Runaway Devil

August 3, 2009
In 2006, 12-year-old "J.R." and her 23-year-old boyfriend Jeremy Steinke murdered her mother, father and younger brother. Collecting information on the couple's troubling relationship, immersion in the local goth scene and obsession with violent music and films, Calgary journalists Remington and Zickefoose piece together the puzzle of a young girl's turn to familicide, a "culture did it" approach balanced by the considerable possibilities that Steinke corrupted the smart young girl, or vice-versa-that a charismatic young J.R. lured Steinke into murder. Ultimately, the authors manage at best to humanize the senseless tragedy of two deeply disturbed people, but don't look too hard for answers; the result is less like a genuine attempt to understand the tragedy than an exploitative narrative sounding the alarm against exploitation. As is unfortunately characteristic of true crime involving youth culture, this case has a schizophrenic approach to the goth subculture, which they describe as both misunderstood (demonized) and having played a prominent part in the couple's crimes. Still, those who want a solid, sensationalist crime account that gets into the heads of its subjects should find this a page-turning thrill.

August 1, 2009
The protagonist of this true story of a death-metal fan who took her musical heroes horrific imagery too much to heart is so young that Remington and Zickefoose dont mention her full name. They call her J. R., but she is more manifest in these pages under her online nom de guerre, Runaway Devil. A former honor student, she was 12 and living in Medicine Hat, Alberta, when she participated in stabbing to death her brother and parents. Did she plan it and manipulate her 23-year-old boyfriend and partner-in-crime, Jeremy Steinke? Or was she, dulled by immersion in the death-metal scene, goth subculture, and attendant real and imagined horrors, his puppet? And could there actually be a murderous goth subculture in small-city Hockey Land? You bet. These kids are scary by any standards, yet Remington and Zickefoose mostly avoid the pitfalls of being overly dramatic; though with a tweener offing her parents, theres going to be a good dose of the dramatic, not to say the macabre. Nicely researched, well presented, truly scary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)