true crime" marketing situs in bookstores might suggest. The book contests two media-perpetrated half-truths about our justice system. It challenges the image of police as chiefly bad or incompetent, and it refutes allegations that the results of advanced forensic science techniques, like DNA analysis, are enigmatic, beyond common understanding, and suspect as reliable evidence.

This book also represents the best of the increasingly popular true crime genre. It compellingly narrates Arlington, Virginia, police detective Joe Horgas's personal quest to stop a serial killer known as the "South Side Strangler." In the late 1980s, Horgas developed a theory that one person was responsible for several torture/murders and a dozen rapes committed in Richmond and Arlington.

Horgas carefully compiled a profile of the suspect and forcefully challenged the predetermined conclusions of his superiors in Arlington, the Richmond Police Department, and the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit to bring the murderer to justice.

Through his professional competence and personal dedication to justice, Horgas eventually captured, arrested, and helped convict the killer--a paroled repeat criminal who was living in a Richmond-based prison alternative called Hospitality House. The book details the detective's use of scientific forensics, including the first use of DNA analysis, to bring about the conviction and 1994 execution of the murderer and to champion the release of a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned (based on a questionable confession) for one of the crimes.

The 1990s have not been good years for those who enforce the law. Recent high-profile trials have left the public understandably wary of police corruption and abuse of authority. Author Paul Mones, a southern California-based defense attorney and children's rights advocate, acknowledges that he often has used the image of the bad cop to his clients' advantage. Mones notes that he has publicly castigated all levels of law enforcement for their incompetence in failing to better protect abused and neglected children. He admits to "long-held prejudices about cops," and to seeing "only one shade of blue."

However, years of research on the book, including living and working with police, fundamentally altered his perceptions of the police and their role in the justice system. In telling the story of Horgas's dogged work on the gruesome cases, Mones paints a portrait of a "quintessential" public servant, who is "on call to the American people twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week-long after the politicians and civil servants in city hall, the statehouse, and Congress have gone home."

The book may provoke the reader to think about the relationship of law enforcement to the law itself. As Mones writes,

[A] police officer has a much more

subtle responsibility, one rarely recognized

by the general public but one

which is perhaps the most important

-- guarding the gates of justice. As

schoolchildren we learn that legislators

write our laws in the hallowed chambers

of our statehouses and judges interpret

them from atop their mahogany

benches. But day to day, it is the police

officer who actually writes and interprets

the law, through the constant

process of enforcing it.

The book also controverts the media perception that DNA analysis is too susceptible to contamination and its results too complex for common understanding to hold sufficient reliability as jury evidence. This foggy perception of "crime science" is cleared up by Mones, who straightforwardly depicts Horgas's professional use of various forensic processes.

But what of a criminal justice system that imprisoned the wrong man while allowing a paroled criminal to continue a violent rampage? In the book's epilogue, Mones says that it was not "crusading journalists or civil libertarians," but rather police and prosecutors who subsequently used DNA test results to secure the release of a wrongly imprisoned man and stop the real criminal. Mones notes that "the advent of DNA fingerprinting ... is gradually changing the geometry of justice as surely as did fingerprints more than 100 years ago."

Some readers may find Mones's graphic descriptions of the crimes and the victims' suffering and some vulgar dialogue disturbing. The story fine is compiled (often verbatim) from investigative records and interviews and is an accurate, albeit unsettling, sketch of the evil reality of violent crime in the United States.

Victor Williams is an assistant professor of law at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.