In the acknowledgements of her memoir, “Hunger”, Roxane Gay thanked reruns of “Law & Order: SVU” for providing a reliable backdrop while she wrote. It’s jarring to think that a show about sex crimes made writing about rape and its aftermath easier, but it does make a weird kind of sense. Lots of women fall asleep to “Forensic Files”, and true crime podcasts are a hot commodity. Even the unsolved mysteries of “Unsolved Mysteries” are tidily packaged to end within an hour, making tragedy snack-y and consumable. But what does it say about us that we treat suffering as entertainment? In “Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession” (Scribner), author Rachel Monroe explores her own attraction to the subject while trying to excavate that question. It is fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure.
Monroe’s four stories correspond to the archetypes Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer, though each contains elements of the others. Frances Glessner Lee was an heiress with few options for self-expression in the 1920s; when she adapted a trend for making detailed miniatures into creating disturbingly realistic reproductions of crime scenes to further the study of forensics it was a radical move. Her “Nutshell Studies” required careful scrutiny to solve, and Lee funded a program at Harvard to ensure her work had a place. She was breaking new ground, but colleagues found her difficult and her work was largely ignored after her death. There’s a story about a woman who inserted herself into Sharon Tate’s surviving family with questionable motives, and one who became obsessed with the case of the West Memphis Three, teenagers wrongly convicted of murder (not content to simply lobby for their release, she ultimately married Damien Echols, their presumed ringleader).
The book’s final section may be the most disturbing. An alienated 23 year old woman obsessed with the Columbine killers — there are “fandoms” that treat murderers with the same high octane love-lust usually reserved for boy bands—found a young man who shared her bleak world view and planned a massacre with him. The plan fell apart spectacularly with her would-be accomplice the only victim, shooting himself in his home as the police asked him to come outside and talk. She’s nevertheless sentenced to life in prison.
While relating these stories, Monroe shares personal anecdotes about her own dips into true crime, including a trip to CrimeCon, an event for fans of the genre and armchair sleuths. Between the desire for tidy solutions that make us feel safer and a perverse conflation of crime and entertainment, some problems arise. I listen regularly to My Favorite Murder, a “true crime comedy podcast” that’s often singled out for criticism for sloppy research as well as an over-reliance on victims who are white and female, like the hosts, and also like me. (I bristle when the hosts uncritically laud law enforcement with no examination of the racism built into its institutions.) Our brains love a binary arrangement: Male/female, bad/good, black/white. Young black men are by far the most frequent victims of violent crime, but the true crime entertainment complex does not find their stories compelling (ditto for trans women of color). Instead we marinate in “mean world syndrome,” media saturation that leads us to feel increasingly endangered despite the fact that crime rates are dramatically lower than in years past. And fear of a scary, made up “other” feels a little too close to life under Trump for comfort. We’ve seen what that leads to historically, and has led to in recent years.
Danger is potentially everywhere, but its statistical likelihood is vanishingly small. Maybe perpetrators can be headed off with access to mental health resources early in life, and we can stop armchair diagnosing one another with psychopathy for fun. Perhaps we can trade steeping in anxiety-inducing leisure activities (which lead to things like calling the cops because your black neighbor has set up a lemonade stand or had a barbecue in a public park or is trying to simply enter their own home) for...virtually anything else. The stories in Savage Appetites illuminate how obsession with crime can be as destructive as crime itself, while never denying its magnetic allure.
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2019
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