Fatal Swath

By John Elson

IN A CHILD'S NAME by Peter Maas

Simon & Schuster

378 pages; $19.95

Like moths around candles, a number of gifted writers have been dazzled by that subspecies of Homo americanus, the murdering sociopath. Witness Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision. Or this well-crafted account of the fatal swath cut by an Indiana-born dentist named Kenneth Z. Taylor.

The women who fell for Taylor were, to put it mildly, unlucky in love. He abandoned his first wife when she was nine months pregnant and tried unsuccessfully to chloroform his second to death. Taylor brutally assaulted his third bride -- bright, insecure, eager-to-please Teresa Benigno of Staten Island, N.Y. -- on their Acapulco honeymoon. A year later, he bludgeoned her to death with a barbell, drove about the country for four days with her , disfigured body in the trunk and then abandoned car and corpse in eastern Pennsylvania. Under police questioning, he confessed to the crime but claimed that a coked-up Teresa had first attacked him, after he caught her performing oral sex on their infant son Philip. The jury had no trouble disbelieving this lurid fantasy. Today Taylor is serving a 30-year sentence for murder.

The author of Serpico and The Valachi Papers is a natural for this kind of material. In a Child's Name crackles with narrative energy, but some readers may wonder to what purpose the book was written, other than to serve as a framework for the inevitable screenplay. Maas suggests that the case "concerns what we as a nation were supposed to be all about" but never really explains how or why. Although Taylor is a psychotic monster, there is nothing epic about his depravity, and Maas never solves the mystery of this man's heart of darkness. It may be unfair to fault an author for the book he didn't write, but In a Child's Name might have probed more deeply had it been a novel rather than nonfiction.