Customer Reviews

September Sacrifice (Pinnacle True Crime)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are interested in a captivating story, a "can't put it down read", this one is for you. Dazien Hossencroft claims he hails from from a wealthy breed in Switzerland (yeah, right..). Let's call him Armando Chavez, his real name. Armando is a really sadistic liar. He's a "world renowned doctor" who doesn't even know the importance of "spell check" on his Curriculum Vitae! Whatever you want to call him, the guy gives a new name to FREAK. A twisted man, a real psychological study indeed. For instance, to any willing listener he claims he is dying of leukemia, deceitfully takes any volunteer's blood for "testing" (even his own baby son's) and predicts the end of the world, among other strange, creepy events. You are acquainted with Girly Chew, Dazien's Malaysian mail-order bride at the beginning of the novel. If the reader isn't alreadly morbidly fascinated with Hossencroft's personality then author Mark Horner's detailed chronicle of Girly's sudden disappearance is sure to keep the detective-reader's attention. Enjoy!

Mark Horner does a terrific job with a complicated tale -- probably one of the best true crime stories ever. I remember reading about this case and watching it on Court TV. Every once in awhile, I see a case and wish that I'd been the one to write the book. Sometimes I think I could do better, but that's not the case here. Mark has really distinguished himself as a wonderful new writer with a gift for storytelling -- something that frequently gets lost in the ripped-from-the-headlines approach of today's true crime writing. -- Gregg Olsen, author of "Abandoned Prayers" and "Cruel Deception"

I would have given the book 5 stars except that I had a problem with Horner trying to create intrigue in the first few chapters. I felt it was unnecessary because this has to be one of the most bizarre true crime stories I've ever read. There are still many unanswered questions that I hope one day will be brought to light, but that doesn't detract from the book at all. It was well researched and a satisfyingly complicated and incredible book.

In his engrossing true-crime thriller, September Sacrifice, Mark Horner reconstructs the extraordinary details of Girly Chew's murder case in Albuquerque, New Mexico, beginning with her disappearance on September 9, 1999, through the murder trials of her estranged husband and his girlfriend, Linda Henning, portions of which were rebroadcast on Court TV recently. Doubtless, such a bizarre and fiendish plot could only have originated from the bowels of some hellish, inhuman creature.

The devil in this case is Diazien Hossencofft: a cartoon name for a counterfeit caricature born Armand Chavez, who alternately represents himself as a geneticist, a doctor, and an inventor, among other concocted claims, shifting his shape and affecting his accent to suit his victims. How ironic, therefore, that his cohort in horror was a woman obsessed with reptilians: mythical alien beings who morph from human to reptile form. Hossencofft proves to be yet another cookie-cutter malignant narcissist, but with a decidedly more macabre twist. I will hereafter refer to him by his birth name out of expedience, and because I know that would annoy him.

In Horner's well-researched work, we discover a number of textbook narcissist traits in Chavez's modus operandi. Chavez, like Peterson, conducts a marathon academic tour that includes familiar locations like The College of Notre Dame in San Francisco and the University of Utah, where he was subsequently ejected from its medical school for stealing laboratory supplies. Before fraudulently entering the program at UU, Chavez abandoned his first wife, Rosemary, and his child in northern California. Horner presents anecdotal evidence that Chavez at least once attempted murder by poisoning a "client" with arsenic, and that he had warned his wife that if he ever killed anyone, the body would never be found. Chavez sought his marks and sources with the preferred narcissit's method: through personal ads posted on the Internet and in magazines. He was a serial "romantic" predator, with concurrent cyber relationships, many of which developed into financial scams. One of the lovers he met on the Internet later relayed that Chavez abused and neglected his and Girly's "adopted" son, Demetri, who was actually his biological child with a Japanese woman from Canada he had seduced, and whom he duped into giving him the baby with a fantastic yarn about an incurable genetic abnormality his son possessed that only he could treat.

Yes, the hits just keep on coming.

Besides being a pathological liar and incurable egomaniac, Chavez was smitten by the love of money that was the root of his evil. His motive for murdering Girly was a combination of wounded pride and greed. He demonstrated the ultimate selfishness by laying claim on a child he didn't want or love (and, in fact, terrorized), but would rather have seen dead than grant Girly custody. Fortunately, Demetri was only a toddler at the time, and was adopted before his father fled New Mexico with another cyber sweetheart from South Carolina, escaping further victimization and chaos, the hallmarks of Chavez's existence.

Girly Chew was the perfect wife: hard working, submissive, domestic, spiritually centered, and accommodating, with a naïve and cheerful outlook and notable lack of cynicism or suspicion. When she came from Malaysia to New Mexico to marry her "successful American doctor" pen pal, her parents were understandably concerned. Typical of narcissists, Chavez removed Girly from the familiar comfort of her home and family, and kept her isolated and uninformed throughout their marriage. When she eventually discovered his infidelities, he reacted with sudden violence, nearly strangling her before a neighbor intervened. His second attempt was predictably more vicious, instigating a police report, a restraining order and a divorce suit. At that point, Girly should have returned to Malaysia. Instead, she hid in a small apartment she hoped Chavez would not discover, and attended karate classes.

At first, after Girly's disappearance, Chavez was investigated and arrested by the FBI for making threats across state lines via a traceable telephone in South Carolina. The feds dropped the charges when New Mexico indicted him for first-degree murder and locked him up in the Bernalillo County Jail, populated by Hispanic gang members and jaded thugs who laughed at Chavez's ostentatious resume and nasally voice and threatened his puny life. Chavez eventually agreed to a plea bargain where he admitted to Girly's murder in exchange for a transfer to a prison in Wyoming, even though investigators had not found Girly's remains.

Connoisseurs of true crime and students of narcissism will not be disappointed in September Sacrifice. It is more fascinating than any three expensive hardbacks combined, and for a fraction of the price. Horner distills the intricate details of the years-long investigation of Girly's murder, the result of dedicated law enforcement, a philosophical district attorney, and complex forensic science, and exposes the myriad layers of Chavez's convoluted parallel life of deception and debauchery. There are many unanswered questions and loose ends that may never be resolved, but true crime stories about malignant reptiles like Hossencofft defy neat packaging. There are many interesting facts that merit discussion and further investigation, and I wouldn't be surprised if some day they connect Chavez to other unsolved homicides.

Being a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I have followed this case and Mark Horner's distinquished career for years. This book showed me what a truly talented writer Mark is. I couldn't put it down. The detail and the insight he showed was incredible. I highly recommend this book for everyone. May you write many more Mark! Maybe next shall be 'Where's The Baby?'

Mark Horner's SEPTEMBER SACRIFICE is a work of true crime which takes place in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Albuquerque, NM. The story is quite complicated and I'll try to summarize it as briefly as I can: In early 1993 a narcisstic, sociopathic con man with the ludicrous fabricated name of Diazen Hossencofft, married a Malaysian woman named Girly Chew, two weeks after she arrived in the United States. In September 1999, she disappeared and has never been found though it's assumed she's dead.
I never did understand why Hossencofft, whose actual birth name was Armando Chavez, wanted to get married as he maintained continual internet contact with numerous women, using them for sex and money. Diazen, like any decent con man, was adept at intuiting which buttons to push for each of his victims. He actually doesn't seem otherwise to have been especially bright, in total opposition to what he felt about himself, as the fictions he created about his life, which changed depending on whom he was dealing with, were so outrageously bizarre that no one with any sense would have believed him more than briefly.
As a very small sample, he worked for the government in a secret genome project and knew too much resulting in their trying to assassinate him; he was a doctor who had developed an anti-aging serum (a scam that was used on wealthy women who would pay considerable money for the shots) which were nothing but vitamin B-12; not to mention being one of the premier heart-lung surgeons in the country.

I found one of his deeds most amazing. He took one of his continual trips (explained to his wife by the fact that his rare medical skills were needed all over at a moment's notice) to Canada where he deliberately impregnated a young Japanese woman. He then told her that, alas, they could never be together and that, further, the child would always be afflicted by a familial genetic disorder which did not exist, a companion no doubt, to the leukemia he continually claimed, which, of course, he didn't have either. He then told her that he would take sole custody of the boy as he had the finances to ensure his care, but that the mother must never see her baby again. WHICH SHE AGREED TO. Three days later he waltzed into the house and presented Girly with their newborn "adopted" son, something that until that moment she had known nothing about.
What I found truly unfathomable was the amount of emotional and financial abuse people were willing to take from him, and that even people who realized he was an outrageous liar remained in contact with him.

But when he hooked up with a seemingly intelligent, pretty, and successful businesswoman, the games begun. Linda Henning was a UFO fanatic and more than a little odd. She met Hossencofft a meeting of UFO enthusiasts where he was trolling for marks. Henning became his ultimate pawn, acolyte, whatever. A couple of illustrative quotes:
"Spiers recognized Hossencofft's initial ability to grasp and maneuver Henning's life. He compared the con man's powers of persuasion to those of the notorious Charles Manson." My thought here is that, like Manson's, Hossencofft's dupes had to be very needy, stupid, or both, often, as in Henning's case, with an often untapped reservoir of lunacy.
And, "Henning, once a con man's easy mark, had attached herself to his sci-fi fantasies" (which he later characterized as utter nonsense) "with such zeal that it seemed to have spun toward some sort of metamorphosis, resulting in a conviction that she, herself, now possessed certain sorceries."

SEPTEMBER SACRIFICE is a long and fascinating book, taking the standard true crime approach of crime, investigation, arrest, and trial. Horner is an intelligent and literate writer. There is very little filler and no melodrama, Horner simply professionally reporting a very complicated case. The depth of the research dealing with Sanchez' (his name at the time) early adult misrepresentations is impressive and this depth continues through to the end of the book. And the amount of effort the book evidences is impressive.

There were certain things that I feel would have made this a better book. First the story, though absolutely fascinating, is really complicated, and additionally Horner does not write in linear chronological fashion. The result is that it's difficult to keep straight what's happening and when, and also there are a lot of relevant characters who appear on and off in the book, and it's also hard to remember who they are. I felt a chronology and a cast of characters page would have been helpful.

The biggest lack in the book though, in my view, is that there is almost no background info on Hemming's childhood and adolescence and precious little more on Sanchez. These people, the main players in the story, were just so bizarre that an in-depth presentation of their early lives would have been just what the doctor ordered for those true crime fans - most of us - who want to know `why" as opposed to only "when", "where", and "how".

Still SEPTEMBER SACRIFICE is an excellent book. I couldn't wait to get back to it and even with the significant deficiency mentioned in the above paragraph, I'd give it 4.7 stars if I could. And that's real close to 5.
Highly recommended.

Girly Chew (her real name) came from Malaysia with the hopes of marrying a man who she thought was a successful doctor, secret government agent, but he was really con man named Armand Chavez. The author does his best to explain Chavez's complicated and twisted personality as he does Linda Henning. It's a tough story to sell even though it's the truth. Well, Armand Chavez better known as D Hossencroft truly fooled a lot of people into believing that he was many things like a doctor, genius, spy. The truth behind his life of lies was nothing more than disappointments and failures of never becoming a doctor. Why does he kill Girly Chew, his Malaysian mail-order bride? Simply because he can't stand to be defeated. I only wished that Girly fled the country instead of sticking around. People who knew the couple knew he was capable of killing her. He had made threats abound to his new girlfriend and follower, Linda Henning. By the time he murdered Girly Chew, he was out of town with his next wife. Armand always kept contacting and conning women into his life despite having wife. Girly Chew was a young woman who was full of hope, promise, and loved by those who knew her. Sadly, her fate is not rare anywhere anymore. Her boss at the bank knew something was wrong when she was late for work since it was her only salvation. She predicted "If I'm late, call the police." The book is decently written overall.

Save your money for something better written. I bought this book because I read rave amateur reviews of it. But Horner's sentences do not contain whole thoughts; his build-ups lead nowhere. He makes little sense. (for instance he writes "and then the jury hears something they would remember for a lifetime." How the hell does he know? They heard it 5 years ago! Has a lifetime passed?) .... What a shame; the Girly Chew case deserved a lot better handling than this. Now, do you want some magnificent true crime writing? Read "The Only Living Witness" by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth--Now THAT is writing. Will someone please send Mark Horner a copy of it? God bless.

I could not even finish this book. It was written in a very confusing manner, and the characters were horrible. The author jumps around from past events to present events and it is difficult to follow.

Enjoyed reading this book. Received in time from dealer. Would do business again. I like reading true crime books and like ordering from Amazon.